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i need your arms around me i need to feel your touch
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-Stomach hurts. Like it's been put through a paper shredder. We're not speaking again. It's been days.
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I keep forgetting to shower, except when I'm going out with high school friends migrating back for the holidays. I blow out my hair and shave my legs, put on a flannel shirt because I'll end up smelling like a brewery from whatever bar we go to. I got over the whole dry cleaning thing a while ago.
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Eye makeup, earrings, smile and try not to swear. I started in junior high, couldn't stop even when they did. Ironically, everyone has grown out of it except me, the one who held out the longest. It still leaks out of me sometimes when I'm with them, like smoke, like I'm sucking on a cigarette no one can see.
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My friends are beautiful, all bright hair and legs, and I feel so secondhand cool with them. Blow the hair out of my eyes, line up the cue ball, ignore the guys who ask what we're doing here. Bowling, someone quips, rolling her eyes. We laugh, and when they still won't leave we invent angry boyfriends. Manufacture our own protection out of thin air.
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One girl is telling a story, swipes the cue ball from the table with one thin arm. She looks skeletal. Has she always looked like that? I can't remember. Stomach hurts. God, you'd think it was a gunshot wound.
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I let the laughter roll around me and draw my heart back in. The men I know and the ones I don't, somehow always the same problem, the same mocking howl in my ear. My sister leaving, the job I haven't heard back from. The friends who have already left, who won't be back. My own quiet departure, waiting for me at the end of this season. We eye each other like we used to date.
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Relax. The dentist told me if I don't stop grinding my teeth, I won't have any left by the time I'm forty. The strain is causing your jaw to triple in strength, he said, but what good is that without teeth? I laughed then, but for weeks afterward I dreamed of them splintering and snapping in my mouth. I spit them out like Tic-Tacs, saved them in prescription bottles.
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The pool balls crack like lightning. A friend scrolls through her iPhone, shows off pictures of her cute coworkers. Nice legs! crows one girl, while a squinty-eyed guy checks out hers. Glance down, check for bullet holes.
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Do you want anything, honey? the bartender asks. I open my mouth like I'm about to say something, but all I can think is, Yes. I want my teeth back.
