Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  “Could I have a suggestion of a personal characteristic of a human?” he asked.

  Shouts peppered the air. From just behind Bea, “Narcissism!” From somewhere, “Psychopathy!” “Altruism!” When Early timidly shouted, “Kindness!” Bea found herself giggling. The ginger-haired improviser had heard “altruism” first.

  “Altruism is our word,” he announced. The crowd howled as he backed off the stage.

  A tall boy with a bushy brown beard stepped forward.

  “When I was in secondary school—or high school as you call it over here”—he had a British accent, and Bea found herself leaning forward to get a better look at him—“I was terrified of girls. Utterly terrified. And I know what you’re thinking—that all boys are terrified of girls. Um, not this terrified. Despite being from a very secular family and having no interest in religion whatsoever, I started going to a Christian youth group with my mate Fritz just so I could meet a very devout girl in the hope that, well, being Christian, she wouldn’t pressure me to have sex.”

  Laughter rippled through the crowd.

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex. I just didn’t like the expectation that I was supposed to be immediately, totally DTF the second any girl decided she was feeling a bit randy. And I know this isn’t how guys are supposed to be, so I was a little bit ashamed. Well, it worked. I started dating someone who was saving herself until marriage, and this was great because I could also save myself but do so without having my masculinity called into question.

  “Until things took a turn. On my seventeenth birthday, I walked into her parents’ house to find that her parents weren’t home and she was totally naked. ‘It’s your birthday present,’ she said. My birthday present.

  “I had no choice but to come clean. I said, ‘You know, Sally, I don’t know if I’m ready for this,’ and she was sort of offended, naturally, and I told her it wasn’t anything about how she looked, and she put her clothes back on and we watched Skins, which you all don’t know because it’s a British show but it’s this teen drama. And lying there I was feeling actually very liberated, you know? Very relieved. I had been honest with her, and I felt understood and accepted. And I started to think, maybe I do want to go for it. Now that the pressure was off, I could experience my own sincere desire.

  “And just as I’m thinking these things, she says, ‘Russell, I’m really glad that didn’t happen today.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I agree.’ And she says, very serious and tenderly, like she’s telling me something delicate, ‘Do you realize you’re gay?’

  “My next girlfriend found that story hilarious,” he said, pivoting to an eruption of laughter. The one girl in the group dashed to the front of the stage in his place. As the laughs subsided, she clasped her hands behind her back and lifted her chin, assuming the position of a child in a spelling bee.

  “Altruism! A! L! T!”

  Two more of her teammates scurried forward and crouched in front of her.

  “Mr. Nettles,” one said, facing the other, “I know you’re chair of the bee this year, so I don’t mean to be out of line here, but do you think you’re being totally fair?”

  “Mr. Watts,” the other said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you suggesting that because Delilah is my niece, I’m showing her favor of some sort?”

  “Well, perhaps. . . I mean. . . .”

  By this point, three other teammates had lined up behind the girl, playing students who were also competing in the spelling bee.

  “Scarlett!” the student playing Mr. Watts called to one of them. “Can you remind us of the words you’ve spelled so far today in this bee?”

  “Certainly!” she said. “Pugnacious, supercilious, divergence, anemone, and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

  “Marcus, how about you?”

  “I’ve spelled wanton, aghast, jeopardize, pyrrhic, and skullduggery.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Watts said. “And now, sweet niece Delilah, what words have you spelled so far?”

  “Cat! Dog! Rat! Me! I! And I was about to spell altruism!”

  Mr. Nettles shrugged. “Seems pretty fair to me!”

  “I would like to ask a question for clarification on a definition,” the girl as Delilah said. “Is altruism a synonym for favoritism? Or is that just a misunderstanding, Mr. Watts?”

  She broke into a laugh, and the audience joined her as Mr. Nettles sprang to his feet and ran across the front of the stage, signaling the end of the scene.

  Bea couldn’t peel her eyes from the girl. In one scene, she played a bicyclist who could only pedal backward. Everywhere she went, she went backward, with one hand on the “bike handles” and the other balancing herself on her “seat.” In order to create this character, she’d had to flee the stage to procure a stool from the far back corner of the room behind the audience. While everyone waited, she’d tromped through the mass of people, stepping over laps, holding a stool above her head. The boldness of this choice!

  After the first half of the show came a ten-minute intermission. Bea’s butt was numb from sitting on the cool tiles, and her cheeks ached from laughing.

  “Bea, look! You should try out.” Early handed Bea a sheet of teal printer paper on which was typed: AUDITIONS: WED, 8/30, 6–10 P.M. WE ENCOURAGE WOMEN, TRANS FOLK, AND PEOPLE OF COLOR TO APPLY, BECAUSE . . . LOOK AT US OTHER THAN LESLEY AND RAJ.

  “Why don’t you?” Bea said.

  Early shook her head confidently.

  “I’m funny enough, but I lack the self-assurance.”

  “I’m not funny enough,” Bea said. “Though I guess what’s funny is the spontaneity. You don’t have to be funny, you just have to be spontaneous.”

  “Right! You just have to be smart. I could be your groupie. I’ll come to all your shows, and you can set me up with that redhead.” The lights flickered, and people began to settle back into their seats.

  “Just try it,” Early said as the room grew quiet. “What do you have to lose?”

  6

  Stayja

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 18–MONDAY, AUGUST 21

  LA was waiting for Stayja when she arrived at the Rooster.

  “Thought you might want some company,” he said as she entered the shop.

  “I have work to do.” She swung her bag into the cabinet under the sink and noted that campus catering had delivered a new supply of ready-made meals for the students too busy to pause for an actual meal in one of the dining halls. Carter students: always hurrying toward something Stayja couldn’t see.

  “Boo,” he said and made a pouty face.

  They called him LA because two years earlier, a production company had come to campus to film a season of the network miniseries Carolina Crimespree. LA had gone in for the extras casting call and then had been given an actual speaking role, appearing in no fewer than four episodes as himself: Grounds Guy Number Two. He’d made three grand, with which he’d bought a flat-screen TV and a used Honda, selling his old tangerine Corolla to Stayja for ten bucks. (It had once been a driver’s ed car, but he’d taken out the passenger-side brake after he’d bought it seven years earlier. It had logged nearly 240,000 miles yet somehow still ran. On both front doors, you could still see the faint ghost of a phone number for the old driving school.)

  Rugged as usual, he wore his standard pair of work jeans, tattered and smeared with mud stains, and a cotton button-up shirt with rolled-up sleeves. This image of him coupled with a subtle grassy, outdoorsy scent was why, Stayja assumed, he’d made it to prime time as himself. LA was sweet—unbearably so—and had been since he was the kid who lived next door, always coming over and asking to play with her and Nicole.

  After Nicole’s dad was killed on a worksite seven years ago, when Stayja was sixteen and Nicole fourteen, they’d used his life-insurance money to transform his machine shop in the backyard into a house for Donna and Stayja so they could stop renting an apartment a few streets over. When they’d run out of money before the roof was complete, LA h
ad climbed up a shaky ladder with a bundle of shingles and spent a week in the July sun finishing the job. He made Stayja and Donna homemade cards on their birthdays—actually cut the goddamn letters out of construction paper like some kind of scrapbook-crazed middle-aged woman. And yet Stayja couldn’t imagine kissing him, a fact that he’d never fully accepted.

  The plastic ready-made meal trays were filled with mayonnaisey sushi rolls, plump clumps of tuna salad, nearly indistinguishable lumps of chicken salad, and some “spicy” vegan version of the same. Stayja tied on her apron and began moving the containers into the refrigerator.

  Nicole walked in, beaming.

  “I got the job!” She held up her hand for a high five from Stayja.

  “That was lucky,” Stayja said.

  “Thanks for the urine, cuz.”

  “What’s she talking about?” LA asked.

  “What’s up?” Nicole said, looking at Stayja and ignoring LA. Nicole and LA liked to pretend that they didn’t get along. They each thought the other demanded too much of Stayja’s time.

  “Nothing,” Stayja said with a sigh. “Oh, I’m working a double tonight. So maybe LA can take you home.”

  “I stole you these.” Nicole chucked a pack of Marlboro Lights onto the counter.

  “Nicole!” Stayja said.

  “No, listen, it’s not traceable. People pay in cash for coffee, you don’t log it, and once you have enough cash to cover a pack, you log a cigarette purchase. Brill, right?”

  Stayja rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t work like that. The coffee is inventory, too.”

  Nicole shrugged. “Doubt it.”

  “I thought you weren’t smoking anymore,” LA said to Stayja.

  “What are you, her keeper?” Nicole said.

  “You can do it, Stayja. Some of the greatest feats in history were accomplished by people who didn’t know they were feats.”

  “Where did you hear that, LA? That’s too smart for you,” said Nicole.

  “It’s also not true,” Stayja said. “Guys, I need to work.”

  Nicole raised her eyebrows at Stayja, then clucked her tongue. “Fine, can I get the keys? When should I come back for you, ten? Eleven?”

  “No,” Stayja snapped, her voice rising. “You can’t drive right now, remember? You got a DUI. You can take the bus home, or walk, or make him give you a ride.”

  “I’m only good for favors now?” said LA. He turned to Nicole. “Hey, I have one for you. Ready?” Nicole’s favorite ongoing game was to come up with two names, the first of which sounded normal until you heard the second. She was the sole arbiter of who reigned champion at any given time, and Stayja had held the lead for months now after coming up with “Phillip and Flathead,” followed by Donna in second place with “Jean and Denim.”

  Nicole had never allowed LA to move above second-to-last place because his spot there drove him crazy, providing Stayja and Nicole endless amusement.

  “Frank and hotdog,” he said. “Good, right?”

  “You did not come up with that, LA.”

  “I did!”

  “You heard it somewhere.”

  “Motherfucker! I didn’t!”

  “Stayja? I just feel like I’ve heard that one before.” Stayja and Nicole laughed as LA sulked. A pair of professors entered the coffee shop.

  “Dudes, time to go.” Stayja shooed them.

  “If I give you a ride, will you trust me that I came up with that one?” LA said as he and Nicole walked out.

  When the dinner traffic slowed, Stayja popped an Aleve Cold and Sinus—her drug of choice when she needed to stay awake and alert—and grabbed the stolen cigarettes Nicole had left her, then exited through the side door to the parking lot. She took a seat on the curb and batted the box against her palm before ripping off the plastic encasement. Some asshole had decided cigarette packs should be plastered with photographs of decimated lungs and bloody gums, and this one featured a grotesque tracheotomy. She tore the glossy wound from the box and let it fall onto the pavement next to her sneaker.

  “Like we don’t fucking know,” she muttered. As she drew a long, precious inhale, a guy she took to be a student stepped out from the shadow of a tree into the glow of the orange lamps that lit up in synchrony on Carter’s campus each evening well before dusk.

  “Can I bum one?” he asked.

  Not many students at Carter smoked out in the open, although Stayja knew many did smoke, because she’d spent her first year of employment at the university selling them cigarettes at the QuikMart. She took her smoke breaks in a relatively secluded location behind the Rooster, in the lot hardly anyone used other than she herself and the few guys with cars in the adjacent frat house. It was rare for a student to ask to bum one, and it always miffed her when they did. Give me a dollar, then, she dreamed of saying. Since you have about a million more than me. But she always handed one over.

  Tonight, she didn’t care. He could take the whole fucking pack. Flicking a cigarette to life, he plopped down on the curb next to her.

  “How’s your day going?” he asked.

  He was blond, preppy in the way that Carter boys were—he wore a quilted vest over a crisp white T-shirt and pastel yellow shorts. His voice was deeper than he looked like it should be, though, and there was a lived-in air about him, as if he’d been through something.

  “Fine,” she said.

  He let the smoke float from his mouth in a slow cloud. “You want to start, or you want me to?”

  She turned to face him.

  “Just a long day,” she said. “I made a lot of oat milk lattés.”

  He laughed. It caught her by surprise. “You mean you don’t love being a barista to the women at an elite university?” His sarcasm was evident, but she couldn’t tell if he was flirting with her.

  “Believe it or not,” she said, feeling herself soften a little.

  “Listen, I’m not perfect. But when I got here, I couldn’t believe some of the entitlement, especially with the girls. One night a year or so ago I was out, and walking back to my dorm I passed this girl dancing on the quad buck naked. She was tanked. Her friends were, like, not even trying to stop her because they were wrecked, too. By the time I got there I guess someone had called campus police. I watched this cop walk up to her and try to get her to put her clothes on, and she yelled, ‘Do you know who my dad is?’”

  Stayja chuckled. “Who was her dad?”

  “I mean, I’m sure some donor or something. But talk about things you never say aloud.”

  Stayja took a drag. “I don’t know. I’d say it if it helped me not get arrested or some shit. Whatever they do to you. Suspend you.”

  “She wasn’t going to be suspended, please.”

  “How come?”

  “Do you know who her father is?”

  They both laughed.

  “I can’t talk. I’m a legacy kid myself.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Legacy kid? Means I got in because my parents went here.”

  “Ah.” Stayja looked at the ground.

  “Do people confide in you a lot?” he asked after a moment.

  Stayja snorted. “All the time,” she said. “Apparently I have that air about me.”

  He took a drag.

  “You need to unload? Go ahead,” she said.

  “What do you want to hear about first—my substance-abuse issues or my daddy issues?”

  “How can I possibly choose when they’re presented that way?”

  He laughed.

  “Daddy issues,” she said.

  “You ever hear of New Start Treatment Centers?”

  “As in call 800-NEW-START? Kill your painkiller addiction without the pain?”

  “That’s my dad.”

  “He owns a drug-recovery center?”

  “He owns a fleet of drug-recovery centers. Like two hundred something.”

  “Okay, and?” she said. Whenever someone made a comment meant to stress how wealthy a person was, Stayja
’s reaction was to feign indifference. Just because people got a lucky draw in life didn’t mean she had to give them the satisfaction of thinking that impressed her.

  “I don’t know how much you know about opiate addiction.”

  “I’m not addicted to opiates, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You’re lucky, because if you are, you don’t get un-addicted. It’s a life sentence. You treat the addiction with drugs that don’t fix it. They just relieve it, and then you have to come back for more. His centers make money off the same people for years. Decades. It’s a revolving door. There is no end to treatment. Do you know what ‘recovery is a lifelong process’ means? It means the guy who’s profiting off your lifelong process? He’s very rich.”

  He spat onto the pavement, then continued. “Meanwhile, he’s glorified as this hero. Everyone loves him. Like he’s doing good. Such a lie.”

  “How so?”

  “The new wing of Wiggins Library is gonna be named after him, for one. A gallery at Dallas Art Museum. I mean that’s because he donates to those places, of course. He’s a real do-gooder on paper.”

  “What’re your substance-abuse issues?”

  “She cuts to the chase.” He was playful, not defensive. “Just alcohol and weed. I got my wisdom teeth out last year, and I wouldn’t let them give me any painkiller but ibuprofen. I won’t give my father the satisfaction.”

  “You think your dad wants you to be addicted to painkillers?”

  He dropped his cigarette on the ground.

  “I think my dad likes to be in control of everything. I think part of him wants me to succeed because I’m his kid and it makes him look good, but part of him likes when I fuck up because he gets to feel like he’s better than me.”

  “So, maybe stating the obvious, but your dad sounds like a jerk.”

  He chuckled. “You should hear how happily self-righteous he sounds when he tells people how long it’s taken me to finish college.”

  “How long?”

  “I’m a senior. I’m already twenty-three. I took what we call a gap year when people ask, but it was a gap year I spent at rehab.”