The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  And then a spate of boyfriends broke out, like mono, across Cleaverton Comp, and Tan got distracted. Abruptly, in Years Nine through Eleven, it had become de rigueur to hoik some gray-faced troll called Tony or Daz up the Big Wheel in Piccadilly Gardens on Saturday afternoons. At Malachy’s, Chloe recited painful accounts of Mo Smith’s tiny left ball and the way Tom Ketter yanked at his earlobes when he came. And Tan started scouting punters at the Hole: old, no; bald, no; meth dealer, no.

  “But, I mean, even if you found some guy,” I told her, “you’d just have to lug him around, and, like, talk to him.”

  “Jesus, Cher,” she said, “how juvenile are you?” And she flounced off home early, leaving me to retreat in a mardy strop to the flat upstairs, ignoring Simon’s entreaties to tell him what the holy fuck was up.

  Then she ambushed Arthur Leese. She tugged him round the side of the church hall after Malachy’s next session, and they huddled there muttering for almost fifteen minutes before he finally beetled off, his face and neck and even his hands a deep, heart-attack red.

  Tan, too, tried to sneak out, but I waylaid her. “Oh my God,” I went. “You’re not. Not with—”

  “Shut up!” For a minute, she looked sheepish. “Anyway, he’s totally into it.” She was meeting him later at the Overhulme Park playground; he was bringing “the things.” She said, “He was all, OMG what time?”

  I winced. “Arthur Leese, but! You can’t. I mean, you can’t.”

  “I can if I want, girl.”

  “I know you can! But it’s Arthur. Like, what’s the point? It’s not like anyone’s going to be impressed, like all, Oh wow, Tania, you’re so lucky! Or”—now I couldn’t look at her—“it’s not—I mean, you don’t like him?”

  “Oh my God,” said Tan. “Oh my God, Cher.”

  “Well, you’re the one—”

  “It’s a rehearsal! It’s a practice. Like, you know, in First Aid. What are you, nine years old?”

  “Hey,” I said, but she’d already stomped huffily away ahead; I trailed her in silence as far as Bargain Booze, where she’d turn left and—as usual—I’d turn back.

  Tan’s old house in Scranton had had seven bedrooms and three whirlpool baths. Her dad had driven a Porsche; Tan’d had her own en-suite, her own laptop, and her own Netflix subscription; she’d seen Les Misérables and Wicked eight times each in the West End. And now she lived in this straggling estate squished between the dual carriageway and the rubbish dump, in a two-up-two-down box that didn’t even have a telly. I felt dead bad for her, but I’d never say so—I mean, I’d heard none of this from Tan herself; it was just that Chloe’s ma swept hair in Curl Up & Dye on Cleaverton high street, and there wasn’t much that Chloe didn’t know or wouldn’t tell about anything that went on locally, Tan included. I knew, even, that Malone wasn’t her actual name, but her ma’s maiden name. The point was, though, that we—me and Tan—were meant to be mates: she pretty much lived round mine and yet I’d not met her ma or seen inside her bedroom. I wanted, suddenly, to yank her shiny hair; I wanted to scream, Fuck you, if you think you’re better than me!

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead, before she walked off for good, I said quickly, “So—I suppose you’re getting palpated by the seminal vesicle tonight?”

  She grinned. “My dear,” she said, “I think you’ll find it’s called the spicule,” and she poked an invisible set of glasses up her nose. “Anyway,” she said in her normal voice, “you can drop the act—you know you’re gagging for a good palpating.”

  “Oh, haha, yeah.” I pretended to retch. “Utter dejection without it, like.”

  She gave me the finger, but kept grinning.

  I walked back alone. The Hole was deserted—we didn’t open until six p.m. Mondays—and even Simon wasn’t at his usual off-duty table; his Sudoku book was tucked away behind the till. I got out the mop and sludged a bucket of suds over the floor, but I couldn’t really concentrate. Each slap of the wet yarn was going Arth—ur—Leese—Arth—ur—Leese, no matter how much I tried to put him—put it—out of my head. It felt like I’d choke. Finally, I dropped the stick and ran upstairs—I’d distract myself, I’d have a soak—but Simon had locked himself into the bathroom.

  “Give us a minute, pet!” he shouted, when I yelled at him to get out. “I have to show yeh something!”

  “Fuck’s sake!” I roared back. I sat down instead at the foldout dining table and opened my geography homework.

  Q.1: Trace the spurs along the Teesside flats.

  My pencil raked gouges through the copybook. They’d have gotten started by now, straddling the slide in the adventure playground: Arthur mishandling Tan, haw-hawing like a frantic goat, and Tan hissing, “Not there—Jesus, Arthur, there!” She’d have loosened her hair; he’d still have the Overhulme blazer buttoned all the way up. He’d be scared of her bra: Arthur was scared of the word bra. What did she want him near her bra for, anyway?

  Q.2: Sedimentation, erosion, deposition.

  Practice, I thought, Christ! We could’ve, like, watched porn; Simon had a box of DVDs in the loft—

  My pencil snapped. I threw it at the wall.

  “All right!” He came out of the bathroom. He was wearing his good shirt and tie, and he’d shaved: his chin looked rough and sore. He’d gelled his hair for the first time in months.

  “Oh God,” I said, “we’re not getting inspected?”

  “What? No!” He laughed. “Jesus, pet. It’s just, well, I’m going—I’ve got a date, Cher.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Perfect.” I ripped the torn page from my copybook and scrunched it up.

  “So,” he said, “tell us. I mean, am I all right, or what?”

  Or what, I thought. You’re fifty-two. Your dead wife’s withdrawn/hostile/uncooperative daughter lives in your flat and listens to you crying in the shower. Of course you’re not all right. But instead I just lifted a shoulder: he could make as much of a tit of himself as he wanted. He wasn’t my actual dad. So did I give a shit if Simon Reyniss was all right? No. I did not.

  “The thing is,” he said, “the, uh, she—well, yeh know Tabitha?” And when I still said nothing: “Tabitha York, like? From yer—”

  “What?” I stared at him. “Not, like, Miss York?”

  “That’s the one—who’d’ve thought, eh?” And he grinned, like we were all together in this twisted little conspiracy, all three of us.

  I got up and shoved past him, into the bathroom, and bolted the door. I sat on the lino, wedged in between the toilet bowl and the stem of the sink. I wasn’t going to cry. He shuffled about for ages—apologizing, excusing himself, blethering on about connections—before, at last, I heard the bouncing thud-ud of the flat door slamming shut. Then I picked up the toilet-roll holder and pitched it as hard as I could at the wall. The steel left a cracked dent in the plaster. Miss York, I thought. The boggle-eyed try-hard. Ma would have clocked him one for even looking at her.

  My phone beeped: a tiny animated thumbs-up from Tan. Ugh: I switched it off and started picking at the crack in the wall. When I had a neat little cairn of plaster dust, I made a fist and flattened it.

  * * *

  —

  Next day at school, Tan was sitting alone on the assembly hall steps; she jumped up when she saw me, and went, “So!”

  “So?”

  “So!” She rolled her eyes. “You want the blow-by-blow?”

  “Ew. Not, like, especially.” I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to loiter; it was only half ten, and I’d already had to duck York twice—she’d come at me between classes, waving hugely, like her having shared a biryani with Simon made us besties.

  “Oh, come on!” Tan fell into step beside me. “What are you, Our Lady, the Holiest of Cheryls? I’m seeing him again tonight.”

  “What,” I said, “so, like, it’s a proper thing now? You and Arthur?�
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  “No! God.” She shrugged. “It’s just convenient, is all. But here, look.” She unfolded a leaf of lined A4 and passed it to me. “He gave me this.”

  “Sublimity,” I read. I stopped walking, turned the page: there was verse after verse. “Epidermis, dermis / I feel / the layers of you. Oh my God. He’s going to flay you.”

  “It’s an ode. He did it right there while I was doing up my top. I’m devo,” she added, but she looked far from devastated; she looked triumphant, like she’d already gotten her BAFTA nomination. She took the poem back and folded it away, and laughed—a daft, fake titter that was as much like Tan as Arthur was like an actual man.

  And that’s how it went for the next three weeks: Tan texting me from the playground or from the abandoned Dip A Door unit by the bagel factory, complaining that Arthur had dirtied her suede skirt, that he’d bought himself a McFlurry but none for her, that he’d given her a blister “in a place you wouldn’t believe”; in school, she’d grab me in the corridor and, smirking, flash me her phone: a close-up of Arthur’s nipples or arse cheeks. She said she wasn’t into him, but she wasn’t what I’d call detached, either: in mid-February, a new girl turned up at Malachy’s, a twitchy little bulimic Year Eight from Overhulme who kept gawking at Arthur as he hunched over his back issues of American Entomologist, and Tan blanked her.

  “Bitch,” she said, when we got back to the Hole.

  “I thought you didn’t even like him.”

  “I don’t! Wow, Cher, you’re obsessed.” She’d decided that I was jealous of her “awakening” and that I needed one of my own; she reckoned she could find me a decent “starter specimen,” and she started listing candidates: the stumpy little server at the petrol station, the skater boy who practiced falling over in the Tesco’s car park.

  I retorted that I certainly wasn’t jealous—that, actually, I was bored, and that the last thing I needed was some dumbo, greasy cretin grabbing at me, and that if I did need that (which I didn’t), I definitely didn’t need it from any of the knob-head lurch-arounds she was talking about.

  Tan said I ought to check myself. “What you need, Cher, is to just get the whole business over with. Like me! Here, for instance.” She took out her phone. “I’ll show you what I had Art do on Saturday. It was unbelievable. You need a teapot and—”

  “Shut up!” I glanced around: we were sitting in the snug—I didn’t want Simon overhearing this. “I don’t want to know, do I?”

  “Oh, please.” She folded her arms. “So what did Saint Cher do all weekend? Ironed her socks?”

  “No!” I folded my own arms. “I’ve a life, too, don’t I?”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So what?” For a moment, I hated her: she was just like York—snooping.

  “So,” she said, “what did you do? Or, here, I’ll guess: you met some lawless young bruiser and did it behind the kegs! Am I warm?”

  “God, Tan, that’s—”

  She grinned. Sneered. “That’s a no, is it?”

  “No! I mean, yes—I mean, like, it wasn’t—” I slammed down my geography book. “What,” I hissed, “it’s that hard to believe, is it? Like, Arthur Leese can go out and do it, but I can’t?”

  She sat back, holding up both hands, like Whoa, girl, chill! “All right,” she said, “so who was it?”

  Who was it? God. I stared out across the room. Leaning against the bar was the usual crew of moody old gets; to their left sat the woman who’d run the pound shop down the street before it went on fire; squished up beside her, a fat boy not much older than me, drinking Coke; next to him, Shane the Tweak, who, according to Chloe’s ma, sold crack in the park. Who was it? How was I supposed to know? I felt clammy.

  Then the toilet door opened: Fredek Rijj, the apprentice butcher, came out, wiping his hands on his T-shirt.

  “There,” I said, “him. Him there.”

  She craned. “What—Fridge?”

  “Don’t stare!”

  “No way,” she whispered. “He’s old. He’s like twenty.”

  It was my turn to smirk. “Think what you like.”

  We watched Fredek return to his table—he walked draggingly, frowning, like he had a grudge against the carpet—and pick up his apron from the back of the chair. He was heading for the door. That meant he’d pass us. Never mind clammy; I felt outright sick. What if he looked at me? What if he didn’t? What if—

  He’d passed. He was gone.

  A pause. Then:

  “Oh—my—God, Cher!” Tan clapped her hands. “Amazing! So, what now? Is it on?”

  What? “On?” I said. “No! It was just—”

  “Quick!” She picked up my phone and put it in my hand. “Text him.”

  I stared at her. “Who, Fridge? Why? What would I even say?”

  “Oh my God, Cher. You know. Something foul. Keep him boiling!”

  “No!” I shook my head. “No way.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Give it here, then.” She took the handset, tapped at the screen, passed it back. “Start simple, see?”

  I read: i wanna c ur drty c0ck

  I dropped the phone. “Tania!”

  “If you can bite it, you can write it.” She grinned. “You’ve got his number?”

  I didn’t want to say no. I looked again at the message—i wanna c ur drty c0ck—and imagined it somehow getting back to Simon.

  “Come on,” said Tan. “Ticktock!”

  “All right! Jesus.” I hunched over the screen, my body shielding it from her view, and tapped out a random number. Save as: FREDEK. Send. “There!” I said, sitting up again. “Happy?”

  But even as I spoke, I could see the blue message status changing from Sending to Delivered. Then, ping: a reply. A picture-message. I almost moaned aloud: that wasn’t supposed to happen! But still, intrigued, I looked—

  “Fuck!” I knocked the handset halfway across the table.

  Tan reached for it. “What—oh, dude. He’s keen.”

  I snatched the phone back and fumbled to delete the message, but the little trash icon wouldn’t respond; I thumbed it again and again until, at last, Delete message? Yes, yes, delete stupid message!

  “Oh my God,” I said. I shut my eyes, but all I could see was—well. I opened them again.

  Tan was beaming. “My, my,” she said. “Cheryl Reyniss. You dirty little tart.”

  * * *

  —

  Arthur had written her another haiku sequence. We sat on the lip of Malachy’s stage as I read it:

  You, the specimen / I, the rapt observer of / all that you reveal.

  “He’s abject,” Tan said. “He’s started calling his gear his membrum virile.”

  You’ve not ditched him, but, have you, I thought, but I said nothing,

  Malachy had cornered Arthur and the new girl to size them up with a measuring tape and an armload of fabric swatches for the Summer Show—Pygmalion mashed with Wicked, set in Moss Side.

  “So,” said Tan, “tell us: any messages?”

  There was, in fact: I’d gotten four more texts in the last twelve hours—three fuzzy close-ups of the dude’s membrum virile and a video of his hand stroking it.

  Tan flicked slowly from one to the next, zooming in and out. “What did you write back?”

  “I dunno.” I shrugged. “Nothing.” And, because she was staring at me, “Oh, come on, Tan!” then: “I’m out of credit, anyway. So.”

  She shook her head. “God, Cher, you can’t just drop it—this is huge.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but—”

  “Tania! Dude!” Chloe was clambering up to join us. “Look!”

  She’d found a flier pinned to the Tesco’s classifieds board. A music video was being shot right here in Cleaverton, and they were casting:

  ***GIRL NEEDED***

 
***YOUTUBE HIT GUARANTEED***

  “Oh my God,” said Tan. “Like—oh my God.”

  “But won’t it be singing?” I said. “Not acting? And, like, you’re not a singer?”

  “Fuck off! You think I can’t sing?”

  “It’s not her voice they’ll be looking at,” said Chloe; she yanked at the neckline of Tan’s jumper and pretended to drool. Instead of flinching, Tan giggled, and Chloe clapped her hands: “Come on, bitches,” she cried, “training montage!”

  So while Malachy fussed about with Arthur’s inside leg measurements, the two of them started sucking in their stomachs and trilling off-key verses of Chloe’s favorite track: Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing.”

  Tan was exuberant. “This is it,” she kept saying, and she tried to drag me onstage with her; when I objected—I didn’t want to dance, I didn’t like to dance—she said, “My God, Cher, can’t you get over yourself? This is, like, my moment!”

  I wasn’t so sure that it was; Malachy had spotted the commotion and was scampering in our direction.

  “Ladies,” he cried, “we have a show to produce! Focus, please! Ladies!”

  “Hey, man, keep it down!” yelled Chloe. “We’re rehearsing!” She’d loaded the Houston track onto her phone; she turned the volume right up, and nodded at Tan, who dropped my arm, took Chloe’s, and started to bellow, loudly, tunelessly: “I’ll never change all my colors for you!”

  Malachy was shrieking, “Girls! Girls! I won’t have this carry-on!” He pointed to me—the closest. “Cheryl Reyniss, get down! Get out—now! Go!”

  I climbed down. Well, what did I care? I hated Drama; I didn’t care if I never came back. Tan had linked arms with Chloe—they were spinning round and round. As I reached the door, Chloe sang out, “Hey, Cher! Who’s a bad, bad girl?” And Tan laughed.

  Malachy had mounted the stage; he grabbed the phone off her and switched it off. “Regan!” he snapped. “Malone! The pair of you—out! Now!”

  Tan laughed again. She and Chloe staggered to a dizzy halt, and Tan gave the rest of the gawping am dram brigade a deep curtsy. Then she hopped off the stage and strode to the back of the hall—Arthur came scampering after her, going, “Tania! W-wait!,” but she didn’t wait: she paused at the door just long enough to send it crashing into his face as he tried to chase her outside.