HERO WORSHIP Rebekah Matthews Valerie longs for a hero—someone to rescue her, someone like her childhood idol Xena, Warrior Princess. Hero Worship is a collection of linked stories that follow Valerie’s search for love and connection in a world that feels dangerous. As Valerie approaches adulthood, she must grapple with a mysteriously ill mother, the discovery of a clandestine relationship between her teenage step-sister and an older man, a Christian roommate obsessed with home-makeover TV, and the looming memory of an ex-girlfriend. From a stint selling ice cream on a bicycle in Toronto to a visit to Dolly Parton’s theme park, Valerie must figure out how to reconcile her reality with the childlike hope that someone else will save her. Hero Worship explores the many facets of relationships between women—sexual, romantic, platonic, maternal, and some of the things inbetween. Battered Suitcase Press
BE CAREFUL I told you, “We don’t really do anything together besides have sex,” so we started going for runs together every Wednesday evening. At a nearby university, we ran around its track, which surrounded a pond, a lopsided oval of brown murky water and brown algae that stained the rocks. You had been gone for two weeks to give a presentation about your research at an 18th century British literature conference in London, and now you were home in Boston, and it was back to our routine once again. You wore a pale blue headband to push your bangs away from your face. When you sweat, it smelled like absolutely nothing. I wore an over-sized T-shirt and a regular bra, not a sports bra, because I hadn’t thought it would matter, and as we ran all I could think about was how I wanted to grab my chest and hold it still. After three laps, we took a break. You leaned forward and put your hands on your thighs. Some of your bangs fell out of the headband and stuck to your forehead. “Those two weeks you were gone seemed like a long time,” I said. “I won’t be traveling for that long again any time soon.” “I know.” “Is something else bothering you?” “Not really. Sort of. We don’t see each other very often.” I squatted to tie my shoes even though they weren’t untied. “We never even spend the night together. I waste a lot of time wanting to be with you.” You took a drink from your water bottle. A normal person would have gotten defensive and told me to deal, told me that she needed her space. A normal person would have apologized, offered to spend more time with me. But you said, “Next time, when you want to be with me, you should write me a letter.” I stood back up. “That’s dumb,” I said. “That’s not going to help.” I started running again and actually did grab my boobs this time, and said, “Fuck this shit,” under my breath. You ran behind me, keeping a few feet’s distance.
But I did start writing you letters. You probably meant that I should do it once, or a few times, and you certainly didn’t mean that I should keep doing it after you decided you didn’t want to fuck me or talk to me any more. But I got so used to this—the way it went for us, like a chain reaction—that when I wanted you, the only solution was to want you more. You’d just broken up with me when my mother calls from Indiana to tell me that she and her boyfriend, William, are moving in together. She has been seeing William for almost a year; they met at their yoga class. He manages a health food store, is a vegetarian, and thinks wearing deodorant is harmful to people’s bodies; he also has a sixteenyear-old daughter. My mother and I are mostly polite friends. We see each other twice a year at most and strategically avoid saying or doing anything to upset the other. It took a while for us to figure out how to manage this, and we occasionally do show affection. She sends me care packages for every holiday, even the minor ones, with candy and seasonal hand towels and socks; if I've had enough to drink, I search for poems about mothers and daughters and email them to her. “William will move here, to the house,” she is saying. “He and his daughter just rent a tiny two-bedroom apartment downtown, so it makes sense for them to move here.” “Oh, right, his daughter,” I say. I am currently trying to re-organize my room—find the things from you, figure out what to do with them. I look under my bed. I see our sex toys, filthy with dust and lint. I wipe them off with wet paper towels, but it doesn’t really get them any cleaner. “Her name is Trisha,” my mom says. “I’m a little worried about how that will go. Will she want me to be her mom or her friend?” It is more than she usually says to me. “What’s Trisha like?” I ask. From my nightstand, I pick up the books you got me for my birthday, and a tiny bottle of the perfume that you gave me after I said I liked yours. Underneath a pile of sweaters, I find the silver square link bracelet from you. I don’t own any other
jewelry, and the bracelet is closer to something you would have bought for yourself; whenever I wore it, I felt like an imposter, like I was doing a bad impression of you. I can’t throw this stuff away. I shove it into a giant trash bag. I should hide the bag, out of my sight, but instead I set it in the corner of my room, slightly open. Lately, my room has gone to shit—clothes on the floor, half-full glasses of water on the window sill, breakfast bar wrappers everywhere, an unopened box of tissue; my friends tell me I should cry as much as I need to, but I haven’t done that once since you and I broke up. My mother is saying, “Trisha seems in most ways a typical girl— she talks on the phone to her friends a lot; she’s boy crazy. And she’s on the Internet all the time, just like you.” “Which is obviously a sign of intelligence,” I say, and we laugh. “Anyway, I bet if you just give her some time, she’ll warm up to you. It will work out.” It works out fine for my mother, but not exactly fine for me. A few weeks later, my mother emails me that Trisha is enamored with the idea of having a sister and wants to visit me in Boston. I say okay, hiding my reluctance. You came over to my apartment and did my dishes while I watched TV. I told you to stop and I’d do them later but you said, “They need to be done.” After you set the dishes out on the rack to dry, you came over to the couch and put your arm around me and played with my hair. You asked me what I was watching, and I said, “This family runs a funeral home. They get the dead bodies ready. It’s really depressing.” At most, I saw you twice a week for a few hours, and you always said you thought staring at a TV screen when we were together was a waste of time. But I liked to sit next to you. After the episode was over, I turned it off and told you I had written you another letter. I went to my room to get it. I came back out to the living room and handed it to you. “Don’t read it now,” I said.
“Why not?” you asked. “I don’t know, it would be embarrassing.” You smiled and unfolded the piece of paper. A part of me had known you would do this. I said, “I am going to the bathroom.” “No, you’re not,” you said. You asked me to put my head on your lap while you read it aloud. You were wearing a white dress with green zigzag stripes, and pointy gold shoes. You didn’t seem to own very many clothes—three or four outfits for the summer, at the most—which made sense for a poor graduate student, but the clothes were always designer labels like Calvin Klein or Michael Kors, much nicer than anything of mine. Though I had recently gotten a grown-up pixie haircut and wore a lot of make-up, I still dressed in outfits from college: jeans that were too small and T-shirts with stupid slogans like “My creative juices may contain pulp.” I usually had to explain the jokes to you. Dear Jennifer, I tried to cover my face with my hands but you wouldn’t let me. You held them with your own and you said, “Don’t be embarrassed. I like your letters.” Today at work, the Internet went out, and during lunch, I couldn’t think of any good ways to waste time. So, I started playing Minesweeper, have you ever played it? It’s a game where you have to get through a minefield without hitting a mine, and you are guided by a system of numbers. I thought about you when I played. It seemed like the kind of thing you would enjoy, because the number system is so perfectly logical. Everything was in order. You let go of my hands. You folded the letter back up and put it in your purse, carefully, like it was something that mattered to you. You kissed my forehead, and you said you loved Minesweeper. I ask my co-workers at our textbook publishing company what in the world to do with a sixteen-year-old girl. They recommend taking her to the aquarium, so after I pick Trisha up at the airport, we ride the train downtown. We wait in line behind a group of middle-schoolers, probably on a class field trip. The girls stand awkwardly, their arms crossed, covering their nascent breasts, and the boys are short and their
voices haven’t changed and they keep stepping on each others’ shoes. At the ticket counter, I use the two complimentary passes I got from my company’s human resources department. They got folded over a few times in my purse, and I straighten them out on the counter before handing them over. Trisha is taller and fatter than I imagined. She wears a low-cut Vneck top, low-rise jeans, and even more eyeliner than I do. Her midriff is constantly visible. Her voice is high-pitched, she hurries to fill even the beginnings of silent pauses, and occasionally, without prompting, she smiles to herself for no apparent reason. On the train ride, we talk mostly about the reality TV shows we both watch. We enter the dark aquarium. Inside, the air is humid and salty, which could either be the water and the animals, or the body odor from all the people jammed into such a hot small space. On both sides of us there are two tanks, one full of arm-sized sharks, the other full of huge, wavering stingrays, with underbellies that look like smiley faces. “Ooh,” Trisha murmurs. “It’s creepy in here.” “Is that bad?” “Creepy is always good!” “I was worried maybe you’d think fish were boring,” I say. “Oh no, of course not,” she says. “Anything in Boston is bound to be more exciting than Indiana. You could read the dictionary, and I’d be interested.” This is both excessively complimentary and slightly insulting, but I remember my own excitable adolescence, and I say, “I know what you mean.” “Really, you do?” “I always felt sort of claustrophobic in Indianapolis,” I say. We approach the indoor penguin exhibit; in the middle of the artificially blue pool there’s a single mountain of rock, and most of the penguins stand here, huddled together, looking sleepy. “Me too! That’s exactly it. Claustrophobic. That’s a relief to hear. I mean—your mom is pretty nice, and Dad leaves me alone for the most part, but I have to say, it’s awesome to talk to someone who just gets it,” she says. “I just knew that you would.”
“What about your friends?” “They’re kind of immature. No one is really all that cool, except…” An aquarium employee or volunteer in a wetsuit descends into the pool on a step ladder and tries to get the penguins to swim with her. She is older, with graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she murmurs gently, “Come on guys, come on.” She wades through the water slowly, and there’s something uncomfortably desperate about her behavior. When she gets a few feet away from the mountain, the penguins hobble away from her and dive into the water. She has a little microphone wired close to her mouth and she starts telling the audience stories about the penguins—apparently two of them have been fighting and pulling out each other’s feathers. I locate the two feuding penguins, swimming on opposite sides of the pool; they both have bald patches on their necks, their gray, scaly skin showing through. “No one is cool except who?” I ask Trisha. “This guy who is—kind of my boyfriend—” Trisha and I turn away from the penguins and head outside to look at the harbor seals, who are barking for fish. They sound like they are being tortured. Trisha starts telling me about her kind-of boyfriend and I silently debate whether this is better or worse than spending an evening at home alone moping about you leaving me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rebekah Matthews is originally from Indiana and lives in Boston, where she posts many Instagram pictures of her cats and watches a lot of TV. Her first collection, Hymnal for Dirty Girls, was published in 2012, and her work appears in magazines such as decomP, Necessary Fiction, Wigleaf, and Storyglossia. She is currently writing a novel.