The Guest

by Emma Cline

What were people seeing in her aura, what stink was emanating?

They were sometimes patronizing, Simon’s friends, but she had long ago become inured to the disapproval of strangers. All those times she had sat in public across from men twice her age, men with sweating, exposed scalps. She felt the presentiment that she would be looked at and understood how to keep herself steeled against those stares.

Alex spoke of the possibility of grad school and this seemed to soothe Simon, imply a modest life of self-improvement. Ambitious in the mildest version of the word.

Straight above was the cloudless sky, a blue that seemed pulled tight.

Music didn’t seem to give him any pleasure—Alex liked that he didn’t pretend otherwise. Younger men had to make everything mean something, had to turn every choice and preference into a referendum on their personality. They had made her uneasy, the men she’d seen who’d been closer to her own age. The possibility of exposure was too great. Much better to have the buffer of an entirely different generation: the older men had no context for Alex, couldn’t even begin to inadvertently piece together any semblance of her real self.

Maybe she was going crazy. At the same time, she knew she would never go crazy—which was worse. She’d been almost jealous of the people she’d known in the city who’d totally cracked up, spiraled into some other realm. It was a relief to have the option to fully peace out of reality.

You could occasionally be overcome by dislike for strangers:

Alex was a sort of inert piece of social furniture—only her presence was required, the general size and shape of a young woman. Anything beyond the fact of her sitting in her chair and nodding along was a distraction.

The parking lot was full, a line of cars edging slowly forward, waiting for a space to open up. People waiting for their turn at fun.

It didn’t make a difference what was behind a rope, really, it just mattered that there was a rope. The people on the terrace needed the people walking past, just as the people walking past needed the people on the terrace.

There was no reason to feel anxious—the fear had been transmuted, the way it often was, into excitement, the memory always dissolving until it was only the idea of fear, and when had the idea of fear ever been a convincing deterrent?

He would be accommodating, she understood, smoothly shifting course so any irritation was barely noticeable, though Alex saw his jaw tighten. He was probably always like this, ferociously easygoing, adapting to whatever was thrown at him. It could be its own form of aggression.

Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in the woods. Instead, the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow-motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.

most people didn’t feel the way they were supposed to feel.

Each thought that appeared in her brain was smoothed to a psychotic polish.