“Mom? Are you there?”
After a few more moments of silence, Lena hung up. She leaned back in the driver’s seat, tilted her head up. The fabric on her car’s ceiling was puffy and shredded from age and humidity.
The next morning, Charlie gave Lena a ride to work. His eyes were glassy. As Lena got into the car she automatically offered to drive.
“No, I’m good,” he said.
“Where were you yesterday?” Lena asked.
He turned on the radio.
“Did you do anything cool?”
He turned the radio up a little louder. The song was a country song about dreaming each other’s dreams, holding each other’s heart, big sky, cute dogs, our little farm. She asked him one more time. He turned up the radio a notch louder. She opened her window. The day was warm and the air felt nice. If they drove around like this for another hour or two, Lena thought she could learn to like country music.
When they reached the office, Charlie got out of the car quickly and walked five paces in front of her. On the back of his arms were five bruises. Perfect circles about an inch apart.
Day 18: You find that someone has left the microwave filthy, but you don’t say anything. You leave it and eat your cold lunch. You accept some deliveries and help do inventory with Ian.
At 10, Lena sent Charlie an email that said only “I’m sorry.” She didn’t mean it and it annoyed her to give in, but she couldn’t handle the silent treatment any longer. Five minutes later, Charlie came over and offered to buy her a snack out of the vending machine.
In the hallway, he pointed to the drawing of a lamp smoking a cigarette on her cast. “Who did that? It’s weird.”
“I think it’s more weird that they gave me a cast.”
“Isn’t it weirder? Not more weird.”
If they hadn’t just made up, Lena would’ve rolled her eyes.
Charlie jingled the quarters in his palm. “I hate that lamp.”
“For your information, I plan on getting it as a tattoo. Across my entire back. Huge. Full fuckin’ color.”
“Sure.” Charlie closed his eyes, as if the overhead lights were too bright. He rubbed his forehead.
“Headache?”
“A little.”
His eyes were on her cast again. She had drawn a bunch of anthropomorphic grapes on it eating smaller, non-anthropomorphic grapes. “You have a future at The New Yorker,” Ian had said when he noticed Lena drawing it. “Just caption it something like ‘Working hard or hardly working.’” Some of her coworkers had signed it or written customary Get Well Soons. She asked a few of the observers if they wanted to sign. One laughed and said, “Oh, Lena.”
“Charlie?”
He turned to the vending machine and bought pretzels without asking Lena what she wanted.
“Is everything okay?”
Charlie handed her the pretzels. He hunched his shoulders. His eyes were bloodshot. “I was visiting my grandparents.”
“What?” Lena checked around, sure there was an observer she had missed.
“My grandparents are getting older and they missed me. You know how it is.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Stop trying to get me in trouble.”
“I’m not. I just thought.”
“Come on, Lena.”
She rubbed her forehead. Couldn’t think of what to say that would de-escalate the situation.
“I don’t know where I was,” Charlie said. “I was at my grandparents’ house, but I know I was also somewhere else at the same time.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Lena said.
Ian and Dr. Lisa walked into the hallway.
Dr. Lisa was saying, “My favorite queen is the one who sometimes dresses like a combination of a sexy-cat Halloween costume and an anime character.”
“I didn’t realize you were so campy,” Ian said. They laughed.
Charlie shook his head at Lena and headed back to his desk.
14
Day 25+: You were asked to work overtime on a Saturday to coordinate a delayed shipment.
Lena put in eye drops that burned and smelled like rubbing alcohol and old plastic. Haircut set a timer and told Lena she had to keep her eyes shut for five minutes. When the alarm went off, Lena opened her eyes. Winced against the light. The observer held out a mirror, smiling. Lena’s eyes were blue.
“I look supernatural.”
“Well, write that down,” Haircut said, passing her the sheet.
On a scale of 0–10, 0 being not at all and 10 being excruciating, how much do your eyes hurt? Are you experiencing any burning or stinging? How do you think you look? Be specific. With 10 being most attractive, how would you rate your appearance on an average day? Looking in the mirror now—same 1–10 scale—how do you rate your attractiveness? After looking at the mirror for an additional five minutes, how would you rate your appearance now?
“Are my eyes going to be like this forever?” Lena asked while giving her comfort level a 6.
“Put it on the page.”
As she stared more and more, Lena liked how the blue looked so bright against her brown skin. She looked like someone who would be in a magazine, maybe, wearing a big gown, looking a thousand feet tall, incredible shoes on her feet. When she returned the form, Haircut drove her to a bar in the city 40 minutes away.
As she sat alone at the bar, sipping a Dark & Stormy, people couldn’t resist talking to her. A black man who looked slightly older than Deziree started calling her Miss Twilight. He told her that he used to be an artist, liked to paint girls like her when he was a young man, before his wife. You, Miss Twilight. He shook his head. A drunk Korean woman did a double take when she noticed Lena’s eyes and said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Toni Morrison would be ashamed of you.”
Two white guys close to her age kept offering her drinks and asking when her friends were coming. Their frat was having a party. Flip cup, beer pong, shots. They said it as if there weren’t a million parties happening in the world that night with those same events. Someone sent her a drink, but she only pretended to sip it once. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, grubby sneakers. Some people, once they saw her face in good lighting, acted as if she were dressed in stilettos and a tight Hello-I’m-here dress. Haircut, sitting farther down the bar, was sipping a beer and filling a notebook. There were other black women in the bar, but they were clearly ignoring Lena; she was not used to that. Although, to be fair, she was not used to any of the attention.
She ordered another drink. The bar was set up so that pool blue and golden lights shone on all the top-shelf bottles. A bottle of Grey Goose was illuminated in such a way that it looked as if God was about to speak to her through it, give her some commandments to live by in this modern age. She stared at the display while contemplating how malleable her body was. A body is like outer space: The more you actively think about it, the smaller you feel, the more detached you feel from the business of living. Lena’s body was constantly doing things her brain wasn’t actively aware of: shedding skin, releasing eggs, waking up to inexplicable aches, pains, bruises. Blinking. She tipped her head toward Haircut. Here was a person she had given—without completely understanding what she was agreeing to—the power to make her body more unknowable. What would she do if her eyes were blue for the rest of her life?