The Nix(36)

All he wanted was to see her. Just a confirmation that she did, in fact, exist. That’s all he needed, and, upon seeing her, he would soon leave, long before she changed clothes and he could be accused of doing something dishonorable. Just this one thing—seeing Bethany and sharing this quiet, private moment with her—could calm him, get him through another week. That she attended Blessed Heart and not the public school, that she spent so much time in her room and so much time traveling, struck Samuel as unfair and unjust. The girls the other boys loved were always present, right there in front of them in class, right there next to them in the cafeteria. That Bethany was so inaccessible meant, to Samuel, in his head, that he was justified in occasionally spying on her. He was owed.

Then one day he was at their house when she walked right into the TV room while Bishop played Nintendo and collapsed into the same extra-large beanbag chair Samuel was at that moment sitting in. She sat in such a way that a small portion of her shoulder pressed against a small portion of his shoulder. And suddenly he felt that all the meaning in the world was concentrated in those few square inches.

“I’m bored,” she said. She wore a yellow sundress. Samuel could smell her shampoo, rich with honey and lemon and vanilla. He held himself still, afraid that if he moved she might leave.

“Want a turn?” Bishop said, shoving the controller toward her.

“No.”

“Want to play hide-and-seek?”

“No.”

“Kick the can? Red rover?”

“How could we play red rover?”

“Just throwing out ideas here. Brainstorming. Spitballing.”

“I don’t want to play red rover.”

“Hopscotch? Tiddlywinks?”

“Now you’re being stupid.”

Samuel felt his shoulder sweating where Bethany’s shoulder pressed into him. He was so rigid it hurt.

“Or those weird games girls play,” Bishop said, “where they fold up pieces of paper to find out who you’re going to marry and how many babies you’ll have.”

“I do not want to do that.”

“Don’t you want to know how many babies you’ll have? Eleven babies. That’s my guess.”

“Shut up.”

“We could play dare.”

“I don’t want to play dare.”

“What’s dare?” Samuel said.

“It’s truth or dare without the bullshit,” Bishop said.

“I want to go somewhere,” Bethany said. “For absolutely no reason. I want to go somewhere just for the point of being there and not here.”

“The park?” Bishop said. “The beach? Egypt?”

“For no other reason than to be at a place for no reason.”

“Oh,” Bishop said, “you want to go to the mall.”

“Yes,” she said. “The mall. Yes I do.”

“I’m going to the mall!” Samuel said.

“Our parents won’t take us to the mall,” Bethany said. “They say it’s cheap and vulgar.”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing those clothes,” Bishop said, puffing his chest out and doing his best impression of his father.

“I’m going to the mall tomorrow,” Samuel said. “With my mom. We have to buy a new dishwasher. I’ll get you something. What do you want?”

Bethany thought about it. She looked toward the ceiling and tapped her finger on her cheekbone and thought about it hard and long before saying, “Surprise me.”

And all that night and into the following day, Samuel thought about what he could buy for Bethany. What gift would capture everything he needed to let her know? The gift needed to distill his feelings for her, give her in one small package a quick potent shot of his love and commitment and total helpless devotion.

So he knew the gift’s parameters, but he could not see the gift itself. Somewhere in the mall’s million billion shelves, the perfect gift almost certainly waited for him. But what was it?

In the car, Samuel was quiet and his mother was agitated. She always got like this on their trips to the mall. She loathed the mall, and so her critiques of what she called “suburban mall culture” grew severe and brutal whenever she actually had to go there.

They navigated out of the subdivision, onto the wider arterial road that looked like any arterial road in any American suburb: a franchise hall of mirrors. This is what you get in the suburbs, his mother said, the satisfaction of small desires. The getting of things you didn’t even know you wanted. An even larger grocery store. A fourth lane. A bigger, better parking lot. A new sandwich shop or video-rental store. A McDonald’s slightly closer than the other McDonald’s. A McDonald’s next door to a Burger King, across the street from a Hardee’s, in the same lot as a Steak ’n Shake and a Bonanza and a Ponderosa all-you-can-eat smorgasbord thing. What you get, in other words, is choice.

Or, rather, the illusion of choice, she said, all these restaurants offering substantially the same menu, some slight variation on potatoes and beef. Like at the grocery store, when she stood in the pasta aisle looking at the eighteen different brands of spaghetti. She couldn’t understand. “Why do we need eighteen spaghettis?” she said. Samuel shrugged. “Exactly,” she said. Why did we need twenty different coffees? Why did we need so many shampoos? It was easy to forget when looking at the chaos of the cereal aisle that all these hundreds of options were actually one option.