The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  “You love me?” Kara looks up into his beady eyes. “Oh, FDR.”

  FDR grins down at her. “What’s an ‘FDR’?” he asks.

  The next day, Saturday, is dress rehearsal for The Crucible. Kara walks into school a little past noon to find Ruthie and Olive sitting on the floor, waiting. Ruthie’s dour-faced under her white bonnet, makeup-less, her eyes ringed and tired. She scrambles to her feet when she sees Kara. Olive’s expression is stony; she takes her time. Kara pretends she hasn’t noticed them and slips into the drama classroom, but her friends are on her heels.

  “Are you okay?” asks Ruthie. “Why didn’t you meet us at the movies last night?”

  “Did you have sex?” asks Olive.

  Kara shushes her. The classroom is filled with their co-stars—stretching, doing vocal warm-ups, buckling their pilgrim shoes, paying no particular attention to the girls. They step into the large closet where Kara’s costume hangs, and Ruthie closes the door behind them.

  “Well?” Olive asks.

  “I don’t see how it’s any of your business,” says Kara.

  Ruthie sighs in relief. She can tell by Kara’s tone—quiet and strange, not clipped and smug—that she didn’t. Olive only gets angrier—all morning she’s imagined, in gory detail, the things that could have happened to Kara last night, and now it burns to see her in one piece and still a virgin.

  “What happened?” Olive asks.

  “Nothing,” Kara shrugs. “He asked me to visit him. We just hung out and talked.” She ignores the look Ruthie and Olive exchange. “It was, if you must know, really nice.”

  “How did you even get in?” Ruthie asks.

  “There’s a back door near the employee parking lot they always forget to lock. FDR told me about it. He knows everything that goes on in there.”

  “Are you, like, boyfriend and girlfriend now?” asks Olive.

  Kara says nothing. She slips the scratchy brown Puritan dress off its hanger, and struggles to pull it over her head.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Ruthie asks. “We could have come with you.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Kara. “That would have been great. ‘Hey, FDR, I’m so excited for our date; by the way, my friends think I’m a child so they’ve come, too.’”

  “It’s just moving so fast,” Ruthie says. “We don’t even know the guy.”

  “Maybe it would be easier for you if he wasn’t a former president of the United States?” Kara’s smile is frosty. “Maybe you’d prefer him to be, like, a History teacher or something?”

  Ruthie feels her face go hot. Earlier that day—as inspired by Kara’s new boldness as she was itchy not to be left behind—she had stepped into Mr. Olsen’s classroom wearing a clingy blue dress she didn’t have the nerve to wear to homecoming. Ruthie had planned what to do the night before, re-reading key sections of the 254 pages she’d written about Mr. Olsen and Cassidy Fontana. She was going to touch his face and whisper, “You dumb hipster fuck” and then he was going to lay her flat and do things to her, more explicit versions of things she wrote about him doing. But Mr. Olsen only looked up from his laptop and said, “What’s up, Rachel?” She could smell the coffee on his breath. She could see a little white glob of donut frosting caught in his mangy beard. “My name is Cassidy,” she’d said, before stumbling out of the room.

  Ruthie felt stupid then but now she feels even stupider. She looks to Olive—this is the part where Olive usually intercedes, changes the subject, protects them both from themselves—but Olive stares pointedly in another direction, her jaw clamped shut. She looks like she has given up. She looks like she is going to burn down the school.

  Kara’s phone buzzes then, and when she takes it out of her bag, she watches three texts arrive from FDR in rapid succession:

  Miss you, says the first.

  C u soon, says the second.

  Send me a pic of ur boobs, says the third.

  Kara quickly shuts off her phone. “Well,” she says at last. “We can’t share FDR, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “What?” Ruthie exclaims. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” Kara laughs a high, mean laugh, a laugh with no laughter in it. “Maybe you’re happy being best friends with people you hate. Maybe you’re happy being alone. But I’m not.” She ties her costume apron around her waist. Ruthie and Olive stare at her.

  “I don’t hate you,” says Olive.

  “We’re not worried because we hate you,” Ruthie says.

  Kara shrugs, reaching into the cubby where her bonnet sits. She pulls out the bonnet, and something falls out of it and onto the floor. Ruthie glances down and screams.

  “What is that?” she shrieks. “Is that a finger?”

  Kara looks. At her feet is a man’s ring finger, still circled by a gold wedding band. She can tell instantly that it’s wax. It’s fallen out of her bonnet along with a couple of roses. The roses are dead. Ruthie’s still screaming. Olive grips Ruthie’s arm, her face furrowed in disgust. Kara swallows. She crouches to sweep the items back into her bonnet, murmuring, “It’s just a gift, it’s just how he shows he cares,” as the rose petals come loose and crumble in her hands.

  Mr. Olsen has them run through all of Act Three. For once the girls are onstage for most of rehearsal, writhing and screaming “Begone!” and beating their breasts. But they’re distracted. Kara stands as far away from her friends as Mr. Olsen’s blocking will allow. She ignores the exhortations they hiss at her. The finger has terrified Ruthie and Olive so much that Ruthie can ignore her discomfort in Mr. Olsen’s presence, and Olive can stop pretending she doesn’t care. Kara’s relationship with FDR is, clearly, flipping weird as all get out. She can’t accuse her friends of being jealous now, because they aren’t. Kara is gray-faced and jumpy the whole rehearsal, and once when Olsen snaps at her for being distracted, she apologizes. When it’s over, she runs for her car, still in costume, clutching the wax finger to her chest.

  “She’s going to go see him,” says Olive, as they watch Kara drive away.

  “You know what we have to do, right?” Ruthie says. “We have to go to the museum and confront FDR. Like when me and Kara talked to Nicholas.”

  “You think?” Olive’s face goes sour, as it always does when she remembers the incident.

  “Absolutely. He needs to know what he’s dealing with—otherwise he’ll do whatever he wants to her. That’s how older guys are,” Ruthie explains with a sigh. “They underestimate you. They assume you’ve got no one looking out for you. They assume you’re nothing.”

  Olive thinks Ruthie is full of shit, but she knows they need to save Kara. Olive has always been the responsible one, unfailingly good and self-sacrificing. In Little Women Characters, Olive was Marmee. In Articles of Clothing, she was Mom Jeans. It’s far preferable to being the ugly one or the prude, but it’s boring, too—nobody falls in love with the mom. Olive stares after Kara and raises two fingers to her mouth. She sucks on the imaginary cigarette she holds there.

  “Okay,” Olive says. “Let’s roll.”

  It is a rush—making the plan, telling the necessary lies, taking the train into the city that night. The girls stow two weapons in Ruthie’s bag—a hammer Ruthie finds in her dad’s toolbox, and a blowtorch stolen from The Crucible’s tech crew. “Just in case,” Ruthie says, and Olive begins to understand why her friends took down Nicholas Dawkins: this act, this rescue mission, is the most powerful performance of love Olive has ever attempted.

  The night is especially dark, the moon obscured by clouds. Ruthie and Olive realize—once they push open the same unlocked door through which Kara entered the museum—that they haven’t brought a flashlight. Ruthie grasps Olive’s hand. Olive takes her phone out of her pocket and turns it on; it casts a short span of blue light in front of them, enough to make their way down the back hallway. They don’t know where in the museum they are until the clouds shift outside and moonlight pours in through the large front windows
of the lobby. Jackie O. looms up in front of them, gaunt and widowed and waxen.

  Olive nods at the In Times of War . . . sign, visible for only a second before the moon goes dark again. “In there,” she says.

  They creep through the corridor, Olive shining light on the faces of the presidents they pass. She stops at Lincoln. His hands are frozen in some eternal gesticulation.

  “Wait,” says Ruthie. “Look at his hand!”

  Olive looks. Lincoln’s left ring finger has been cleanly lobbed off. “It wasn’t even his,” Olive says. The girls exchange a look of disgust. They keep moving.

  When they finally reach FDR, they’re surprised by how old he seems. He’s perched in his chair like a grandfather, and far from lifelike. He looks more like the Penguin from Batman than a former president of the United States.

  “Um,” says Olive. “Excuse me, sir?”

  FDR doesn’t move. His gaze fixes on some point beyond them.

  “Is he asleep?” Ruthie whispers. “Does he sleep with his eyes open?”

  “I can’t tell.” Olive stretches a tentative hand forward, waves it in front of FDR’s blank eyes. Nothing happens.

  The girls hear a shuddering noise, like a door opening—it’s distant, but the silence around them has been so tense that Ruthie, startled, drops her bag at FDR’s feet. The hammer clonks to the floor. Olive shut her phone off quickly, snuffing out their only light.

  “What was that?” she hisses.

  “I don’t know!” Ruthie inches her way down the corridor, arms outstretched in front of her, shaking for fear she’ll actually brush against someone. She doesn’t. Her eyes adjust to the dark lobby, and when she discerns nobody moving within it, she turns on her heel and wanders back to Olive, using the sound of her friend’s nervous ragged breathing to guide her.

  “I don’t see anybody,” she says to Olive.

  “Okay,” Olive says. She turns on her phone again, casting its blue light. She and Ruthie take in each other’s alarmed faces. Then they look at FDR.

  His grinning head is tilted upwards. He’s looking at them; there is no mistaking this. And in his left hand, he is holding Ruthie’s hammer.

  Ruthie’s scream is something low and gurgling and feral. She pulls at Olive’s arm, trying to drag her away, but Olive can’t move. Her mouth is open and her eyes are perfect circles. Suddenly, the lights come on. Ruthie’s scream dies in her throat. She and Olive turn to the opening of the corridor, where Kara stands, hand poised over the light switch, her Crucible bonnet askew.

  “What the hell is going on?” Kara says.

  FDR places the hammer calmly in his lap. “Friends of yours, dummy?” he asks.

  It’s shocking for Ruthie and Olive to hear this wax figurine speak, but it’s even stranger to hear someone call Kara “dummy.” They see their friend’s face flush as she approaches.

  “Not anymore,” says Kara.

  FDR sizes the two girls up, gazing at them for a moment too long. His expression never changes, yet both Ruthie and Olive feel a strange wave pass over them, a sense that their own bodies no longer belong to them.

  “Pretty,” he grins at Kara. “Why hasn’t any of that pretty rubbed off on you?”

  Kara’s hand is wrapped around Lincoln’s severed finger. She’s holding it so tightly that her arm trembles.

  “Hey,” says Ruthie faintly, in protest.

  The girls had assumed FDR would be handsome, or magnetic—at the very least, kind of nice. But it’s beginning to dawn on them that he’s completely horrible. That whatever Kara has with him is nothing they want.

  “You guys should probably go,” Kara says after a moment, not looking at them.

  “Don’t be like that,” FDR says. “I thought we could play your game. Categories, right? You want to play Categories with me? Kara told me the rules—you’re each a different thing in the category, and Kara’s always the Ugly One. Isn’t that right?” His eyes shift to Kara. “You’re the Ugly One. Right, dummy?”

  “Hey!” says Olive this time. “You can’t talk to her like that.”

  FDR’s head begins to bob, the cigarette holder between his teeth bouncing up and down. It’s as if he’s laughing, but they don’t hear any laughter. “Oh, little girl. Of course I can.”

  Olive and Ruthie look at Kara.

  Kara tries to smile. She tugs at the string of her bonnet. “It’s okay,” she tells them. “He’s just joking around. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Olive sucks her teeth a moment, then shakes her head. She picks Ruthie’s bag up off the floor. Ruthie’s so embarrassed for Kara she can’t quite look at her. Plus, she needs to retrieve the hammer from FDR’s lap; it’s her dad’s only hammer. But she doesn’t want to ask. She leans in as quickly as she can and takes the hammer by the handle, but FDR grabs her around the wrist before she can pull back. Ruthie whimpers. FDR laughs again.

  “Little girl,” FDR taunts softly. He lets go.

  Olive takes the hammer from Ruthie and drops it in the bag, where it clangs against the blowtorch. She and Ruthie begin to walk down the corridor, but they haven’t gotten very far—only to a bemused William McKinley, shrugging over the Spanish-American war—before Olive stops, and turns.

  “Kara,” she says. “Come with us. We’ll get pizza or something.” Olive sounds gentle, but firm. Her voice makes Ruthie’s courage return. Ruthie remembers how she felt, standing beside Kara in the cafeteria last year, shouting at Nicholas Dawkins—strong. Bigger than human. Like if she wanted, she could breathe fire. She stares at Kara now, mortified in her bonnet, and thinks of Mr. Olsen calling her ‘Rachel.’

  “Come on, Kara,” Ruthie says. “Let’s go.” And then she adds: “What would Cassidy Fontana do?”

  But it’s the wrong question, because all three know what Cassidy Fontana would do. Cassidy Fontana would stay at home in slinky clothes, laughing and sighing and waiting to be fucked. Cassidy Fontana would do what she has always done. She would do exactly what Kara is doing.

  “No,” says Olive. She takes a few hesitant steps toward FDR’s wheelchair. Kara is wild-eyed and frightened. But Olive keeps moving toward them. “Don’t be Cassidy Fontana.” She reaches into Ruthie’s bag and pulls out the blowtorch. “Be Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  The girls don’t know whether FDR doesn’t understand what they’re saying or just doesn’t care; he continues to chomp down on his cigarette holder without expression. But Kara takes the blowtorch and turns it over in her hands, gazing at it like it’s some kind of a talisman. She looks at Ruthie. She looks at Olive.

  “Begone!” Olive screams suddenly.

  And Ruthie joins in. “Begone! Begone! Begone!”

  They use their loud, screechy stage voices. Olive stomps and Ruthie waves her fists wildly. Both of them have their teeth bared, and they wear the exact expressions they get right before Kara says something awful to Mr. Olsen, something she should really get detention for but somehow never does; they look at her like she’s the most powerful creature in the world. Kara loves that look. She drinks it in now.

  Kara adjusts the blowtorch and stands up straight. Then she extends one arm and releases the trigger, and with her other hand she pulls the plastic lighter from her pocket and flicks the wheel in front of the gas. A line of blue fire emerges, melting the tip of FDR’s cigarette. Fat white drops of melted wax spill onto FDR’s lap and he starts to yell through his teeth, rolling his wheelchair backwards, but whether it is from fear or basic anatomical inability, he can’t turn his head. He backs into the wall. Kara follows until FDR’s cigarette holder has melted down, then his teeth, then his lips. She holds the blowtorch steady until FDR no longer has a mouth, just a smooth seal of white wax across the bottom of his face. She drops Lincoln’s finger, which she’s been squeezing so tightly it’s now misshapen, to the floor, and she turns the torch on that, too.

  “What kind of a gift is a finger, you freak?” Kara yells at FDR as it turns into a small, flesh-colored puddle. Ruthie and Olive stand behind h
er and cheer.

  Outside the museum, Kara hands Ruthie the keys to her car and crawls into her own backseat. When Olive gave her the blowtorch every nerve in her body went wild with adrenaline; she could feel the blood coursing through her veins. But now she’s tired and her head hurts. The three girls are silent as they drive.

  Olive and Ruthie are stunned by what they’ve done. Olive touches her imaginary cigarette to the end of the blowtorch, then lifts it to her lips. Begone, she thinks, blowing imaginary smoke out the open window. Ruthie has already started re-writing Cassidy Fontana in her mind. Now Cassidy Fontana smears on poison lip gloss and kisses Mr. Olsen until his mouth burns away; she takes off on the back of an eagle to become an avenging Amazon, a terrifying virgin princess. As they hit the parkway, Olive turns on the radio and Ruthie picks up speed and they let the cold wind whip around their faces as they sing along to the worst pop song they have ever heard, their favorite.

  When they played the Category of Musical Components, Olive was a drumbeat, Ruthie was a synthesizer, and Kara—the loudest, the only one they’d ever want to speak for them—was vocals. Now Olive and Ruthie bounce and shimmy, approximating dancing as closely as they can without unbuckling their seatbelts, and Kara leans her head back. She can feel Ruthie’s eyes on her in the rearview mirror, so she mouths along with the lyrics. But she doesn’t sing. She doesn’t make a sound.

  KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN

  What the Ocean Eats

  FROM McSweeney’s

  JANUARY, THE NEW YEAR passed at last, and Pomai will soon be gone. She sits at her large desk, large room in her mother’s large house, reading the buoy reports on the internet. An eel of fear squirts up her throat. A savage swell has arrived on the coast, north-northwest, waves hitting at twelve to fifteen feet, the edge of her ability. The whiteblue light of the computer screen is on her face. She closes her eyes and hopes for bravery, but finally it doesn’t matter, the fear; she can’t stop herself, knowing this is her last weekend in Hawai’i. The truck is packed. She’s going direct into the teeth.