Viral_Stories by Emily Mitchell

Author:Emily Mitchell [Mitchell, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393350531
Amazon: 0393350533
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

A Boy My Sister Dated in High School

A boy my sister dated in high school slapped her across the face during an argument. They were sitting in the front seat of his car, parked by the basketball court behind our house, and she made a sarcastic reply to something he had said and before she knew what was happening, he’d raised his hand and swung it, open palmed, against her cheek.

She didn’t tell me about this until years later after we had both left home. When she told me, I felt at once angry and strangely guilty because the boy in question was extraordinarily good looking and I remembered having been impressed in a shallow way that I never spoke about that my sister was dating someone so handsome. I was jealous of a lot of things about my sister in those days: her beauty and her ease with people, how spontaneously funny she could be, how well she was liked. She fit in at our school and in our town, in her own body, in a way that I could not seem to manage, quiet and bookish and peculiar as I was then and remain. Still, there was never a time when I didn’t love her very much and when I wouldn’t have done whatever I could to support and defend her.

Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I asked, when she finally told me.

When the boy she was dating hit my sister, it made a sharp cracking sound, just like it does in the movies. She raised her hand and touched the side of her own face. The expanse of skin where he’d struck her buzzed and tingled, felt weirdly alive. It didn’t hurt and even the actual slap itself hadn’t really hurt. Instead, she was shocked, surprised because she had not expected this, and then confused about what she should do next.

She looked over at the boy she was dating, who had just hit her. He was leaning way back away from her against the car door as if he was afraid, either of her or of what he had just done. In his eyes was an expression of shock and remorse much more intense than anything she herself seemed to be feeling. He too had been surprised, and he looked like he might be about to cry. At that moment it came into her mind that maybe, in punishment for what he had done, the gods had magically frozen him in his current physical position: curled up like a frightened fetus with his eyes bugged out and his mouth hanging slightly open. Perhaps he would be stuck like that forever. In her mind she envisioned having to explain to the boy’s mother how her son came to be paralyzed in this posture: He hit me, she would say, and then, well, now he doesn’t seem able to move or speak. I’m sorry. She thought of him in various scenes over the course of his life to come—in

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