At the end of the party, two raindrops chased each other schizophrenically down the window to the carpet. They hung in suspension, for a moment, in unity, and then they fell. If the room were not so hot with presence, vodka and redbull on the countertop, perhaps they would not have existed. A moon faced sort of boy traced hearts and faces into the glass. Karen disclosed that the patterns made her feel nothing, that it was like artists who believed they were original because the world was slowly drained of ideas. The boy above her did not listen, isn’t it nostalgic? Like a car window? And she didn’t say anything back. Everyone else started drawing ovally pictures which bled into each other. 

Karen was scared her wisdom teeth were growing in, which is why she attended the party in the first place, as a distraction. The whole night spent running her tongue over the space between her gums, hiding in the corner to pick between the edges of her mouth… Was it disgusting? At one point a girl came over with a jar of maraschino cherries; can you tie a knot with your tongue? Karen said she could only untie a knot, which was not the correct answer, but she took one of the cherries and used the stem to scratch the rawness, the cavities. The windows were green, which made the other girl’s real color look dark and mean. What was her name again? Everyone was giving themselves names these days. She was the girl who drew the rainbow on the window, but who otherwise seemed nice in the mechanical sort of way. She was the girl who, despite the awkwardness, did not leave or even look away from Karen who had her fingernails in her mouth. 

I’m sorry, I’m trying to make myself bleed, Karen said. My teeth are killing me, anyways. The other girl pictured Karen above a cadaver, pressing her fingernails into the soft parts of the body until they glowed red like delicate crescent moons. Karen was certain the numbness of drinking defeated her point of being there. Did you receive much affection as a child? Asked the shallow-eyed girl. 

Karen recounted, One day they took all the children who went to church with their parents and put them in a separate room, which smelled like lysol and the faint reflection of bodies, but stale, as if the room had not been used for twenty years. Then they said that they were going to read a story about how God loved us very much, but it was really Noah’s Ark. All of the stories they read to us from the picture book included a sort of brutal death, which was glossed over. None of the kids could sit still except me, and I was getting annoyed at the amount of movement and the paleness of the Sunday school teacher. Was she born in this room just to read stories to us? All the animals in the book were smiling with human faces, but everyone in the world had just died. I never knew loneliness before as a kid, since I was always around my parents -- but that’s why they took us to the new room. I bet the loneliness would not have been worth being saved. And we waited the whole time for our parents to pick us up, from the strange watery woman and the strange room, but they didn’t show up and so we read another story about how god put a small boy in a pit with a lion. 

We never went to church because my dad was worried about my mom making friends; the other girl said, picking at the edge of her blue dress. Karen thought about calling her parents to pick her up now, since it was snowing -- or raining, she wasn’t sure. The other girl started dancing, and in her sobriety Karen resisted, pressing her back up against the window, even though the girl in the blue dress reached out her arms to her, arms with freckles, and Karen’s back was growing suctioned to the window with wetness. She asked the other girl,

Did you receive much affection as a child? Did you get along with your parents?

The other girl kept dancing and did not answer. Maybe she nodded, or she was nodding along to the music, or she was nodding along to both. Karen put her thumbnail into the gum near her back molar, digging underneath the tooth. The other girl started spinning; the spinning was blue, but warm like the pain. The pain was sinewy. The party was ending. The girl in blue grabbed her elbow, hard, the tooth flying through the air, Karen's mouth full of real blood, sour, the other girl’s laughter ringing like the bluntness, the music throbbing in the new space, the head rush dizzying. 

Karen bent down to search for the tooth, red mucus dripping out of her mouth. The other girl crouched down with her, giggling, her gestures futile, her head dipping toward the carpet in an insanity of laughter.  Does it matter if we find it? What are you going to use it for? She rolled on her back. Karen said something like I can’t just have part of me out there. The water dripped from the window, leaving soft impressions on both their clothing. The other girl, in blue, reached toward Karen, breathing slowed, but not in a waiting sort of way. Not in a cautious sort of way. Not in a wondering sort of way, more in the way fish on land eventually stop panicking, and get acquainted with the sky, before their oxygen fades out.

A boy reached out his hand in assistance. Not to Karen, who started laughing, as if to pick up on a piece of music left unfinished, but to the other girl, who accepted. This is kind of how I picture it feels to be before someone is born on the other side of whatever this is, and Karen curled into the fetal position, still laughing or gasping for air, and the girl walked away while looking behind her, and from below none of the pictures in the window were left intact, since they had come into the real world as movement, but patches of the window were clear with enmeshed remnants of rain. And Karen was aware of that moment of being young.

She walked home that night wearing someone else’s forgotten raincoat. The flannel inside was dotted with a constellation of cigarette burns. 

Weeks later Karen received the tooth in an envelope on her doorstep. The note on the back read: When I was eight years old my mother decided to be free of communal obligation. I spent a lot of time watching the koi fish in the pond in our backyard, which was small, while my parents fought about things I still don’t understand. One morning, a motley-looking bird pulled the oldest fish out of the water and flew off. I ran inside, crying, and my parents stopped their fighting to ask if I wanted to learn to shoot a gun, to shoot the bird. I asked them if that might save the fish. They said no. When I was in High School I was asked to prom by a boy who showed up late, and my mom wouldn’t let me go with him. She drove me to the school gym herself. We didn’t speak. I don’t always understand people, but I can imagine they love me. It’s a little dangerous but nice for a moment, like that night, when I couldn’t understand if it was raining or snowing but something in between. I suppose when the snow melts it’s rain, for all intents and purposes. For a moment, though, it’s solid. Geometrically perfect, in theory. 

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