The Relive Box and Other Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  She’s squeezed in tight with the mass of graduates making for the back exit, the dean and a dozen other functionaries, like Ms. Krentz, the PE teacher who coaches women’s soccer and has a face like an over-inflated soccer ball, insisting they all stay together for safety’s sake in case the threat is real, which in ninety-nine percent of the cases it isn’t, but the college can’t take that risk. Obviously. So Hailey’s boxed in and sweating—it must be ninety degrees—and her heart is going so hard she thinks she’s having a heart attack and here they are out in the sunshine with the trees everywhere and the sweet cool smell of the air and Stephanie Joiner comes out of nowhere like a guided missile to stick her face in hers and crow, “Can you believe it? I mean”—loping along in her big white heels that are like rowboats on the green river of the lawn—“what a shitty thing for somebody to do.”

  “You don’t think it’s real, then?”

  Stephanie looks almost insulted. “You kidding me? It’s just some asshole, some frat rat that thinks he’s being cute—”

  “What about the terrorists?”

  “Terrorists? What are you talking about? In Hibernia? There isn’t a Muslim within three hundred miles of here.”

  “Well, they’re not all Muslims,” she says, matching her stride for stride when all she wants is to get away someplace private because she knows what she has to do, of course she does, and that’s make another phone call to public safety because there’re bombs all over the place, don’t they realize that? In Threlkeld especially. “I mean, what about Columbine? Or what, that elementary school in where was it, Connecticut?”

  Stephanie—how did she manage to glom onto her? doesn’t she have any friends?—just swings her head round to glare at her without breaking stride, tramp, tramp, tramp. “I’m not going to debate you. It’s a prank. Bet you anything.”

  “Terrorists,” she insists, or tries to, but she doesn’t sound very convincing, because after all, Stephanie’s right, whether she knows it or not. What do they shout, the terrorists? Allahu Akbar! Why doesn’t some dude in a beard come running across campus shouting Allahu Akbar and save her the trouble? Tramp, tramp, tramp. It would be almost funny if she wasn’t having a heart attack. Everybody’s murmuring and bitching, the whole black-clad crowd of them trudging across the lawn like cattle with Ms. Krentz and a dozen other profs herding them along because the college is running scared now and they all have to stick together, the sun, the trees, the mass of parents somewhere behind them, and all at once she breaks free and makes for the nearest building, Morey Hall, the engineering building she’s been in maybe once in her life and she’s furious suddenly, because why won’t they listen to her?

  She needs privacy. She’s having a heart attack. She’s got her phone in her hand. But here’s Ms. Krentz double-timing across the grass to cut her off, calling out to her from fifty feet away, “No, no—you’re all to stick together.” And then, adding lamely, “Till we get this sorted out. Dean’s orders.”

  It’s a moment. Ms. Krentz is right there, pulling up short. “Come on,” she says, and she couldn’t recognize her, could she? It’s been three years since Hailey took PE, and she was hardly a shining light, especially since she couldn’t for the life of her figure out how to dismount the parallel bars without crashing on her ass about sixty percent of the time. “I know this is hard, but we need to—”

  “I have to use the restroom.”

  Ms. Krentz—she wears her hair long, unlike any other PE teacher on this planet, and if her face wasn’t so puffy she might almost have been attractive, or once maybe—gives her a look of incredulity. “You can’t hold it till we get there?”

  “It’s an emergency?”

  Everyone’s shuffling past and giving them sidelong looks, as if things aren’t unusual enough as it is, and Ms. Krentz just lets it go. “Be careful, okay?” she says, then turns round and starts back across the lawn.

  Inside the restroom at the far end of a cool wax-smelling hall with arched ceilings and framed photos of men in lab coats and glasses glinting from the walls, Hailey locks the door and ducks into the farthest stall down and then locks that door too, steadies her phone in one trembling hand and punches in the number. Someone answers on the first ring—a man, the same man she talked to half an hour ago, his voice tense and low. “Hello?”

  “I told you,” she says. “I warned you. There’s bombs all over the place, in Threlkeld too. You need to clear out graduation or things are going to get”—and here she hesitates, all the bad lines from all the bad movies she’s ever seen cartwheeling through her brain—“get ugly,” she says finally, and cuts the connection.

  Thanksgiving break had been the worst, till now anyway, going home and having to act as if everything was okay and listen to her mother go on about how proud she was of her, the first one in their family to graduate college and could she possibly know how much that meant to her? She actually brought a bunch of books home with her and locked herself in her room with her laptop to keep up the pretense when she wasn’t out making the rounds with her girlfriends from high school and some of the guys too, who were all home from their various schools, and she kept up the pretense with them too. Her mother kept asking if she had enough money for books, tuition, housing, and she kept saying she was okay, living off-campus now with these two other girls and telling her how much she appreciated the checks, which were fine, they really were. Did she like lying to her mother’s face? No. But she kept meaning to make up the classwork, at least that first semester, but then, after winter break, Connor unceremoniously dumped her to go out with Chrissie Fortgang, a blond stuck-up bitch whose father owned half the building supply stores in upstate New York and Vermont too, and she went into a depression that just kept spiraling down till she hated herself and couldn’t get out of bed and for a while there (in February, February was the low point) even stopped going out to Elsie’s and The Study Hall. It was like she was in a cell in a prison somewhere, and if she did go out to the bars there was no joy in it because she knew it was inevitable she’d see Connor there, with or without Chrissie Fortgang, and she felt she just couldn’t handle that. Spring, which always used to make her feel as if her whole life just got kickstarted and she could do anything there was in the world, slammed down on her like the lid of a coffin, and she didn’t go home for spring break because she couldn’t face her mother and she didn’t go anywhere else either. Just stayed in her room, hating herself, while her two roommates went to Saint Thomas and soaked up the sun.

  She was so miserable that week she even tried Hawthorne again, as if that would help her, as if she could roll that big stone of Professor Dugan’s class off her chest and then maybe go to summer school or something, just catch a break, but that didn’t happen because Hawthorne was as impenetrable—boring—as ever and how he could be some sort of big American writer was beyond her, even in his day when things were so slow and rural and people didn’t have as much choice in their lives.

  Had I one friend,—or were it my worst enemy!—to whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood!—all emptiness!—all death!

  Right. So die already.

  U there?

  I’m here but i’m afraid to ask—u ok?

  Not

  U really called in again?

  What else was i supposed to do?

  Thats crazy

  They dont, i mean they’re not, like nothings happening & my moms in the stands

  Dont panic

  You know what, i wish i did have a bomb

  This is the worst moment of her life, maybe of anybody’s life, ever, though right there at the dark margins of her imagination she can picture a whole vast world of refugees and genocide victims and starvation and disease spinning away from her out beyond the towering high ceiling of the basketball arena and the safety and privilege
it encloses, but you’ve got to put it in perspective. None of that matters now, not the kittens in the kill shelters she used to circulate petitions over when she was in high school or the welfare mothers or the Zika babies or anything else—she’d sacrifice them all in a heartbeat, right now, right here and now, if those idiots would only take her seriously. Just for today, that’s all she asks, just this once. They’re the public safety department, aren’t they? What are they, deaf? Don’t they care? What if some maniac really did call in a threat? What then?

  She is seated now, one of 332 prospective graduates in the crisp white folding chairs that scallop the backs of their black gowns as far as she can see in front of her, and so far nothing is happening. There’s a smell of body heat, cologne, that perfume again. Gum maybe. Everyone’s chewing gum because the atmosphere’s so tense, the crowd in the bleachers buzzing softly, like the yellow jackets that used to hover in the meadow out back of the house on hot, still summer days, the students around her looking vacant and sober, any party atmosphere just squashed dead now. She wants to text. She has to text. It’s like breathing. Janelle’s the only person in the world that knows what she’s feeling right now and she needs her more than anything, but she can’t text now, she won’t, this is it, the final drop of the final blade, and why aren’t they canceling it, why isn’t the dean—?

  But there he is, rising up out of the first row with a whole troop of dignitaries, older people, white hair and red ears, jewelry, sashes, and that woman, she must be the politician that’s supposed to deliver the commencement speech, though nobody’s ever heard of her, and—

  But again. Always a but, always an interruption.

  At first she didn’t notice the two men in uniform, not public safety, but cops, real cops, making their way up the row in the opposite direction of the dignitaries, heightened security, that’s what it is, and still she doesn’t get it. Not yet. Not until they keep on coming, walking abreast, their heads up and eyes alert, as if they’re looking for something, and they finally stop at the aisle where she’s sitting, six seats in from the left.

  In the days of Connor, the first days and weeks especially, she felt freer than she ever had in her whole life, because she was in love, yes, but not just with him, with the idea of him too. School had been the one constant in her life since the dawn of consciousness, preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, senior high, college, on and on till she hit the wall in Dugan’s class, and Connor—who’d dropped out junior year to sail through the Panama Canal to Puerto Vallarta and back round again and never did bother to reenroll, or at least he was taking his time about it—was contra to all that. He gave her those slow syrupy days, gave her the wind in her face and the smell of the grass and the flowers and the wild rocket ride of a beer and shot for breakfast, though of course he was a bastard and had been all along and she hated him. But back then? There was this one outfit she used to wear—black Topshop jeans, suede ankle boots and a tight tee that read HOMEMADE across her tits—and every time he saw her in it he’d give her a slow smile and say, “Hey, Hail, you’re the bomb, you know it?”

  If there’s irony in that, she’s not the one to appreciate it. You can’t afford irony when your mother looks at you like she wants to cut you up in small pieces and feed you to the sharks, when you have a lawyer and have to go to court and when the memory of that night at graduation when they traced her calls and came up the aisle and took her away in handcuffs is like a slow drip of acid every minute of every day she has her eyes open.

  The good news? She’s not getting any jail time, or any more than the one night she already served before her aunt Ceecie bailed her out because her mother wouldn’t. She’s currently working as a sales clerk at Nordstrom Rack in Poughquasic Falls to pay down the $10,000 fine the judge imposed on her and she’s got two and a half years left of the three years’ probation they gave her, with community service thrown in for good measure. Nobody at Hibernia will ever speak to her again, not that that’s a bad thing, especially. And Poughquasic Falls, which is fifteen miles south of Hibernia, is just far enough away so she doesn’t have to really see any of them. She’s down on herself, of course, so far down she sometimes thinks she’ll never climb back up, but she’s trying, each day that crawls by taking her that much further from that arena and the nightmares that shook her awake every night for the first month. She’s got a dirt-cheap efficiency above the thrift store, a neighborhood bar she can almost tolerate, and she’s just started seeing this guy who likes to shoot pool there on weekends (he drives a Ford Saturn and if he’s ever even heard of a Triumph motorcycle it’s only because it’s part of the background noise of society).

  So there’s this one day, maybe ten days before Christmas, the store a madhouse, and she glances up from the cash register and who does she see standing there in back of her current customer but Stephanie Joiner. Stephanie doesn’t notice her at first because she’s got her head down, mentally adding up the price tags, so Hailey has a moment to prepare herself, fighting down the sick feeling rising in her throat. If anything, Stephanie looks even worse than in college, her hair cut short as if she’s the penitent and not Hailey, and she’s wearing a white parka that makes her look like the Doughboy. That helps. But still, once the woman in front of her—middle-aged, dandruff like sleet in her hair, taking forever to dig out her credit card and ID—bundles up her packages and steps aside, there’s Stephanie, looking as if she’s in Saw II or something.

  “Jingle Bell Rock” rattles out of hidden speakers. The whole store smells of that Christmasy cinnamon deodorizer the floor manager likes to go around spraying every fifteen minutes and the overhead lights are harsh, blunting everybody’s eyes and making death masks of their faces. For a long moment Stephanie just stands there, clinging to her armful of ugly skirts and uglier sweaters, then, without a word, she marches over to the next cash register and gets in the back of the line. And then it’s the next customer and the next one after that.

  Guess who i saw in the store like ten minutes ago?

  Who?

  Stephanie joiner

  Who’s that?

  Like really i might as well have a letter A stitched on my sweater

  What ru talking about?

  Or a B, maybe a B

  ??? who’s stephanie?

  I don’t know just some girl

  So who is she?

  Actually?

  Yeah

  She’s nobody

  So why mention her?

  I dont know maybe b/c i’m nobody too

  Dont say that

  I’m saying it

  ARE WE NOT MEN?

  The dog was the color of a maraschino cherry and what it had in its jaws I couldn’t quite make out at first, not until it parked itself under the hydrangeas and began throttling the thing. This little episode would have played itself out without my even noticing, except that I’d gone to the stove to put the kettle on for a cup of tea and happened to glance out the window at the front lawn. The lawn, a deep lush blue-green that managed to hint at both the turquoise of the sea and the viridian of a Kentucky meadow, was something I took special pride in, and any wandering dog, no matter its chromatics, was an irritation to me. The seed had been pricey—a blend of chewings fescue, bahia and zoysia incorporating a gene from a species of algae that allowed it to glow under the porchlight at night—and while it was both disease- and drought-resistant it didn’t take well to foot traffic, especially four-footed traffic.

  I stepped out on the porch and clapped my hands, thinking to shoo the dog away, but it didn’t move. Actually, it did, but only to flex its shoulders and tighten its jaws around its prey, which I now saw was my neighbor Allison’s pet micropig. The pig itself—doe-eyed and no bigger than a Pekingese—didn’t seem to be struggling, or not any longer, and even as I came down off the porch looking to grab the first thing I could find to brandish at the dog, I felt my heart thundering. Allison was one of those pet owners who tend to anthropomorphize their animal
s and that pig was the center of her unmarried and unboyfriended life—she would be shattered, absolutely, and who was going to break the news to her? I felt a surge of anger. How had the stupid thing got out of the house anyway, and for that matter, whose dog was this? I didn’t own a garden rake and there were no sticks on the lawn (the street trees were an edited variety that didn’t drop anything, not twigs, seeds or leaves, no matter the season) so I stormed across the grass empty-handed, shouting the first thing that came to mind, which was “Bad! Bad dog!”

  I wasn’t thinking. And the effect wasn’t what I would have hoped for even if I had been: the dog dropped the pig, all right, which was clearly beyond revivification at this point, but in the same motion it lurched up and clamped its jaws on my left forearm, growling continuously, as if my forearm were a stick it had fetched in a friendly game between us. Curiously, there was no pain—and no blood either—just a firm insistent pressure, the saliva hot and wet on my skin as I pulled in one direction and the dog, all the while regarding me out of a pair of dull uniform eyes, pulled in the other. “Let go!” I demanded, but the dog didn’t let go. “Bad dog!” I repeated. I tugged. The dog tugged back.

  There was no one on the street, no one in the next yard over, no one in the house behind me to come to my aid. I was dressed in the T-shirt, shorts and slippers I’d pulled on not ten minutes earlier when I’d got out of bed, and here I was caught up in this maddening interspecies pas de deux at eight in the morning of an otherwise ordinary day, already exhausted. The dog, this cherry-red hairless freak with the armored skull and bulging musculature of a pit bull, showed no sign of giving in: it had got my arm and it meant to keep it. After a minute of this, I went down on one knee to ease the tension in my back, a gesture that only seemed to excite the animal all the more, its nails tearing up divots as it fought for purchase, trying, it occurred to me now, to bring me down to its level. Before I knew what I was doing I balled up my free hand and punched the thing in the head three times in quick succession.