Stag: A Story (2 page)

When the guys found out about her they found
out through Boyd. I volunteered it to no one, including,
especially, my parents. It felt like a secret, a perilous secret
wrapped in a much bigger secret. It hadn’t occurred to me that
getting a fake girlfriend could be a good disguise. I was too
afraid that if I tried playing a role I would fail so spectacularly
that my secret would be laid open and made obvious to the farthest
reaches of any audience. Better not to play, better just to stay
the same, the same as yesterday and the year before, when no one
asked questions, when lack of interest was normal and taken for
granted and OK, when there was no pretending necessary and I was
only me.

“I saw Tyson’s mother at the bank today,” my
own mother said at dinner. The dance was just a few days away now
and had invaded dinner too. “We talked about how we can’t wait to
see you boys all dressed up in your suits. She’s going to take
pictures. Oliver, I told her you’d kill me if I take pictures, but
she says I should—as mothers we deserve to take pictures.”

I felt sideswiped. Pictures? Posing? I hadn’t
anticipated any of this.

“Oliver?”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Ollie,” my father said, “let your mother
take pictures. It’ll only take up a minute.”

“You can’t. No one else’s moms are
going.”

“
All
of the other mothers are going.
I’m not going to follow you into the dance, I just want to see you
and your friends all dressed up.”

“No. No, you have to just drop me off and
leave.”

“Ollie, do I embarrass you that much? I’m not
going to dress as a clown, for heaven’s sake.”

I finished my dinner in silence. I could feel
my eyes were wide, frozen, too big to close.

*

As evening on Saturday approached, my mother
reminded me again and again, with increasing urgency, that I needed
to start putting on my suit. My last best hope had been to forget
to go to the dance, but no one was letting me.

I pulled the suit out of my closet and
dropped it on the floor, a small protest. Before closing the door I
stood looking into the darkness at the other end, the good end.
Tucked behind a shoebox of dusty G.I. Joes was a square of shiny
contact paper with the name
Micah
written on it in block
letters. The name-tag of a boy I’d known—just seen, really—at
summer camp between sixth grade and seventh. I had rescued it
crumpled from the trash, where Micah tossed it after walking away
into eternity on the last day. I had smoothed it and pressed it to
the inside of my t-shirt, rode home with it against my skin.

I had told myself I wanted his name, wanted
his looks, his smile, admired his skills with whittling sticks and
heading soccer balls. That’s all, and for a while I believed it.
But I started telling myself about him, too, at night when I was in
bed, when I pushed my pajamas and underwear down around my ankles
and rubbed against the smooth sheets.

Now, crawling under hanging clothes and over
scattered shoes, I sat in the closet holding Micah’s name-tag. Its
backside, fuzzy with t-shirt fibers and stray hairs, was no longer
sticky. On the shiny side I could see my blurry reflection; his
name in black went across my face.

From downstairs I heard my mother call again.
I was running out of time.

*

“Try to have fun tonight, Ollie, OK?” my
father said. I was standing in front of him, my back to his chest.
He was tying my tie. I looked at him in the mirror. The top of my
head was level with his throat. When the tie was tied he
straightened my collar and put his hands on my shoulders and turned
me around. He looked into my eyes. “You’re so serious all the time.
Loosen up a little.” He punched my arm lightly. “It’s a dance, not
the end of the world. People actually have fun at these.”

After he left the bathroom I looked at myself
in the mirror. People had fun, but I wasn’t people. The suit, the
tie. They had dressed me up for my execution.

*

Here’s what I knew: That I was in the car on
my way to be the date of a girl and I had no flower to give her.
Amid all my worries this was the most tangible, the one I was
guaranteed to confront. But I couldn’t get a flower because I
needed my mom to buy the flower. And I couldn’t tell my mom I
needed a flower because then she’d know I had a date, and she’d
know I didn’t want a date, and why. And then? And then...? I
couldn’t see anything after that. There was nothing after that. It
was gray static, like the end of a videotape.

My mom looked over at me. “I really wish
you’d worn your suit jacket, Oliver.”

We rolled to a stop in front of the school,
in a lot full of kids and parents.

“I’ll pick you up at nine,” my mother said,
but I was already out of the car. She sighed. “Are you sure I can’t
get out?”

I pretended not to hear. Reaching back, I
swung shut the door. I wanted her to leave before she had a chance
to talk to anyone.

Kids were milling around the playground,
posing for photos while waiting to be let into the school. The boys
in their suits were easy to recognize but I was shocked by how
different the girls looked—their hair was up, they had makeup on,
their gowns brushed poofily against the basketball lines on the
blacktop. Why could we not have worn jeans?

And some couples were holding hands; I
averted my eyes. My awareness of Micah, my awareness that I was
aware of him, this had been private knowledge, an unfortunate fact,
easy to keep under wraps. I thought I’d be able keep it under wraps
forever. A perpetual bachelor. Why would anyone know? Why would it
ever come up? But tonight it was being brought up, in supposed
celebration. With gowns and balloons. Wait, what? Balloons? It
didn’t even make sense.

I spotted Dwight at the back of the
playground, standing alone beside a telephone pole. He had on
khakis and a wide paisley tie. He was kicking at the dirt as though
his life depended on it.

“This is stupid already,” I said to him while
gazing around nervously. I hadn’t watched my mother leave but our
car was no longer in the lot so she must have complied. I didn’t
see Taylor either. Maybe she forgot. Maybe she was sick. I found
myself hoping she got in a car accident on her way here—then I felt
funny and looked down at my shoes. This thing I was was making me
wish things like that about someone like Taylor Corgan, who wore
pink barrettes and was obsessed with butterflies in third grade.
This thing I was made me want her to die.

Tyson and Michael showed up together.
Michael’s parents were flaky so Tyson’s sometimes looked after him.
We had to pose for photos.

“Are you boys all going stag?” asked Tyson’s
mom from behind the flash. The word was like a taunt now.

“‘Cept for Ollie,” said Dwight.

“Ollie’s got a girlfriend,” Michael
snickered.

“Where is she, Ollie? Do you want to get her
in the picture?”

I shrugged.

Mrs Cordray pursed her lips. “You’re still
missing Boyd too,” she observed, then snapped a few more shots.

Soon Mr Allen, our principal, pushed open the
double doors and kicked down the doorstops. Behind him the
cafeteria was lit in a rosy glow.

“They’re giving you dinner?” Tyson’s mom
asked, slipping the camera into her purse.

“Spaghetti,” Michael said.

“Tyson, don’t eat any ricotta, remember. I
don’t want you getting the squirts in your suit.”

“
Mom
,” Tyson said.

Locked in my group’s gravity I approached the
mass of students funneling into the cafeteria. Moments after I
passed inside, a hand seized my wrist.

“There you are,” said a girl named Erika.
Erika was friends with Taylor. “She’s been
waiting
for
you.”

She pulled me alone toward a row of windows,
the kind with chicken wire between the panes. Taylor was leaning
against one of them, her palms cupping her elbows against her
chest. Her gown was yellow, patterned with sunflowers. These were
the only flowers between us; when she saw my hands were empty, that
I had neither a corsage nor even something wild picked at the edge
of the playground, disappointment saddened her face. She quickly
covered it with a smile.

“The streamers are cool,” I said, looking
around, flushed with my inability to meet her one request.

“You look handsome, Ollie,” she said.

“Thanks.” A reflex of manners made me want to
add
You too
, but if I did that, what would be next?

Around us chairs were beginning to scrape
across the tile as couples took seats at the tables we ate at every
day, but which tonight looked glamorous, with white paper cloths
and narrow vases holding roses and sprigs of baby’s breath. The
other half of the cafeteria was cleared, the extra tables and
chairs stacked high against the walls to allow for a dance
floor.

“Should we sit down?” said Taylor, waiting to
be led.

“Um. I guess. I’m going to go make sure Boyd
gets here OK first, OK?”

“Oh. But. You’ll be back? Should I find us a
table?”

I didn’t know what to say so I tried to
smile, but my face felt as stiff as my brain.

On my way to the door I passed the table
Tyson and Michael and Dwight had chosen. It had a few empty chairs;
Tyson was draping his suit jacket over the one beside his, I
assumed to save it for Boyd.

“Going out to wait for Boyd,” I said.

“Should we save you a seat?” Michael
asked.

“What?”

I exited the cafeteria confused. Was I
expected to sit with my friends? Of course not. But if Michael
thought I could, then I could think I could. Taylor could sit with
her friends and I could sit with mine. That would be OK. I realized
my hands were shaking.

I sat down on the curb and watched the
parking lot. Behind me someone—Miss Onedo—told me the spaghetti was
on its way out.

“Just waiting for Boyd Wren,” I told her.
“It’s important that I make sure all my friends get here.”

I heard her laugh at me, even as I was
realizing how stupid I sounded, how earnest. As if I had a goal, as
if it were important—I wasn’t hiding, I was working. I wasn’t being
hideous, I was being thoughtful.

I only had the luxury of waiting a few
minutes before Boyd, in suit and tie, spilled out of his parents’
red minivan. I walked him inside.

“My dad doesn’t know how to tie a tie,” he
explained, smoothing the white silk against his black shirt, “so we
had to get one of the neighbors.” He looked around. “Where are you
and Taylor sitting?”

“Taylor’s probably with her friends,” I said.
A glance confirmed she was with Amy; both of them were looking at
me expectantly. “I’ll sit with you guys.”

“Ollie, that’s lame. You should go sit with
her, you’re her date.”

“It’s fine. It’s just spaghetti.”

It wasn’t just spaghetti, though. Not to the
hair-netted lunch-ladies who volunteered to cook it for us on the
only night we were polite enough to say thank you. Not to the
chaperons overseeing their charges’ first tottering steps into
adulthood. And not to all my classmates, in their suits, in their
gowns, paper napkins carefully draped across their laps, spinning
pasta on dented forks delicately so as not to spray sauce. Not even
to me; it felt like a last meal to me. While I ate I felt like
everyone’s eyes were on me, willing me to get up and go sit with
Taylor. Under that weight I twirled my spaghetti and breathed.

*

Stag.

Stag had offered me an escape, a chance even
to have fun, the way Boyd and Michael and Tyson were having fun
now, doing robotic dance moves under the colored lights. The only
thing stag had required was that I commit to it. I had balked, I
had failed to commit.

Now I was being punished. Now I was standing
at the edge of the cafeteria beneath a tower of stacked chairs,
seeing intermittently past dancing bodies the tears-moistened
cheeks of Taylor Corgan glistening in the lights. Now I was feeling
the weight in my chest, the breath I couldn’t get a hold of. I had
imagined that not sitting with Taylor at dinner would make her
forget about me, lose interest, find someone better, but I was
wrong, it had only made everything afterward more important. Not
sitting with her at dinner was rude. Turning down her offers to
dance was monstrous.

Yet I did turn them down, again and
again—when the offers came from her friends, when they came from
mine. Even when I saw in her eyes the dawning realization that the
night she had so looked forward to was crumbling around her like a
dream scraping into a nightmare. Even when she cried and pretended
not to be crying.

My friends, realizing it was up to them to
salvage things for a crying girl in a sunflower dress, turned on me
at 8:30, when there was only a half-hour left. I was not only a
monster then but an outnumbered one, which was the only thing
worse.

“Ollie, jeez,
look
at her,” Boyd said,
directing my eyes across the dance floor with a stab of his hand.
“You need to go dance with her while you still have time.”

“She’s been crying half the
night
,”
Tyson said. And it was true: Erika and Amy were ministering to
Taylor with tissues and plastic cups of water, and casting furious
glares at me.

“I’m waiting for the right song.”

“Never mind the song. Just go dance!”

“I’m stag.”

“You’re not stag, Ollie, you’re her date,”
Boyd said. “Stop being such a fucking wimp.”

Having the swear word directed at me in anger
for the first time startled me. And from
Boyd?