FICTION | Aaron J. Muller Heads

FICTION

Heads

EXCERPT FROM THE SHORT STORY HEADS

By Aaron J. Muller

I spent the few uncertain moments after prom looking at Harry’s severed head. He was smoking in the dark and his black tux was invisible against the night, making his pale face float disembodied in the dark. A rental, and it fit him like shit. Too big in the shoulders, and the pants bunched at his feet like he was wearing pajamas. I imagined his hair slicked back, a saxophone in his hands, but he looked the same as always, just fancier.

We just couldn’t decide what to do, which is what happens when two people both know exactly what they want to do but won’t say it because the other person might not want to do it. Not sex, because he and I had talked about how weird it would be, how we didn’t want to, as the saying goes, “ruin our friendship” by sleeping together, even though there was no one else that would fuck either of us. I wanted to go back to his basement and get high and play a video game and then fall asleep, but he wanted to go to Stephanie’s afterparty. We both knew these things, but we always got high in Harry’s basement and there was only one annual Stephanie party. At the same time, we both liked getting high in Harry’s basement and someone always made a scene at the annual Stephanie party, and we both worried our turns were coming up.

I was wearing my father’s old suit. I just hadn’t been able to imagine myself in a tuxedo jacket, and this was free, because my dad was old now. It was a cool gray, surprisingly not doublebreasted as I imagined all of the 1980s having been. The pants were a little short, but I was wearing nice socks with a brown and black argyle pattern on them.

Harry turned his severed head to the side, looking out across the now-empty parking lot of the dance hall. He threw his cigarette onto the concrete, right next to a discarded soda cup, blackened by the pressure of many tires driving over it. The kind of thing no one ever threw away, because maybe the next person who saw it would be that person, and everyone thought everyone else would be the better person and that it was okay to be a shitty person just this once because who knows what kind of diseases that thing has on it.

“Either way,” Harry said to me. “I don’t have anything.”

We had gotten so used to the codewords we used them even when we were alone. Codewords, as in, a lack of words. Saying nothing in order to say ‘weed.’

“I’ll text Seth,” I told Harry.

“Man, fuck Seth,” Harry said to me.

“I’m good.”

We laughed. I texted Seth, who said we could come by his house as long as we didn’t pull any fag shit.

“Man, fuck Seth,” Harry said to me. We got in the car and Harry drove.

Between us we had seventeen dollars in cash. We used two of them to get 99 cent iced teas. We bought from Seth with the rest, and he gave us a bunch of shake in one of those sandwich bags that doesn’t have a zipper but that you have to fold over

itself then roll it up. I put it in the inside pocket of my dad’s suit, and we drove to the midway point between Harry’s house and Stephanie’s house, which was the elementary school.

Inside of the car, with the overhead light punched on, Harry’s head was back on its shoulders. I took the bowl out of the glove box and we smoked even though we weren’t anywhere yet.

“We can go to Stephanie’s,” I said. I wanted to hear music, and we weren’t allowed to play it in Harry’s basement this late. One of us had to give in first and it was probably my turn. Harry shrugged.

“Just for like an hour,” he conceded. “See if it’s fun. If it sucks, we’ll leave.”

I thought about what it might feel like to leave the party. Leaving came with a great sense of relief, usually, as I knew things were about to be quiet and we would soon be in Harry’s basement watching a movie. When we were kids, we would leave parties together, one of us having begged his mother to come get us, unable to commit to a sleepover. There were only a few places I could sleep. My bed and Harry’s basement and one time the passenger’s seat of his car while we were driving upstate because we had nothing else to do. We counted water towers.

“Okay.”

I liked houses from the outside, at night. When the light looks yellow through the living room window and everything is quiet even when there are people in between the curtains with their mouths moving. In the passenger’s seat, where I always was, I’d looked into so many homes and admired their yellow happiness. Only the cleanest homes will let you see inside. People part their curtains when they have something you can be envious of. I’d think: when I have a home, I’ll mount a television

on the wall like that and in the corner there will be a small table with shimmering bottles of liquor on it. Not the plastic stuff at Stephanie’s, which had a handle on the bottle, like a milk jug. They mixed the cheap whiskey with iced tea when there was no soda.

Through the window of Stephanie’s living room I could see the still-bright party, in the hours before the lights went off and everyone found their person to kiss or fight in the yard. From the car, I could only see a cross section of the living room, leaving out the coffee table below, covered in used red cups, abandoned by their drinkers.

The car was dark and I wanted Harry to kiss me, but then he turned on the light and I still wanted him to kiss me but it was harder to pretend that he might. In the dark it was like sleeping. You can dream when you’re asleep.

I drank spiked iced tea over moon-shaped ice, the kind that comes right out of the freezer when you press a lever on the door. It tasted like this one time I was on antibiotics as a kid but I couldn’t swallow pills so they crushed it between two spoons and put it in a drink. That was when my headache was so bad I had spots in my eyes and I couldn’t turn my head and they found the red rings on my stomach where I’d been bit. I’ve felt different since then, but my parents don’t believe me, because to them it’s like I’ve just grown up and changed because they were never inside my head when it was hurting. Harry understands because he’s the closest person to being in my brain aside from me, and maybe sometimes he’s in there more than I am, because he had a headache too, and I loved him for it. For other kids maybe it would have been a revelation, but Harry wasn’t even the first boy I loved.

Harry’s black tuxedo looked like the very absence of light against the painted walls of Stephanie’s house. Her mother read a lot of magazines, so the look of the place was always changing. Every year her party was a different color. This time, everything was lavender and gold. Stephanie was rich and could afford to change things in her house. She got new shoes every year and never rode the bus, even before we were old enough to drive.

Still wearing her floor-length, maroon taffeta gown, Stephanie played hostess, scurrying around her own home, inspecting the discarded cups and listening to the conversations, looking as though she might disintegrate into a maroonish dust should anyone start arguing, should there be any obvious signal that the stability of the night was about to deteriorate. When she saw me and Harry standing by the mahogany cabinet in the dining room, her bare shoulders sloped with a refreshed ease. We’d never cause a scene.

“Sorry we didn’t get to dance,” she said to Harry. Stephanie the proto-hag, courting us both for the possibility of a lifelong friendship with a gay man who understood things.

“I’m sorry you’re not the queen,” Harry said. She’d lost to a girl on a higher tier. Cliqueless and brilliant, a friend to no one but beloved by all. She had been wearing a white dress but didn’t look like she should be at a wedding because she was too readily oozing the teenage joy of peaking at seventeen, and not knowing it.

“I don’t care,” Stephanie said. A girl-hand from the passing crowd handed her a plastic cup. She winced when she drank it, like they do on TV, and her voice sounded wet when she next spoke. Like in movies. “Tiara is from the fucking Dollar General.”

“I suppose you got yours from Claire’s,” I said.

“It was my sixteenth birthday,” she said. “I got it from Party City, like an adult.”

She was okay. Maybe I only hated her sometimes because she could hang on Harry’s arm without reproach and could wear a maroon gown without it being a fun hobby meant to entertain people, like I would have to do it. Maybe I only hated her because she seemed really happy most of the time, and because she didn’t care that she wasn’t prom queen and she had a big nice house and parents who let her do things they shouldn’t let her do. One spiked iced tea in, I laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it, as if I could say without saying that I was sorry for hating her, even though I’d never said it out loud and she probably thought I was just being weird.