Would You Rather

A common opinion about Tom in that small New England town was that the lumbering teenager was “a little off,” as if he were something left out of the fridge too long. He was indeed physically and socially awkward, quiet, and, when he did speak, prone to stuttering, but in some ways he was sharper than his detractors. He noticed, for example, on that hot and humid September afternoon, that someone had preceded him up this trail to Tower Hill, maybe only minutes before. There were the red pistachio shells, absent yesterday, studding the path every twenty feet or so, nearly inconspicuous amid the fallen red-yellow maple leaves, which also hid tree roots that would trip up hikers less observant than himself. And the glint of a tiny, balled-up foil wrapper—Tom spied that immediately. Uncoiling it, he determined with a single lick the flavor of the gum it had contained: cinnamon. He saw much that other people missed. A devotee of the TV Westerns he would watch as his father slept off his benders—and later, after his father left town, at his grandmother’s—he loved best the Indian guides featured in those shows: stone-faced savants, keen observers of the land who toiled in anonymity beside their lesser paleface colleagues. He often spent long hours up here, imagining himself as such a woods-walker, stooping to brush aside twigs and pebbles and read whatever message the disturbed earth might reveal.

Tom’s unsteady gait only served to reinforce people’s sense that something was not quite right with him. His stride suggested an unpredictability, as one might expect, for example, from the stagger of a drunken man. This was due to Tom’s right leg being slightly longer than his left. The modified left shoe that for months his grandmother had saved up to buy for him, its sole and heel thicker than its companion’s, corrected this imbalance somewhat but not enough to keep the other teenagers from tagging him with the infuriating nickname Lurch, derived from some old sitcom. The previous autumn, the high-school football coach, spotting Tom’s muscular frame draped on the chain-link fence near the practice field, grew excited at the potential upgrade that this strapping freshman might represent for his squad’s D-line and coaxed Tom onto the gridiron. But one look at the boy’s wildly uneven stride during sprints cooled the coach’s enthusiasm.

The derision, whether spoken or merely visible on faces around him, fueled a rage that Tom channeled into furious scribbling in the back pages of a series of school notebooks, imagined scenarios where he exacted vengeance on his antagonists. His grandmother, stumbling occasionally on these dark imaginings, would sit with him and massage his muscled shoulders until they eased and he could put words to the blackness.

Within minutes, Tom found more remnants of someone’s passage on the trail: a crumpled cellophane pistachios bag, a silver screw-top from a bottle of brown liquor—bourbon, he’d guess, recalling the smell that had emanated from the empties his father amassed. Also, a cigarette butt: menthol, with a waxy lipstick tread on its tip.

He soon noticed, too, the absence of the black birds that always seemed to guide him up the Tower Hill trail. Like a gang of beggar children, the flock would anticipate Tom’s every step, launching and lighting, launching and lighting in a billowing black cloud from the branches overhead with a raucous running commentary of chucks. Tom liked to imagine that the birds were heralding his journey, in celebration or as a warning. He’d read that Native Americans had special connections to one forest animal or another; perhaps these birds were his own kindred creature. What might it mean now that they were nowhere to be seen?

The trail steepened for a hundred feet before cresting near a small parking area a few feet from the water tower. The lot’s asphalt had crumbled to a black powder, the tower having been abandoned years back, when the town became part of the neighboring water district. The access road, itself rutted and overgrown, was gated down near the highway. Only rarely did Tom see cars up here, only the occasional police vehicle dispatched to break up the weekend gatherings of teenagers who hauled cases of beer up to the wide stone steps at the tower’s base, where the entrance was bolted shut with thick metal bars and heavy padlocks.

Tom spotted the four teenagers before he left the cover of the dense rhododendrons near the tower. Three of them—two boys and a girl—he recognized from school, though none were in any of his classes. He knew these three to be nearly inseparable, always lunching together and sneaking out to smoke behind the dumpster near the teachers’ parking. The girl’s name was Carol Ann; she was one of the female students that Tom found impossible to talk to, yet difficult to keep his eyes off. Something about her curves and her auburn hair, long and lustrous, and her thick auburn eyebrows intrigued him; she could be cast as the sexier of the girlfriends in the Spider-Man comics he read voraciously in the back aisle of Forcier’s Pharmacy. The two boys with her he knew to be named Andy and Sid, though he wasn’t sure which was which. They were strong, wide-bodied like himself, but unpleasantly loud and crude.

Tom didn’t know the second girl: She was younger than her companions, and in contrast to Carol Ann’s voluptuousness, her body was more that of a middle-schooler, her breasts inconspicuous, her hips straight, more like a boy’s than a girl’s. Her dark hair was short and parted left to right—like his mother’s in the photo his grandmother kept draped in black in her room—and she sat on the steps, hugging her knees and watching Carol Ann with an intensity that Tom recognized in himself.

Keeping still, Tom observed the four of them from behind the dark undergrowth.

“Okay, Sid. Would you rather … let me think—”

So this would be Andy. He was the taller of the boys. He was tugging at a jackknife he’d just thrown into the tower door’s splintered wood.

“All right,” he continued after a pause. “Sid. Would you rather, uh—Carol Ann, what’s your cousin here’s name?”

Carol Ann was lighting a cigarette. She took a drag before answering: “Sarah.”

“Sarah, right … Okay, Sid: Would you rather do it with Sarah … or with me?”

He laughed loudly, and Sid gave him a push.

“Andy, stop being a dick,” Carol Ann said. She shook her head at the tip of her cigarette, as if it, not Andy, were the annoyance.

Andy turned to her, feigning innocence. “What? What’d I say?”

“That’s not how you play,” Carol Ann said. “And leave the kid alone.”

The game of Would You Rather was a favorite of Tom’s. He took it very seriously and played it endlessly in his head, fashioning clever questions and thoughtful reasons for his answers. Often, he’d try out new ones on his grandmother as she stirred soup before their dinner. One of his favorites was: Would you rather get what you want, or want what you get? He could think about these questions over and over and still find new facets to the issues they raised. It exasperated him that many of his peers—Andy, for example—preferred raunchy versions of Would You Rather. For Tom the game was ideal for philosophical inquiries. When he asked such questions at school, classmates would roll their eyes and ignore him. Sometimes his desire for a serious response grew so strong that he’d raise his hand in class and, apropos of nothing, ask the teacher a Would You Rather question, as if it were likely to be on an upcoming exam.

Andy sighed. “You guys are so fucking boring.” He threw the jackknife into the tower door again, this time much harder.

Tom kept his eye on Sarah, who in turn continued to stare at Carol Ann with a single, unspoken appeal, as if she earnestly desired something without being seen to want it. He saw in Sarah’s expression the suppressed terror of a captive, someone who’d been abducted and whose only chance at survival in this forlorn place was to placate her lawless companions. Why the girl was with such people Tom could only guess, but he knew Sarah was not like them. His sudden sense of kinship with her caused Tom to abandon his hidden nook and approach the teenagers.

All four stared at him, as if he were a sitcom character who had wandered onto the wrong soundstage.

“What the—” Sid began, but Andy interrupted him gleefully.

“Lurch!”

All of them laughed, except Sarah. Did she think he might be their accomplice? Tom wondered. He wanted to assure her of his harmlessness, maybe signal to her that he was not of their tribe but instead a potential ally. But how could he begin to do that?

His face burning, Tom gave Andy a baleful stare, as if he were an insect he could not swat just yet, then addressed Sarah directly.

“M–my name … is Tom,” he said, immediately lamenting the stammer he’d never been able to master. The girl did not answer. He searched her expression to see if it would take on the faint disdain he inspired in others.

Turning, he found himself, as always, unable to look directly at Carol Ann, as if she wore on her tight violet camisole the harsh glare of the sun. He kept his eyes on her cigarette.

“How … you d–doing, Carol Ann?”

Sid snorted. “Dude, what makes you think we give a shit? What the fuck do you want? Screw, already.”

If you react, you please them, Tom’s grandmother had always instructed him. Don’t give them that.

Tom took a breath and turned again to Sarah. The girl looked back blankly; his good intentions were obviously veiled to her. Whatever he had hoped to accomplish by inserting himself into their company, it had been a foolish plan. He saw himself as they all saw him: ridiculous.

Still, he was sure the girl needed help of some kind, some deliverance from this loud, rude gang.

Suddenly he had an idea. It came in the form of a question.

“W–would …”

He caught himself. Yes, he could tell them his secret, show them; he felt sure that would elevate him in their eyes, in Sarah’s especially. But he hesitated: His was a treasure they would not—could not—appreciate. Should he really share it with them?

Andy jumped in.

“Wood eye, wood eye!” They laughed—Sarah included—at this punchline to a joke they’d all heard a hundred times. Their derision stabbed Tom somewhere deep inside and dispelled his hesitancy. He plunged forward.

“Would you rather, uh … ”—how could he put this, to pique their curiosity?—“stay here sweating in the hot s–sun … or go for a nice, cool swim?”

They looked at him, baffled. Tom recognized again people’s utter bewilderment at such a strange creature in their midst, but he took advantage of their puzzlement to lead them along the tower’s circular wall, stopping underneath one of the window openings that lined the rough-hewn stone blocks a dozen feet above their heads.

“W–wait … here.”

Tom lumbered toward the dense woods and tugged from the forest litter a thick, many-limbed branch, dragging it to the tower and leaning it against the wall so its heavy end reached the lip of the window. He spider-legged up the branch’s latticework. At the apex, he seized the window’s seemingly secure grillwork, wrenched it free, and dropped it inside. A muffled clang echoed back.

“Come … on up. It’s easy,” Tom called to the others. He squeezed his torso through the granite window frame and disappeared.

Within minutes, all five of them were standing on a steel-grate landing along a stairway that hugged the tower’s interior. Tom escorted them up to the metal deck that circled the immense water tank, which was long abandoned but still partially full.

The light here was dim, but Tom could see the look of wonder on his companions’ faces. He led them to the railing, where they could peer down into the dimly lit abyss at the water twenty feet below. He picked up the flashlight he kept on the floor of the deck and let its beam play across the surface of the water.

“Holy shit!” This was Sid, and his words came echoing back. The deep boom of his voice delighted them, and immediately they all—Tom included—launched their own howls into the tank.

“How deep is it?” Sarah asked, with a reverence in her voice that pleased Tom.

“Fifteen to twenty feet,” he answered. “Deep enough that when … you touch bottom, your ears start to hurt.”

“Wait. You really go in this thing?” Carol Ann asked, appalled.

“Sure. You … j–jump in from here.”

“But how do you get out?”

Tom walked to the tower wall and carried back the long coil of rope he had stashed there. He tied it to the railing and lowered it into the water. Then he retrieved a car’s inflated inner tube from the same spot and tossed it into the tank. “For when you need a rest.”

Sid and Andy needed no persuasion. They stripped, piling their clothes near the tower wall, and hoisted themselves up on the railing. They looked back at the girls.

“Come on, ladies. What are you waiting for?”

Carol Ann and Sarah exchanged dubious looks.

“Uh, we’re good,” Carol Ann said.

“Don’t be a pussy, Carol Ann,” Andy said. “Get over here.” Both boys laughed and high-fived each other.

Carol Ann sighed. She shimmied out of her cut-off jeans, but kept her top and underwear on. She sat on the railing with her friends, their knees poised over the water. Sarah moved as if to join them, but Tom touched her elbow and shook his head.

Sid called out a count: “On three, okay? One—two—” They launched themselves forward, hitting the water and surfacing with shouts and ecstatic profanities.

Tom watched them splash and kick. He took the rope in his hand.

“It’ll be okay,” he said to Sarah, nodding to the swimmers below. “I’ve got this.”

He felt peaceful now about his decision to share his secret place. For months he’d treasured the hidden aerie, having breached its inner sanctum only after a week of steadfast sawing at the window grating, dulling the teeth of multiple hacksaw blades in the process. From the tower’s highest windows he could look across the forest canopy and see the town: the high school, his grandmother’s tenement building, all the spots where he’d been made to feel out of place for as long as he could remember. From here it all looked like the sprawl of miniature villages and fake greenery that devotees of toy trains create to lord over in garages and basements. He recalled a story he’d read, a kind of creation myth held by the First Peoples, that featured a revered figure called the One Who Lives Above. The image had always impressed Tom. There was a power in these high places, he reflected. Up in his tower, he felt that supremacy, that sense of looking down on others. In town, he had no such dominion. In town, people looked down on him. This was better.

Yes, he had given up his secret. But now, with Andy and Sid and Carol Ann down there darting about like water striders in a rain barrel and the rope’s bristly fibers in his hands, Tom knew their power over him was gone. Their stupid jokes, their insults … They were all beneath him now, and with Sarah safe, released from their orbit, he felt a sense of purpose.

Together they watched the splashing trio below. After a few minutes, Carol Ann seemed to tire. They watched her swim to the inner tube and hug it close.

“Why did you keep me from going in?” Sarah asked quietly.

“You’d never be … able to climb back out. The tank walls are too slimy.”

He watched her consider this, saw misgivings cloud her face and her next question forming. But he wanted to pose one of his own first, one of his favorites.

“Would you rather … be loved by everyone, or feared by everyone?”

She took her time answering, from which Tom understood that she knew the game and appreciated its subtleties. Her unhurried deliberation pleased him.

Finally she said, “Loved. That’s an easy one.”

He nodded, gratified at her answer but also thrown by it: The question had never seemed simple to him.

“Yes, me too,” he said, feeling something within him unclench. Below him, Andy and Sid joined Carol Ann at the inner tube. Their raucous energy was gone, and they shivered slightly. Their voices seemed feeble, distant.

Tom turned to Sarah. “You can go now. It’s all right. I’ll pull them up.”

“I’m fine right here,” she said.

Again, he marveled at the girl. She was a more advanced being than she seemed, years younger than himself and yet further along on whatever path awaited him. He felt the absurdity of his earlier appraisal of her situation.

Carol Ann swam over to the rope. She tried to pull herself up several times without success.

“Just … hold onto it.” Tom braced himself on the railing and hauled up Carol Ann’s dead weight till she reached the top. Sarah helped her cousin hook a leg over the tank’s rim and tug herself up onto the metal flooring, where she wiped the slime from her chest and legs with disgusted groans.

Andy and Sid needed the same assistance, which gave Tom a satisfaction that almost made up for his decision not to wreak a terrible punishment on them. Their embarrassed demeanor as they slipped on their clothes added to his gratification.

Back outside the tower, they basked in the streaming sunlight. Sid and Andy each took a swig of bourbon, and Carol Ann walked over to Tom and held the bottle out to him. Something in him wanted desperately to take it, to be one of them, but he shook his head.

Sitting there, it dawned on Tom that the tower and its secret pleasures were now lost to him. He could probably trust Carol Ann to keep it to herself, but having shared the water tank with Andy and Sid, he could not risk their returning to it without his supervision. Like children, they could not appreciate its dangers. He would have to figure out a way to weld the tower’s steel window grate back into place. He remembered how his grandmother, when she took Tom into her home years ago, had needed to take a second job to support the two of them. Now he realized he was like her: a person with responsibilities.

Walking back down the trail later, the five teenagers spoke little. Where the trail was particularly rough, Tom offered his hand to Sarah. He observed Sid and Andy’s alcohol-fueled unsteadiness but refrained from remarking on the irony of their lurching. He took in the birches, the eyes dotting the ghostly trees’ papery skin—wood eyes! And he wondered whether he was the only one to note the chatty company of the birds above them, their inscrutable, incessant discourse.

DAVID DESJARDINS

David Desjardins is a journalist with roots in Rhode Island who has worked at the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal, and other newspapers. His short stories have been published in Ruminate, Roanoke Review, the Worcester Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife.