Stag: A Story by Ben Monopoli Page A

folded into a triangle
and decorated with hand-drawn orange musical notes. I closed my
eyes and counted. One, two, three.
    “What is that!” Dwight gasped from the
cluttered locker beside mine. He was ready for it to be a treasure
map, a ransom note, but I knew it was neither of those.
    “Just from my mom,” I said, slamming the
triangle deep into my backpack.
     
    One, two, three. One, two, three, one, two,
three.
    I thought about throwing it away without
reading it. I couldn’t be responsible for something I never saw. I
owed no one an answer if I never saw a question. I was going stag,
didn’t they know? The note was an insult. But it was an armed bomb
too. One I needed to defuse before it blew up.
     
    I opened it on the bus, slunk down in the
green vinyl seat with my knees pressed high against the back of the
seat in front of me. Within the pocket of my lap I unfolded the
triangle. In orange ink it read: Oliver. Would you like to go to
the Grad Dance with me? (Jessica Parson) Please check one and put
this in Locker 341. __ Yes __ No. From Jessica Parson. PS: I’m good
at dancing, you’ll see. Some, but not all, of the I’s were
dotted with circles.
    Jessica Parson, only Jessica. A weight
lifted; I exhaled and my knees slid down the green vinyl. Jessica
was a girl it was OK not to want to go to this dance with. Any
dance with. She was a girl no one would want to go to a dance with.
My friends would excuse this, based on Jessica’s ever-present
kitten sweatshirts, her big buck teeth, her faded stretch-pants
everyone said smelled like horse manure because she lived near a
farm. They would reject it. To have help in rejecting a girl for
not being good enough—this was a fine disguise.
     
    “She asked you?” Tyson said, affronted, when
I showed the guys the note. “That wench.”
    “I bet she’s going to wear h-h-horse poop
perfume to the dance,” Michael said, laughing, rubbing the heel of
his hand against his perpetually itchy chin.
    “I feel so dirty now,” I whispered
dramatically. “I need a chemical baaath.”
    “Let’s see that note again,” said Boyd,
holding out a sturdy hand. I gave it to him. Using his knee as a
table, he drew a blue X on the line beside No . Then he
paused, touched the pen cap to his lips, then circled the No .
    “Write on it In your dreams Jessica ,”
said Michael. “Write on it You smell like shit .” He had the
devilish grin of a boy new to swearing.
    “This is fine like this,” Boyd said.
    He folded the note in a series of halves and
handed it back to me. Between first and second periods I raised it
to the ventilation holes of Jessica’s locker.
    I closed my eyes and counted to three. Paper
whisked against metal and it was gone.
     

 
     
    As the days slid by everything started to
become all dance, all the time, an onslaught too overwhelming for
my anti-monster trick. It came from everywhere—the obvious places,
but even my own bedroom.
     
    “We should buy you new shoes for the dance,”
my mother said. My suit was back from the seamstress and she’d
realized it was still incomplete.
    “I don’t need shoes,” I said, wedging the
suit into the back of my closet, where I could better pretend it
didn’t exist. Plastic hangers clattered to the floor. “I can wear
my church shoes.”
    “But those aren’t very fancy. Don’t you want
to look nice? People are going all-out for this.”
    She was sitting on the end of my bed,
cradling her chin with one hand while her elbow rested on her knee.
She was looking at me as though I were the most mysterious thing in
the universe.
    “Who cares if I look nice?,” I said, shutting
the closet door and letting my hand slide damply off the knob. “Can
I go outside?”
    She sighed, pressed her knuckles to her lips.
“You’re going to have a lousy time at this dance, Oliver. Do you
know why? Because you’ve already decided to have a lousy time.”
    “I’m going outside,” I said, leaving her in
my room and taking