Cool

Excerpt

Here’s what I discover the evening after my mother leaves: if I throw a pebble into the air, bats will swoop after it. They dive toward the ground and then back up to the sky—every single time. It’s like they never learn their lesson. “They think it’s a bug,” my father tells me when he sees what I’m doing. I didn’t even know we had bats in New Hampshire. I thought bats existed only in horror movies and comic books—though I once heard my mother say, “I must have bats in my belfry,” and I laughed, but my father didn’t.

“Stop it, Carlene,” my father calls across the lawn. The sun is almost down and he’s a shadow under the porch light. It’s a hot summer evening; the air is foggy from the exterminator truck that just chugged through the neighborhood. “Don’t be mean to them. They’re going to get you.”

I throw another pebble; there’s a silent swooping of wings. Sometimes one bat comes, sometimes two.

“I’m serious,” my father says. “They’ll get you.”

“I find that highly doubtful,” I say and throw another pebble.

Becky Hagenston

Becky Hagenston’s first collection of stories, A Gram of Mars, won the Mary McCarthy Prize; her second collection, Strange Weather, won the Spokane Prize. “Cool” will appear in her third collection, Scavengers, winner of the Permafrost Book Prize, forthcoming in 2016 from the University of Alaska Press. Her work is also forthcoming in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015. She lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where she is an Associate Professor of English at Mississippi State University.

Patrick Ryan on “Cool”

I won’t lie to you. I have a cool mom. I have the kind of mom anyone would be lucky to have, because she’s not only great at being a mother; she’s also great at being a friend. We enjoy each other’s company. We make each other laugh—a lot. When I was a kid, my mom volunteered to be a chaperone for one of my school’s field trips (to a fish camp, if I remember correctly), and during the course of the day, a good number of my classmates came up to me and said, “Man, your mom is cool.”

Carlene, the protagonist and narrator of “Cool,” has a mom who many of her friends think of as cool. Carlene herself thinks of her mom as cool. Or, at least, she did up until recently. What changed? Carlene is still wrapping her head around it. Her mom gives her great presents. She likes to go out and do fun things with her and friends. She likes to get a little wild. But somewhere along the way, “a little wild” became “a little too wild.”

When does cool become not cool? When does a parent go from being awesome and on the same page as you, to being a painful embarrassment? And what are you supposed to do with that, when suddenly you would rather crawl under a rock than be seen with your own mom in public? Becky Hagenston’s story “Cool” asks all of these questions, answers some of them, and leaves just enough unresolved to make the plight of Carlene and her mom, Patty, stick with us. I’m thrilled to welcome “Cool” into the One Teen Story family, and I’m honored to be presenting it to our world of readers.