Connie touches the point of the toothpick to the soap’s nozzle and plunges it into the milk.
“Car door boobytrap Duffy. Swat Todd, I mean Fuckface.”
At the center is the toothpick, nuking that little white world, exploding everything into color, birthing new colors in the chaos, knocking the molecular houses down, turning towns into wet ash, the destruction coming all from a single point, where Beddy wanted to be, the center. Down the toothpick dives, over and over, Connie intoning the revenges all the while the fingers on her left hand rap on the table rhythmically. Beddy feels her attention being stretched and divided. Between the reaction, Connie’s voice, and her friend’s fingers thrumming on the table, she does not know where to focus. For a while she settles on listening to the revenges while watching the reaction, but gradually she finds her ears and eyes drawn to Connie’s fingers, thrrap, thrrap, thrrap, and the flashing of her rings she wore to Formal, each inlaid with a human tooth. She watches and listens to the teeth dance on her hand until her fingers stop.
“The milk has spoken.”
The colors are still now. The milk a mossy brown oil slick.
“What did it…we…pick?” Beddy says.
“We’re jamming Fuckface, and doing the Smell Jar to Duffy.”
Ok. She hasn’t agreed to any of this yet, but ok.
“That’s what the milk spelled out and we’re just going to do it?” Di says. “We have no free will?”
“Fuuuuuuuck. Di, you accidental genius. I totally forgot it’s my brother’s spelling semifinals. My mom’s wondering where I am.
“Di, we have to leave now. I don’t have time to take you home, so you’re coming with.”
“Ok.”
Beddy eyes Void, busy sucking a raw egg into his mouth and, finding it inedible, discharging it into his hand, then turning it at a different angle and trying again.
“Take me with you,” she says faintly.
Her friends get out of their chairs and scoot them in. They must not have heard her.
“Please take me with you.”
“We can’t leave all these dishes,” Di says.
“No time,” Connie says.
“We know Deirdre will be upset.”
Beddy nods vigorously. All of her Formal preparation had made her fall behind. “Of course,” she says. “She will.”
“Ok, then. You get upstairs and hurry out of that sad-ass bathrobe,” Connie says, “and Di and I will take care of these. Mostly Di.”
Now how to get Void to follow her upstairs? She snatches the egg from him, and thinks briefly of hurling it into the living room so he’ll bound after it, but he isn’t a dog, is he? Not even an imaginary one.
She places the egg back in its carton and shelves it in the fridge. He utters something like a whine, somewhere between disappointment and longing. Maybe he’s more dog-like than she thought.
She stands in front of him to establish eye contact, or as near to eye contact as she can wager. She tilts her neck toward the living room twice rapidly.
He doesn’t move, other than the slight pitching while hovering in place, as if his bouyancy is borne by an invisible tide.
She tilts her neck again, this time in clear pairs of two.
His head cocks, and she’s sure she has his attention. Maybe he doesn’t know the gesture. His goggles stare back at her, at the same time she feels staring coming from behind her.