The Best American Short Stories 2014 (41 page)

“No matter what happened last night,” I said, “some chocolate-chip pancakes will taste better than that.” I took the bottle from his hand and poured the cider and the cereal in the almost-full garbage bag sitting on the floor by the sink. I mixed batter and chocolate chips.

“Help me,” I said. “Slap some butter in a pan.”

Soon there was the crackling and the smell.

“Big night?” I tried.

“Fuck you,” said Five, “if you ever tell anyone else what I'm about to tell you went down.”

I told him I wouldn't as long as he held the bowl so I could scoop the batter right. And he talked.

Once they were upstairs, he said, God asked him please not to call her God and call her Melanie instead. She hooked her phone to his speakers and asked him to take down the Eskimo-themed poster from the swimsuit issue. In all of this he obliged. When he tried to slide off her arm-tights with his teeth, she said, “Funny not sexy,” which threw him a little. Once her bra was off, she put a yarn-shop Simon & Garfunkel song on repeat and kissed him on the lips.

It occurred to him that this girl had been Nutella's breaker. Bedding her was, for a Delta Zeta Chi brother, what bedding Shania Twain would be for a southerner or what bedding Natalie Portman would be for a Jewish person; he was belly to belly with the most major figure in the Delta Zeta Chi culture.

He thought of how Nutella, the least spastic person in the world, a man who could take a jab to the mask in lacrosse and not flinch, had burst open from her hotness, and how that explosion had been documented in a poem that was known to all our house, if not to all Greek houses. He, Five-Hour, was a champion of knights brought in to rescue a princess from a tower the king had failed to scale. I am SWAT, he thought, I am Lancelot. The more he considered it—how God was the ultimate princess, and he, therefore, the ultimate prince, deep in a forest impenetrable to others—the smaller and softer his dick became. For he could not believe that a supra-Nutellian knight was who he really was.

By this point in the telling, Shmash was loitering in the doorway of the kitchen, presumably drawn by the smell of batter. When Five and I looked up he retreated to the living room.

Five staggered to the corner of the kitchen and pressed his forehead against the wall. I turned off the stove and pinched his cheek. His face was wet. I have never cried—not once—since I was ten, and I admire people who can do it. The criers can see the admiration in my face, and it helps them talk.

“Do I just lie?” Five whispered. “Do I just act as if I fucked her, and if someone asks, say a gentleman never tells?”

I told him to tell the truth. To act like it was nothing to apologize for, because it wasn't. He fist-bumped me, weakly at first, but again and again, until the bumps acquired force. It was not what I had said, I think, because my advice was unremarkable. It was only that he could see the respect on my face, the respect for his tears, and respect, above all, was what he needed.

“I'm done telling Oprah about not getting it up last night,” he called to the living room. “And he made pancakes.”

Five minutes later everyone was in the sunny kitchen, eating, brewing coffee, rinsing dirty plates, taking out the trash, crushing beer cans, talking about internships. Nutella squeezed fresh OJ wearing only his Red Sox boxers and baseball cap, and juice ran down his arms. Buck proposed a toast to Five for continuing the Delta Zeta Chi tradition of almost fucking God. Dust motes frolicked in the air as if emitted by our muscles, and the kitchen smelled like garbage, chocolate, sweat, and spring. I wondered if there would come a day when I would cry.

That night I had a dream I didn't want to have. In a white hotel room, I said to Nutella, Why not? What's the reason for us not to, you and I? What harm? I woke up spattered in cum and consoled myself as I washed my abs, hunched over the sink in the bathroom down the hall, with a different question: when ten sportsmen slept beneath a common roof, the smells of their sweat joined in a common cloud, who could escape unsportsmanlike dreams?

 

The following evening was Otter Night at Theta Nu. We walked to the TN house with flattened cardboard boxes under our arms. To otter, you needed a cardboard box and a wet carpeted staircase. The theme of ottering was, look how brothers will pour buckets of water on a carpeted staircase, sled the stairs face-first, and be injured.

We ottered once a year at Theta Nu, but this Otter Night was remarkable for the presence of God, who'd been invited by Nutella. As soon as she climbed the stairs with the flattened box in her hand, we gave it up. None of us had seen a girl otter. To otter was to engage in a dick-bashing test of will. (Jockstraps were expressly forbidden.) To otter with tits was beyond imagining.

She stood at the top of the stairs, eyes closed, back straight. We shouted, drank, whispered that a girl wouldn't do it, filmed with our phones. She laid her box on the ground, looked at the ceiling above her, as if to consult a watchful parent. And then, to the ticking of a drum machine and the groans of a rapper and the groans of the rapper's woman floating above the rapper and the machine, she dove.

Her eyes flinched open every step. It was all quiet the three, four seconds of actual otter, but for the damp
thump
-
thumps
, and a collective fraternal gasp. At the end, she reached for the bannister to slow herself, a good move, and her landing at the bottom did not look unbearable. She came to a halt with her upper body on the soaked floor, her legs sprawled on the soaked stairs, her face in carpet, the cardboard sled tucked like a lover beneath her pummeled breasts.

“Give me a beer,” she said, and I hugged Stacks, Nutella, and Shmash, and they hugged me back, and we all screamed God, God, God.

 

Throughout the night, God drank beer and touched guys' arms. And a weird thing happened: the brothers declined to put the moves on her.

No one steered her to the dance floor and freaked her. No one hovered beside her and asked her questions about her classes, holding his beer at chest height like a mantis to display his biceps.

The brothers were scared. Attempting her, Nutella had blown his load. Attempting her, Five had limp-dicked. And she ottered like a warrior.

But to me she was a secret collaborator. We were both Nutella poets, the way people we read in core humanities were nature poets. I wasn't scared of her at all.

When the music went “Biggie Biggie Biggie,” I took her by the elbow and we took the floor. We humped the air between us; we collaborated.

When the two of us left early, hand in hand, stumbling down Frat Row to Delta Zeta Chi, she said, “I have to say, I'm surprised this is happening with you.”

I asked her what she meant.

“Just a wrong first impression.”

The house was abandoned, all the brothers at TN's post-otter party, hoping to show off their injuries to girls who had seen them be brave. Our feet creaked on the stairs as she followed me up. In my room I gave her the plug to hook her phone to my speakers and asked her to choose music. She filled the room with the yarn-shopness that Five had described, and I recited her poem from memory, with the lines I'd added, while she sat on my bed with her chin on her fist.

“Consider it your poem too,” she said, and I knew I was supposed to kiss her, and I did.

I had never been to Silicon Valley, but that was where I went that night. Green grass in the shadow of silicon mountains, steel gray with chalk-white caps. Silicon wolves stalked the foothills, screen-eyed. I saw myself kneeling in that grass, doing for Nutella what God was doing for me. I made the sounds I thought Nutella would make.

I put on a condom as the yarn-shop song started over. When we were about to start fucking, I asked her to recite the poem. She looked at me for a moment. Please, I said, and she recited.

I recited with her, and it worked: when we fucked, Nutella was close, because like two lungs we had drawn him into the room. He was just out of reach, something sprayed in the air, like a poem.

I saw the blood only when we were finished. I looked at her face for an answer. She sat and sucked air through her nose, wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“Were you thinking about Nutella?” she asked.

I said no in a too-deep voice.

“You're lying to me. Why did you want us to say the poem?” She started to cry. Her shoulders jumped in rhythm to her sobs. “It's cool, but at least don't lie to me.”

Cry, I ordered myself. We would cry together. I pictured tide pools in my eyes. I pictured what the funeral would look like if my little sister died, her friends crying in their glasses and braces. But I'd tried to make myself cry many times, and always the same thing happened: my eyes knew I was trying to do it, and refused. I couldn't make myself cry any better than Nutella and Five-Hour could make themselves Melanie's lovers.

I waited for a minute, listening, trying to join. Finally, I leaned over and put my lips under her eye, so that I could taste her. I wanted to tell her what I tasted: sour makeup and salt.

“I'm sorry I lied to you,” I said. “I thought about Nutella but also you at the same time.”

She took my hands and folded them across her ribs. And then something occurred to me.

“You can't write a poem about how I said that,” I said. “About anything to do with me and Nutella. Even though it was your first time, you can't write a poem about it that you show to people.”

I watched her blink in the dark.

“I might not write a poem about it,” she said. “But I'm going to talk about it with my friends.”

“You can't,” I said. “You can't tell them I thought about Nutella.”

“OK, I won't,” she said, and I knew that she was now the one lying.

I pulled away from her and sat up in bed. I could see what was going to happen to me like a film projected on my wall: My life was ruined. She would tell her friends, who would tell other girls, and Shmash or Five would find out from one girl or another. Shmash and Five would be too embarrassed to tell Nutella, but they wouldn't be able to resist telling other brothers, and one night, very drunk, a brother would tell Nutella. And nothing would happen. No one would say anything to me. No one would want to take anything from me. But brotherhood would be taken, in the end. The ease with which my brothers spoke to me, the readiness with which they spilled their guts in times of humiliation—this would be withdrawn. My place among them in the consulting firm of the clock and talons.

The arboretum full of chamber music exploded, as if God had sung a note so high it shattered four stories of green windows.

I sat there hating her. She must have hated me back, because she got out of bed, put on her clothes without speaking, and left the house by the time the brothers returned from TN. I lay awake and listened to them bang around the kitchen. They chanted in unison, a single, iambic owl:
uh
-
ooh
uh
-
ooh
. It sounded like
beware, beware
.

FROM
The New Yorker

 

E
ARLIER, ON THE TRAIL
, they'd seen it. The massive dog. Tugging at its master's leash, so that the young man's calves bulged with muscle as he fought to hold the dog back. Grunting what sounded like “Damn, Rob-roy! Damn dog!” in a tone of exasperated affection.

Signs along the trail forbade dogs without leashes. At least this dog was on a leash.

The woman stared at the animal, not twelve feet away, wheezing and panting. Its head was larger than hers, with a pronounced black muzzle, bulging glassy eyes. Its jaws were powerful and slack; its large, long tongue, as rosy-pink as a sexual organ, dripped slobber. The dog was pale-brindle-furred, with a deep chest, strong shoulders and legs, a taut tail. It must have weighed at least two hundred pounds. Its breathing was damply audible, unsettling.

The dog's straggly-bearded young master, in beige hoodie, khaki cargo shorts, and hiking boots, gripped the leather leash with both hands, squinting at the woman and at the man behind her with an expression that seemed apologetic or defensive; or maybe, the woman thought, the young man was laughing at them, ordinary hikers without a monster-dog to pull and strain at their arms.

The woman thought, That isn't a dog. It's a human being on its hands and knees! Such surreal thoughts bombarded the woman's brain, waking and sleeping. As long as no one else knew about them, she paid them little heed.

Fortunately, the dog and its owner were taking another trail into Wildcat Canyon. The dog lunged forward eagerly, sniffing at the ground, the young man following with muttered curses. The woman and her male companion continued on the main trail, which was three miles uphill, into the sun, to Wildcat Peak.

The man, sensing the woman's unease at the sight of the dog, made some joke, which the woman couldn't quite hear and did not acknowledge. They were walking single file, the woman in the lead. She waited for the man to touch her shoulder, as another man might have done, to reassure her, but she knew that he would not, and he did not. Instead, the man said, in a tone of slight reproof, that the dog was an English mastiff—“Beautiful dog.”

Much of what the man said to the woman, she understood, was in rebuke of her narrow judgment, her timorous ways. Sometimes the man was amused by these qualities. At other times, she saw in his face an expression of startled disapproval, veiled contempt.

The woman said, over her shoulder, with a wild little laugh, “Yes! Beautiful.”

The hike had been the man's suggestion. Or rather, in his oblique way, which was perhaps a strategy of shyness, he'd simply told her that he was going hiking this weekend and asked if she wanted to join him. He had not risked being rejected; he'd made it clear that he would be going, regardless.