person can’t see you, smiles are always audible. I smiled and said, “Hey. What’s up? You called?”
“Yo,” Miles said again, “Come over.” I said I’d be there in twenty, and he grumbled, so I said I’d be there in fifteen, and he hung up. I let the soufflé sit in the oven and cancelled the bake temp and time.
Even the oven is easy. If I were an Egyptian putting three out of ten thousand eggs in a soufflé, I’d have to stamp out a freaking fire before running off to someone’s studio apartment in the middle of the night. Instead of all that, I stood in front of the mirror and stretched the corner of my eye out and swiped liquid eyeliner across the base. The second eye always comes out less straight, because when you open the first eye after pulling it at the corner, everything looks a little blurry for a few seconds. I didn’t really care if it was perfectly straight as long as it made me look more feminine. I checked my phone, because if I tell Miles fifteen minutes and it takes me twenty, he’ll be sleeping and won’t hear me knocking or his cell ringing, even though I can hear it from the other side of the door. After the eyeliner, my room key, coat, ID, cigs, and out the door running along New Hampshire Ave and jaywalking across the intersection.
It’s sordid, I know.
I knocked, and he opened the door. His eyes were a little low, and he pulled me into a hug by the hand, so we were still holding one hand while hugging with our other arms. It’s always an awkward hug, even after a year. I think the last time it was an around-the-neck kind of hug, so I couldn’t really move my head, and for some reason that had scared me a little. He led me farther into his room and sat at his desk, grabbing my hips and pulling me down, sitting me on his lap. I turned to face him, and he put a finger to my face pushing it back the other way.
Afterward, we fell asleep. I woke up at 4:43. He was shaking my shoulder. When I sat up, he turned over. The last time I was there, which was probably a month before, maybe longer—I had put him on my phone’s reject list for a couple weeks—I had noticed a chunky plastic bracelet on the floor which I took and wore around campus for weeks. This time there was a chunky yellow-green beaded necklace, which I also picked up.
I pulled on my pants and shirt and shook Miles’ shoulder and dangled the necklace over his face. I got a furrowed brow and a shoulder shrug before he turned over again. If Miles communicated verbally more often, he may have said, “I’m an asshole, baby. Ain’t like I hide it.” The kid was empty. Everything on his inside was on his outside. I grabbed my coat off the floor and pushed my feet into my shoes. I tried to shove the necklace into the front pocket of my jeans, but my pocket was all twisted over itself and around nothing.
Ten minutes later I was home, and I put the oven back on before slumping down on my couch. I don’t even know why I was so pissed. My face was freaking cherry red, and I waited for the pain in my hands and legs that happens when I move from cold to warm air to go away. They get all puffed up and red and uncomfortable and manly. My thighs started itching first so I was scratching my red thighs with my red hands, just making everything more irritated. It’s not like I didn’t expect it.
I held the necklace in my hand. The beads weren’t spheres but they weren’t cubes, and I guess they were nice to feel, smooth at least. I massaged the beads in my palm and stared at them until they melted together into a long string of yellow-green. I was thinking about Miles and about how he probably wasn’t nursed when he was born and formed severe attachment issues and how he was probably in some state of arrested development after having seen his infant self in a mirror at the age of two months or whenever, and then I decided to soufflé the necklace.
I used a mitt to pluck the soufflé out of the oven. I snipped the necklace string and pushed each bead into the soufflé with one finger until it was littered with green dots. I went into my bedroom and rummaged through my desk drawers to find the bracelet from
a month ago, and I pushed the round red plastic into the center of the soufflé. Then I put it back in the oven for a while.
Of course the whole thing smelled terrible. It smelled so bad that I dumped it out the window. I used the rubber scraper, and the whole, waxy plastic fruit-cake-looking thing flopped out of the dish and down three flights onto the pavement of the alley below, wack and squish. I was going to drop the casserole dish along with it, but I thought I might need it again. Even Egyptians had dishes. So instead I retrieved the Mixmaster and held it straight out the window and let it go. I laughed, and it sounded plastic cheap when it hit the pavement. Egyptian pavement. Sand. Stone. Sand to grind flour. Tooth disease. Wheat and corn. The freaking Nile and the alleyway below. On the riverbank, the metal whisk attachments clanged and popped out, bouncing a couple times before coming to rest.
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