We were throwing eyes onto the train tracks when Bobby asked me to be his best man. Our knees dangled from basalt escarpments where he’d spraypainted Bobby+Heather4ever. Apparently, Heather’s ex, Reynolds, still sent her wild horny messages. Bobby couldn’t stand it. So he and Heather were getting married. He pitched an eye. Colored glass exploded, glinting on the rails. Our dads were ocularists. Eyes they didn’t sell to taxidermists, schools, and hospitals accumulated in our garages. Lately more and more. As kids, we used to play while our dads drank Mickeys. We played with their empty bottles, lengths of plastic pipe, with the eyes that lay around our houses, staring from everywhere. When people looked at me, giving their full gaze, I struggled to relate any feeling to it. When Bobby said Marla would be one of Heather’s bridesmaids, I bit my cheek. But I didn’t say no. Bobby was my oldest and best friend. By the time of his asking, I’d fallen away from everyone else in our loose orbit. We were freshly eighteen, “grown-ass men,” and the possibility of finding myself alone was a new sound whistling from a distance.
***
Bobby’d fallen for Heather a year ago, at the twins’ house. Brenda and Marla were identical with burnished-copper curls and upturned noses. You couldn’t tell them apart except an Illinois-shaped birthmark behind Marla’s ear. Bobby and I’d brought some of our dads’ eyeballs to their Halloween party. The eyes looked real but were cold in your hand.
In a basement crowded with halfhearted costumes, we drank their dad’s beer. Marla handed me a Budweiser. I handed her an eye. She wore an XL Slipknot T-shirt and said she was supposed to be her last shitty boyfriend. What was I supposed to be? But I hadn’t dressed up. I wasn’t supposed to be anything.
Everyone knelt in a circle and spun a bottle. We were all too old for this, and that made it fun, like nails in a doll’s head. Some pecked lips and hurried back to their spots—the bold claimed seven minutes in the closet that was more of a repurposed root cellar and smelled of earth and insulation every time the door opened. My knees ached from kneeling. I hoped the bottle didn’t pick me. I wouldn’t know what to do, whether someone would want me or flinch when our lips brushed. I kept my eyes down, not looking at anyone, but Bobby had eyes for Heather from the start.
Everything bored Heather since breaking up with Reynolds. At some other party, he’d ran around on all fours, yelping like a coyote and sniffing crotches. She loved telling that story and looked sort of deflated when she’d finished and we’d all heard it before. When the bottle aimed at Bobby, Heather shrugged—these were just games. Bobby crawled across the circle, put an eyeball in her hand, and whispered, “I’ll win any game you wanna play.”
The bottle picked me next. Across the way, Marla, dressed as her last shitty boyfriend, pushed back her hair where her birthmark showed like a tattoo of a jagged wound behind her ear. But before anything happened, the twins’ dad came home bellowing mad: his beer fridge was empty, his house full of teenagers. We scraped bellies and shins, escaping out the basement window. We fanned across the neighborhood, kinetic, and weightless. We shouted down alleyways and between the naked alders of the shadowed park.
Marla caught me by the wrist. Her eyes, thrown wide open, pulled all the scant light. “You still owe a kiss.” She pointed to Bobby and Heather making out on a park bench. “That’s how the game works.”
***
By February, Marla wanted us to be Billy-Bob Thornton and Angeline Jolie, sharing vials of blood like she’d read about in Star magazine.
We were alone in her basement. Sarah McLachlan played loud so her dad couldn’t hear us. We kept falling out a window and never hitting the ground. Afterward, we counted rug burns on our backs and knees. I stared at the knife in Marla’s hand. She was ready to feel this. When I couldn’t do it, disappointment tumbled in her rolling eyes. Marla lay the knife down on the carpet by her knee, pulled on her shirt. Turned down the stereo, while McLauchlan cooed, “We are born innocent.”
***
One night, we dusted backroads in Bobby’s Corolla. Pines saw-toothed in the moonlight. Heather propped her feet on a box of our dads’ eyes and splayed her fingers, admiring the engagement ring. In the backseat, Marla said she loved me. I’d never said that to anyone. That wasn’t something said in my house. My dad and I didn’t say much of anything in my house.
Heather’s phone kept chirping in her coat pocket like an orphaned baby bird. Bobby accelerated, turned up the stereo, blasting some nu-metal band.
Marla pressed our foreheads together. Her breath hot and apple. She said it again.
“Now you say it back.”
The Corolla struck a pothole. A big cavity in the blacktop. For a second, everything lifted. We rejoined the road with a bang. In the wrinkling gravity, my chin spilt Marla’s lip, and her brow filled my head with loud white light. By the time my eye began to swell and blacken shut, I still hadn’t said anything. Words thickened and webbed, stuck down where my breath had left me like it was never coming back.
***
By wedding day, Marla and I hadn’t talked in months. I knew she was there in the church, but I hadn’t seen her. In the basement, the groomsmen changed into our rented suits and cranked Foo Fighters on a boombox. A spoiled veggie platter was stinking up the church basement—something between mold and fart. No one knew who’d brought it or left it there. I took this for a bad omen but couldn’t say so while knotting my tie minutes before the ceremony. Bobby grinned, air-drumming to “Everlong.” I held my breath and smiled back. The night before, we’d drunk Mickey’s on the escarpment. Trains cleaved the dark and scattered broken eyes like eggshells. We’d imitated how our dads talked—low, woozy—as though this were something near to us now. When rain fell over us, it felt like nothing, like it’d fallen yesterday over someone else. We were tomorrow’s weather.
After the I-dos, Bobby and Heather donned sunglasses, threw the bouquet. Marla and I were paired in the procession. My hands shook as we converged into the aisle. But her arm hugged mine tenderly, and I felt the soft velocity of how we were before.
“You guys stink,” she whispered, giggling. “Did a sink back up?”
The wedding party spilled onto the sidewalk. An errant wind pushed its fingers through everyone’s hair. It lifted and tossed all the girls’ and women’s careful arrangements. Where Illinois should’ve been mapped in pink behind Marla’s ear, the wind revealed another skin, the color of cold butter. I watched Brenda, not Marla, tame her curls down.
“Please don’t tell.” Brenda said. “Marla owes me bigtime for swapping with her.”
***
The newlyweds moved into a tiny walk-up behind the Thriftway. No one had cared for the building in years. The rickety stairs to their door swayed, on the verge of collapse. Whenever I visited, Bobby and Heather appeared bewildered by their lives, their apartment, marriage. The air lay stiff with weed smoke. Bobby described his new HVAC job in mundane detail. I tried to at least look like I cared. Heather studied her fingernails so hard they might’ve been tiny TV screens, a fly’s eyes’ view of whatever occupied her thoughts. Bobby always played music loud so we couldn’t hear Heather’s phone going off. But I saw the white-blue flashes on the wall whenever her screen lit up with a text.
***
At another party in the twins’ basement, everyone snorted crushed pills off a Ouija board. I didn’t come to these parties anymore. But supposedly, Reynolds showed up after everyone had gotten crooked. He’d come directly from getting a scorpion tattoo, his forearm still bound in saranwrap. By then, Bobby’d passed out, sleeping in his coat in the corner. Plugging her nosebleed with a tissue, Heather pulled Reynolds toward the closet that had once been a root cellar. She smiled at the twins before closing the door—it was all games, just stupid games.
By night’s end, Brenda had to put Marla in the bathtub—a reaction to something, a bitter ghost, a chemical hex, working its bad magic in her blood. She wouldn’t take her shoes off or let go of her phone. I woke up to garbled texts, a tumble of letters shaking behind the screen. It took a while, arranging them into words, incantations, you could never take back.
***
That summer, Brenda and I got jobs stocking shelves at Thriftway for minimum wage. She told me that Marla had moved in with a guy over in The Dalles and was going to be a dental hygienist. I asked Brenda what she was going to be. She flipped me off. “Right back atcha!”
On sale days, we tied balloons and hit off a helium tank as the hours perforated. When Brenda related Bobby and Heather’s drama, her voice squeaked like a cartoon chipmunk: Reynolds was driving Heather around in a Pinto everyone knew he’d stolen. While Bobby had tail-spun out of sight. He hadn’t said anything to me.
I’d gone to the apartment, up the rickety stairs, but Bobby didn’t live there anymore. I went to his dad’s house where his dad answered the door in a bathrobe and didn’t invite me in. His eyes were red and broken, but not from crying. About a month ago, Bobby’d called to say that he was driving regional trucking routes out of Spokane. That was the last he’d heard. When the door closed behind him, I tasted bitterness like licorice all the way home.
Brenda palmed me some warm linty pill. I didn’t ask questions. We washed them down with bright green Jones Soda we pulled from fridges along the Thriftway’s back wall. The bottle’s label was a black-and-white photo—people mailed in pictures to get picked and printed on the labels: a pair of arms raised a small child to a cloudless sky, and the child, leaving those arms, reached out to swim up through summer.
We discounted cans of creamed corn while Lyle Lovett played in the overhead. He sang summer too, but for a better season, one that’d passed before we’d been born. It was getting harder to feel my hands. Canned vegetables rolled around our feet. Lovett drawled on sweetly and not for me. I kicked away cans I’d dropped and drank my Jones Soda spilling green down my shirt. It was summer and it would be again. But never weightlessness and careful arms waiting beneath you.
But it should’ve been.
Tract lighting snowed down the aisles. Through the static-frosted air, I reached to brush the curls from Brenda’s neck. She laughed and didn’t pull away. Closing my eyes, I attempted time travel—I’d never thought to at least try! But instead of going back, I just fell down among the canned vegetables. When I opened my eyes, there was no Illinois pinked behind her ear. Brenda helped me up, laughing her head off in our own time. It didn’t matter who we were.
A sharp bubble rose in my chest. I felt it pop—something unstoppable crushing through me. In a fluorescent blizzard, among the aisles, I heard the furrowed steel of trains punching down the tracks. The low gutting whistle. The distance from here to then went on, telescoping out and out until I couldn’t say a word.
Still, Brenda was laughing. She laughed for a long time.