Too Cool

Short Story (Published in The Weekender Arts and Culture Magazine)

I felt that each tree slanted toward us, shouldering the heavy fog above the spinach green and maplewood Outback as it screamed muted music and tobacco-filled gossip. The canopy of the sequoias was blocked by a whiteness that expanded through the cloud.

I nervously scratched at the ingrown hairs on the underside of my thighs. The first time we’d gone up to the cabin, I’d let Jake put his hands on me, take my clothes off. It was fun to kiss him, act like we knew what we were doing. I had draped the sheets across us in perfectly adult ways. We never talked about it, but I knew Eve and Rachel knew the ritual; we’d seen too many movies, knew how it should look. But my mind was on Sister Danielle.

“I swear! They’re gonna get huge! Like Beatles huge. Like Arianna’s tits huge. Like fucking huge.” I sat in the back, ass barely touching the seat to get close enough to unnecessarily shout at Eve and Rachel.

“Loving the sound. Very ethereal.” Eve let smoke out with her words, tapped her cigarette out the window. Eve liked to smoke to music. Ethereal was a word we both liked to use.

“I hate this hipster shit. Put on Tupac before I bail.” Thin arms reached for the tangled black cord leading to the back seats of the car.

“Rachel, we’re alternating. Just pretend you’re in an American Apparel for five minutes,” I said.

“I’m going to tuck-and-roll out of the car.”

“Go ahead,” Eve smiled through her cat-eyed sunglasses, hands lazily draped over the wheel with her left foot tucked under her pointed knee.

“My feet won’t let you.” I wrapped my feet over Rachel’s seat to her shoulders, bare to pinch her arms. “Endure it, bitch.”

“No! Get those off of me!” Rachel burst with mock outrage. She jerked forward, slamming her breasts to her locked seat belt.

“Strap her in, Mary. Ride’s getting curvy and hipstery.” Eve took another drag and turned the music up four notches.

“Oh, eat a cock,” Rachel laughed. Her hair bounced, aerodynamic in a black topknot above the headrest.

“Whose? Rico’s?” I gobbled imaginary dick to her glare and enjoyed the song.

Before hopping in the car, I had told the girls to wait while I grabbed my geography book I’d left in class. We were supposed to do our report on Iceland. When I got back to the classroom, I burst in unceremoniously, door slamming its spring stop. The room was empty tables and scattered papers, but Sister Danielle was sitting alone at her desk. I watched her wipe her cheeks. I paused, then said I needed my book. She said of course. She had smiled at me reassuringly.

The song ended and Rachel hissed at me while she reached to play the next song. I hiccupped at her.

Jake, his cousin Matthew, and Rico were already up at the cabin. Were probably drinking Natty Lights, watching baseball, and talking about tits. It always felt like we all got a lot more grown up whenever we were all together, us and the guys. Rachel started it, trying to impress Rico by being better than him. Then Eve and I had to sardonically reference their love affair just to show we paid attention. Matthew was already older and Jake just tried to act like him anyway. 

Still, without us they were probably telling shitty jokes about Sister Helen being a fat fuck.

When they told us Matthew had his parents’ cabin for the weekend again, Eve got her brother’s Outback and crammed it with backpacks of clothes, cases of Stellas, and a tacky purple lawn chair named Harriet that went on all of our adventures. We had to push her brother’s baseball gear under the seats and prop our backpacks and the beer on top of Harriet, but things fit.

I opened my geography book. I thought about Sister Danielle crying. That’s what it had looked like. Like she was wiping away tears. I couldn’t think of ever having seen an adult cry before. I definitely hadn’t seen my parents. I wondered if she was sleeping with the dean and he ignored her. Or if Sister Helen told her she’s a shit teacher.

“Hey, did you know Icelandic has been virtually the same for the last thousand years? It hasn’t changed at all basically,” Eve said.

“Iceland’s too cool for us,” Rachel snorted and turned back to wiggle her eyebrows at me over her Aviators.

“Their culture has the highest gender equality too,” I wiggled my ears to move my own shades up and down back. “Too cool.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?” Eve laughed.

“Smallest gap in pay.”

“Let’s move to Iceland,” Rachel declared.

Maybe Sister Danielle is just pregnant and hormonal. She’s about that age.

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” Eve hit her horn for emphasis. “It also has the world’s largest glacier. It’s, like, just pure white for thousands of miles.” 

“Too cool,” I grinned.

“Ha. Too cool,” Eve kept a straight face.

“It’d be nice to go there,” Rachel mumbled as she started to paint an electric blue on her toes. “Wear something bright and stand a hundred miles away and see if we can see each other.”

“Maybe we’d only hear each other,” I said, rolling a joint on top of the book for later.

“We probably wouldn’t hear anything.” Eve took another drag.

“I think it’d depend on th—”

A glimpse of brown jolted ahead of us before a great tumbling rocked the car. I hit my head on the roof from the violent bounce, knocking my glasses to the seat next to me. I tried to let out a yelp, but the air left my lungs. Rachel screamed. Eve gripped the steering wheel and stomped the brakes so hard her thighs turned white. The Outback skidded to a sideways halt. It was then that I absorbed the crashing-of-glass sound of the beers slamming into each other. A trickling noise followed by the scent of fermentation wafted toward the front of the car.

“Shit,” Eve breathed, her fingers talons gripping the steering wheel still.

Blue nail polish was spilt in a chaotic jet on the dashboard ahead of Rachel. Eve’s cigarette lay smoking next to the speedometer. Harriet was much closer to the window. My ankles almost gave out as I opened the car door and stepped down.

“Mary...” Rachel whispered. Eve followed after prying her fingers from the wheel. Rachel pulled herself out before she could be left alone.

It was a deer. No horns, but it looked bigger than a baby. Female, maybe ninety pounds. Muscles in its cheeks throbbed and twitched. They looked so strong from up close. It was so colorful. Specks of white interrupted a rich chestnut color. A deep rust stained its abdomen. 

We stood still in our ripped shorts and t-shirts, and I suddenly thought we looked stupid. Rachel had a stripe of blue down her leg. Eve’s blonde bob looked oily with sweat. I was barefoot. The trees looked bigger from outside the car.

The deer’s top-right hoof twitched. It let out a terrible moan. Blood soaked into the deer’s pelt. A few ribs, crushed inward, made the deer look incomplete. It looked like a flaccid balloon. The fur was distorted where a tire had tread. The hoof continued to twitch with a growing violence. It swept clear a two-inch path free of bristles, but did no more than scrape the asphalt in a low dissonance. Another moan.

We stood still. We watched it move its eye in a fluttering quickness that turned my stomach.

“It’s not dying,” Eve said, creating a pointed contrast with the purr of the wind and the scraping that we had not experienced since the tumultuous stop of motion. Everything felt aggressive after that screeching halt: the light breeze, the too bright sun.

“What do we do?” Rachel said in a watery voice. She couldn’t seem to find a comfortable way to stand. Her legs were too long.

“Maybe there’s someone we can call,” I suggested.

“Do you think we could take it with us?” Eve squinted in the whitening fog.

“Would it fit in the car?” Rachel asked.

We all looked at the deer. Its eyelid was covered in a soft fur that vibrated. It sounded a quiet trombone in the back of its throat.

“Should we move it?” I asked with a slight nod towards it. We looked at the deer.

“We can’t just leave it here,” Rachel’s voice broke. “Fuck.”

“It’s in pain.” I glared at her.

“It’ll die.” Eve nodded. We nodded. We watched the deer.

Minutes passed. The hoof scraped the asphalt.

I turned and stared at Eve. She turned her head, attuned to the movement. Our eyes met.

And then she turned toward the car and unlocked the trunk. We watched her dig under Harriet for a green and black duffle bag. She pulled out two metal baseball bats, silver with peeling layers of tape on the grips. Eve handed me one. We looked at the deer.

“It won’t fit?” Rachel whispered.

“It can’t fit,” I said, drifting sandal-tanned feet toward the deer.

“It’s in pain,” Eve followed me.

“It’s in pain,” Rachel agreed.

I circled to the other side of the deer, inches away from the path of its hoof. Eve lifted her bat to point at its head. The bat hovered there, skimming its eyelashes. Rachel walked to the side, five feet from the deer’s head.

With weak ease, Eve lifted the bat high in the air, a focal point for the trees to bend toward. Then she brought the bat down in a shaking blow to the deer’s jawbone. An identifiably flesh-padded crunch ate at our ears. The deer moaned in a pitch I’d never heard. Eve lifted the bat again, bringing it down harder this time, splintering the snout. A gurgle of snot and blood now accompanied the forest-like rumble of the deer’s muted wails.

“Shit. Mary, you try.” Eve clutched her bat and wiped her forehead.

I put one foot forward, positioning myself to use my body’s weight in the blow. I brought the bat down with the same fleshy splintering above Eve’s first mark. We felt teeth clatter loose. The deer wheezed and a few splats of blood flung out in oozes. I lifted the bat again. I brought it  down with more force, silver gleaming and blurring. The back of the skull caved in. A gurgle followed by another small burst of blood leaked out of the deer’s smashed snout.

Eve lifted her bat again. The deer’s ear smashed inward and stuck against its head.

Rachel walked to the trunk and sifted through the clutter until I heard the clink of glass. She returned to the deer with the neck of a beer bottle, ending in a lopsidedly jagged point. She squatted down, breaths away from the deer’s face. The blue stripe of color cracked with the new tension on her skin. Rachel plunged the sharp end of the bottle into the deer’s eye.

A milky liquid leaked from the point. The deer’s hoof twitched in a slightly irregular sharpness, and a gurgle splattered more blood by the snout.

I dropped my bat to the road in a three-crash landing and walked to the trunk. There were two bottles that were still intact in the closest case of beer, and I grabbed one. I returned to our friend, crouched, and crashed the bottle against its skull. Beer spilt over the deer’s face and mixed with the blood spots. The deer was making bubbles in the golden liquid.

“God fucking damn it!” Eve shrieked as she brought her bat down again, splintering the glass into freckles on the deer.

“Shit, Eve, you almost hit us!” Rachel and I had swung backward, my feet dipping in the beer.

We watched the deer bubble, a pathetic balloon.

We watched it, but then Rachel said, “Maybe we should run over it again.”

We watched the deer. Rachel rubbed her bony arms against each other. Eve squinted and twisted a thin silver ring around her middle finger. I noticed a new scrape on my pinky, probably from the crash.

We watched the deer, and then we walked to the car. We tossed the baseball bats under Harriet, and parted for our separate seats. It was like a dance. None of us went to the same place or opened the same door, but we moved in sync. We meticulously put our seatbelts on. I wiped my feet on the carpeted car floor, Eve inserted the keys into the ignition with authority, and Rachel threw the empty bottle of Mac nail polish out the window.

The car came to life with a shudder. Eve put it in gear. We each turned back to look at the deer.

One deep breath and the car jolted backward. We saw it coming this time. My hands went to the ceiling; Rachel’s to the left shoulder of the passenger seat, bracing her twisted position; Eve’s split between the wheel and just below Rachel’s hold. The lurch tore at the left side of the car, and I felt myself fall slightly to the right as it jolted the car at the back and then front wheels. Eve slowed the Outback down and switched gears again to repeat the experience. We turned our bodies to face the windshield and re-braced ourselves. We gained speed, and I was so prepared, I barely felt the upness. I hiccupped. Eve brought the car to a stop once more. I got out of the car.

The deer no longer lay on its side but looked crooked. Its legs had bent at grotesque angles, no longer in a discernibly animal way. Its skull was a smashed husk, and its ribs no longer fought an attempt to inflate. I grabbed its hind legs, soft and speckled with white, and dragged the deer out of the road, next to a sequoia. It was heavy. I wasn’t expecting the weight. It looked so small and jagged, but it felt heavy and bloated. It left a copper streak across the asphalt and a lack of dried brown tree bristles. The clamminess of my feet lifted dirt and points of brown needles as I set the deer down and walked by a small puddle of beer and dark-green glass shards. They glinted in the foggy light, looked like candy.

I walked back to the open car door, pulled myself in by the roof, and sat sideways with my back propped against the far door and my legs across the seats. Eve pressed the AM button under the CD player and some NPR official blared then mumbled about driverless cars as she twisted the volume knob. The burnt out cigarette lay against the speedometer still. Rachel crossed her legs and opened the window further with the lever of old cars.

Before the car started moving again, we each lifted our sunglasses to our eyes and lowered our shoulders. The car lurched forward, and we were off.

Silently sitting in the closed space, I heard my breathing. It interrupted itself with a hiccup every so often. The deer didn’t even have horns.

Minutes passed. Rachel started to cry. I picked at the scab on my pinky then stopped myself. After a while, Eve slowed the car down to a halt, opened her door and vomited.

“I brought Gatorade,” I dug behind my seat for my backpack and pulled out a blue bottle. She finished and swung an arm out to take it. She closed her door, and we carried on.

::

The cabin was well stocked with Heineken, so we didn’t mention the Stellas that broke. “What have you fuckers been up to?” Jake shouted from the porch. Rico and Matthew giggled out the screen door.

There was a moment of silence, and I was about to shout some sarcastic response, before Eve grunted “the usual.” She pulled her backpack across Harriet from out of the trunk. She smiled calmly at Jake and Matthew on the porch, but her knuckles gripping the half-empty Gatorade bottle were white.

“I need a beer,” Rachel swung her bag over her shoulder and crossed her arms to climb the steps to the front door.

“Plenty of those,” Rico opened the door and tried to pull her in for a hug.

“Beer,” Rachel said sternly as she sidestepped his embrace.

I grabbed my backpack and shut the trunk on beer-soaked Harriet. Jake jumped down the stairs to poke me in the stomach.

“Classic Rachel, shutting Rico down,” Jake laughed. “What took you guys for fucking ever?”

“I had to make sure Arianna had enough food and water to last locked up in your closet for the weekend.”

Jake frowned then laughed. “But really, I thought you guys would be here at four.”

“I had to grab my geography book.”

The night started early. Opening my beer at the table, I tried to make eye contact with Eve. She looked at me then looked quickly away. I looked to Rachel but she stared into her beer, examining the green of the Heineken bottle.

::

Jake skimmed his hands across the hem of my panties. We’d moved to the bedroom with the tacky bear rug.

“You think she’s going to Alec’s next week?”

“I don’t fucking know, Jake. Ask her yourself.”

He lifted one hand up my shirt, lowered the other to his belt. I took another gulp of beer while helping him with his zipper. The bed opened, and he took my bottle and put it on the bedside table. Jake burped into my neck after a few short thrusts.

“Would Arianna like it up here, you think?” He leaned over me after finishing and lifted my beer off the table for a swallow.

“Nah, she likes the beach.”

After a while, Jake fell into a heavy sleep. He hummed low growls and twitches. I thought about Iceland. According to ritual, I put on Jake’s t-shirt and walked out of the room for another beer. I could see Eve through the front window, smoking in a sheet on the porch. Rachel sat in one of Matthew’s parents’ robes on the armchair, removing the nail polish on only six of her toes. I pulled a Heineken from the fridge and felt a deep and empty chill.

The cold burst out in this awful gust that rattled in my ribcage. Rachel curled tighter in her hunch. Eve took in a thick and heavy drag. I scanned the kitchen counter for a bottle opener, spotted my prize, and snapped the cap off. I took a sip and then a gulp. Half the bottle was gone.

“Too cool.” I hiccupped.

The picture of Sister Danielle crept into my mind with the chill. I got a strong urge to tell Eve and Rachel that I saw her sitting at her desk with her face in her hands and her back hunched not so nun-like, but then I went back to bed with my beer, pulled on a fresh pair of underwear, and fell asleep. Anyway, it could also have been allergies.