HOW IT HAPPENS

Great River Review is proud to nominate Annie C. Faber's short story, "How It Happens," for The 2021 Best American Short Stories series.

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            Sometimes I get the feeling bad luck’s trailing me like frayed threads at the cuff of my jeans. Like, it’s real enough to touch, but not so real I couldn’t get rid of it if I’d just stop pulling at all the wrong places.

            Like, my first boyfriend—some mean, acne-faced sixteen-year-old who touched my chest like he was about to be arrested for it, pretty standard—was named Jack, a Jacob broke my heart at seventeen, and then a Jackson dragged my whole life through the dirt from nineteen to twenty. So I’m not allowed within fifty feet of anyone whose name starts J-a-c anymore. Don’t know what it is about them, but they’re clearly bad news, and you know what they say about getting fooled a fourth time: Seriously, how stupid are you?

            Don’t get me wrong, I’m not usually one to believe in curses or whatever, but sometimes you’ve just got to face the evidence. Like, I dated a girl once whose mom felt energies, saw spirits, the whole nine yards, and she always said that bad things come in threes. Well I swear that shit was prophecy, because I’ve seen it in every mess of bad things ever since. Like, one: you get your heart broken. Two: you get an incurable illness. Three: you get raped. Am I getting ahead of myself?

            Maybe I’m making connections out of nothing, yeah, I’ll grant you that possibility. Maybe my head’s just putting things together to try to make sense of them. But either way, there’s stuff I can’t separate no matter how hard I try. Or maybe more like, no matter how much I want to.

            Take, for instance, sex and Crohn’s disease. Have you ever tried to explain the word immunosuppressed to a drunk man in your bed? A tip: do it before you take your top off, or he seriously won’t pay any attention.

            Here’s a Friday night for you: I’ll go out. I’ll go dancing. I’ll put on lipstick and I won’t look sick, though I hardly ever look sick, what you’d call looking sick.

            I’ll say, it’s an autoimmune disorder.

            He’ll say, Is it contagious?

            I’ll say, No, it’s genetic.

            And he’ll say, Okay, whatever, his hands falling through my hair like water.

            So you’ve been tested?

            Yeah, baby.

            Because it’s a really big deal, I’ll say, my head light and knees tired, straddling his waist, pinning him to my mattress like a bug. I could get really sick, I’ll say, like it’ll mean anything to him.

            Yes baby, yes baby, yes.

            I’m not sure he remembers my name.

            And I’m not sure why it’s always men I take home at the end of the night—I save the girls for a proper date, coffee and lunch and me paying and all that—but I think maybe it’s this veil of dissimilarity. He’s a creature almost like me, maybe just one species away. Like maybe we can only come so close. And maybe it’s not so bad.

            Or maybe it’s just easy. And I can’t say, with what I know now, that it’s the best idea—but if you want my advice on how to get them, I’m telling you it’s all confidence.

            Take Danny. I saw him play a set at a house party, just pushed through the sweat of the crowd and thick dark of the wood-paneled basement, walked right up and said, Hey. Don’t wanna trouble you, but call me sometime.

            And write your number on a piece of paper—nobody does that anymore. He’ll be like, Who’s this chick? And if you’re lucky, he’ll be in your bed two nights from then.

            My roommate Jill always says I have a type, made fun of me the morning after she first saw him come around, all blond and mop-headed, skinny, left his black sneakers by the back door.

            She said, So’s he in a band? perched on the couch in her Star Wars pajama pants, spoon halfway to mouth, dripping lactose-free 2% milk back into her Frosted Flakes.

            I said, Yeah, and, Screw you.

            I’m not sure what I thought we were doing. But for a few weeks, he’d text me good morning or good night, complain about his day, make me laugh, and I don’t know, I started to care.

            We weren’t together because you can’t be together with someone who only comes over when the moon is up. But there was one time we fell all asleep by accident, holding each other, lamp beside the bed still glowing, and mid-night when we woke briefly to shift in our sleep-sweat, he looked at me something like tenderly and said, I’ll just stay until the morning.

            A few hours later, when I saw him lit up in the yellow pour of the window behind us—pale shoulders bare, hair complicating his face with tangles—I thought that I liked it, that I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, although I never did.

            All in all, we had a pretty good thing going for a while. He'd call me headstrong as a compliment, and I guess that made me feel like he got me, or some part of me, anyways. Always at my place, never his, and always walking out real fast, but I figured maybe we were building to something. Maybe it’d just take time.

            Then one night he showed up a mess, 2 AM, after a gig, and we’d already had a few drinks by the time we realized neither of us had a condom. He was kissing my neck and telling me, Don’t worry about it.

            Well, I’m not an idiot. I wasn’t crazy about the idea. I hesitated. I almost said, Maybe we could just hang tonight, but I could tell from the way he tensed when I pulled away, left hand poised to push himself up off the bed, that dinner and a movie had nothing to do with what was on his mind.

            He said, I mean, I don’t know about you, but like, I’m not sleeping with anyone else right now.

            He’s got brown eyes. All wide and long-lashed, like they belong on a beautiful girl. I said, Me neither.

 

            Hello?

            All the air inside me scatters; for a moment I can’t gather it, can’t speak. I hadn’t really expected Danny to pick up the phone, figured I’d probably just leave a message, because it’s been a couple weeks, and who answers after three rings at noon when all you are to them is a booty call, anyways? Hey, it’s Joanie.

            Yeah, what’s up?

            Well, not sure how to say this but, y’know, I felt like it needed more than a text, and I was like, do you see a guy in person for this kind of thing? I was laughing nervously and sure he had no idea what I was talking about.

            You wanna see me? It sounded like he was outside, maybe walking somewhere, wind and unfamiliar voices butting into the speaker.

            No, I laughed again. That’d be a little tough. I’m in the hospital right now.

            Oh, what the fuck? Are you okay?

            I paused a moment but then I thought, Whatever, and said, You gave me Chlamydia.

 

            Crohn’s disease is an autoimmune disorder of the digestive tract which doctors will charmingly explain as spanning from mouth to anus. In short: my body shreds its own guts like old paper. I bleed. I vomit. I tear apart. I hurt.

            Crohn’s can be an oddly nebulous creature, too, for something that’s supposed to have a definition—fucking up my legs with inflammation, filling my lungs with nightmarish little nodules, starving me halfway to hell. Heavy doses of Infliximab, an intravenous drug you might call Chemo Lite, keep me in remission. They also render me highly susceptible to infection.

            Did you know that Chlamydia has an incubation period? I didn’t. Sixteen days since I’d seen Danny I went into the infusion clinic. They shot me up and that was pretty much curtains on said incubation period in my case. Had to be admitted for IV antibiotics and observation.

            The nurse asks my name and birth date as he hooks a bag to my line.

            Joan Baughman, September 17th, 1996.

            Danny stares into space for a moment and then says, Oh, you’re a Virgo.

            I say, Please, just shut up. At least until we’re alone again, he does.

            How’d you get those? He notices the coin-like blue bruises that dot my arms, from missed veins and IVs gone bad.

            All the heroin I do.

            Se—seriously?

            I forget, often, what some people aren’t used to.

            Even this room. I could find my way from toilet to bed in pitch dark, easy. I know where the spare chair is hung, folded on a hook behind the door. I can work the weird bed/TV remote, no problem (though someone always insists on explaining it).

            The only thing that really changes room to room in a hospital is what you see out the window. This stay, it’s a courtyard, maybe seven floors down—all rocks and little dead things, suffocating under the January-white sky—and across from me, another tower. More rooms. More windows. More people like me, I guess.

            When I look back, Danny has his face in his hands, and it takes me a second to realize that he’s crying. I’ve got nothing against tears in general, but God, he does not look sexy, red-faced and crumpled in the bedside chair like that.

            I say, Dude, seriously? If you can’t deal with seeing somebody in the hospital, just don’t come. I don’t need you here.

            And he says, It’s not that, wiping his nose. I—I’ve got a girlfriend. What the hell am I supposed to tell her?

            I think he’s lucky my stomach hurts so bad, or I’d get out of this skinny excuse for a bed and kill him.

            Danny, listen. I do not care. My crotch is leaking because of you. And you have a girlfriend?

            He dries his eyes and says, You’re right. How are you? like it’s an act of heroic bravery.

            Uh, I’m pretty bad, man. You know Chlamydia can sterilize women, right?

            He’s crying again. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

            And what am I supposed to do? Forgive you?

            Well, I didn’t know I had it! And I didn’t know you could get, like, super-Chlamydia. I didn’t know you were amino-whatever.

            Immunosuppressed.

            Yeah. Why didn’t you tell me?

            Says the guy with a girlfriend?

            When he leaves, he doesn’t look at me, just says sorry again, closing the door real softly and I think, Fuck you, because I know he’d slam it if he didn’t see me as a cripple now.

            

            A hospital never goes dark or quiet all the way. The hall light’s always on, door to your room cracked open all night, nurses shuffling outside, or inside at all hours, to check on you, to take your blood. You get used to it, if you’re there long enough. One day you’ll just stick out your arm before they even prick you, and while they’re still looking for your last un-busted vein, you’ll fall right back to sleep.

            Mom’s in the bedside chair when the on-call physician wakes me for rounds at six in the morning. She says, How you feeling, lovebug?

            Like hell.

            Dr. Whats-His-Face tells me I can take the rest of the antibiotics at home. I’ll be discharged.

            Mom wants to know how it happened. When we’re alone, she asks, What’s his name?

            Danny.

            His full name.

            I—I don’t know.

            You don’t know his last name?

            I say nothing. Her anger penetrates me, feels real as the catheter threaded in my veins.

            And that’s something you do often? Fuck strangers with no last name? She’s screeching, honest to God screeching.

            I’m silent.

            That’s how girls get raped, Joanie.

            Fuck off.

            That’s how girls get raped. That’s how it happens.

            When they bring me the discharge papers and ask me to sign, half my head’s three years behind.

 

I’m eighteen again.

The only thing that really changes room to room in a hospital is what you see out the window. Tonight, the view is thick with fog. I think the drive home will be slow.

I sit cross-legged atop used hospital sheets. My hand un-IVed for the first time in a week. I’m free. Pen in one hand, discharge papers in the other, I watch the doctor walk in. More than his face, I see his mouth. Smiling.

            Before you go, he says. There’s one thing I never did. And just I’m kicking myself over it.

            My roommate’s behind a thin blue curtain, watching a movie that sounds black and white, grainy sound turned high as it’ll go.

            The nurse is blonde. I think she’s pretty. She watches the doctor’s hand move and I can see in the set of her mouth she knows something is wrong.

            I say, When’s it over? and he pulls out of me so fast it’s almost like I’m in control.

            I sign the papers.

            Why didn’t you tell me?

            I’ve been thinking of my answer all day:

            You get home. You can walk again. Slow, but you can walk, and you walk to the shower. You haven’t felt clean, really clean, in so long. Hospital shower’s just not the same.

            So you get in and you stay in. A long time. Scour yourself with hot water and firm hands. Rub in the soap until you’re red and hurting. Wash the sweat and grease from your thinned hair. You don’t cry. You don’t look in the mirror.

            You turn off the water. You know now for a certainty that you’ll never be the same.

 

            Stroking the bandaged hand my IV was just pulled from, my mother shakes her head. She says, Joanie, Joanie, Joanie. You’ve got to be more careful.

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Annie C. Faber is a writer whose fiction has appeared in The Esthetic Apostle  & The Ilanot Review. Her work is heavily influenced by the autobiographical, drawing on topics of chronic illness, sexuality, and love in a physical body that can be as much a challenge to inhabit as it can to understand. She is the winner of a 2019 Hopwood Undergraduate Fiction Award.