Retribution (23 page)

In the late spring, Mr. Marcosian allowed Rachel to place her two favorite photographs in the yearbook—the portrait of a fierce Mr. Bobs and the picture of the toppled cheerleaders called
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Girls Feel Pain, Too!
He reluctantly agreed with Rachel that this work's title had a feminist ring, even if the photograph itself showed a strange choreography of prostrated girls. No one, it was true, much liked her darker work. But it seemed to Rachel that suffering was more real, indisputably real, than anything else, so real that you had to tell people lies about your necktie, you had to mark up the walls with insults, you had to vandalize the yearbook's sports section with the shadows of loss and pain. You had to reach out and hate someone, or at least try to hate someone. You had to.

Before school let out for the summer, Rachel did one last thing. She cut out five words from a magazine article and glued them to an index card, as if she were a blackmailer, a kidnapper, an extortionist, to construct the sentence “I am very very sorry,” then put it together with Mr. Bobs's stolen whistle in a manila envelope, which she sealed and left outside his office door. She felt it then, too, a little bit more of her meanness going.

She didn't know why she spent so much time with Rand now that he would be leaving in a few weeks, and she told him so. “It just makes things worse,” she said.

He promised to write, to E-mail often. He said, “You can just know that I am out there. That's a good thing to know.”

“Out there,” Rachel said, trying to feel better. She thought of Rand in a jar, the rain coming down, the old ladies and Mrs. Taub weeping and weeping. No flowers, not even one. She wept, too. For the first time in she couldn't remember how long, she cried openly. Rand looked a little scared. He was just a boy, after all. “Don't worry,” she said. “I'll stop soon.” And she did.

In the afternoons, Rachel sat at her mother's bedside, wearing one of her new blouses from Nordstrom and a little lipstick, though her mother was too tired to notice now and wore no makeup herself, her illness finally having overcome her vanity. Now and then, she would wake and sit up in bed and stare at the bad painting of the little boat on the wall across from her and make simple conversation. “Tell me about the weather. How is your father? How is school? Tell me about your German boy.” Rachel would give her simple answers and watch her mother's large eyes, which seemed less and less able to rise out of sleep, which seemed now to reflect a world submerged in pain and darkness. Where are you going? Rachel wanted to ask her, but she didn't. Are you scared? How much does it hurt? Instead, she said, “Dad has finished constructing his ship. He's painting it now very slowly. You know what a perfectionist he is.” She half-expected her quiet mother to ask her again at any moment that terrible question about the deserted island, that stupid boat that her mother kept staring at. And though she never did ask it, Rachel had settled on an answer. She'd decided that she would not wish to go to that island, that she would not submit to that strange fantasy's conditions, its horrible limits—What three things would you take?—and if she were forced to submit and placed in that simple white boat that her dead grandmother had painted and asked that question, she would answer in defiance, “Nothing. Nothing. I'll take nothing.”

RETRIBUTION
. Copyright © 2001 by John Fulton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Most of these stories have been published in periodicals and anthologies. “Braces” first appeared in
Zoetrope
(Fall 1999, vol. 3, no. 3) and was reprinted in Spanish translation in
Habra Una Vez,
an anthology of young North American writers. “Clean Away” was published in
Sonora Review
(Spring/Summer 1998). “Rose” was published in
The Southern Review
(Fall 1999, vol. 35, no. 4). “Iceland” was published in
The Florida Review
(Summer 1999, vol. 24, no. 2). “The Troubled Dog” won third prize in the 1997
Playboy
College Fiction Contest. “Outlaws” originally appeared in
New York Stories
(Fall 1999) and was reprinted in
The Sun
(Winter 2001). “Visions” appeared in
Passages North
(Winter 2000). “First Sex” appeared in
Third Coast
(Spring 2001). “Liars” was published in
The American Literary Review
(Spring 2000).

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First Edition: July 2001

eISBN 9781466890596

First eBook edition: January 2015