If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories by Laura Kasischke Read Free Book Online Page A

of the last left standing at the end of that game, it just made him an easier target for Scott Alguire or David Haviland—brutes, with unbelievable physical strength. They’d aim for Tony’s head, and he’d hear the hard ball zinging toward him (like those phone lines, somehow shiny and more terrifying than a scream) before it took him out, sent him sprawling onto the waxed floor while other children cheered.
    In college, when he’d told Melody about this game, about Scramble, she’d nodded knowingly. She, too, apparently, had played it in her own elementary school on the opposite side of the state from his. She said, “I just always tried to be the first one out. I’d stand right at the line and let another girl toss the ball at my shoulder and then I’d go sit on the side.”
    This had amazed him—the idea that someone (even a girl!) would so willfully and cannily buck the system by choosing failure over injury. Tony had longed to go backward in time and see if he could do it, if he could just stand there and be eliminated by a soft toss rather than fighting it out until the inevitable and painful end. And what would it mean to him if he could have? If they’d yelled Sissy at him, could he have stood it? Or would they not have yelled Sissy ? Would his classmates, perhaps, have seen it as the bold move of a very brave boy, a boy much smarter and more capable than they had ever even imagined being? Might his boldness, perhaps, have brought the whole charade of Scramble to a screeching halt? Would the gym teacher have found something genuinely amusing for them to play instead? Something that didn’t require pain, and losers?
    But of course Tony could never have done it. Tony was nothing like Melody. And, back in those early days of their relationship, that had been the whole point of such pillow talk, to discover over and over again how alien a creature she was. A better, smarter creature. A creature completely lacking in irony and anger and malice, and better off for it. On the surface, they had things in common. Their English majors, for instance. But Melody was the kind of English major completely devoted to reading books and talking about them, with no ulterior motives and no future plans—as if there would be some kind of future in that, as if you could get a license and go off into the world explaining your feelings about books to other people and get paid for it. And she was a genius at it. Her analyses of books were often more interesting than the books themselves, even if she only liked the ones with happy endings.
    Tony was, however, an English major because he’d claimed nothing else and time was running out and he was a junior who’d takennothing but literature courses for no real reason other than that they met, often, in the evenings or late afternoons, and he liked to sleep in.
    Also, he had a knack for faking his way through lit classes with all A’s, intuiting early on that ninety percent of one’s success or failure in a literature course (not to mention the mood of the instructor) depended on whether or not the student participated in class discussion:
    “In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ does the wife have a choice other than to go mad?”
    Tony really had no answer for that, so he would, instead, be the student who asked the question. It was a way of participating, generating participation—avoiding and initiating controversial discussions at the same time. The professor, or lecturer, or teaching assistant (it didn’t matter which one, they were all equally touched and grateful and singled him out as an English major and an A student right away) would heave a sigh of relief and lean back in his or her chair. The other students seemed to admire him, and only that woman (girl?) with the black hair—the history major from the basement of Pizza Bob’s—seemed ever to notice what he was up to.
    Like him, she seemed to have wandered into more than her share of literature classes with just as