The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Again he is at his desk. The computer the university had given him, its bright screen before him. He watches the cursor; its metronomic blinking reminds him of a countdown.

  “Abel Jones,” he says to himself. “What in heavens are you waiting for?”

  KEVIN WILSON

  Kennedy

  FROM Subtropics

  John F. Kennedy was a boy in our high school, but he went by Kennedy. For a brief time he made things pretty bad for us. We’d started our junior year without ever having exchanged a single word with him, had only seen him as he stalked the hallways, his long, greasy hair covering his face, his Coke-bottle glasses. He always wore this olive-green military jacket with the name KENNEDY stitched across the right breast. Underneath that he seemed to have every single Cannibal Corpse T-shirt in existence, a never-ending parade of skeletons and knives and blood and people with the skin ripped off their faces. He wasn’t allowed to wear the T-shirts at school, since they were against the dress code, so he wore the jacket over them, even when it was hot out, and if he sensed your weakness, he’d open his jacket and flash the T-shirt at you as he passed you in the hallway.

  Ben and I were best friends, each other’s only friend, really. There were other people we liked fine enough, and sometimes we’d hang out, but Ben and I were constant. I liked the steadiness of his friendship, that if I ever reached out into the darkness, he would be there. We had known each other since we were six years old, when his family had moved here to Coalfield from Seattle because his dad taught sociology at the tiny liberal arts college in town. Ben was the only Japanese kid in Coalfield, though there were some Chinese kids who were adopted and a Korean family who ran a Chinese restaurant. He wrote experimental poetry, had won a national contest for high school kids the year before. I was just a regular kid, pretty smart, but I’d been protected by my parents, which had left me without street smarts, with no sense of how to navigate high school. My parents still kissed me on the lips, and when they hugged me, it was always for slightly longer than I wanted it to be. We played bridge after dinner, my parents and I and my younger sister; we listened to Simon and Garfunkel records, my mom singing along. The idea of going to a party, or the football game on Friday nights, never would have occurred to me or Ben. We hunkered down, made our own happiness, and hoped that maybe we’d figure things out by the time we left Coalfield and went off to college.

  Kennedy ended up in our art class in our junior year. The room was some kind of converted garage, cement floors splattered with paint, and there were all these huge, heavy tables, where we sat on stools while the teacher, Mrs. Banks, lounged on a recliner in the corner of the room because her back was messed up. She barked out instructions, and we’d follow them to the best of our abilities. On the first day of classes, a minute after the late bell rang, Kennedy skulked over to the table where Ben and I were sitting and threw his backpack down so hard that it flew across the table’s surface and hit Ben’s arm. Ben took the pain without complaint. And maybe that was all Kennedy needed, that certainty that he could hurt us and we’d never tell.

  Our first assignment was to do a figure drawing from this little twelve-inch wooden mannequin. Ben was pretty good at it, had always been a decent artist, and had sketched out a pretty perfect representation, but I was having trouble with it, couldn’t make the individual parts of the figure come together. Kennedy just took a graphite pencil and pressed it so hard to the paper that it nearly ripped it apart. He drew the most basic stick figure and then drew X’s where the eyes would be. “Look at this shit,” he said to me, but I tried to ignore him, still trying to get my drawing right. He suddenly punched me in the arm so hard that I gasped. “Look,” he said. Even though he was so greasy, so scuzzy, his skin was perfect and pale, not a mark of acne. His eyes looked wavy beneath the thick lenses of his glasses, but they were an intense blue.

  I looked down at the drawing, the dead figure. “Yeah, okay,” I said. I went back to my own drawing. “That’s you,” he said. I just shrugged. Mrs. Banks was far away from us, maybe asleep. I stood up. “I need to get some water,” I said, and walked to the drinking fountain in the hallway, where I took a long, sustained sip. I could feel my face burning with the fear of what Kennedy might do to me, and I took several deep breaths. When I got back, Ben was staring at me with this look of alarm, like he was trying to silently warn me of some impending doom. I sat back down and looked at my drawing. A huge, cartoonish dick had been appended to my figure. “Oh, man,” I said, looking at Kennedy, who was completely focused on his own drawing, acting like he had no idea what was going on. “C’mon, Kennedy. Please.”

  “What?” he said. “Oh, wow, look at that. You like huge cocks, I guess? You look like you love big dicks.”

  I tried to erase the dick, but even after I’d rubbed and rubbed, the outline was still visible on the paper. So I flipped to the next sheet of the pad and started over. While I drew, Kennedy leaned toward Ben and slapped his arm. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, you, Nip. What’s your name?”

  “Ben,” Ben whispered.

  “Hey, Ben,” Kennedy said. “You see that guy over there?”

  I couldn’t help but look too, and we turned to see Eric Murdock at one of the far tables. He had a full mustache and was wearing a tank top.

  “That guy has a huge dick,” Kennedy said. “I saw it in the locker room. Twelve inches, probably.”

  “Okay,” Ben said.

  “And he’s a virgin. Can’t get a girl to fuck him. Hey!” He punched Ben’s arm. “What do you think about that?”

  “Nothing,” Ben said.

  “What’s his name?” Kennedy asked Ben, pointing at me.

  “Jamie,” Ben said.

  “What about you, shithead?” Kennedy asked me.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe girls don’t want to have sex with a twelve-inch penis.”

  “I know a lot of girls who would like to bounce around on that thing,” Kennedy said. “Older girls. Women.”

  When it became clear to Kennedy that we weren’t going to give him anything of substance, he started drawing devil horns and a tail on his stick figure and pentagrams dancing around its head. He didn’t talk to us again, like we didn’t exist, like he hadn’t punched both of us so goddamned hard, talked about huge dicks. Ben and I were grateful for the reprieve. We thought maybe that would be the end of things, that Kennedy would move on and we’d be safe.

  After school I drove Ben to his house in my hand-me-down Chevy Cavalier and we stumbled inside. We hadn’t said a word about Kennedy for the entire drive, partly because we didn’t know what to say, how we could talk about him without saying the word dick a bunch of times. We’d already done all of our homework during study hall, the work easy because it was only the first day, and so we ran past his mom, who translated poetry and complicated technical manuals from Japanese into English, and closed the door to his room. We decided to go old-school, put Contra in the Nintendo, eschewing the secret code that would have let us gain unlimited lives, and worked ourselves into a state of complete numbness, our eyes glazed over, like we’d plugged our brains into a machine and in return for our full attention it had made us happy, our bodies ice cold.

  We were both obsessed with video games. We spent every dollar of our allowances on new games, and because we shared everything, we could buy twice as many. Ben had a Nintendo and a Super Nintendo, an old Atari 2600, plus a Game Boy and even a Game Gear. I had the two Nintendo systems, plus a Sega Genesis and a Sega Master System. We would play for hours; sometimes I’d play until my hands were paralyzed, until I could no longer bend my fingers, and I would simply hand the controller, midgame, to Ben, who would pick it up without missing a beat. It wasn’t enough to finish a game; we had to beat it in record time, playing the same board over and over and over until we figured out how to clear it as fast as possible. As each of us played, the other would whisper, “Go, go, go, go,” and it sounded as steady as a heartbeat.

  We had to have the highest scores.
And when we got them, we took photos of the screen, turning off all the lights in the room until it was pitch-black, wiping the screen clean with Windex so there were no smudges. Ben even had a tripod to steady the camera. And even with a perfect picture, when we got the photos developed, the images were still slightly blurred, and you could see the rounded edges of the CRT screen. We’d get doubles, one for each of us. We kept them in a photo album, labeled and carefully curated. We thought, maybe, this might help us get into a top-notch college. Even if it didn’t, who cared? For those hours our bodies were the bodies on the screen, and we kept them alive for as long as we possibly could.

  Finally, after three hours of gaming, Ben’s mom called us to dinner. I always loved the food at Ben’s house, dishes like seaweed crumbled up in a bowl of pristine rice, a raw egg cracked over it. And Ben loved eating at my house, so many casseroles, so many variations of starch, cheese, and meat. That night Ben’s mom had made somen noodles that we dipped into little bowls of hon-dashi and soy sauce, little dried shrimp floating in the bowl, that fishy taste that made me so happy.

  “How was school?” asked Mr. Nakamura, and Ben and I looked at each other for a second too long. “That bad?” Mr. Nakamura said.

  “It was okay,” Ben finally said. How would we even begin to describe Kennedy? What could be done? I stuffed a bunch of noodles into my mouth, slurping them up. “It was fine,” I agreed. And that was that. It was like, in missing that moment when things were still normal, we had given up any chance of controlling Kennedy’s effect on our lives. He had us. If he wanted us, whatever he wanted, he could have us.

  * * *

  But things were okay for a week or two. Kennedy would tease us, trying to gross us out, prodding at our bodies, testing for weak spots. He’d grab my ear and twist it, making me yell out, which would rouse Mrs. Banks to an upright position, but she’d just call for order and that would be that. He once said that he doubted that Ben had any pubic hair and tried to pull down his pants, but Ben held on to his belt until Kennedy grew bored. “You guys are the fucking worst,” he would say, staring at us like we were Sea-Monkeys he’d ordered that had immediately disappointed him.

  We didn’t do anything. We didn’t tell Mrs. Banks, since we couldn’t imagine what she would do. We didn’t sit at another table, surround ourselves with other people for protection. We didn’t fight back. Now I understand it: we had stayed invisible for so long that we weren’t used to people noticing us, and so when Kennedy noticed us, shined a light on us, we simply froze, simply sat there and took it, all these little indignities, and hoped that he would fuck up in some other class and get suspended, a temporary reprieve.

  One day Mrs. Banks told us that we were going to work in groups. Each group was to create a replica of the Parthenon out of cardboard. The project was going to take a week to complete and would require a lot of precision work.

  “How many people per group?” Ben asked, his voice quavery and weird.

  “Three,” she said. “Yes, three per group.”

  Ben visibly deflated, and Kennedy smiled. “You fuckers thought you could get away from me?” he asked.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “We just like working with each other.”

  “Yeah,” Kennedy said, leering. “I bet you like working with each other. Working each other’s dicks in your mouths.”

  “C’mon, Kennedy,” I said.

  “You are the fairiest fairy that I’ve ever seen. What kind of music do you like?”

  There was no way that I was going to tell him that my favorite album was Tevin Campbell’s I’m Ready. I wasn’t going to tell him that I liked Britpop.

  “Heavy metal,” I said.

  “Yeah, right,” he said, slowly nodding. “Like what?”

  “Ratt?” I said, like I was in a spelling bee and had never heard the word before in my life.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he said, laughing.

  “That’s metal,” I said, confused. “I know it is.”

  “You need to listen to death metal,” he said. “You need to listen to Mayhem. The lead singer killed himself and then another guy in the band made a stew with his brains.”

  “That’s awful,” Ben said, and he sounded like a grandmother who’d just heard that a lady at her church had cancer.

  “You two . . . ,” he said, but didn’t say anything else. He just stared at us. “I’m gonna work on you two.”

  * * *

  At my house Ben and I played Donkey Kong Country. I used a stopwatch while Ben tried to run as quickly as possible through the board, chaining rolls together to keep the speed boost, plowing through enemies instead of taking time to jump on them. It was hypnotic, so calming. “You’re doing it,” I said, smiling. Ben worked his hands on the controller, could almost do this blindfolded.

  “I’m scared,” he suddenly said.

  “Of the game?” I asked, confused, looking at the screen.

  “Of Kennedy. I’m scared of him,” Ben said.

  “Me too, I guess,” I said.

  “What do we do?” he asked.

  “Nothing. What can we do?” I really had no clue.

  “Go to the principal. Go to the police. He’s going to hurt us.”

  “It would be so embarrassing,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. Right at this moment he got dinged by an enemy, and he cursed, tossing the controller to the ground. “Here,” he said, gesturing to the controller. “You take over.”

  We switched positions and I started the game over, the side-scrolling making me wonder if the game would ever end, the way it kept opening up. I wanted it to never end.

  “We should kill him,” I said.

  “No way,” Ben said. “Not even as a joke.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” he said after a few seconds.

  “We’ll be okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, but he sounded sad. I turned away from the game, watched it reflected in Ben’s eyes, the colors so beautiful.

  * * *

  Our Parthenon was a disaster. Ben and I simply didn’t have the kind of brain for three-dimensional building. Nothing quite made sense, no matter how long we stared at the photo of the Parthenon—​the one in Nashville, not in Greece. And Kennedy, dear Lord, he did everything possible to mess it up. I wondered how he’d made it this far in school when it was so clear how little he cared, how he would dare anyone in authority to do something about it. But it was like he was invisible to people in charge. I couldn’t figure it out.

  We had to use a hot glue gun to set the pieces of cardboard, and Kennedy immediately took control of it. While we were holding the pieces together, waiting for the glue, Kennedy would touch the tip of the gun, burning hot, to our fingers, sometimes even squirting the hot glue onto our skin. We’d yelp, and Kennedy would howl with laughter.

  “Kennedy, seriously,” Ben said. “Don’t do that again.”

  “Okay,” he said, still giggling. “Okay, you’re right. Sorry. Okay, hold it steady. I’ll really do it this time.”

  And then he’d burn us again. At the end of the day, Ben and I held up our hands for inspection and noted all the little burns, purple and angry, that covered our hands. Looking back on it, I want to take myself and just shake and shake, like, What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you let that happen? But I can still remember those moments, when it felt like I was paralyzed inside my own body, like I had to pull myself deeper and deeper inside of myself, away from the surface, in order to stay alive. I think Ben felt the same way. We tried not to talk about it.

  That Friday, the last day of the project, we still had a lot to do, because Kennedy kept breaking our Parthenon out of spite. The night before, I’d had anxiety dreams where for the first time I got a grade lower than an A because Kennedy fucked it up for me. I couldn’t get into any colleges. In the dream my parents kept asking, “What’s wrong? How did this happen?” which was crazy because my parents only asked that I do my best
, barely even checked my grades. And now we had to stay after school, the three of us in the art room, in order to finish the Parthenon. We’d begged Kennedy to go home, to let us finish it on our own, but he’d insisted he wanted to be there, to make sure it was up to his standards.

  So it was just the three of us, not even Mrs. Banks in her recliner, which was where Kennedy was now lounging, violently yanking on the lever to make the leg support unfold. He put a Morbid Angel album on the cassette player, which during class only ever played John Tesh jazz. After about an hour, we had something that resembled the Parthenon. We carried it over to the worktable and put it next to the other Parthenons.

  “Okay, Kennedy,” Ben said. “We’re finished.”

  “We’re not finished until I sign off,” Kennedy said, hopping out of the chair. He walked past the supply cabinet and grabbed an X-Acto knife, which made both of us instantly stiffen. He tested the point of the blade on the tip of his finger. A little pinprick of blood appeared. “C’mon, Kennedy,” I said. We backed away from him, putting a table between us.

  “Calm down, pussies,” he finally said, slipping the blade into the front pocket of his jacket. Then he picked up our Parthenon and held it up in the air as if he was going to slam it to the ground.

  “Kennedy!” we both shouted, and he gently put it back down on the table.

  “Excellent work,” he said. “Makes these other Parthenons look like a fucking joke.”

  “Okay, great,” I said. “We have to go now.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked, looking curious, as if he had never once considered the possibility that we had lives away from him.

  “We’re going to my house,” I said. “Play some video games.”