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  “I can tell you’ve done this nightmare before,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “You should try it on coke.” She shrugged. “I’ve got some. Have you ever done it?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “The thing is,” he said, “I’m already on Adderall, so I’m worried it would just be—” He made a soft, explosive sound and continued playing. She sensed he was neural kin; there was the static, preoccupied expression, the rocking of the torso, the hiding eyes, the small body, the hair that stood in bunches. He was cokie, metabolically.

  “You’d like it,” she said. “I can tell.”

  “Are you a pusher?” he asked, as he worked the controller. “I thought that was something that only existed in movies.”

  “I sell it,” she said. “I don’t push it on anybody.” Coke was more fun than Adderall, she explained. A gram would be well worth his while, an investment. Anytime he wanted to offer people just a little bit and get the party started, he could. A hundred bucks was a reasonable price. It was not a lot of money for trying something that could be a good drug for him, a fun drug but also a study drug for when his prescription wasn’t enough.

  The Hunter, operated by Wagon Wheel, was fighting the Wet Nurse in her lair.

  “Do you always make the Hunter male?” she asked.

  “I go back and forth,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “Do you go to school?”

  She shook her head.

  “I thought so,” he said. “I was like, why would she be selling the shit out of something like that if she was in school, with everything taken care of?”

  She was starting to find him a little annoying. Where are you? she signaled Abby. There was no answer. I’m sorry I fucked up, she continued. I know I was bad today.

  After a few seconds, there were dots by Abby’s name. Then: Please stop contacting Abby. She doesn’t want to be in touch with you right now.

  She wondered which one of them it was. Jasmine? The bodyguards? Never mind, she thought, no point dwelling on it. She felt ill, but there was shit she had to do: get paid, get nights. Fuck those people and the bubble they lived in.

  “Hey,” said Wagon Wheel. He paused the game and squinted at her. “Are you okay? You were looking at your phone and you just kind of…” He pantomimed a slump. “Oh, shit,” he said, when he noticed she’d begun to cry. “What’s wrong?”

  It was quiet with the game paused. “I like this girl and she doesn’t like me back,” she said. She gestured toward the controller, to indicate that he should resume playing.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been there, with girls. It always feels like they’re killing you. And then they go spread their legs for some confident asshole.” He unpaused the game and continued the fight. She sat and cried and watched him run in circles to escape a spell.

  “Hey, could I play for a second?” she asked. “I won’t fuck it up, I swear. I’m pretty good.”

  He gave her the controller. She dried her eyes with her knuckles and wiped her nose with the heel of her hand. And everything narrowed to the keep in which the Wet Nurse lived. The Hunter’s health was diminished, but Wagon Wheel had neglected to use his arrows; the quiver was full. His problem was that he couldn’t figure out how to evade the Wet Nurse’s swords for long enough to load the bow. Claire knew how to do it on the run.

  As she played, Wagon Wheel made choking sounds. He summoned the two boys on the couch and the three of them stood behind her to watch. She hummed along with the Wet Nurse’s lullaby, a waltz played on a harpsichord with loose keys. This was something she often did when she fought a boss, hummed along with the boss’s special soundtrack. She paused the game to take off her sneakers, and after a minute she found a groove. Over and over, she dodged a swipe of the claws, nocked an arrow, and retreated with a parting shot. Soon the Wet Nurse flagged. Claire ducked behind her and swung the poisoned scythe. When the Wet Nurse’s final spell expired, Claire finished her off with Molotov cocktails, and her death wails were drowned by the Deltas’ cheers.

  She tossed the controller to the floor, to let Wagon Wheel decide what the Hunter should do next. It had been a while since she’d fucked with Bloodborne, and it had felt good to kill the Wet Nurse again. The boys were scratching their necks and asking for information: How did she know when to switch to the scythe? How did she jump backward at a diagonal, and how did she know when she was out of range of a spell? But Claire didn’t feel like explaining it all. She was so tired. It had been over a month since she’d had a good night’s sleep. It had been a long time since she’d cried. The last bump had been the tiny one in the practice room before Campus Progressives, and that was okay. She was sad in a way that didn’t call for cocaine, that called for soft surfaces rather than hard. The rug on which she sat was not luxuriant. Its pile was not high. It smelled of beer and ash. That, too, was okay. She stretched to her full length, and the boys shuffled out of her way. They had stopped waiting for her to answer their questions and were theorizing about her technique. Her puffy coat made a decent cushion. It released a feather when she rolled her head, and she watched the feather’s slow descent. Still humming the Wet Nurse’s lullaby, she spread her fingers to work the gamer’s cramp from her hands. With the Deltas standing over her, murmuring among themselves, and the game’s music swelling and victorious, she closed her eyes and dreamed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author is grateful to Mitzi Angel, Claudia Ballard, Lorin and Sadie Stein, Molly Walls, Gemma Sieff, Christine Smallwood, Greg Jackson, Caleb Crain, Rachel B. Glaser, Robin Wasserman, Nicole Rudick, Amie Barrodale, Clancy Martin, Rob Spillman, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Anthony Vinci, Rodrigo Corral, Jason Fulford, Laird Gallagher, Mark Jude Poirier, Ben Neihart, Lexy Benaim, Allan Gurganus, Annie Baker, Linda Baker, Conn Nugent, Yaddo, MacDowell, Ucross, the staff and board of The Paris Review, and the Greeks and non-Greeks who shared their stories.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Benjamin Nugent is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize. His stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review. Nugent has also written for n+1, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Time. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  GOD

  BASICS

  FAN FICTION

  OLLIE THE OWL

  THE TREASURER

  CASSIOPEIA

  HELL

  SAFE SPACES

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  120 Broadway, New York 10271

  Copyright © 2020 by Benjamin Nugent

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2020

  Some of these stories previously appeared, in different form, in the following publications: The Paris Review (“God,” “The Treasurer,” and “Safe Spaces”); VICE (“Hell” and “Fan Fiction”); Tin House (“Ollie the Owl”); The Best American Short Stories and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review (“God”); and The Best American Nonrequired Reading (“Hell”).

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71642-4

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  This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this collection either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

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