Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories (Reading Group Guides) by Kyle Aryn

Author:Kyle, Aryn [Kyle, Aryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Company of Strangers

The only thing my brother and I ever agreed on was that I would die horribly. As a child, I knew that I could be trapped in a tanning bed until my skin bubbled and melted away from my skeleton. I could be swallowed by an earthquake, washed away in a flash flood, eaten alive by rats. I could spontaneously burst into flames or choke to death on a Cheerio. I could catch the Ebola virus and bleed to death from my eyes and nipples.

Our father failed to recognize the seriousness of my impending death. A doctor, he saw only the facts: “Monkeys get Ebola, floods don’t hit the suburbs, and rats are just squirrels with naked tails.”

“Maybe I’ll be kidnapped,” I told my father. “On any ordinary day, I could get stolen and chopped into little pieces.”

He sighed heavily and looked at me over the rim of his glasses. “By whom?”

“By bad men,” I told him and pointed at my brother. “It could happen. Jack said.”

My father glared at my brother, who nodded. “It’s true. She could.”

Bad men were everywhere. They filled the pages of newspapers and monopolized the Six O’Clock News. It was only a matter of time before one came through my window at night and snatched me from my canopy bed. He would bruise my arms, pull my hair, tear my nightgown. A bad man could fill a child’s mouth with one fist to keep her from screaming, could duct-tape her hands behind her back, could slice her apart and throw her into a river.

“I could be gone in a heartbeat,” I told my father. “And maybe all the police would ever find is a finger.” I wagged my pinkie in front of him. “Better take a good look in case you ever have to identify me by it.”

My father took a deep breath. “Let’s not worry about it, shall we? You just be good and safe and remember what they told you in school about talking to strangers.”

“It isn’t always a stranger,” my brother interrupted. “One of our neighbors could lock Lilly up in a cellar and take pictures of her without her clothes on.”

“That will never happen,” my father told me. “But if it does, I will save you.” Then he cuffed my brother on the back of the head and hissed, “For the love of God, Jackson, please don’t make my life any harder than it already is.”

My father’s wife had died young. His job was demanding. His son was cold and his daughter walked home from school ready to accept candy from the first stranger who offered. The women he might have hoped to love moved through his house like a parade, smoked cigarettes in his kitchen, then fled the first time they met his children. They left for good when his son looked them up and down and whispered “Whore” beneath his breath. They ran from the house screaming when his daughter smeared lipstick across her neck and wrists and lay naked in the bathtub the first time they tried to spend the night.

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