Anika hates Iséla the way she hates people who win cars from radio stations. More than four-pound sinecure service dogs who shiver and piss on airplanes, more than interrupting others to insist on the correct pronunciation of Ibiza, more than the wage gap, Anika hates Iséla. This hate, sulking and seething, licks at the curves of her brain, distracts her during work, disrupts her sleep.
Anika vividly recalls—more colorfully but less accurately each time—the horrendous plaid of the basement couch, designed as though for the express purpose of deterring sex; the decidedly local haircut of Iséla at age sixteen; her baseline resemblance to Penélope Cruz in a halo of Miller Lite; the TV on, ignored; Iséla’s fingernails, self-painted, discount blue; a half-consumed bag of chips, ripped open at a devil-may-care angle; the sliver of sky through garden-view windows blushing into a kind of warning, early-a.m. pink; nail polishes fumblingly compared, a lattice of fingertips; lip balms, likewise poised for a joking-then-serious comparison; Leave it to Beaver drifting, unnoticed, into the local news.
Because this is a dream, and therefore nonsense, Anika is now famous, and Conan O’Brien is asking, via inexplicable dream logic, “Who was your first kiss?”
The audience hoots, desperate to know. Needing this.
“Iséla,” she says, viciously coy. The audience hoots louder, an exploded sixth-grade locker room.
“And…?” Conan presses.
Anika examines her nails, a chic lemon-meringue yellow, with careless, offhand finesse. “It was…fine.” An exquisite, flawless snub. Somewhere, Iséla kills herself.
She only lives in that little town—Redfield, but really South Dakota, all of it—for one year. But it’s a formative year. The things people say are all in the neutral, nowhere dialect of Bob Barker and Tom Brokaw, a trustworthy nothingness. She senses its power, this nowhere-voice, and learns how to do it. She moves away and is fine, better than fine. Still, her revenge fantasy languishes just beneath the skin, underscored by the grating laughter of Andy Richter, couched in the imagined, incorrectly remembered upholstery of the overstuffed Conan O’Brien chairs.
In subsequent years, Anika sits hunched in the dull blue glow of her computer screen, Avi (textbook, unimpeachably husbandlike) faintly snoring in the darkness behind her. Through the vapid dark magic of the internet, she clocks the recurrence of Iséla’s acne with wincing pleasure. The grapes, as it turns out, are in fact sour.
Of course, as any oenophile will tell you, sour grapes—on occasion—become wine.
Shortly thereafter, on the advice of no one, Anika wends her way through her class reunion, gripping a cup of Riesling like an enemy throat. She shouldn’t have come—Avi warned her not to, smelling on this excursion the unburied body of a former self. Yet here she is, weaving through a sea of thin-lipped housewives and shriveling jawlines—hating them all, hating everything to the nth—toward her magnet, her nemesis…Iséla.
Iséla is now, infuriatingly and exhilaratingly, sans acne. “Your face,” says Anika.
Iséla smiles, a maddeningly perfect smile. “No, yours.”
They are at once a tangle of fingers—fingers Anika has often fantasized of snapping in half, denailing, tormenting with an obscure iteration of mislearned acupressure-as-torture, now interlaced with hers.
Tonight will be an ecstatic blur of possibility, not yet misremembered. They will kiss. Anika will cry; Iséla will not object. She will feel what it is to hold a world, fragile and aching, in one’s palm.
To open one’s fist and find it gone.