Prom Night

            We took turns driving wheelies around the parking lot after prom. My date’s friend and his older brother had picked us up from my house hours earlier, snapping pictures as my date slid a navy-blue corsage onto my wrist. It matched the dress I had borrowed to look beautiful, a blue sleeveless number with a sweetheart neckline that shimmered when I turned. My makeup and hair plus jewelry had taken three hours at Macy’s. My blue eyelids complemented his blue checkered tie and the gray suit jacket he would sling over my shoulder by the end of the night as we waited on the nautical-themed balcony of the boathouse. The dance floor had dwindled to 90s R&B, and the football players had disappeared, taking the cheerleaders with them. We hadn’t been invited to any after parties. My date kept asking if I was okay. If I cared, I didn’t show it. Out of obligation or pity, the older brother drove us around Columbus near dawn, the streets empty as we soared across the inky highways and skirted through the parking lot at the strip mall. The lot was so empty our voices reverberated as we hooped and hollered. We were both without a license. Life was happening, the night seemed to say, and we would either be swept along or left out. I hoisted the dress around my thighs and climbed into the driver’s seat. I sparked the car and moved forward a few inches before putting it into park, laughing, and climbing out to give my date a turn. The boys jostled his shoulders as he climbed into the car with a sheepish grin. When the headlights flickered on, I saw the bird—a grey medium-sized Canada goose sprawled lifeless on the pavement, its neck bent backwards under its wings, a spiral. I recalled the boathouse at prom, overlooking where the city and the river converged. How the lights spilled out into the water, like one great teeming body. My date rolled the window down and peered out. Is that a goose? The streetlight shone on the carcass as the night curved around us. Perhaps I half-expected him to stop. I half-hoped we’d all climb out and peer mournfully over its drooping body. Instead, he pulled the car into gear and pressed on the gas. The tires rolled over the bird like a speed bump. He pressed the gas again, and it sputtered. This time, pieces of feathers took to air like smoke. He seemed to hesitate as he did it, though no one had asked him to. I froze, unsettled. It was the unnecessary cruelty of boyhood. The same one I’d seen when I was eight, and I played inside an empty cardboard box that my brother shoved from behind. The box toppled over, the opening flaps buried beneath me so I couldn’t get up. I thought I’d be asphyxiated by the weight of my own body (head bent, neck lodged between my knees). While I screamed, my brother laughed somewhere in the ether, like he had fulfilled some compulsory dare. In the car, I felt my stomach pool with vomit. I felt stuck and silly, now, in that prickly dress and matching clutch, which were neither mine, but somebody else’s, the countless folds of girls at prom night, wistful in a v-formation, streaming in and out of the bathroom. All those hours under the hot comb and at the makeup counter. Geese travel over 2,000 miles in a day like this without stopping. I strapped my seatbelt as the tires kissed the pavement. He spun the wheel and drove a round across the parking lot, the bird flattened and even more dead than before. He pulled into park and passed the keys to the older brother, who asked if we were hungry. When we arrived at my house, I wrangled for my keys and turned towards the door. I would not look back. I would not talk to him again, even when I saw him in the neighborhood, and then out in the city, always thinking of the goose’s molted feathers, masked thick with blood, the cascade of light shining over its lifeless body. How some things come all this way, only to die in the end.