Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead

authoritative tone seemed to surprise her. She set her drink on the carpet, swung her legs around, and, taking his outstretched hands, stood unevenly on her bare foot and her cast. He put one arm under her knees and one around her back, and then he straightened up, cradling her. The easy way she lay in his arms reminded him that she was no stranger to being carried. Jacob had met her pas de deux partner, the only boy at her studio, Gregory, son of Russian immigrant scientists, a sallow, pimply creature who was educated by private tutors to avoid the brutalizing influence of high school. Gregory, for all his apparent wimpiness, could lift Joan over his head with ease. Jacob had wondered what it would be like to lift her, to grasp her by her thighs or her waist and move her body through space as he pleased. She looked at him. Their faces were very close. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Let’s go to the beach.”

      Jacob’s mother handed over the keys to her Rambler wagon with minimal admonitions. The front seat stretched out long between him and Joan, its scratchy cream upholstery radiating early summer warmth. Joan sprawled in the sun: wiry legs poking out of short shorts, bikini ties in a tantalizing bow at her nape, her face turned to her open window. The Rambler, with its big windows and long bench seats and vast carpeted launchpad of a cargo space in back, did not seem, as it usually did, like a blocky symbol of maternity but was transformed into a terrarium of sexual possibility. For weeks, Jacob had been gearing up to try something with Joan. Not because he didn’t care about their friendship but because he felt like his participation in that friendship, as it was, had become disingenuous. He wasn’t a saint or a child. He wasn’t the palace eunuch. He wasn’t her cousin, as he knew she had told one of her boyfriends. She might reject him—probably would reject him—but he needed to come clean. High school was, for all intents and purposes, over, and he needed to slough off its context. He wasn’t eager to be separated from Joan, but he was curious what would be in store for him at Georgetown, who he would be there.

      They turned off the main road and bounced along a sandy lane to their usual spot, some way down the shore from the popular swimming beach. Before they’d left, Joan had rallied enough to stump around the kitchen filling a thermos with fruit punch and her mother’s vodka, and after he parked, Jacob took the towels and the ice chest and crossed the low, sharp-grassed dunes. He spread the towels out on dry sand, and then he went back to get Joan. She was standing on her good foot, leaning against the Rambler.

      “I think it would make the most sense for me to ride piggyback,” she announced when he drew near. “For long-distance transport.”

      He considered. He had already held her in his arms, and having her cling to his back sounded like a new and interesting variation. “Okay,” he said. “You’re the boss.” He turned around and crouched down. Nimbly for someone in a cast, she hopped aboard. As he started across the sand, he kept his eyes on the terrain in front of him, but his nerves were busily mapping her body. His hands were wrapped around the backs of her thighs. He could feel her ropy muscles under his fingers and a film of sweat. The rough plaster of her cast occasionally scraped the outside of his left calf. Her arms were around his neck, her sharp chin on his shoulder, the soft points of her small breasts against his back. The spot where the crotch of her shorts pressed against his waist was almost too potent to think about. His glasses slid down his nose, and he kept having to toss his head like a horse to keep them from sliding off. They didn’t speak until he stooped to let her dismount onto the blue-and-white-striped towel.

      “Such service,” she said, sitting and smiling up at him uncertainly. She felt the pull, too. He knew she did.

      He sat. She looked away, out at the surf, which was breaking sluggishly, the waves plumping up in gelatinous heaps before collapsing into exhausted white frills. He was alive with fear and need. Then she said, as though everything were normal, “The worst part about being injured is how smug my mom is about the whole thing.”

      He closed his eyes against the glare of the sun. “Yeah?”

      Joan nodded. “The other day she circled an ad for a typing course and left it on my pillow. I wanted to hit her.”

      “You can’t do that.” He dug in the ice chest and busied himself pouring out cups of vodka punch.

      “Hit her?”

      “Type.”

      She smiled ruefully. “With my mom, it’s like she’s missed the whole point of my entire life. I work myself to death at something that’s really actually important, and all she wants is for me to be a secretary. It’s not like I know if ballet’s going to work out, but I have to believe or else there’s no point.”

      “At least,” Jacob said, trying to focus on the problem at hand, to be, in spite of everything, a good friend, “you know that what you want was your idea in the first place. My parents brainwashed me into the fine citizen I am today.”

      “What do you mean? You don’t want to go to Georgetown?”

      “No, I do. But I’m not sure I wanted to be skipped ahead and put in extra classes and all that. I don’t know. It’s done. I get to leave home early, so I should be grateful.”

      “Sometimes I wonder,” Joan said, her mouth red from the punch, “how you’re supposed to know if you’re really feeling what you think you’re feeling. Like how do we know everybody sees colors the same way, you know? Do we all feel ‘happy’ the same way?”

      Jacob shrugged.

      “In ballet,” she went on, “when something’s really beautiful, I feel a lot, but not happy or sad, really. Just a feeling. With goose bumps. I like it.” After a moment, she sighed and rolled onto her stomach, resting her forehead on her arms. “If I can’t dance, I know I won’t die, but it feels like I will.”

      He rolled over onto his stomach, too. “It’ll work out.”

      She turned her head so they were looking at each other. “You’re the only person who takes care of me. You think I don’t notice, but I do.” Her punch-stained mouth was as inviting as red velvet.

      Later he would not believe that he had simply scooted across his towel and put his mouth on her red one, lunged at her, really. The desire was so pure it set his teeth on edge. He pushed her over onto her back with an insistence he didn’t know he was capable of. Her arms went up around his neck; her hands clasped the back of his head; he sprawled across her. Some seconds passed before he became aware that her hands had dropped to his chest and were pushing at him. He lifted his face slowly, unwillingly.

      She looked stricken, panicked. “I can’t,” she said.

      His frustration produced an abrupt and furious certainty that he had been cruelly wronged. “What do you mean you can’t?” he demanded. “Of course you can.”

      She shook her head, opened her mouth, but said nothing.

      He couldn’t stop himself from saying, “You’re a selfish tease, and I’m sick of it.”

      She sat up. Her small face was hard, knowing. “Oh, I see. You’re not really my friend. You were just hoping to get some all this time. Didn’t you have anything better to do? Isn’t there someone else you could follow around? You’re such a kid.”

      “No one cares about you like I do,” he said. The core of his anger had gone cool, and he felt an appalling flicker of the remorse that would follow. “I’m the one who takes care of you. You said so yourself. But what does that get me? Nothing.”

      “What does that get you?” she repeated. “What do you think it should get you, Jacob?” She flopped flat onto her back, limp, legs apart. “Here you go. Here’s the grand prize. Buffet’s open. Help yourself. Go ahead.”

      He looked down at her and couldn’t help but consider kissing her again. Instead, he wrapped his arms over his head and pulled his knees to his chest. In the past, when he had imagined kissing her, his worst-case scenario—also his most likely scenario—had ended with humiliation. He would plant an exploratory kiss; she would balk, embarrassed; he would be humiliated. He had not anticipated the lunge, the greedy engine driving him through