Girls’ Night In

Elaina Smith

We started a bonfire in my living room that night, probably twenty minutes after we stopped doing the regular girly stuff. You know, like painting each other’s nails and shaving my head. We lit my hair on fire and set the coffee table ablaze. Sylvia howled in pleasure, dipping herself into the flames so we could pass her around and smoke her. I’d never had a cigarette before, but Sylvia is known for going down smooth, so I only coughed a couple of times.
          Cleo, who is a pair of lips, spent a lot of time with Sylvia one-on-one. Cleo was plump and pillowy, always decorated with the shiniest, stickiest gloss. When Cleo took a drag, Monica and I looked at each other, wondering if we should give them some privacy.
          “Maybe we should put some music on,” Monica said, inserting herself into the tape deck of my boom box. The first few notes of “Are You Ready?” by Creed played, and we groaned. Monica was disheartened by the fact that we were sick of her songs, but there are only so many times you can listen to Human Clay in its entirety. But that’s who she was, and we had to love her for it, right?
           We didn’t know it, but it was the last time we would be together for a long time. I was moving the next day and craved one more wild night with my girls. Did they know how much I loved them? Or did they feel used?
           We took a drag of Sylvia and danced around the room. I started to feel light-headed, so I opened the window. The neighbors yelled from across the yard for us to turn down the music, but this only made Monica louder.
           “Can you take me higher?”
           And higher we went.
           We eventually exchanged Sylvia for some weed. She was starting to feel burned out. I hoped she didn’t always feel this way around us.
           Instead of adding weed to the burnt hair smell, we went outside to light up. The sky was green that night, and the moon was full. It reminded me of the type of moon you’d see a cow jump over.
           I asked my friends: “Have you ever seen a cow jump over the moon?”
           Cleo took a puff of the joint. “Yeah, but it was that weekend I went camping by Marquette. I think I saw Bigfoot that night, too.”
           We giggled. We told jokes until we fell to the ground and eventually, we were laying in the dewy grass, kicking our feet and squealing at the joy of being alive.
           We talked about the guys from our shared job at the Dream Weaving Center. We ranked them by hotness, then by who we felt safest with. We played spin the bottle on my back patio, but somehow, it always landed on Cleo.
           We wept over the fact that I was moving away soon. I talked about how being a Dream Weaver for the past four years had been eating me from the inside out. It was time for me to move on to the next thing: going back to school to become a Whimsy Consultant. This was the perfect way to say goodbye. New hair. New city. New me.
           Monica huffed as her tape deck clicked and the last song ended.
           “I think it’s time for me to go to bed,” she said. She was always the first to leave the party. She called her boyfriend to come get her. Without her music, the vibe died off.
           “What happens when we die?” Sylvia asked.
           “I don’t think anything happens,” said Cleo.
           “I don’t know,” I said, “I think I believe in heaven.” I touched my patchy, bald head. Inside, the bonfire still roared in my living room. “And I think it kind of feels like this.”

Elaina Smith is a Chicago-based writer, pursuing her MFA at DePaul University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southwest Review, New Plains Review, and Suspended Magazine. When she’s not writing, Elaina enjoys painting, going to local punk shows, and being a dive bar karaoke menace. She also teaches English at Roosevelt University.

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