The Decent Proposal by Kemper Donovan Read Free Book Online

L.A., especially—made her a perfect ten. Smooth and flawless, her face required no adornment. Her light complexion was the pride of her mother, who despite her daughter’s best efforts held fiercely to the antiquated Asian belief that the whiter the skin the better. Mike’s natural beauty extended to her hair as well: pin-straight, it was thick and textured enough to hold a natural glow, a burnish that was almost metallic. Even this morning’s slapdash ponytail tapering a few inches past her shoulders looked like something out of a shampoo commercial.
    She reached her car—a Jeep Wrangler with no windows or roof—pawing blindly for her keys while checking Facebook with her other hand. Richard had already updated his status:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Monday, Bloody Monday
    and she dumped her bag on the sidewalk to devote her attention to double-thumbing a reply:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Everyday is Like Monday.
    She knew he’d get it, because she’d forced him to listen to Morrissey a few weeks earlier, and this had been one of his favorites. It was an established fact that Richard was hopelessly plebeian when it came to music, and would have been lost without her guidance.
    Mike knelt on the ground, unearthing her keys at last. Before starting the ignition she placed two fingers over her lips and transferred them to a plastic St. Christopher statue taped to her dashboard. She did this every time she entered her car, except when her parents were in town. For them, the statue came down. They were evangelical Protestants, and wouldn’t have understood why their daughter indulged the Catholic notion of worshipping the saints. But Mike found the saints fascinating, and occasionally inspiring.
    She shot eastward on Olympic.
    As far as her parents knew, she was still the dutiful daughter whose first move after being dropped off at Amherst was to join the College Community Group affiliated with the nearest Korean Presbyterian Church. At eighteen, Mike had been as picturesque and poised as she was now, at twenty-nine, and she rose to the top of the church’s hierarchy with the same queenly insouciance she’d perfected in her old church in New Jersey. Each night she held court in the dining hall among her fellow churchgoers, and for all that her day-to-day existence had changed upon entering college (the communal bathroom was perhaps the biggest hurdle), life felt very much the same. It was only looking back on that first year, now, while turning into the LA Fitness on Bundy, that she could see how unhappy she’d been, how bored .
    Her discontent came to a head a few weeks before the end of freshman year. It was a simple matter of being late to dinner one night and seeing her usual table from afar. There they all were: her crew, her posse—heads bowed, hands clasped, willfully oblivious to the gawks and stares of everyone around them. Mike didn’t want to be one of the ignorant people gawking, butshe suddenly didn’t want to be one of the earnest people praying, either. She wanted to be free of it, if just for a night; they hadn’t seen her yet, so she turned—sharply, on her heel—and carried her tray as far away as she could, to an empty table upon which a discarded textbook lay, making the space feel even emptier, somehow. Perfect. She sat down and began leafing mindlessly through the thick pages. It was an introduction to art history, and she was ogling the David when someone cleared his throat above her:
    â€œUh . . . ’scuse me?”
    She looked up. He was holding his tray so uncertainly it looked as though he might drop it. She took in his pocket tee, braided belt, and baggy yet tapered jeans. Ugh. When were guys going to learn how to dress? When?
    â€œCan I help you?” she asked, not caring that she sounded like a bitch. She wanted to be left alone.
    â€œThat’s my textbook,” he said,