She held up two tea boxes, asking his preference. He chose the box without flowers.
She went out to fill the teakettle. While she was gone, Eugene went over to the photos to scope out her body in detail. He was back in place by the time she returned and plugged the teakettle in.
Say you were a little girl and you took ballet. Maybe your mother forced you. Maybe you thought it was part of being pretty. Or because ballet was a realm that girls dominated. A sport that was also an art, so way better than tennis, or gymnastics. Didn’t ballerinas get deformed feet? Wasn’t the discipline cruel and unusual? If so, the ballerina was just as brave-hearted as Eugene sensed she was.
“This is weird, but can I see your feet?” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I want to see if they’re all messed up. From dancing.”
“They are!” the ballerina said. She seemed excited to show him. She lay down on her bed. Eugene came over to look.
“Pretty ugly,” he said. (Not true.)
Then, brave himself, he sat on the bed and started massaging her feet.
“That feels good,” the ballerina said. She closed her eyes.
For the next minute they were silent. Eugene started on her other foot.
“Can I ask you something?” the ballerina said. “Are you gay?”
“No,” Eugene said.
“Because I was wondering.”
“No!” he repeated.
“I wouldn’t care,” she said.
“I asked you out on a date!” Eugene said.
“That was a date? At the movies?”
“Not a very good one.”
“I’m so sorry!” she said. “I thought it was like a bunch of people were meeting.”
It didn’t matter anymore. He wasn’t thinking about that.
He was thinking that dancing wasn’t like making a monument in bronze. With dance you did it once, perfectly or not, and then it was gone forever.
Whereas he was too clumsy for that, and so had to sweat and gnaw his mental cuticles.
When she got up to pour the tea, he tried his best. He didn’t have a pen handy, so he had to sound it out in his head:
At nine, her mother watches from her wheelchair
As she dips and leaps and pirouettes.
This girl, once curled inside a body
now curling in on itself
has been commissioned, on a patch of floor
in Scarsdale
to move for both of them.
Or something like that. Eugene could see it now. The scene, if not the words. But he could feel them up there, queuing inside his head. He just had to wait and let them out. Then fuss with them until they hardened. Until they weren’t going anywhere, anymore.
ELLA MARTINSEN GORHAM
Protozoa
from New England Review
On a Thursday in May, Noa ditched her friends after school and jumped in a Lyft with Paddy. She wanted to pet his baby mustache in the back seat of the Kia. Instead she floated her arm out the window and bounced it to the hip-hop leaking from his earbuds. The air was warm and dense and sweat curled in the backs of her knees.
They rode along Venice Boulevard past shaggy stumps of sawed-off palm trees and sun-faded billboards hemmed in graffiti. Noa’s friends Wren and Annaliese messaged her from the carpool lineup: Why the little toad? He’ll use you. Roast you. They sent flame emojis.
Noa turned away from Paddy, just slightly, so he wouldn’t see the messages. Homework at my house, she replied.
Wren and Annaliese were still preoccupied with complex cake recipes. They fastened back their sleek hair with headbands tricked out in enormous, furred pompoms. To Noa they seemed all parts light, which was good if you could meet them there, in the light, with the horses. Noa had come to feel like another species around them, a graceless mouth-breather. Their distaste for Paddy held no sway with her.
Someday they might understand how it was necessary to take a risk for a boy. Yes, she was afraid. That was the point.
Paddy bowled his backpack down the hall and free-fell onto the couch in Noa’s living room. They played and replayed his latest post, a video poking fun at Callan from school. Paddy roasted people online under the name PaDWack. He had built a fan base after winning the school’s slam poetry competition. As his rhymes got meaner his followers adored him more intensely.
“This is legit brilliant,” Paddy said as he watched himself rap in the school bathroom with his porkpie hat pulled over his eyes:
Maestro Callan with his hobo pants.
Taking a bath in the school trash cans.
Today in the lab he gets a nosebleed.
Keep off my keys, and stop picking at these [pointing to his nose].
Callan was an easy target, a loner who used to slide out of his chair and finger his nostrils constantly when they were younger.
“Hobo pants, so true,” Paddy said.
“Told you,” Noa said. She’d fed him that line about Callan’s jeans, which were tattered and torn off at the knee.
“You’re wicked, Protozoa.”
“Protozoa.” She savored the word as she spoke.
“The cells?” Paddy said.
“I know what they are.”
In a few weeks they would graduate from the eighth grade at Windsong, where they’d been together since kindergarten. Paddy was set to attend a magnet high school for the highly gifted and sometimes forgot he wasn’t smarter than everyone else. Noa was going to the local public school in Venice where her mother said she would develop certain life skills.
Paddy rhymed some more: Noa Noa Protozoa, swervy like a boa. They drifted to her room. A faraway lawnmower churred and sun soaked the window above her bed. That morning she had hidden in the closet a model of Hogwarts castle, forty-six posters of boy bands, a bracelet loom. She had placed on the desk a freakish pencil drawing of her father with distorted features, her best one. Paddy, immersed in his phone, paid no attention to any of it.
Noa grabbed her giant plush crab and nailed him with it.
“Hey!” His hat fell to the floor and he quickly stuffed it back on his head. “You have to respect the lid.” Cowlicks made his hair stand in odd clumps. He’d worn a hat to cover it for years, a knit beanie or a bucket hat or his most recent porkpie. At some point he’d become known as Paddington instead of Trevor, his real name.
As he pushed her onto the bed a laugh caught in her throat, her heart beating savagely. He dove next to her and cupped his lips over hers, teeth knocking on teeth. His had white plastic buttons of invisible braces on them. She thought of licking candy dots off long sheets of paper as she’d done on the Santa Monica Pier.
Later she would share details with her new closest friend, Aurora Waters, who had been places with boys already. It’s happening, Aurora, she nearly blurted out.
Paddy hitched up her tank top, exposing her belly.
“Wait.” She drew back.
“I mean. You invited me, Protozoa,” he said.
“Fine.” She tried to soften her body. His fingers trotted around the hem of her skirt and rolled her blue fishnet tights all the way to her toes. Then her breath was taken, as if she’d slipped into water too deep and dark to touch bottom. She pressed her nose against lip hair and groped the twiney muscles of his arms. His tongue slid along her face to her ear.
“Don’t,” she said when he rooted a thumb under her panties. It was like being jarred from a dream. Her bralette had been pushed up so she covered herself with the plush crab.
“That’s booey,” he complained and then collapsed facedown on the covers. Without a shirt he appeared much smaller. He had the fragile shoulders of a child.
“Stop looking at me,” he said.
“I wasn’t.”
His stomach rumbled. “You have any of that truffle-up-agus your mama makes?” Without waiting for an answer he skidded down the hall to the kitchen.
A moment later Noa’s arms and legs still hummed, as if her own daring produ
ced an electrical charge. Things had gone almost exactly as she’d hoped or probably better. She took a blast of selfies to document: pouting, mouth slack, wide-eyed.
I did it, she messaged Aurora Waters. Fat-tongue emoji.
As Paddy rattled kitchen drawers down the hall, Noa thumbed through her phone. Her mother had just posted a photo of rabbit roulade plated with smashed root vegetables. The photo was poorly cropped, with her mother’s freckled arm in the background. Noa commented under the photo #MR, short for Mother Rabbit. Her mother would reply much later with a winking emoji.
Noa’s parents opened the restaurant Jenney together a few months before, but her mother was the force behind it. She’d had the investors for dinner, charmed them with her food. Noa’s father never would have gone to the effort, he said. Before they had the space, they’d catered office lunches out of a truck and her father seemed satisfied with that.
The restaurant was a dozen blocks from their house in Mar Vista. In the late afternoons Noa’s father rode his bicycle home to check on her. Most often he stole some time to sun his broad back on the patio. He would pore over books with pages thin as tissue paper; he called them a “compendium of philosophies.” Or, he would strike up a conversation with the neighbor Sharn over a fence that pitched heavily toward her yard. They would chat about her tomato plants and David Hockney and the eyesore McMansion going up across the street. Sharn was retired, a widow, and always seemed to have an ear for Noa’s father.
“Shouldn’t you be getting back?” Noa said once as the sun edged behind Sharn’s roofline.
“Soonish,” her father said as he clapped at a bug tickling his neck.
“You should go now,” Noa sang as she walked down the hall. Takeout boxes littered the kitchen counter, emptied of rabbit sausage and fritters with chunks of pear. Paddy had flung open the French doors to the yard and wandered with a box in hand.
“This is bomb,” he said, sucking dramatically on a fork dipped in yellow custard.
“Spoonbread,” she said. People called it a drug. She slipped into her mother’s clogs and joined him outside. The brick patio was edged in nasturtium with flat round leaves like lily pads. Her father’s surfboards leaned against the tilting fence.
Paddy offered a nibble but Noa pushed it away.
“Should we take a picture together?” she said.
He shook his head and handed her the fork and box. Then he pulled out his phone and scrolled down a feed of photos. “Your mama’s getting mad famous. You call her MR?”
Noa’s face went hot. He had found her mother’s post. “Mother Rabbit. Boring. Don’t follow her or anything.”
“But that’s catchy.”
Paddy’s mother walked with a limp, thick ankles ending in spreading flat shoes. She was no one interesting. Paddy liked to say that he was adopted, that his real parents were famous actors in other parts of the world. He looked enough like his mother that he couldn’t be believed. For a while his lies caught up with him at school, but he saved himself with his PaDWack roasts.
“Rabbit,” Paddy said as they walked inside. “Bunny. Huh.”
“It’s popular in Europe and the South.” Noa tossed the empty box in the sink. She didn’t mention that he’d eaten some.
They moved to the front door, noses in phones. He typed something and Noa’s phone buzzed. He had messaged her: 300 likes for nosebleed von hobo pants.
If you roast me, better make me look good, she replied. She remembered that he’d made up a rhyme for their music teacher Inez, a “siren with all guns firin’.” After he posted it all the boys began to fawn over her. Like Inez, she added.
No promises, Paddy replied. Whims. He leaned into her as if he would kiss her goodbye but instead he flicked her breast.
What the fuck, Paddington! He disappeared into another car, leaving her staring after him until she saw spots.
When he was gone Noa burrowed into the jumble of relics on her closet floor. She balanced her laptop on flattened posters and the backs of doll bodies and sought out Aurora Waters. Can you chat?
Aurora was older, in high school on the other side of the city in Hollywood. She had boasted of her own encounters with boys, insisted that she’d felt a “magic ripple.” They had met online after Noa set up a new account. She projected a mood using carefully selected images: a series of a healing bruise, a collapsed building in the aftermath of an earthquake, the peculiar drawing of her father.
Dark heart? Aurora had written her, introducing herself. Noa did feel at times exactly as Aurora said. Images that used to make her happy now made her wince: shaved ice doused in rainbow syrup and a hedgehog so small it slept in a teacup. She didn’t want to adore those things again, but nothing yet had taken their place.
Aurora popped up on Noa’s screen in the middle of a yawn. Her hair, which was dyed blue, was pinched into a nest on her head.
“I hooked up with Paddy,” Noa said. “The one with the hat?”
“Yeah, I saw the message. The rhymer,” Aurora said.
“It’s fun but kind of like drowning.”
“Did he shove his tongue in your mouth?”
Noa nodded. “I see why you call it magic.”
“So you liked it.” Aurora peered into the camera as if it would help her suss out the truth. Her skin was pale and even, heavily powdered.
“He took my tights off,” Noa said.
“You didn’t let him bone, though.”
“No, no, no.”
“Good, because then you give up any power you have. At all.”
“Have you tasted plastic braces?”
“I didn’t think you would do it,” Aurora said.
A hoarse woman’s voice hollered on Aurora’s end, bags and keys settling on the counter. Aurora walked to her bedroom door, put her ear against it and slid the chain lock. In slim black overalls she could have been six feet tall. She’d written on the pockmarked walls, in Sharpie, words from one of her favorite trip-hop songs: Ride the Night. Liberate your heart.
The most exotic thing was that Aurora went out as she pleased any night of the week, hopped into a hired car and roamed the hills above the Sunset Strip and the bluffs in Pacific Palisades. Noa’s favorite picture of Aurora was taken on those bluffs. With crazy eyes she pretended she was about to jump off the edge of an overlook, like the ocean was a trampoline she could bounce on.
Aurora sat in front of the camera again. “You don’t seem sad today,” she said, pulling a thumbtack out of a plastic breath-mints case. Her cuticles had been eaten away. “I have to hurry.”
It was their secret ritual to watch each other cry. Aurora said that sharing tears was a high and a release. In Japan, she said, entire rooms full of grown men bawled together.
“Well, Paddy was in my bedroom just now,” Noa said. “It’s playing in my head like a movie.”
“Yesterday you even said how fucked up the world is. Remember the starving dogs that no one loves?”
Noa nodded and sniffed her old dolls, molded plastic faces and synthetic hair.
“Or think about this,” Aurora said. “What if it never rains again? It won’t, I bet.”
Aurora scratched at the inside of her arm with the thumbtack. She whimpered and her mouth twitched. The tics of emotion were familiar to Noa though they’d only known each other for two weeks.
Aurora stopped herself and cleared her throat. “If you can’t be deep, it’s not helpful,” she said. “There’s nothing I get from it.”
Noa crumpled her face as if she could trick herself, but failed. Aurora cried steadily for three minutes and then snapped from it like a switch had been hit.
Late-afternoon fog nuzzled the house, casting Noa’s room in darkness. From inside the closet, she heard the clicks of her father’s bicycle spokes and the creak of the gate.
His flip-flops slapped against the kitchen floor. “Noa!”
She scurried down the hall.
“What’s this mess?” He swatted a takeout box into the sink. A sweat
stain bloomed over his heart on a threadbare T-shirt. The chef’s jacket her mother had ordered for him was probably rumpled and stuffed into his backpack.
“Well, I ate already,” Noa said. “So I’m not hungry.”
“You ate everything? Not buying it.”
“I had a homework group after school.” She nudged a crumb along the floor. “They love the food.”
He raked his whiskers. “Didn’t we say no friends when you’re alone?”
“I won’t do it again. I’ll FaceTime with you at the restaurant, I swear,” Noa said.
“Nobody wants Roberta back,” her father said. Roberta, the old babysitter, had taught him how to track Noa on his phone even though he claimed he wouldn’t do it. Noa had persuaded her parents to let go of Roberta when they opened a restaurant so close to home.
“No one in eighth grade has a babysitter,” Noa said. “Aren’t you my supervisor now?”
“Aye. But this is a trial run.” He narrowed his eyes at her then walked over to the French doors and rested his forehead against the glass. “Let’s go surfing,” he said. “Tomorrow, before school.”
“I got pounded last time. And there’s so much trash.”
He looked at her. “If we see animals, that’ll be worth it. Dolphins? Maybe a ray?” He tapped on the window.
Noa’s father tried to coax her outside once in a while. On a recent afternoon he’d begged her to draw a portrait of him while sitting on towels in the yard. It was awkward to stare at her father, so she didn’t try to get a realistic drawing. Instead she gave him broken and misshapen teeth and made his whiskers a long, braided beard.
“I like this,” he’d said, leaning back on his hands. “You’re off the phone, doing something in the actual world.”
“The actual world?” she’d said as she exaggerated the hollows under his eyes. On paper he was a hillbilly tweaker.
“Yeah. You know.” He leaned over and tore a leaf off the nasturtium and waved it in her face. Then he ate it. He might have understood that her world was entirely different, but he was romantic about what could be touched and tasted.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 17