It is Halloween, and a guy named Nick is driving me and my friend Kelly home from a party. Kelly is an eighties girl and I am dressed as nothing. This guy is in a suit and a bow tie with a camera around his neck; he says he’s supposed to be some historic photographer. He is a photographer in real life, too. He’s cute, in a shaved-head sort of way. I like the stubble on his face and his voice, which is soft. We drive through the smashed-pumpkin streets.
He gets out and opens the car door for me and Kelly. I ask him not to watch as I walk up my building’s stairs. I tell him it will take me a while. He says okay, and his eyes meet mine and do not look away, which startles me. I watch him drive off.
Kelly lives two houses down. She follows me up the stairs to make sure I don’t fall.
The next day I email Nick a thank-you. I don’t know his last name or where he lives, and I don’t know what he knows about me. We have mutual friends, and I’m sure he’s heard enough. A back-and-forth starts. On the road for his job, he sends me photos of his hotel rooms in Las Vegas or Dallas, and sometimes images of the sky. I try not to hope. I try.
•
A gold weight the size of a pinkie nail is sewn into my left eyelid. This is so my eyelid will close at night, if pulled down by a finger, and stay closed. “You have some real jewelry and you’re not even married!” says my surgeon. He injects the movable half of my forehead with Botox, to match the paralyzed side. This isn’t just cosmetic. He says the weak half might start moving if the strong side is stilled. “Motivate the little guys to do their job,” the surgeon says. After a few days, my whole forehead stops moving. I try to wiggle my left eyebrow, the weak one. Nothing. The little guys seem to have given up for good.
My left eye is operated on again. The goal is to pull the pupil toward the center so I no longer see double. The dream is to get both of my eyes to gaze at the same thing at the same time. This will require multiple operations. After each one, we have to wait a few days for the stitches to dissolve to see if the surgery has worked.
I test myself. I lie on my bed and watch the ceiling fan rotate. I watch the yellow lines on the highway as my mother drives me back to the hospital for a checkup. Everything is still double. “Maybe next time,” the surgeon always says.
There is some good news: My eyes appear less crossed now. This makes me happy, maybe happier than it should.
•
I learn that another girl likes Nick. She claims to be his best friend. Her name is Mallory, and one night out of the blue she calls me and invites me out for drinks.
We go to a biker bar. It is really a brand-new building with linoleum floors and posters of motorcycles on the walls. Nick is in Hawaii for a shoot—a college basketball tournament, Mallory tells me, which I already know from the emails. “I have him write down his traveling schedule for me,” she says. “The guy can’t take care of himself. I need to know when to feed him!”
I ask her if they’re together, or ever were. She’s sitting on my left, so I have to turn my whole head to see her.
“No, no,” she says. “Nope. We’re too close for that.”
She is very cheerful.
I take big swallows of an icy gin and tonic. The windows are open and the wind is freezing. My hand aches from gripping the glass. Mallory asks me if there is anyone I like. I say no one. “Oh, I have the perfect friend for you!” she says. She means her roommate, who spends most of his time playing video games and hasn’t had a girlfriend since high school.
On the way home, we drive by Nick’s apartment building. “I decorated it, of course,” she says, “beige and blue.” She laughs, and I laugh, too, but we are not laughing at the same thing.
As she drops me off, she says, “Nick’s just not really a girlfriend kind of guy, you know? He works too much. Besides, he’s very picky.”
I slam the car door. She isn’t looking at me anymore.