Tenth of December

Content Warning: This story references death by suicide and physical and sexual abuse and depicts attempted sexual assault.

The story alternates between three inner monologues, the first of which belongs to 14-year-old Alison Pope. Alison descends her family’s staircase while imagining a series of princely admirers, none of whom can avoid embarrassing malapropisms in describing her beauty. She is waiting for her mother to get home and take her to ballet class. She practices her moves and thinks of all the things she loves—her teacher Ms. C, the girls in class, and her home and community. While dancing around the house, she imagines a baby deer and protects it from the news that its mother has been killed by a hunter. She considers who she might be romantically involved with, referring to her potential suitors as “{special one}” and rejecting various boys she knows because “What she liked was being in charge of her. Her body, her mind. Her thoughts, her career, her future” (6).

While considering all the things she doesn’t know, she sees Kyle Boot, her teenage neighbor, jogging up the street in nothing but running shorts. She pities him as a “poor goof” who doesn’t have many friends in part because of his parents’ strict rules. She imagines being kind to the people around her, thinking “Each of us is a rainbow” and that people were inherently good in general (8). She’s interrupted by a knock on the door.

The narrative shifts to Kyle Boot’s point of view; his house is tightly structured by rules and charts, and his father has left him a note to place a new geode in their yard in a precise fashion. Kyle realizes he hasn’t taken his shoes off, which causes intense anxiety as he imagines having to explain his mistake to his father. He internally rebels against his rigid homelife with strings of creative, imagined profanity: “crap-cunt shit-turd dick-in-the-air butt-creamery” (13). He wonders what’s wrong with him before realizing it’s a Major Treat Day, which means he can choose 20 minutes of television. He has an imagined argument with his father about what he’d like to watch, then imagines his father threatening to take away cross-country and calling his language “ape talk.”

Kyle sees a van pull up in the church parking lot across the street. Kyle notes this in a logbook his father makes him maintain. A man gets out, puts on a reflective vest, and knocks on Alison’s door. Kyle grows concerned when he sees the man pulling her forcibly outside. Kyle steps out of his house, and the man freezes and shows Kyle a knife, then threatens to kill Alison if Kyle moves. The man takes the resisting Alison to the van and Kyle considers how many rules he is breaking. He thinks about when he failed to intervene in another student’s teasing and the praise his parents gave him for staying out of it: “Think of all the resources we’ve invested in you, Beloved Only […] I know we sometimes strike you as strict but you are literally all we have” (16). Kyle looks down at the geode at his feet.

The narrative shifts to the unnamed kidnapper’s point of view, who is elated that his plan is working. He rationalizes his actions by thinking about kings taking women as their right, and he believes that Alison will begin to have feelings for him eventually. When he realizes he left the van door locked, hindering his abduction plan, his dead stepfather Melvin appears in his mind with “the hot look of disappointment that had always preceded an ass whooping, which had always preceded the other thing” (19). When Alison continues to struggle, he punches her in the stomach.

Kyle looks at the geode and imagines his parents rationalizing his inaction when he hears the punch. He thinks of the things he and Alison did together as neighbors when they were children. He picks up the geode and runs toward Alison and her attacker, thinking of all the rules he’s violating. He hurls the geode at the kidnapper, who falls over, bleeding from his head. Kyle is elated at his success and feels powerful.

Alison flees as the story shifts back to the kidnapper’s point of view. He is woozy and confused. Kyle smashes the van’s windshield as the kidnapper contemplates death by suicide over returning to jail, but “the king does not take his own life” (24). As the kidnapper contemplates all the ways he will escape through sheer force of power and will, Kyle returns to him and holds the geode over his head, threatening to bring it down.

Back in her house, Alison watches after calling the police. She sees Kyle holding the geode and whispers, “Kyle, don’t.” The story shifts into the future: Alison is plagued by recurring nightmares of Kyle bringing the rock down and realizing he’s ruined his own life by killing the kidnapper. In the dreams, she’s powerless to stop it. After the most recent dream, she woke to her parents comforting her, asking her to relate what really happened: She went outside and stopped Kyle. Her parents tell her that she “Did beautiful” and that she and Kyle stopped a bad thing from being much worse (28).