Page 40 of Such Sharp Teeth

He doesn’t look the way he did in high school. He’s taken a different shape. He’s a different person. He’s grown up. It occurs to me that maybe I don’t know him anymore. Maybe I don’t know him at all.

Our dynamic, too. It’s not what it was. I don’t have all the power anymore. I’m not in full control. Because I care. Because I want him.

I sip some of the beer straight from the pitcher.

“You first,” he says.

“Are you a good bowler?” I ask him. “Is that why you asked me to go bowling?”

“No,” he says. “Not particularly.”

I select a dark purple ball. I don’t really love the idea of sticking my fingers in these holes. Who knows the last time these balls were sanitized? But I guess I’ve done worse.

“Then why’d you take me bowling?” I ask him.

“Seemed like your kind of thing,” he says. “You don’t like to sit still.”

“Mm,” I say.

It’s true. Maybe I don’t know him anymore, but he knows me.

I let the ball go, and it doesn’t really roll so much as soar a few inches over the lane. When it smashes into the pins, the sound is loud and violent. I worry I broke something.

I turn around, wearing this worry on my face.

“Strike,” Ian says.

He doesn’t appear fazed by the aggression of my bowl. Both the teenager behind the front desk and the bartender are gawping from afar, so it was definitely not the average strike.

On my next go, I practice restraint.

“If I didn’t know you better, I would think you started to hold back on me,” Ian says, eyeing me suspiciously as I wait for the machine to regurgitate my ball.

“No,” I say. “This is me trying my hardest.”

Trying my hardest not to reveal that I now have legit supernatural strength.

I become so focused on not putting a hole through the back of the alley, the conversation withers, and by the end of the game we’re barely talking, just taking turns bowling.

I pour myself more beer and realize I’ve finished most of this pitcher myself.

It’s not going well.

When the game is over, Ian stares at the screen and says, “Do you want to go to my place?”

He’s barely finished the sentence before I say, “Yes.”

—

Ian lives in a two-story brick building on a busy stretch of East Avenue, with restaurants and coffee shops and stores that sell shit like knit hats and greeting cards and ornaments. He pulls down a secluded driveway and parks on a patch of gravel behind the building. He opens the car door for me, which is helpful, because my hands are busy catching all this bountiful nervous sweat my body has apparently been stockpiling for the last twenty-seven years.

“This used to be a bank,” he says, letting us in through the back door.

He flips on the lights.

There’s a kitchen to the left, with stainless steel cabinets and appliances. There’s a long, counter-height wooden dining table with pipes for legs and stools underneath.

Beyond the kitchen is a living space with vaulted ceilings, wooden beams, exposed brick. Hanging Edison bulbs light the room. There are an enormous couch and a few worn leather armchairs. Many, many bookshelves, the same wood-and-pipe style as the dining table, jammed with books. There are framed pictures of album covers and concert venues. In the corner of the room is a collection of instruments, mostly guitars, a drum set, a keyboard, a bass. There’s a record player sitting beside crates and crates of records.