PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 Read online

  During orientation, the casting director handed me a thick binder filled with scripts to memorize so I’d know how to stay in character for every conceivable situation. Every catastrophe here is called a situation, and every single one is covered. If lightning strikes and fries a sixth-grade class, there’s a section for that on what Hercules would do. When a soccer mom tries to kiss me on my lips I’m supposed to pretend to play hard to get and then try to distract her by shoving my muscles in her face. Hercules can be such a tease. Then when her husband tries to pick a fight with me, I’m supposed to pretend that we’re actually play-fighting, and then I’m supposed to run and get out of there. Hercules can be a bitch. When a kid’s being a jackass and asks a dumb question—this part I actually like—I’m supposed to twist his question into one that’s more family friendly, and then from there I’ll give one of my stock answers. In the end, it’s all about staying on script and running and evading. I am a born natural at that.

  THE BOY AND his parents stare at me expectantly.

  “Hercules,” the boy repeats. “How do I become strong like you?”

  The scent of churros is slaying me, but this kid is adorable, so I squeeze his hands and gaze into his wide eyes.

  “Young man, what’s your name?”

  He takes a deep breath and shouts, “Garen.”

  “Young Garen, I want you to be strong, I want you to be brave, and I want you to listen to your parents. Do you understand?”

  Garen swivels and looks at his parents, who look this close to combusting with pride. They reach for each other’s hands and nod and mouth the words I understand, Hercules at him.

  Garen focuses his attention back toward me. He puffs his chest out again, and he shouts: “Dad wears Mom’s dresses and makeup like you do.”

  When he sees me with my mouth agape, he attempts to clarify. “But only when Mom’s not home,” he assures me.

  I know the absolute worst thing I can do in this moment is to look at Garen’s parents, but that’s what I do. Their hands are clasped, and their smiles remain plastered, but nothing registers in their eyes. It’s like four vapid orbs gatewaying into an abyss. Then she shoves away his hand and turns to look at him, and it’s like I can already see her about to say, Honey, is that true?, and I can already imagine him struggling to come up with some way to respond, and then I’m like, Nah this fool is so boned. And in this moment, the only thing running through my mind is, I’ll be damned, that binder doesn’t cover everything after all.

  “THEY DON’T PAY us enough for this shit,” Zac says. Zac and I are slumped in our chairs in the breakroom. We’re still in costume.

  In the far corner, Annabelle is having lunch with her daughter. In the past, as Ariel, Annabelle was legendary for how she connected with the kids. There would be a line of children with their parents snaking around the corner, patiently waiting to hug her and tell her about school and their pets. She would smile with delight and say, “Tell me more.” Then Annabelle had her daughter. When she returned from maternity leave, she had put on a little weight, and they reassigned her to a new job as a fully covered Mickey. Her Mickey headpiece sits on the table as her daughter cries and says she doesn’t like to be left with employee childcare. “I’m so sorry, sweetie,” Annabelle says. She looks exhausted.

  “So what did you say to that family?” Zac asks.

  I shrug.

  Garen’s mom had marched toward us and was about to yank Garen away when I stood and gently held her hand.

  “Ma’am,” I said quietly.

  She tried to shake my hand off. Her back and shoulders were as rigid as a springboard.

  “Just let us go,” she said, and her shoulders slumped, and I saw tears begin to well around her squinting eyes.

  “Can I just say something real quick to Garen?” I asked.

  She hesitated, and then she tightly nodded.

  I knelt down and grabbed Garen’s hands once again. He looked confused and as if he might cry too. I leaned forward and spoke directly into his ear.

  “Young man,” I said, and he whispered a tiny yes back.

  “Hercules wants you to know,” I said, “that no matter what happens, your dad and mom love you very much, okay?”

  He nodded.

  “So I want you to be brave, and I want you to be strong, and I want you to listen to everything they tell you, okay?”

  He nodded again.

  “And now,” I whispered. “Hercules wants you to go give your mom and dad a big hug. Can you do that for Hercules?”

  He nodded one last time, and he ran to his mom and hugged her tight, and he ran to his dad, who had been standing unsurely in the background. Then they were gone, and my shift was about over, so I stood and walked back to the breakroom.

  I think for a moment. “I guess I stayed on script,” I tell Zac.

  He stares.

  “I mean the script’s not half bad,” I say, and he nods and loses interest.

  JAY LOOKS UP from his spreadsheets when I come home that night. His company lets him work from home, so most nights I find him surrounded by reams of paper. He doesn’t let the cancer stop him from putting in a full workday, and he’s meticulous about tracking his hours.

  “How was your day?” he asks.

  “It was a blast,” I say. “Dads getting caught lying, and kids needing therapy for the next ten years.”

  “So just another Disney day?” he says.

  “Yep. How was yours?”

  He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes before he reaches for a stack of papers and pointedly raises one.

  “Jeremy,” he says. “We need to talk inheritance and insurance. I’ve run some initial calculations, and the projections indicate . . .”

  I tune out when he begins to use big words, but he gets more animated as he picks up steam on his findings, and he’s sexy as fuck as he incessantly taps his paper with his pen, so I strip off my shirt and straddle him.

  He stops talking.

  “Ah,” he says.

  “Let’s talk about your impending death some other time,” I say.

  Later, I step out of the shower and find Jay curled up on the sofa. His glasses, off-kilter, are hooked onto one ear and hanging on his forehead over wisps of his fine hair. He snores lightly. I stare at his face. When he’s awake, he always looks as if he’s worried about something, probably because he is. Worried about me, probably. He likely has months left, and the only thing he seems to have on his mind is whether I’ll be okay after he’s gone. It’s only when he’s asleep that he finally looks relaxed. He snorts, and traces of a thin smile begin to form. I wonder what he’s dreaming about, and that makes me smile.

  I WAS BACK home with Jay for summer break when we first learned about the cancer. By then, we had been together for two years. The prognosis was bright then, and Jay was adamant I return to college.

  “I’ll be cured before you come back,” he said.

  That night, needing to get out of the house, we went to P.F. Chang’s.

  “Are we celebrating anything special tonight?” our server asked.

  “Just our health,” Jay said gently.

  “That’s very sweet,” the server said, smiling. She studied us, and she said, “Well you two look as healthy as—”

  “It’s my birthday,” I cut her off. Her mouth curved into an O, and she said she’d give us a minute to look at the menu.

  Jay turned and gave me his look.

  “What? Health doesn’t get you free cake at P.F. Chang’s,” I said.

  “I suppose that’s true,” he said.

  We were subdued for most of the dinner. It was toward the end, after dessert, that I could no longer hold back.

  “What if things go wrong?” I blurted out. I was reeling from too many apple martinis.

  “Jeremy,” he said. “Do you realize, statistically, how many standard deviations off we need to be to see the treatment fail?”

  I said no
thing.

  “It’s a little under three,” he said. “Expressed numerically, that equates to—”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  He reached over for my hand and nodded.

  “I’m going to be fine, Jeremy. You have to trust me, and you have to trust in the numbers.”

  I relented. In the darkened room, the candle flickered over his creases and reflected tiny orange flames in both lenses of his glasses. He’s all lit up in fire, I thought. And I believed.

  But I should have never left him.

  EVERYBODY’S IN A shitty mood at the park today. This happens sometimes. Some days, with no reasonable explanation, foul moods spread and take over entire sections of the park like a contagion. By midmorning, under the already wilting sun, tempers flare within families and in groups of middle school friends, Tomorrowland’s Space Mountain dome standing glumly in the backdrop.

  This includes Cody, the eight-year-old bald-headed Make-A-Wish kid who’s sitting in his wheelchair with his arms crossed. He glares as his parents stand helplessly to his side and as the swath of media photographers fumble with the cameras draped around their necks and do not take photos.

  Cody’s mom approaches him and places her hand on his frail shoulder. “Honey,” she says, “is there anything we can do to make you happy?”

  “I want to go home,” he says, and the Make-A-Wish and Disney public relations people wince in unison.

  “But sweetie,” she says. “Isn’t this what you wanted to do more than anything in the world? What changed?”

  “Disney World sucks,” he shouts, and I see two photographers quietly pack their cameras back into their cases.

  Dad is starting to unravel, and I see him approach Cody with his fists clenched. Before I realize what I’m doing, I find myself standing between Cody and his dad, my face lit up in smiles. I motion subtly at his dad before I kneel down and face Cody.

  “Hi there, young man. Your name is Cody, right?”

  Cody stares at my biceps with wide eyes. My physique generally has that effect on most boys who regularly worship Marvel superheroes, and I can imagine that the effect is greater on a kid as sick as Cody. He nods and looks into my eyes shyly.

  “Young man,” I say. “I hear you on your discomforts. It’s too hot and it’s too crowded and everybody’s in a bad mood.”

  He nods emphatically.

  “So tell me,” I say. “If you could do anything right now, what would it be?”

  His face brightens. “Video games,” he says.

  I nod in complete agreement. I say, “Hercules loves video games. What’s your favorite?” and he shouts, “Minecraft,” and I silently sigh in relief. That’s like the one game I have some knowledge of.

  “That’s Hercules’s favorite game,” I say, and he looks as though he might jump out of his wheelchair and hug me. “What are you working on right now?” I ask, and Cody smiles and closes his eyes for several moments, as though he had transported himself out of Disney and into his Minecraft world. When he opens his eyes, they are shining.

  “I found a way that I can fly forever,” he says.

  I say, “Hercules wants to hear all about this.” The photographers take their cameras back out of the cases, and as the cameramen begin to record from a distance, Cody explains to me in a feverish pitch and with two animated hands the mechanics and items he acquires before he sprints and dives off a cliff and launches himself higher and higher into an infinite horizon—eventually so high, in fact, he explains, that the game stops rendering his image, and he disappears entirely from the screen.

  “That is very high,” I agree. “But Cody,” I say. “If you fly beyond the horizon and disappear, won’t you miss your parents?”

  “It’s just a game, Hercules.”

  “Touché.”

  “Hercules?”

  “Yes, Cody.”

  “I’m dying, you know,” he says. From the corner of my eyes, I sneak a peek at Cody’s parents. They stare intently at their son.

  “I know,” I say.

  “Hercules?”

  “Yes, Cody.”

  “Will you come to my home and play Minecraft with me?”

  I say nothing.

  “So we can fly forever?” he says.

  I look into his eyes, and I can see that he is bracing for the inevitable no. “I have an even better idea,” I tell him as I begin to smile. He looks up. “Peter Pan’s Flight is a short walk from here. Have you been on the ride?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Hercules promises you,” I say, “that riding that ride feels just like flying. How about we take that flight together, just you and me?”

  He considers this for a moment before he says a quiet okay. I turn to his parents for permission, but they already look like they might throttle me with gratitude, so I stand and take Cody’s hand as his mom pushes his wheelchair. Behind us, the photographers and media and public relations teams quietly follow, and the crowd ahead splits to make room when they see the procession. But I only have eyes and ears and heart for Cody—script be damned—and he has me eating out of his hands as he patiently explains master-level tips on how to rule over the Minecraft domain.

  A PHOTO OF me kneeling and clasping a smiling Cody’s hands makes the front page of the local newspaper the next morning, along with the caption “Local Hero Captures the Hearts of Boy and Disney Community.” Jay lowers the paper and raises his eyebrows over breakfast.

  “You sure work hard for nine dollars an hour,” he says.

  “They should promote me to management,” I say crossly. I couldn’t sleep last night.

  “Or at least to playing Gaston. Now that’s a real man,” Jay says as he dodges the Cheerio I flick at him. He returns to the paper, and I get ready to leave for work.

  The Orlando roads are slick with rain this morning, and the traffic is heavy. I’d always wondered why they chose to build the Happiest Place on Earth in practically the Wettest City in the Country. I like it when it rains, though.

  I stare past the windshield wipers sweeping frenetically to keep my vision unobscured. Outside is a sea of gray. With every gust of wind, sheets of rain shimmer. Trees shudder.

  I hear the approaching wail of sirens. I pull over and stare at the ambulance as it passes by and then turns at the intersection, in the opposite direction from home. I remain parked by the curb. The sirens fade, until I hear only the rain pelting the roof of the car and the furious beating of my heart. I rest my eyes and feel the heat radiate through my closed eyelids.

  Yesterday, on Peter Pan’s Flight, while waving a very temporary goodbye to Cody’s parents and the media folk, I helped Cody step on board the suspended galleon that served as our flying ship. We settled in our seats and launched high into a dark London night. We flew over Tower Bridge and Big Ben before rising to clouds of wispy white fluff swaying under giant whirring fans made invisible behind the cloak of night sky. Below, a sea of tiny golden lights—villages of homes shining kerosene lanterns—twinkled and pulsed, as if the constellations lay not above us but below.

  I looked at Cody. His face was spellbound as we glided and swooped over mountain peaks and into the heart of Neverland. At one point, our galleon dramatically lifted high into the sky to escape the wrath of an enormous crocodile. Cody whooped and wrapped his arms around me. I squeezed his shoulder and pointed down at the crocodile, who now held Captain Hook in the clutches of his jaws.

  As we emerged outside and through the exit that led to the disembarking zone and to Cody’s parents welcoming us back, Cody sighed and rested his head on my shoulder.

  “How’d that feel, Cody?” I said. “Was that just like flying or what?”

  He sighed again and embraced me and said, “That was way better than Minecraft.” I squeezed him tight before I stood and helped him off the galleon and into his waiting wheelchair.

  After insisting it was not a big deal to Cody’s parents and posing for a final roun
d of photos, I said my goodbyes and jogged back to my post in Tomorrowland. As I navigated between throngs of people making their way to their next attraction, I imagined that it had been Jay and I flying on the galleon. Jay, being Jay, would peer over the ledge and at the city below, and he’d squint and point out, “The placement of Big Ben seems off. It should be over there.” I’d tell him to shut up and enjoy the ride. He would remain silent for a moment, and then he’d look up toward the ceiling and say, “The engineering in this facility is really quite remarkable, if you stop and consider—”

  “Shut up,” I’d say again.

  I’d close my eyes and shiver when the cold air blew over my ears. In the distance, I’d hear Peter Pan and Hook’s swords whirl and clang in battle as the Darling kids cheered and whistled. Jay would turn to me and pause and cock his head, and he’d say, “Is everything okay, Jeremy?”

  And I’d grip the ledge so hard that pain shoots up my wrists, but he wouldn’t see that, and I’d smile and say, “Yeah, just hungry. Let’s get a turkey leg after this.” And for the rest of the ride we would remain quiet, our galleon propelling us above a dark ocean and gliding toward the exit, where sunlight would peek in from around the corner and the cast members, bored shitless, would remind us to watch our step on our way out.

  Ernie Wang resides in Las Vegas. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review and Passages North.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  The Rumpus strives to make space for writing that might not a find a home elsewhere. We love stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. In “Bellevonia Beautee,” Lauren Friedlander situates the reader within the characters’ world but insists we leave all assumptions at the door. The story is full of detail but also mystery. Most importantly, this story pushes against tropes of women victims in fiction. The female victims here are granted agency and imagination. They are more vivid and fully fleshed out on the page than the man holding them captive. Their humanity is rendered with clarity, and they refuse to surrender to their circumstances in small ways, and ultimately, perhaps, in not so small ways.