You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard Read Free Book Online Page B

“Yeah?” the man said. “Oh, I think you know,” she told him.
    â€œOr here’s another one,” Cato says to me. “Adam goes to God, ‘Why’d you make Eve so beautiful?’ And God says, ‘So you would love her.’ And Adam says, ‘Well, why’d you make her so stupid?’ And God says, ‘So she would love you.’ ”
    Henk laughs.
    â€œWell, he thinks it’s funny,” Cato says.
    â€œHe’s eleven years old,” I tell her.
    â€œAnd very precocious,” she reminds me. Henk makes an overly jovial face and holds two thumbs up. His mother takes her napkin and wipes some egg from his chin.
    We met in the same pre-university track. I was a year older but hadn’t passed Dutch, so I took it again with her.
    â€œYou failed Dutch?” she whispered from her seat behind me.She’d seen me gaping at her when I came in. The teacher had already announced that’s what those of us who were older were doing there.
    â€œIt’s your own language,” she told me later that week. She was holding my penis upright so she could run the edge of her lip along the shaft. I felt like I was about to touch the ceiling.
    â€œYou’re not very articulate,” she remarked later, on the subject of the sounds I’d produced.
    She acted as though I were a spot of sun in an otherwise rainy month. We always met at her house, a short bicycle ride away, and her parents seemed to be perpetually asleep or dead. In three months I saw her father only once, from behind. She explained that she’d been raised by depressives who’d made her one of those girls who’d sit on the playground with the tools of happiness all around her and refuse to play. Her last boyfriend had walked out the week before we’d met. His diagnosis had been that she imposed on everyone else the gloom her family had taught her to expect.
    â€œDo I sadden you?” she’d ask me late at night before taking me in her mouth.
    â€œWill you have children with me?” I started asking her back.
    And she was flattered and seemed pleased without being particularly fooled. “I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to pull information out of you,” she told me one night when we’d pitched our clothes out from under her comforter. I asked what she wanted to know, and she said that was the kind of thing she was talking about. While she was speaking I watched her front teeth, glazed from our kissing. When she had a cold and her nose was blocked up, she looked a little dazed in profile.
    â€œI ask a question and you ask another one,” she complained. “If I ask what your old girlfriend was like, you ask what anyone’s old girlfriend is like.”
    â€œSo ask what you want to ask,” I told her.
    â€œDo you think,” she said, “that someone like you and someone like me should be together?”
    â€œBecause we’re so different?” I asked.
    â€œDo you think that someone like you and someone like me should be together?” she repeated.
    â€œYes,” I told her.
    â€œThat’s helpful. Thanks,” she responded. And then she wouldn’t see me for a week. When I felt I’d waited long enough, I intercepted her outside her home and asked, “Was the right answer no?” And she smiled and kissed me as though hunting up some compensation for diminished expectations. After that it was as if we’d agreed to give ourselves over to what we had. When I put my mouth on her, her hands would bend back at the wrists as if miming helplessness. I disappeared for minutes at a time from my classes, envisioning the trancelike way her lips would part after so much kissing.
    The next time she asked me to tell her something about myself I had some candidates lined up. She held my hands away from her, which tented the comforter and provided some cooling air. I told her I still remembered how my older