The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I could come over too if you want,” he said, and he wasn’t smiling. We couldn’t tell if he was serious.

  “His mom’s pretty strict,” Ben said, thinking quickly. “She’s a hard-ass. I can’t bring people over without her okay first.”

  “Well, tell you what. Next week I’m coming over. Play some of these video games. Have fun. But right now I need you guys to give me a ride. I missed my bus because you fuckers couldn’t glue cardboard together. So give me a ride, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess so.”

  Kennedy got in the backseat of my car, and I was terrified of what he might do there, where I couldn’t quite see him. I thought he might cover my eyes while I was driving, kick at the back of my seat the entire ride. But he just kind of fell across the entire backseat, lying on his back.

  “Drive out to the soccer fields,” he told us. “Over on Wrigley. Then turn onto Bald Knob Road. Bald fucking knob. Har-har. You two have bald knobs, I bet.”

  For the rest of the ride Kennedy just lay there, not making a sound.

  “Okay,” I said as I made the turn, “I’m on Bald Knob Road.”

  “Two twenty-two,” he replied. “Buncha shit in the front yard.”

  We pulled up to a one-story ranch, and he was right, there was a bunch of shit in the front yard. There were two busted riding mowers, a burned-black steel drum with blackened pieces of wood sticking out of it.

  He didn’t get out of the car.

  “We’re here,” I said after a while.

  “Just give me a minute,” he said. He didn’t move. I could hear him breathing, it was so quiet in the car.

  “Okay,” he said, jumping out of the car. “On Monday I’m coming home with you.”

  “Kennedy, I don’t—”

  “Motherfucker, I’m coming over,” he said, leaning back through the open door, his face close to mine. “And if you try to leave me at school, drive off without me, I’ll look you up in the phone book and then I’ll come over there. And it will be bad fucking news for you two.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, you can come over.”

  “Have a good weekend,” he said, running to the house.

  We sat there for a while, my hands shaking.

  “I think I’m sick, Jamie,” Ben said. I caught sight of myself in the rearview mirror and was surprised at how pale I looked.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said. “He won’t do anything with my mom there, and my sister too.”

  “Are you serious?” Ben asked. “He’s going to kill us.”

  “He won’t,” I said. “He’s just testing us. He’s just messing with us.”

  “Maybe,” Ben said, but his look was far off, like something had glitched in his brain.

  “Do you want to play video games?” I asked.

  “Maybe just drop me off at home,” he replied. “I don’t feel so great. I think I need to rest.”

  When I dropped him off, I grabbed his arm, and I hated the way he flinched when I did it. But I still held on to him. “We’ll protect each other,” I said. “Okay?”

  Ben nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  “If he did something to you, Ben,” I said, almost crying, “I really would kill him.”

  Ben smiled and got out of the car. I didn’t see him the rest of the weekend, didn’t even pick up the phone.

  * * *

  On Monday, when school was over, Ben and I stood outside my car, shifting from foot to foot, waiting for Kennedy. “We should just go right now,” Ben said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  “He’ll just follow us home,” I told him. I had completely given up. If Kennedy wanted to kill me, if he wanted to wrap his hands around my throat and squeeze, I would let him. Ben, I think, was still hoping there was some way out of this, some code we could punch in that would open up a secret room, a place we could hide, a place where we couldn’t be hurt. I was beyond that. Whatever happened, I just wanted to get it over with.

  Kennedy finally showed up, nodding his approval that we’d waited for him. “Let’s go,” he said. “I have to be home by five or my dad will kick my fucking ass.”

  My mom treated Kennedy like he was a street urchin in a Broadway musical, shaking his hand, saying how nice it was that Ben and I had added a friend to our little crew. Kennedy seemed stunned by her easy kindness, her offer of a Mountain Dew, because he barely even spoke, wouldn’t make eye contact with her. She let us get some snacks and then we were upstairs, in my room. Right away my sister, Molly, peeked in, wanting to see this new boy, but we shouted her away, terrified, honestly. We had this unstable thing inside the house, and we wanted to keep it contained in my room so that we’d be the only people damaged when it blew up.

  The night before, I’d hidden everything good, all my money, my comic books of any worth. I’d shoved it all in my closet, tossed some blankets over it. I even took the SNES, because I didn’t want it to get damaged, and put it away. I had looked around the room, wondering what I owned that Kennedy might linger on, that he might use against me. And truly, it seemed like everything in the room would give him reason to beat me senseless.

  “What game do you want to play?” I asked Kennedy, trying to be a good host.

  “I never played a video game in my entire life,” he said without blinking.

  I couldn’t tell if he was fucking with us.

  “Are you serious?” Ben asked.

  “Dead serious,” he said.

  “What about the arcade?” Ben asked, as if it was unbelievable to him that someone our age had never played a video game.

  “Nope,” Kennedy replied.

  “Well, what do you want to play?” I asked. “What kind of game? Like, Mario Brothers or maybe a driving game?”

  “Something where you kill people,” he said. “Duh.”

  I looked at the games I had lined up on my bookshelf. Kennedy pushed me aside and brought his face close to the spines of the games. “Whoa,” he said finally. “Holy shit, this is Rambo. Like the movie Rambo?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “Can we play this?”

  “Sure. It’s two-player, so we can work together.”

  “Cool, cool, cool.”

  I handed Kennedy a controller and turned on the system. The blue and white letters showed up on the screen, and then there was Sylvester Stallone, all buff, that red headband.

  I started the game. “Okay,” I said, “this button shoots bullets and then this one here shoots exploding arrows. Use those to blow up the tents and you’ll rescue the hostages.”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “You’re the yellow headband and I’m the red headband.”

  Within seconds of starting the game, Kennedy walked right into a bullet and his character fell over dead. But he started up again, another life. The same thing, dead.

  “Jesus fuck!” he said. “This game is fucking hard.”

  “Just try to dodge the bullets,” I said. “Don’t run ahead too far.”

  “Oh, shit, thanks, fucker,” he said, his voice sarcastic. “Avoid the bullets.”

  We played a little and then Kennedy died again, which meant he’d have to restart, which he did. “This gun doesn’t do shit,” he said. “Let’s try these exploding arrows.”

  “Wait, be careful,” I said, just as he fired an arrow right at my character, immediately killing me.

  “Oh, shit, you can kill each other?” he said.

  “Well—” I said, but before I could finish he shot another arrow at me, killing me again.

  “Okay,” Ben said, trying to help out, “but that’s not the point—”

  “Eat shit, motherfucker,” Kennedy said, killing me again. After this third death, the GAME OVER screen came up for my side of the screen. I didn’t push the button to restart, just let Kennedy wander around until he finally got killed again.

  “This is what you guys do all day?” he asked, throwing the contro
ller on the ground. “This sucks.”

  “Do you want to play something else?” I asked.

  “You guys just play for now,” he said. “I’m going to look around, see where you hide your fucking dildos.”

  Ben looked at me like How long can we do this? but we just picked up our controllers and started playing, clearing the board, moving up the screen. I tried not to look back at Kennedy, though I wondered what he was doing.

  And then, just as we were settling into a groove, Kennedy slammed Ben to the ground, jumping on top of him and straddling him. He had a pillow in his hands, and he put it over Ben’s face. “Sneak attack!” Kennedy shouted, and Ben’s arms started flailing wildly, just pawing at the air, not doing anything to stop him. And I was frozen there, watching this, for at least five seconds, before I finally pushed Kennedy off of Ben, tackling him to the ground. Kennedy then grabbed me in a headlock, squeezing so hard that my ears popped.

  “This is more like it,” he said. “This is fun.” His voice was monotone, like none of this was real, like he was acting in a play.

  I couldn’t get free. After a while he got bored and let me go. I scooted away from him to the wall, where I panted, holding my neck.

  “What is wrong with you?” Ben asked him, but his voice wasn’t angry. It was genuinely confused, hurt.

  “What?” Kennedy said. “This is all me and my brother did, fucking wrestling, trying to beat the shit out of each other. And then he joined the army, and now it’s just me at home. I just wanted to fuck around.” He pointed at me. “You had some fight in you for like half a second and then you pussied out.”

  “I think you better go home,” I said, almost crying, trying hard not to cry.

  He looked at me like he couldn’t tell if I was joking or not, like he had no idea why I was upset. “Seriously?” he said finally. When I didn’t say anything, he just shrugged and said, “Well, you have to drive me home.”

  “Fine,” I said, trying to breathe normally, trying to make my body move. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “I better get home myself,” Ben said, not looking at me. “I’ve got homework to do.”

  “What?” I said. “You’re not coming with me?”

  “You’re not coming with me?” Kennedy said, his voice mocking and high-pitched.

  “It’s just . . .” Ben looked toward the door. “I have all this homework.”

  “Please?” I said. “Please come with me.”

  Kennedy turned and walked out of the room. “Come on,” he said as he stomped down the stairs. I could hear him telling my mother goodbye, and her saying that he could come by anytime he liked.

  “Please,” I asked Ben again, whimpering.

  “Okay,” Ben finally said. “Okay.”

  As we walked down the stairs, he stopped me for a second. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that wasn’t cool of me.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, but I didn’t know what was going on, couldn’t tell if I was making too big a deal of this. In such a short time, my life, which was boring but tender, a thing that mattered to me even as I understood that it would eventually change, had become a kind of dream. I keep trying to explain to you why I didn’t try harder, but maybe you understand. Maybe you don’t think this is as strange as it feels to me.

  When we got to Kennedy’s house, he refused to get out of the car. “Come inside with me,” he kept saying—​an insistent, monotonous refrain. “Come inside. Just come inside. Come inside. Come inside and see something.”

  “Please, Kennedy,” I said. “It’s late.”

  “We have homework,” Ben said.

  “We have homework,” I corroborated.

  “Just come inside,” he said again. “Come inside and let me just show you this one thing. This one thing and then you can go. Come inside. Come inside my house.”

  Inside the house, his father, his head shaved bald, gray stubble for a beard, was sitting in a recliner, watching some old boxing match on TV.

  “Hello, JFK,” his father said, muting the TV, but Kennedy didn’t respond, tried to push past. His father stood, was a giant in that room, his head nearly touching the ceiling. “Who did you bring into our house?”

  “Just some guys,” Kennedy said.

  “Friends?” his father asked, like it was the silliest thing in the world to suggest such a thing.

  “What does it matter?” Kennedy asked.

  “Who are you?” his father asked, turning to us.

  “I’m Ben, Mr. Kennedy,” Ben replied, but I was still too nervous to respond.

  “Ben’s Japanese, okay?” Kennedy said. “Not Vietnamese.”

  “I know that,” his father said. “Jesus, son, do you think I don’t know what a Vietnamese looks like?” Then he turned back to Ben. “I respect your people. Let bygones be bygones and all that. You built a hell of a society out of the rubble of that mess. Hats off to you.”

  “Thank you,” Ben said.

  “Who are you?” he asked me.

  “Jamie,” I said.

  “You friends with Kennedy?”

  “Kind of ?” I said, like a question.

  “We have, like, a class project to work on,” Kennedy said.

  “Well, I guess I’ll let you get to it,” his father said. Awkwardly he resettled himself in the recliner and turned the volume back up.

  We walked down a long hallway, and as we passed each open room, I noted that it was much more ordered than I had expected, considering the disarray of the lawn. Perhaps it was thanks to his father’s military background that he kept the house so clean. He even used the same air freshener that my parents did. Inhaling its flowery scent, I had this temporary moment, this little period of grace, during which my body relaxed. And then we got to Kennedy’s room. There were two different locks on the door. He took some keys out of his pocket, undid them, and opened the door. Inside, his room was pretty well organized, the walls covered in posters of death metal bands, images that, if we hadn’t already been so bombarded by the ones on Kennedy’s T-shirts, would have terrified us. “Here, let me get some stuff out,” he said, and turned on his stereo. From the speakers a deep droning immediately emanated.

  “We need to go,” I said to Kennedy, but he wasn’t listening to me; it was kind of like we weren’t even there. He opened his closet and pulled out this long box, like you’d keep comic books in, and laid it at his feet. When he removed the top of the box, he gestured for us to come closer. I was certain that there would be human heads in the box, skeletal remains. I knew it would be bad. I knew it would be hard to forget.

  Ben and I looked down into the box and saw all manner of chain and leather, everything shiny, pristine. Kennedy tapped the box with his foot and it rattled. “I ordered all this from a catalogue,” he said. “I’ve got quite a collection.” He reached into the box and pulled up a bee’s nest of handcuffs, so many pairs that it was hard to count. He tossed them on his bed and then pulled out a black mask that had a zipper where the mouth should be. “Sometimes I sleep in this,” he said, smiling. He seemed so proud of these things, like we were all in a club together.

  “I want you to do something for me,” he then said. “Can you do something for me?”

  “We really want to go home, Kennedy,” Ben said, and now he really was crying. “I want to go home.”

  “You can go home in just a second,” Kennedy said. “All I need is for Jamie to lie down on the bed and put on those handcuffs.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” I said.

  “If you do it, then you and Ben can go home,” he said.

  I don’t know why we didn’t run, but it didn’t even occur to me. It felt like the entire world had shrunk down to this single room, that the three of us were the only people still alive in it. And even though there were two of us and one of him, I knew that it didn’t matter. So I lay down on the bed.

  “On your stomach,” he said, his voice forceful, deep.

  I turned onto my stomach.

  “And
take off your shirt,” he said, which I did. Then he handcuffed my arms to some straps attached securely to the bed frame, one set of handcuffs for each hand. He clamped them so tight that the metal pinched my wrists and I gasped.

  “Kennedy,” Ben said, but I choked out, “It’s okay, Ben. I’m okay.”

  Kennedy was now cuffing my ankles, so that I was pinned to the bed. I heard him rustling around in the box, and then he returned to my line of sight, close to my face and holding a kind of whip, like an octopus, all these tendrils, solid black. “This is a flogger,” he said. “I’ve never used it on a real person before.”

  “Kennedy,” I said. “I’m afraid.”

  He knelt on the bed, and I felt the mattress sink. And then he whipped me, lightly at first, which just made me hiss, the air rushing out of me, and then harder—​again, and again, and again. And I was outside my body, just floating above it, and I was watching myself, and I was so sad that this was happening to me. I looked pretty bad; I could see it from up there. There were all these welts on my back, but I was just taking it, just lying there.

  And then I heard Ben screaming, crying, and after a little while the door burst open. “What the fuck is going on?” Kennedy’s father yelled, and Kennedy dropped the flogger. I turned my head as far as I could, looking over my shoulder, just in time to see his father walk across the room, push Ben into one wall, and slam Kennedy against the other—​once, then twice, leaving a ragged hole in the drywall. When he tossed his son a third time, Kennedy fell against the window, the glass shattering and tinkling on the ground outside.

  “Get him out of those handcuffs,” his father shouted, but Kennedy was muttering.

  “What?” his father said. Ben was now whimpering, lying on the ground. I could just barely see him if I turned my head at an angle.

  “I dropped the keys,” Kennedy finally said.

  “Well, find them,” his father said.

  For about two minutes I listened as Kennedy crawled around the room on his hands and knees while his father stood there, towering over us. He turned off the music, and it was so quiet, the most total silence I’ve ever heard.

  “Okay,” Kennedy finally said, “here they are.” And he unclasped all four sets of handcuffs. And I was free.