Paddy posted a new roast that evening during peak hours. In the video he chanted:
Noa Noa Protozoa.
Bish hungry so get out your boa [grabbing his crotch].
Form a line at the doa.
But Harry Poe-tare not welcome anymoa.
After his rap, he flashed his nipples. He’d taped over them two photos of protozoa, glassy and oval as seen through a microscope.
Delete!!! She messaged him. I’m a hungry bish? You’re the most hungry.
But it’s about you. My muse, he replied. Four emoji faces laughing so hard they were crying. You asked for it, Proto.
A ball of sickness formed, swelled against her ribs. She messaged Aurora: P did it. Roasted me. So bad, right?
Her phone pulsed with new people wanting to follow her. They’d jumped from Paddy’s video to her accounts. Not strangers, really, because she had heard of them loosely. They were curious, of course. She added them all as followers.
Want someone to call me hungry, Aurora messaged an hour later. You get all the attention.
Makes me look desperate, Noa replied. Cracked-heart emoji.
He likes you.
OK.
The titties though. So juvenile.
By eleven the rhyme had more than four hundred views and Noa was being called dirty ho, being sent pictures of body parts that looked like cutaways from porn. Dick pics were normal but she’d never been flooded with so many. She was sure the people calling her names were jealous. Words were always thrown at girls looking to be wild. The smartest girls, the girls Noa admired most online, just ignored them as if they didn’t matter.
Protozoa. Aurora messaged. What do you think he’d call me?
A-snore-a. No. A-whore-a.
Ha. Cruel.
“Noa,” her mother called gently, poking her head into the room. Noa shoved her phone under the mattress. Her mother crept in and lowered herself onto the bed, swung a bare, dimpled leg over Noa’s body.
Noa groaned. “I don’t want to talk about food,” she said.
Her mother sighed like she’d been wounded, but she didn’t go away. Noa took her mother’s hand and guided it to her own back. Her mother began to scratch.
“Tell me again,” Noa said. “The first boy you liked. Wasn’t he New Wave or Mod?”
“He rode a Vespa,” her mother said. “Gunter. He had those thin suspenders.”
Noa looked up at the ceiling. She tried to imagine her mother on the back of a scooter, bare-skinned knees darting through cars.
Her mother gathered Noa’s hair and fanned it across her back. “Daddy’s panicking. He wants you to stop wearing those stockings.”
“The fishnets? What else did he say?”
“Well, they’re provocative. It makes him uncomfortable, and he can’t say that to you.”
“Stop!”
“Listen,” her mother said. “I told him that’s not how you raise an empowered woman. I’m not having any part of it.”
Noa pulled her mother’s arm tight around her. “He’s so lost.”
“He doesn’t know what a girl’s like.” Her mother pressed her cheek against Noa’s back.
Noa sensed there was more to her father than that, acting like he had nothing to do in the afternoons. Tanning, chatting up Sharn. She stayed silent. It seemed dangerous to mention those things, as if that would turn them into real problems.
The next morning Noa walked through the elementary playground in long strides, the low angle of morning sun at her back. Finger paintings dried on clotheslines. She bobbed under them, passed the soft rubber slopes and the climbing structure with a sail hoisted high like a ship. Either Windsong had shrunk overnight or she had grown into a giantess.
In the middle school building Paddy waited for her at her locker surrounded by his baller friends. Everyone could see that he liked her, the way he stood there waiting. She threw her shoulders back.
“Protozoa,” he said, making his friends snicker. His fists were thrust deep in his pockets and he waggled them. “Under the bleachers at lunch?”
“If I have time,” she said to be aloof.
All morning her insides lifted and turned as though she’d swallowed hundreds of moths. Hooking up at school, she messaged Aurora from the bathroom under the stairwell. It was the only bathroom on campus with total privacy, a locking door.
Aurora FaceTimed her right away. “Why?” She was hiding in a stall at her own school, whispering. “Don’t be so public with it.”
“I thought you said this was good.”
“You’re getting played.” Aurora gnawed on her fingers.
There was a knock at the door and Noa hung up. She was done listening anyway.
In the hallway between classes, people walking behind Noa broke into a murmur of “Pro-to-zo-a.” Boys snapped the waistbands on their Dri-FIT shorts. The attention made her flush but she didn’t mind it. No other couple had started with any kind of sensation.
At lunch Paddy was not in the gym as planned. Noa roamed the school, checking the computer lab and the music studio. She saw Wren and Annaliese in the room where a nursery had been set up for teachers’ babies. They each held an infant on one hip. When they caught Noa looking in at them the pity that came across their faces made her seethe. She’d deleted their messages that morning: Toad called you a slut. Told you. What if Paddy roasted them next, she thought. They could be joined twins, sharing one brain.
On the yard the Rent-heads had taken over the climbing structure. They swayed and sang “Aquarius,” warming up for that night’s performance of the musical Hair in the school theater.
Noa covered her ears and circled back to the gym, where Paddy’s friends Asher and Finn sat on the floor. They maneuvered basketballs under bent knees and tipped potato chip dust into their mouths.
“He got called to the office,” Finn said. “Had to go on leave. For a week.”
“He left with his mommy,” Asher said, and belched.
The thought made her shiver. “He was sent home for a nosebleed rhyme?” Noa said. “People are too sensitive.”
The boys looked at each other.
“You snitched,” Finn said. “It was the Protozoa.”
Noa’s mouth dropped open. “I would never. I told him to do it.”
“Snitch.” Finn lobbed his basketball at her. She dodged it and ran across the campus to the school theater.
The dressing room was dark and swampy with costumes. Noa dropped into a heap of tie-dyed shirts. I said nothing! She messaged Paddy. Want spoonbread? I’ll send some. Postmates.
Fatal, black hole of no reply.
She saw that the PaDWack account and all of his rhymes had been erased.
He’s gone, she messaged Aurora. Fuck my life. Smoking gun emoji. She folded her knees to her chest. Can you? Crying-face emoji, blue-face emoji. She took a raggedy breath.
“Are you going to cry?” a voice said. She shrieked. It was Callan, nestled in a corner.
“Don’t sneak up on me like that,” she said.
“This is my perch,” he said, bugging his eyes.
“His phone was taken,” she said. “Paddy’s. I feel bad now.”
“Poor baby,” Callan whined, batting a ballet shoe across the room. “When he’s back I’m going to tackle him and blow snot all over his hat.”
Noa cringed. “You saw the roast.”
“I tried not to,” he said. “’Cause I think the internet’s garbage. But my sister follows him.”
His sister, who was Aurora’s age, had sent Noa a follow request in the night.
“Then he burned you too, calling you amoeba or some crud,” Callan said.
“I know, but. It’s a little different when he teases me.”
Callan laughed so hard he held his stomach.
Just deal, Aurora messaged.
“Maybe your sister knows my friend. She lives near you.” Noa showed him a photo of Aurora: halter top, pale hollowed waist, and pants that pooled at her feet. “Works at Vinta
ge Cache on Melrose?”
“That goon?” He grabbed her phone away. “She’s around. If you want to see her, the actual person, I know the spot.” He said Friday nights an army of kids invaded a construction site off Sunset. He would take Noa if she could get across town.
You going out to the spot? She messaged Aurora. You have to!! We can chill.
All of the online girls Noa admired most said that strong eyebrows were critical to the face. In the vanity mirror on top of her desk she brushed and gelled her brows. Soon she would meet Aurora Waters at a secret spot. She was closer than ever to the future she wanted to have.
She had FaceTimed her father, so he could see that she was alone at home. She’d convinced him not to bother with her, said she’d be attending the school’s production of Hair that evening with Wren and Annaliese. He said that she was making a good choice and he was glad for it. His words felt right, even though she’d misled him. She was making a good choice. She borrowed from her parents’ closet a vintage Dodgers jersey, Valenzuela, and wore it as a dress with the fishnets and gold ankle socks and her creepers with platform soles.
In her frenzy to put herself together, Noa stopped thinking so much about Paddy. She was surprised when, on her way out the door, she received a message from him.
Look what I found, he wrote. He attached a video of her mother, an instructional on how to butcher a rabbit. The video was one in a series produced by a farm collective her parents belonged to. Noa had completely forgotten about it.
In the video her mother cuddled a spotted rabbit to her chest, then held it out and stretched its legs. Next her mother stood over a slaughtered animal, guiding the viewer through the separating of its parts. Wide smile, arms glistening. She was completely absorbed.
Bunny killa, Paddy wrote.
Just like pigs and cows and . . . , Noa started to type. She deleted it. Too much effort was required to explain her mother’s thoughts about rabbit: the versatile flavor, the small impact on the earth.
In fact her mother looked demented in that video. It was shot during her mohawk phase. She’d since grown her hair in on the sides.
She’s a chef. What does your mom do?
She would let him hang there. His mother couldn’t compare with hers.
Callan waited for her on the corner of Sunset and Doheny in front of a liquor store. “The spot!” He pointed uphill and they began to climb. It was dusk and billboard lights began to flip on, washing color out of the sky.
A canteen swung from Callan’s shoulder. “My grandpa’s, from Nam,” he said. When they were far enough above Sunset he offered her a chug. “Jack and coke.”
She coughed and her eyes watered but she drank again.
He gave her a military salute.
“Don’t be hyper,” she said.
“I haven’t been in three years.”
They meandered past steep driveways that led to homes built into the craggy hillside, homes on stilts.
“Freedom!” Callan yelled, spinning with his arms skyward.
Noa copied him but got dizzy.
They came to a chain-link fence that had been pushed down between drooping eucalyptus. Callan boosted her over and upslope they clambered, through spindly trees that had dropped a carpet of needles. A girl’s laughter carried down the hill. Come on, the laughter said. Hurry.
A, are you at the spot?
Noa’s insides were churning when they arrived at a place where the hillside had been flattened and cleared. In the near-dark she made out kids pushing each other in shopping carts across the dusty lot. Others had climbed on the Porta-Potties and hung upside down from them taking selfies.
“When security comes you have to just—” Callan said, thrusting a fist toward the trees. He led her to the opposite end of the lot, where kids lolled on a tarp fastened over a mountain of gravel. Smoke ribboned upward from them.
“Bruddah!” a girl called out in a taunting voice. Callan’s sister, who called herself EmZee online. He scaled the tarp and sat next to her.
“Where’s Aurora?” Noa said. She pulled herself up next to Callan.
He took a black pen from EmZee and sucked, then expelled vapor with a practiced flourish. “Juul,” he said. “You want?”
Noa shook her head but took a hefty swallow from his canteen. She shuddered. A swarm of city lights below seemed to move, like they’d let go of whatever held them to earth.
“She’s the one in that rhyme,” Callan said to EmZee, hanging a thumb at Noa. “I told you.”
“Hey, I follow you now,” EmZee said.
Noa nodded.
“Follow back.”
“Yeah, OK.” Noa found the girl on her phone and sent a follow request.
Callan pulled his T-shirt over his knees, over the torn-apart jeans, and rested his head on them. His cheekbone was sprayed with acne, his Converse gaped at the toes as if his feet were growing right in front of her.
“Come on, I want a ride in a shopping cart,” Noa said.
“PaDWack?” EmZee said. “He slays me every day.” She leafed through her phone. “Look, he posted again.”
“Can’t be,” Noa said. “I’ve been checking.”
“There’s a new account,” EmZee said. “Padman.”
Noa leaned in to watch Paddy, who jeered at the camera:
You know Protozoa.
She’s hungry as fark.
She eats bunny rabbit.
She’s just like a shark.
She eats hobo meat straight up in the dark.
“Turn it off!” Noa said. She closed her eyes and pressed on the lids. “Trash talker.”
EmZee latched on to Noa’s hand to console her, but then she laughed. “Who eats bunnies? He’s so full of shit.”
Noa couldn’t say anything, couldn’t move. The drink in her belly riled, torching her throat and her nose. She was punched right through the middle, drained.
“You’re the hobo, you know,” EmZee said to Callan.
“Who cares,” Callan said. “Horse’s muff.”
“None of that’s true,” Noa said.
She wondered how Paddy knew they were together, there at the spot. Someone had taken their picture or tagged her. She looked around. Nobody seemed to be watching her.
Why do you hate me? She messaged Paddy.
No hate. So easy to mess with Proto.
You’ll be kicked out.
I got free speech rights. My mama will sue.
She messaged Aurora: Where are you? P roasted me again. Red-face emoji. Tornado emoji.
Rays of orange light rotated across the lot. “Shit. Rent-a-cops,” Callan said. Noa skittered behind him to the trees where they’d come in. He took off ahead of her, nimble in the brush. She half-crawled downhill all the way to Sunset.
From the Lyft home, Noa tried to FaceTime Aurora Waters.
Not picking up, Aurora messaged.
OK, love you, Noa replied.
She waited a minute.
Why not? Noa messaged.
Too much babyness.
No! I was at the spot. I got drunk as fuck, A.
I don’t even go there.
Noa checked all of Aurora’s accounts. In the last few hours Aurora had found online a new favorite person, Rileyyy424, who was shown in a scruffy animal costume with matted fur and ears. Looked like she’d slept outside in it. Aurora had liked and commented on all of Rileyyy424’s posts. There was nothing special about that girl.
The next minutes blurred together. Noa got to her bedroom without speaking to her father, who was laughing in the yard with Sharn. She hid away in the closet with her laptop and trained its camera on herself. She was already swallowing hard over the lump but quickly drew cat eyes with a soft and runny liner. Then she hit record.
She didn’t need to wind doll hair around her finger to get started. Her eyes became wet easily. Tears traced the contours of her cheeks, dragging black makeup. She watched herself in the monitor, sobbing freely in her own company. She went on until she was
completely emptied.
Then Noa played back the entire video. The first flash of pain in her face was the most impossible not to watch. She cut the video to a continuous three-second loop: tears forming, crawling, repeat. The video made the hair on her arms stand up.
She posted the loop on all her online accounts. A, made a crying GIF. Check it out.
She waited for something to happen.
Her father rapped at her bedroom door.
“Hold on!” she said. She would have to face him. She thought he was desperate, to seek the friendship of an old woman. Her Mother Rabbit had become too much for him, with ambitions too massive.
Seconds later one of the girls who followed Noa, one of her new friends, posted a video of herself crying with a bloated nose and a chin dripping with tears. Another crying video popped up, and another. A face with makeup-dotted zits, a tongue coated in white scum, lips stretching to bare teeth with metal braces, a set of knuckles with H-A-R-M drawn on them.
Her father rapped again. She must come out now, he said. She was in all kinds of trouble.
“Privacy! Please!”
Ten crying girls. Twenty. It was as though they’d all been waiting for Noa, full of feelings that no one else wanted to deal with. They were right behind her. So many that the echo of sobs was almost unbearable. Gathering momentum, they pushed outward like a tide.
NICOLE KRAUSS
Seeing Ershadi
from The New Yorker
I’d been in the company for more than a year by then. It had been my dream to dance for the choreographer since I first saw his work, and for a decade all my desire had been focused on getting there. I’d sacrificed whatever was necessary during the years of rigorous training. When at last I auditioned and he invited me to join his company, I dropped everything and flew to Tel Aviv. We rehearsed from noon to five, and I devoted myself to the choreographer’s process and vision without reserve, applied myself without reserve. Sometimes tears came spontaneously, from something that had rushed upward and burst. When I met people in bars and cafés, I spoke excitedly about the experience of working with the choreographer and told them that I felt I was constantly on the verge of discovery. Until one day I realized that I had become fanatical—that what I had taken for devotion had crossed the line into something else. And though my awareness of this was a dark blot on what had been, up to then, a pure joy, I didn’t know what to do with it.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 18