The Big Hit

by Jamie Bennett

  It would have been wonderful for the professor to find that painting, missing from the family for all of these centuries. I imagined giving it back to them, how happy they would be. But probably the college wouldn’t have been thrilled about the professor handing back a work of art worth a bucketful of money. We would cross that bridge when we came to it, if ever.

  I gave myself five minutes per book request, because otherwise, I could have spent weeks in the basement looking. I’m a Fun Guy wasn’t in its correct place, but I spotted it only two shelves down. I put the paper request form into the front cover, admiring the picture beneath the title of the scientist wearing Groucho Marx glasses and carrying a rubber duck. It did look like he was trying to be a fun guy.

  I picked up my head from the cover when a light malfunctioned and came on in the corner of the room. It didn’t scare me when it happened, but it did always make me look. I stuck the fungi book in the tote bag I carried, then looked at the next slip. It was a request for a volume on literary theory, and I knew that part of these stacks was a mess, almost everything in the wrong place. I walked slowly toward the section, reviewing the other book slips as I did. A Brief Guide to Noncommutative Geometry. Oh, that one was probably gone. A lot of the economics and math books had gotten wet during a flood in the basement the past spring when the creek running behind the library had overflowed. The building dipped down in the back, close to the creek bed, and water had poured in through an old door. We’d had a huge job moving out ruined volumes before mold took over. I would look, but chances were that—

  Another light came on across the room, one section away from the last one, which in turn clicked off. Jeez, no wonder Solomon got freaked out down here. I had never seen them do that before, the lights turning on in sequence like that. I had never had more than one come on spontaneously, either. I flipped to the next book slip and smiled when I saw the title: Renaissance Masters of Northern Italy. That was a book I probably needed to read, if we were seriously going on a treasure hunt in the art collection. Even if I had my doubts about it, it would be pretty cool if—

  The light on the other side of the basement clicked off and the next clicked on. I stopped. Was there maybe a cat in here, roaming the aisles? I thought of the big grey guy who visited my yard. It would be kind of good if a stray had managed to find its way into this pit, because there was definitely a mouse issue…the next light came on as the former one turned off. I stopped the music and pulled out my earbuds. “Hello?” I called into the silence.

  My phone rang and I jumped about three feet into the air, grabbing frantically at my pocket to stop the noise. “Dylan?” I answered.

  “What’s the matter?” my brother asked immediately. “Your voice sounds weird.”

  “No, I’m fine,” I assured him. “If my voice sounds weird, it’s because I’m in the basement of the library. I can’t believe I even got a signal. But I can’t talk, because I’m right in the middle of something.”

  “A library emergency?”

  “Exactly. I’ll call you tonight, when I get home.” The phone made a metallic scratching noise and I held it away from my ear, grimacing.

  “…Friday night,” my brother was saying when I listened again. “You could go out.”

  “You could too. Take Julia out on the town for some fun.” I could almost feel his smile through the phone. He was crazy about his wife, after having almost blown his chances with her. I felt like he was pretty lucky to have her, but she didn’t seem to mind him, either. “I’ll call you tomorrow and you can tell me about the nice restaurant you treated her to.”

  “Good idea, Daisy.”

  The phone made another terrible noise in my ear so I said bye to him and hung up. As I did, the light above me went out, too. I hadn’t been moving enough, and for half a second, I stood in the darkness. I waved my arms above my head, and as it illuminated, another did also, a few aisles away from where I was standing.

  And then another. They were moving in a line, getting closer to me. Another, then another. “Hello?” I called again, and again, there was no answer.

  Oh. Now I was scared. I started to walk, briskly, back toward the stairs. It had to be a cat. Or one of the mice, even though they had never been big enough to set off the lights before. It was a cat, for sure, or a super-sized mouse. I walked even more briskly, and when the next light turned on, the walk became a jog. The light in the aisle parallel to where I was jogging burst on in time with mine. The jog became a run.

  I got to the end of my row, but before I took a step out to turn the corner and make a break for the stairs, the light in that section suddenly came on, triggered by…something? I tried to stop but my tennis shoes slipped on the smooth concrete floor and I skidded out into the aisle.

  And when I saw him there, I screamed. He was huge, like a giant, bigger than my big brother, bigger than anyone I had ever seen in real life. He stretched from one shelf to the other, wider than Solomon, wider than two of me. Oh, crap. I had frozen in place, unable to run, but I opened my mouth to scream again.

  “No! No, it’s ok!” He held up his hands, like I was robbing him. Or like he wasn’t a threat. “It’s ok. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I heard my own breathing. It sounded like I was whistling, it was coming so hard. “Oh, my God! What in the ever-living hell are you doing in the library basement?”

  Because it was him. It was Knox Lynch, standing right in front of me.

  Chapter 3

  I just stared, and he just stared, and we stood frozen, staring at each other.

  I opened my mouth to ask again why he was there and the light above us went out. Instead of talking, I screamed.

  It flicked back on almost instantly, and it showed Knox Lynch waving his tree-trunk arm over his head. He was wearing a black shirt that wasn’t skin-tight, but it showed every bump and cord of muscle in his arms, chest, and shoulders. He could have broken me like a twig.

  He lowered his arm and held up both hands again. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I wasn’t trying to scare you,” he told me. His voice sounded like it had on the video: low and growly. It kind of vibrated through me.

  “What are you doing in the library basement?” I gasped. My breath was still whistling in and out of my chest and I was pretty close to full-on panic. I put my hand over my heart, feeling it pound beneath my ribcage.

  “I’m doing research upstairs for a paper. I got permission to use the lower entrance.”

  The entrance that had allowed the water to come in during the flood. I’d had no idea it was even usable.

  “Wait, what are you talking about? A paper?” I asked, trying to focus.

  “I’m taking a class here at the college. I’m trying to get the credits to graduate this spring.” Knox slowly lowered his hands. “Are you going to scream again?”

  “No. No one could hear me, anyway.” And saying that out loud scared the living crap out of me, because I had just yelled my head off, twice, and no one had come running. They really couldn’t hear me down here. The panic surged back up.

  “Are you going to tell people about this? That you saw me?” He made a small movement forward, and I took a big step back, away from him.

  “No!” I shook my head, hard. “No, I won’t tell anyone. But why are you hiding and sneaking around?”

  He was silent for a moment. “I don’t want the circus,” he finally answered, and I understood what he meant when I remembered the incident of the Woodsmen long snapper at the public pool. “I just want to take my class, do the work.”

  I nodded. “No one ever comes down here, except on Friday afternoons when we look for books. Usually I’m the one doing it and I’ll leave you alone.”

  Knox considered me. “You saw me the other day, in the stacks. That was you.”

  I nodded again. “That was you, too.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything then?”

  “I guess I thought it would be hard to believe. And I don’t have a lot of people to tell
,” I admitted. I kept to myself that one of the reasons I hadn’t mentioned it was that I had seriously questioned my own sanity.

  We went back to the staring contest for a moment, and I looked right into his eyes. They were different from how they appeared on TV or in pictures—almost silver, they were so light and shimmery, especially compared to his long, dark eyelashes and dark eyebrows above them. His hair was the same color, close enough to black that there wasn’t any difference, but his bronzed skin saved him from looking like a corpse. He looked…beautiful, beautiful and ferocious. I shivered.

  Knox had to tilt his head down to look at me—he must have had to tilt his head down to look at everyone—and his thick hair was like a curtain on either side of his face. “What’s your name?” he asked me.

  “Daisy. Daisy McKenzie.”

  He held out a hand that was the size of a baseball mitt. “Knox Lynch.”

  It struck me as funny. “I know,” I said, and I smiled a little, my lips still trembling. I hesitated for another second, but then I stepped toward him and we shook. I watched my hand get engulfed, swallowed up in his fingers.

  It seemed like Knox held my hand for a moment too long. When he let go, he was the one to step back quickly, and he turned and walked off toward the stairs, the lights clicking on and off behind him as he went.

  I sat down on the lid of a box of books that bent slightly under my weight. What in the ever-living hell had just happened? There was a United Football Confederation star hiding in the library basement? If I hadn’t touched his hand, I might not have believed it, again. I looked down at my own hand and imagined the warmth of his fingers around mine. I still wasn’t going to tell anyone that I had seen him. Knox Lynch and I shared a secret.

  The light above me went out, and I jumped up to turn it back on and to go hunt for the geometry book. I didn’t find it, but it was probably because my mind was somewhere else entirely.

  ∞

  I steered down the long driveway to Tatum’s house on Saturday, and parked carefully so that I could get my car out and leave, if I wanted to. I was 26 and going to my first party, and that fact made me simultaneously want to laugh at myself and almost cry at the time I had wasted. Instead, I got out, and knocked on the glass door. Tatum flew up to it, smiling at me from the other side.

  “Hi! You’re finally here.”

  “Am I late?” I asked, but she was already pulling me into the house.

  “This is it,” Tatum announced. “Home fucked up home.” She pulled my sleeve again so that I stepped further into the foyer.

  “It’s nice,” I said. It was huge, that was for sure.

  “My mom decorated in the nineties and no one has touched it since.” Tatum made a face. “She loved shabby chic. We don’t have one piece of furniture without chipped paint.”

  I followed her into a big kitchen with an enameled stove and oven that in itself was close to the size of the bathroom in the cottage I rented. “She also liked to cook,” Tatum said, following my eyes to the enormous range. “I think the knobs froze in place after she died. No one ever uses it.” She bounced over to the kitchen island, covered in liquor bottles. “Want a drink?” She picked up a martini glass, brimming with something pink, and gestured to it.

  “No, thank you.” I looked over at their family room, with the overstuffed couches in slouchy, rose-patterned slipcovers. “Your dad left the house as it was because he didn’t want to change what your mom had done?” That was sweet, and sad.

  Tatum burst out laughing. “Are you kidding? He and my mom couldn’t stand each other. He always says that he practically threw a party when she died, he was so happy he got to be single with no alimony to pay. He feels bad about it, for me,” she assured me. “But he’s much happier screwing younger women. Come up to my room.” She told me on the way up the steps about the rules her father had given her: she couldn’t drive his car or touch the giant stash of alcohol, and of course, no one was allowed to come over. “I put a tiny scratch on his car last night,” she said offhandedly, and tossed back the rest of the pink drink. “It’s probably fine.” She pointed into a large, floral bedroom. “That’s my dad’s. See how big the bed is? Lots of room for movement.”

  Tatum’s bedroom was lilac-colored and gauzy, with piles of stuffed animals and a big mural on the wall of peonies and ribbons. “Did you ever want to redecorate in here?” I asked her, looking at her dollhouse, a replica of the house we were standing in.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever be back.” She heaved a teddy bear against the wall. “I thought I’d graduate from MSU and do something in Detroit, or Chicago. Or Los Angeles,” she said vaguely. “Now I’ll be stuck up here for life. Why didn’t you come out with the spin girls and me last night?” she suddenly demanded. “They’re wild. Like, out of control, and it’s awesome.”

  “Um, remember I’m not on that text? I’m a yoga girl.” But not really. “I was busy, too,” I explained. Busy reading, busy trying to coax the grey cat up onto my porch, and busy researching everything I could about Knox Lynch. For someone famous, there wasn’t a lot of public information about him. He had played football at a really small college in Oklahoma, and because of it, he hadn’t gotten a lot of national media attention until he showed up at a workout before the draft into the professional league. He had amazed the coaches and scouts with his size, speed, and skills, and that was where his press coverage had started. There were a few articles about him scoring in the single digits on some kind of intelligence test that all the players took before the draft, too. A headline from an Oklahoma paper had read, “Dumb as a Box of Knox?”

  “I threw up three times last night,” Tatum remarked, and that jerked my mind away from Knox Lynch. “I tried to make wine floats and I think that’s what did it.”

  “Wine floats?”

  She nodded. “Cabernet sauvignon and vanilla soy ice cream. The spin girls don’t do dairy.”

  I almost threw up myself, thinking of that combination. “Why would you eat that?” I asked her.

  “Why did I do donuts with my dad’s car in our neighbor’s yard after I puked?” she asked me back.

  “Yes, why would you do that, too?”

  Shrug. “So this is where you can come hang out if people downstairs annoy you tonight.” She heaved another stuffed animal against the wall. “You can lock it from the inside and I have weed under the bed, if you’re interested.”

  “No, thank you.” I looked at Tatum carefully. She had big, dark circles under her puffy eyes and her skin was a little greenish. “Why don’t we go out for a walk?” Exercise always made me feel better. Eating right helped, too. “When we get back, we can make some dinner and see if the stove still works. I bet it’s fine.”

  “A walk?” She stared listlessly at the window. “I haven’t been outside yet today.”

  “Let’s go now, and then after dinner you can get dressed before everyone comes over.” I had chosen my own outfit carefully: dark jeans, boots, and a blue shirt that would almost certainly not get me noticed. Tatum’s hands went to her hair, balled in a band on the top of her head. “I could braid your hair for you. I can do it pretty well.”

  “Really?” She got a huge, happy smile. “Ok. Yeah, ok.”

  We walked in the chilly spring air on a trail which led past her neighbor’s house. Tatum pointed to the yard. “See?”

  “Oh, crap! You did that?” The grass was torn into muddy furrows.

  “Let’s walk faster.” Once we got past the damage zone, we did have a fun time. She asked a lot of questions about my family, so I mostly talked about my brother. “Wait a minute. Your brother is Dylan McKenzie?” she demanded. “Like, the swimmer, Dylan McKenzie?”

  I nodded. He had retired, but he was still the guy who had been the ideal and role model for a generation of American swimmers. And he was famous from his endorsements, and for being the biggest athlete to ever come out of our area. I saw Tatum looking speculative. “He’s married. He loves his wife Julia so much,”
I mentioned casually, and her face fell. “Tatum, do you really do all the things you write about to the yoga girls?”

  “The things?”

  “The…sex things,” I said, and blushed. Really, she should have been the one blushing. The stuff she wrote was majorly X-rated.

  “I’m not making it up,” she said firmly. “We’re all looking there to get the scoop about guys, right? I don’t lie when I write about them. Mostly.”

  “Like what you were saying about that stuff with Clay, holding his head in your…you know, or what you did with Yanis? The thing about the vacuum and the, um, cherries?” I blushed harder, just thinking about it. I hadn’t known that you could do that with small appliances and fruit.

  “Oh, no, that was a lie,” Tatum said breezily. “That would never work with cherries. Maybe nectarines, though. And what I wrote about Clay, making him—”

  “Do what you said you did,” I interrupted. “That wasn’t true, either?”

  She considered. “Yeah, not that either. But everything else was. And I was very sexually free with my ex-boyfriend.” She considered again. “But I didn’t like any of it all that much.”

  Hm. I definitely had some questions about sex that the internet and all the books I read late at night hadn’t been able to answer for me, probably because I was too embarrassed to look in the right places. I had discussed a few things with Julia, Dylan’s wife, but it grossed me out quite a bit to consider that what she was telling me, sex-wise, was all in relation to my brother. “So, um, about condoms,” I started.

  “Always,” Tatum said promptly.

  “Right, of course. But, like, who puts them on?”