Best Debut Short Stories 2020

by Tracy O'Neill

  “It’s Wednesday.”

  “So?”

  “You just told me to stay in school.”

  He clicked his tongue and wrinkled his mouth to one side as he pulled out his cigarettes from his pocket. He offered me one, but I refused.

  “Andre’s supposed to have some good shit tonight.”

  I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “I’m high as fuck right now,” I said.

  “Me too,” he said, and then he lay back on my thighs. I could feel his head inches from my dick.

  After a couple drags, he reached his cigarette-free hand up to my chest and started rubbing me. He would always start with my chest, his fingers stretched and rocking around one pec and then the other. Then he’d work his way down, past the band of my underwear.

  “Not tonight, man.”

  I sat up, displacing his hand. He looked at me and his eyebrows fell over his eyes.

  He sucked his teeth and sat up.

  “Fuck. You’re a real bummer tonight, you know that?”

  Then his scowl disappeared and, instead, he looked so tired that it made me want to fall away from him.

  Once I heard Jay’s bike growl and fade away down the street that night, I tried to return to my book. I opened to a random page and read a story about how one time the Greek version of the devil came up from the ground and stole one of Zeus’s daughters, and her mother, who was also Zeus’s sister, was so fucked up, she froze the earth and made the first winter, which screwed everyone over. Meanwhile the daughter learned to love the man who stole her and she learned how to become a queen who was supposed to make all the new dead people feel welcomed. The story’s main point was supposed to be why we had seasons or some shit like that, but all I could think about was the daughter and how she recognized she felt more at home in hell than she did on earth. And I wondered how much of a choice she actually felt like she had in the matter.

  JAY STARTED DOING that shit to me after he caught me doing it to another guy at one of the hangouts he took me to when I first moved in. It was in that guy’s basement. There were half a dozen of us there, including a girl called Sam, who Jay had been trying to get me with since I started hanging out with him.

  It was a sketchy-ass place with no lights on except for the blue light of a basketball game, the volume turned way down low. The coffee table was trashed with dirty mirrors and bongs, tampers and tongs, like some kind of lazy-ass scientist got too high to finish his experiment. There was a pleather sectional full of limp bodies that shuffled over for Jay to sit and join them. I plopped myself on the floor in a corner, trying to pull myself into something invisible, but the circle of drugs found me and forced me into their dirty circuit of pass-and-smoke. Andre, the host, was on the part of the sectional closest to me. He had on a black bomber jacket with an A on the chest, and the same letter scrawled across a black snapback. He kept looking at me like I was going to steal something or rat out what was going on down there. He was holding the hand of his girl, some chick with fat thighs in leopard leggings. The higher he became, the more smiles he sent my way.

  I learned quick at those strange parties that you could touch another guy’s dick or even blow him, as long as there was a girl who’d do the same to you and as long as nobody saw you doin that shit. And no kissing because kissing meant you were a faggot.

  Jay had lots of girls, and I used to think it was them he’d have over to the house without anybody knowing. That night at the hangout, one of them sat on either side of him as he breathed in something from a bowl, opened his arms like wings, and nestled each girl beneath his pits. They laid their ears and dark painted nails on his wifebeater and all three pretended to watch the game. Sam sat on the opposite side of the room from me, the TV light and the smoke making a dense forest we’d get lost in if we tried to meet each other halfway. We blew smoke rings back and forth instead.

  I was fucked up on something Andre said was weed but had a tangier taste and left me high two days after. Sometime during the night, while Jay was busy with one of the girls and half the party had left, Andre leaned over to me and caught my hand. He rubbed the back of my wrist with his dark thumb.

  “What do you catch with these hands?” he asked, rubbing in concentric circles. And all I could picture in response was a place under the sky where all kinds of stars showered down and kept slipping through my fingers. I couldn’t catch a single one.

  Jay found us in the bathroom. He pulled me up from the floor and told me it was time to go and I walked home tucked under his arm, like the girls at the party.

  I FINISHED SKETCHING Jay’s tattoo on an afternoon he and my grandma almost blew the roof off the house. I could hear them through the screen door before I even got up the steps to the porch.

  “Why was he here, then?” my grandma shouted at Jay’s door. “Tell me. Why. The. Fuck. he was here, then! Open this goddamned door and talk to me like a man!”

  I stood in the kitchen with my backpack hanging off my shoulder.

  “I told you, if you want to be doin that shit, you better find another goddamned house to do it in!”

  I went out the same way I came in and headed for the park just down the block, where I’d wait for the storm to blow over.

  The park was small and wound around a dirty puddle of water people called “The Lake.” There was a playground for young kids with a slide and a dome of climbing bars that looked like a cage. The whole set was tagged, covered in angular, Sharpied letters. The park was usually trashed because the city was too lazy or too scared to come down and tidy things up on our side of town, but there was one spot under a tree by the overflow ditch where I liked to sit if there weren’t any mosquitoes and it wasn’t too hot. Sometimes it smelled like piss and stale breath, but I liked that nobody could see you from the park pathway.

  But when I got to my tree, I found someone else was already there. Andre was leaning full back into the bark, smoking a cigarette and looking at his phone. He had on his black snapback with the cursive A and an oversized T-shirt.

  “Julian,” he said without getting up. We rubbed hands and pounded fists and he offered me a cigarette. “How’s Jay these days?” he asked. “I haven’t seen him in a minute.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “He’s in some shit with my grams right now.” I didn’t take the cigarette and I didn’t sit down.

  “Always in some shit.” Andre sucked on his cigarette. He held it between his thumb and middle finger, like he forgot how to make an “okay” sign. He laughed. “What kinda shit? You know?”

  I shrugged again, readjusted my bag.

  “Those are some sweet-ass wheels he got himself. You ride that thing yet?”

  I nodded my head and looked up at the park path. A lady with a tattoo on her neck was yelling into her phone. “Yeah. Pretty sweet.”

  When I looked at Andre again, he was sneering at me. He looked hot and swollen, like if you stuck a stick in him, he’d ooze out something green or gray.

  “I’ll see you around, man.” I turned to go and started walking past the overgrowth of dead grass. It hissed and scratched my shins.

  “When you gonna give me that mouth again?”

  I stopped and felt the sun hit me in the back of the neck. I turned back to Andre. His hand was on his crotch. “I ain’t a faggot, man.”

  Andre sucked his teeth. “Well, then tell Jay to come suck my dick. I know he is.”

  I walked home and sat on the porch and waited for Jay to rev up his bike and leave for the night. I left my sketch for him on his bed.

  A COUPLE DAYS later, Jay showed up at my school during lunch. I heard his bike before I saw it.

  “Wanna go for a ride?” he asked without turning off the bike. I saw myself reflected in his sunglasses.

  “Sure.”

  “Helmet’s in the back box.”

  We took the highway toward the mountains. I didn’t have a jacket and the higher up we got, the more snot streamed out of my face. Jay finally pulled over at a rest stop that
doubled as a scenic overlook.

  “Cold as fuck,” I said, and I tucked my arms into my T-shirt.

  Jay didn’t seem to mind the air. We both sat on a bench by the bike. I shivered and he smoked. We sat like that for a while. The sun looked bright and hot but the wind kept swiping away any chance of me feeling it. It didn’t help that the trees had already turned into a fire blaze of their own. I thought about my sketchbook and I wanted to go home.

  When a cloud covered the sun, I turned around on the bench and surveyed the panorama of empty picnic tables. There were yellow spots in the grass from dog piss. The trash can overflowed with Styrofoam cups and plastic bottles. The parking lot was empty.

  Jay finished his cigarette and flicked the butt onto the asphalt. He stood up and stretched his arms behind him. I got up and leaned over the seat of the bike, resting my chest on my forearms and elbows. The leather seat was warm from the sun.

  “Wanna see somethin?” he asked.

  Jay unzipped his jacket without waiting for my response. He threw it onto the back of the bike and turned around. He took his wifebeater by opposite ends at his hips and, in one motion, pulled off the shirt.

  “Check it out.”

  There was a square patch of gauze spanning the width of his lower back. Black ink or dry blood dotted the bandage like an inverted constellation.

  “Here. Peel it off and take a look.”

  I came around from the other side of the bike and pulled the tape from two corners and then opened the bandage like a door.

  “Whaddya think?”

  He’d gotten the motorcycle tattoo.

  But it wasn’t the one I sketched for him.

  This was done by some other artist who probably saw the sketch Jay brought in to him and laughed his head off and then went ahead and drew what was now permanently on Jay’s back.

  It looked better than anything I could do.

  “Did it hurt?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Like hell. Took a shit-ton of time, too. Had to go back twice. See the inscription though, at the bottom?”

  I peered down at the small of his back, where the skin dimpled above the gray band of his underwear. In scrolling calligraphy were my initials.

  My thumb floated over the letters, but I didn’t touch him.

  “Sick, man.” I covered the tattoo with the bandage.

  We got back on the highway and I tried my best not to push into the small of his back as we descended the mountain.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE Jay disappeared, my grandma threw a football party, like she usually did before the weather got too cold. She’d invite the neighbors and her two brothers and their families. They’d come in their snapbacks and oversized jerseys, twelve-packs and young kids in their tattooed arms. My aunties, the two women married to my grandma’s brothers, would be the only ones who’d bring food—chips and deviled eggs and store-bought guacamole and sometimes meat for my grandma’s kettle grill, which sat rusting in the backyard. In the purses of the women and in the sagging pockets of the men would be the darker stuff for later, when the game was long over and the teasing and gossip would take a dip.

  Everyone would start out watching the game, crammed into my grandma’s living room. They’d pass cigarettes and bongs during commercials. The scraps of food on Styrofoam plates would crust over and collect flies. Most of the time for those parties, I’d come out from my room and find a corner to watch. I watched the people more than the game. They sat there on the couches and the armrests and the shag carpet, the smoke slowly weaving them together through the thin lines of light from the TV, pulling them all closer and closer until it seemed like they were one big body with one singular mind, wasted and high as fuck.

  Jay wasn’t there.

  If their team was winning or losing by a lot, the party lost interest and they’d migrate out into the yard if the weather was warm enough. That night was the first night the air started to bite, so all the women stayed inside the house, except for Debbie, my cousin, a dyke who thought she was one of the guys. My uncle Ronnie started the fire pit and all the guys sat around it, drinking cans of Budweiser from a blue cooler that seemed to fill up again every time someone opened it. The kids would run back and forth between the yard and the living room or go to a neighbor’s house, lost in their own games, the darkness slowly untethering them from their parents.

  After a while, the guy cousins around my age, Debbie included, started getting stupid and smashing empty cans against different parts of their bodies. My cousin Derik upped the ante and poured a drop of the harder liquor into the can, set it on fire with a cigarette lighter and twigs, and then tried to smash the lit can with his foot. We were all supposed to try it, and when I refused, Derik called me a cocksucker. He said it like a curse and I let it do its work on me. I became a specter like the rest of them, violently smashing three cans before realizing I’d scorched my laces. And then I went to sit with the older men, who stared at the fire pit, watching everything from a distance.

  The fire lit their faces from below, so the shadows of their noses and wrinkles made them look like hard, worn masks. None of them seemed to see me take a seat in the circle and they kept on their conversation.

  “Trudy’s too hard on him.”

  “Trudy ain’t hard enough. If he was my son, I’d knock the fuckin shit outta him every chance I got.”

  “Speakin of, you hear he got his fuckin ass beat? Over at Chino’s?”

  “What he do this time?”

  “Mouthed off to one of the bartenders. He was hanging around with Duane, Lisa’s kid, you know, the—” and Uncle Ronnie flicked his wrist down in an exaggerated gesture and puckered his lips. “And when they saw that, they shot their mouths off at him and he shot his mouth back and it all ended with him limpin his ass out the bar, that fag probably kissin his wounds and suckin his dick all the way home.”

  They all laughed at that.

  “He don’t have a dad, though. That’s what happens. God knows I love my sister, but—she can’t handle that fucker. Not all on her own.”

  “And that goddamned hair!”

  “I hate to say it, but maybe jail’d do him some good.”

  “Jail? Ship his ass overseas! Army’d knock him straight.”

  I stopped listening because just then Jay appeared outside the party, just beyond the circle of flame, like some kind of omen or vision. I was the only one who saw him. Everyone else was too engaged with their talk or the dumbass can game. He wasn’t alone. A hooded shadow followed him into the shed where the bike rested like a dozing hellhound. The hair at the nape of my neck stood up and a breeze sent the autumn cold through my hoodie. I wiped my nose, set down my can of warm beer, and headed to the shed. Nobody seemed to notice.

  I didn’t know how drunk and fucked up I was until I stood up. Everything was sharp and dull, tall and small at the same time. It felt like the fire was hot on my heels. The dying leaves hissed long after the wind blew through them. My cousins’ stupid laughter clanged and echoed in my head like bells far off in the distance. I stumbled my way up the path.

  The shed twisted up like an abandoned church. I pushed open the door just wide enough to see inside. It was dark, but some firelight from the pit made its way through the dirty panes of the window and I could see Jay bent over the seat of his bike. The figure behind him had his pants halfway down his thighs, so his bare ass was showing and he was rutting into Jay with all the chaos of an animal, his back twisted over like a question mark from having to stand on his tiptoes to get at Jay. You could hear both of them trying to stay quiet, except for one moment when Jay let out something halfway between a sigh and a whimper. That noise tacked itself onto me like a wraith and I quietly shut the door and rejoined the circle of men around the fire.

  A few minutes later, the shed exploded to life with the crack of the bike’s pipes, and everyone about shit their pants. The doors flew open and Jay ripped out of the driveway, that stranger with the hood clinging hard to his back.

  “Godda
mn,” my uncle Ronnie said over his cigarette. And then all the men turned back to the fire.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Jay was gone. His clothes and stash of cash, all of it missing. I went back to the shed, stupidly thinking he’d moved all his shit in there, but his bike was gone, too.

  It broke my grandma more than she’d ever let on. More and more nights, she wouldn’t go to bed and started falling asleep on her chair. I’d come home to find a cigarette dangling from her hand over the rugs or the polyester arms of the recliner, threatening to engulf the house in flames. Sometimes, when she did manage to get to her bedroom, she’d call in sick the next day and sleep in her heap of sheets way past noon. I started digging in her purse and going to the grocery store alone.

  I tried to change her memories about Jay, using the same trick I used to change my own memories, but it was a dark trick, because she started slipping and calling me his name, even when she was sober. Mostly she cried silently on the porch. I’d watch her from the screen door, the tears rolling down her cheek one at a time, like rationed coins for lost souls.

  FOR A COUPLE years after, before I moved out of my grams’s and actually started trying for things like my GED and community college, I’d sometimes think about the last time I saw Jay, and I wondered if it was real. Whenever I was fucked up and some guy was suckin me off or I was busy with some girl I’d just met, sometimes I’d catch myself making the noise I heard him make, and when I did, I would know exactly where he was. Or I’d know exactly where he’d been. And sometimes I’d even know where he was going next.

  Damitri Martinez (he/his) is a 2019 Lambda Fellow. His work has appeared in Foglifter journal, where he is also an assistant editor. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. He lives in Denver, Colorado. To learn more, visit damitrimartinez.com.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  For many years Granta has partnered with Commonwealth Writers to publish the five regional winners of their Commonwealth Short Story Prize—one each from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Canada and Europe. It’s a prize that gives a platform to places isolated from the traditional infrastructure of publishing, and through it we’ve had the chance to publish a range of brilliant new voices—among these is Mbozi Haimbe.