The game is Spin the Bottle. But now that we’ve emptied the bottle, whiskey’s casting amber blurs across the front-yard dusk, and our voices don’t feel like our own anymore, and mistakes are being made. My lips are smudgy with the wrong words. My hands ghost themselves right through things I want to touch, knock down things I don’t. Brent’s hands are on Jenny Campbell’s bikini hips, not mine, and Garrick is asleep beside the dark blue yawn of Jenny’s pool, and pretty soon—I’m sure of it—he’ll fall in and drown and we won’t know until morning, and everyone else has gone home, and also the bottle is smashed in a thousand pieces. Nothing left to spin.

Truth is, I want to go home too. I’m tired of Jenny’s. Her house smells like cats and vanilla air freshener gone stale. I didn’t notice that when I was little, but I must have locked it somewhere deep because now it smells like memory. Her pool parties were better when it was all girls and actual swimming, not boys and looking skinny in swimsuits. Plus there was that time Mr. Campbell walked into the poolhouse bathroom when I was changing and said there’s a tick on you, come here, here, let me pull it off. Although really it was nothing.

But Jenny is a grade older, with a fake ID and a reputation that left me behind a long time ago. And Brent is in love with Jenny, or pretends he is. And I’m in love with Brent, or think I could be if I try. And he offered me a ride to the party in exchange for a hand job, so here we are, and besides, no one said any of this is supposed to feel easy or else why do they make the songs like they do?

◆

I was the one who broke the bottle. Not really on purpose. It just looked so kickable where we left it on the blacktop. Empty, in Mr. Campbell’s empty parking spot. Somewhere in their summer cabin right then, Mr. Campbell was touching Mrs. Campbell under cool white sheets. Somewhere in the poolside dark behind me, Brent’s mouth was attached to the crook of Jenny’s neck, tasting salt. Somewhere upstairs, Jenny’s little sister was having a slumber party with the same sleeping bags we used once, princess pink and nappy. I remember how the zipper stuck. All of that was an amber swirl inside me trying to harden.

We’d been spinning the bottle all night and I hadn’t landed once on Brent. I kept landing on Garrick and his rubbery mouth, his rubbing body that made me think the right words but not feel what was underneath them. He kissed me in the closet and I thought of the word heat, but nothing felt hot. He put my hands on him and I thought hard, pulse, touch, but nothing filled the space inside me. Hannah, he said, again and again until his voice began to shatter. Until he made noises that were not words, that were just the sounds of feelings, and I thought of the word word, the hole in the middle of it, nothingness folding in on itself. 

The closet smelled like the house, which smelled like a memory that kept slipping away: fur and sticky sweetness.

I didn’t mean to break the bottle until I did. So when the glass settled its glitter on the asphalt, a sea of skin-splitting stars at my feet—everything busted to upside-down brightness—I figured, well, at least I know I’m capable of it. Of being a body that wants something before the brain.

———

Sometime before the blacktop, or sometime after—the hours kept plunging into each other, weightless in the deep blue night—Jenny’s little sister said, Tuck us in, Hannah, tell us a story, Jenny’s inside the closet. So I went upstairs. There were four little girls there, zipped up tight across the floor. The bed had a white canopy. The shelves were filled with pastel figures. Precious Moments, they were called, shineless ceramic shells of children with pale pink cheeks and looking-up eyes. Which story? I asked them. The Little Mermaid, they said, but not the nice one. The real one. With the sea foam, and how she dances on the knives for the prince. When I lay down on the kitteny brown carpet, the girls combed out my hair with their fingers. Their skin beside mine smelled like sunburn and chlorine, a baked-clean smell. When I woke up, they were all asleep, and if I’d told them a story it was gone now, buried deep in their damp heads, knotted in the hair that would be dry by morning.

◆

So much for the game, I tell them when they hear the smash, when they both come running. Jenny looks out at the glass-gutted driveway. Her eyes are shining. Her neck has a mark like a red thumbprint. I want to cover it up. I want to press my thumb hard into it. Garrick, who has not yet drowned, is way over there by the edge of the pool, singing a song about shakers of salt. Only Brent seems to appreciate my wreckage. He stands in the empty space where Mr. Campbell’s car is not, picks up the biggest piece of glass, a grinning circle. Mouthpiece at one end that has tasted all night like Jenny’s blackberry lip gloss. Crystalline teeth at the other. We can still spin this, Brent says, and he smiles and looks at Jenny, and Jenny looks at me, and Brent looks at me, and the blood foaming under my skin must be the feeling I’ve been waiting for my whole life—isn’t it? Somewhere in the dark, Garrick is falling asleep, but here in the driveway, no one is ready to call it a night. No one is ready to say enough.