“Head On” by Lisa McAllister
A clear cold last day of the year. We spend it in bed, as usual, only getting up to shower and change when the shadows start turning the snowdrifts blue gray and the light sucks away gradually from our fourth-story windows and leaves us in the dark.
“They’re your fucking friends. I don’t see why I have to go.” Cal sitting on the floor, lacing up his combat boots.
“Because you do.” Me at the bathroom mirror, eyeliner in hand.
“You’re lucky you’re cute.”
“Fuck off.”
I am ripped black jeans, Bikini Kill T-shirt, Doc Martens, his old blue flannel. He’s almost my twin in ragged jeans, Misfits shirt, black leather jacket and boots. We look like we feel: wild and full of an unformed and unspoken anger that simmers below our collective surface like a school of piranha, constantly taking bites out of us.
The heater in the car works, but the defrost doesn’t, so he scrapes at the inside of the windshield while I drive, the Pixies cranked up. “As soon as I get my head around you
I come around catching sparks off you.”
I sing along; he doesn’t.
“This the place? Did you know he was rich?”
“No. Julie’s only been dating him about three months.”
“This is going to blow.”
“Maybe it will be fun.”
“No.”
“Whatever. Maybe they’ll have booze.”
I park the car on the street and we skid down the sidewalk to the lit-up house. From the front walk, we can already hear the party, loud bass, the sound of voices talking and laughing.
“Should I ring the doorbell, or…”
“It’s not a dinner party. Open the fucking door.”
We walk in and immediately start sweating—the place is packed. I look around for someone, anyone, I know. The air is thick with cigarette and pot smoke. I look around for the girl who was my best friend, somewhere the middle school girl who ate mint chocolate chip ice cream until she threw up, the girl who saw Goonies twelve times in the theatre, somewhere the girl who came late to her best friend’s wedding, only five months ago. This is her boyfriend’s house; these are her new friends.
Finally, I spot Julie hanging around the kitchen, wine and beer and liquor bottles on granite countertops, some boys throwing fake fruit at each other.
“Hey.”
“Hey. Glad you could make it.”
Julie doesn’t offer to introduce me and Cal to anyone. We’re on their own. We grab beers and wander back into the living room. Cal sits down in front of the stereo, starts going through the records. I flop on the couch and lights a cigarette. Some drunk kid comes up and sits beside me. “Didn’t you go to West?”
“No.”
“Because you look like—”
I get up and move through the crowd, stopping for a moment to lay my hand lightly on Cal’s back before heading toward loud sounds coming out of the basement.
Julie’s douche bag boyfriend Eric has a guitar strapped to him, tuning up on an actual stage his daddy must have had built for him, in this finished suburban basement nightmare. Kids mill around in front, waiting for what promises to be terrible. The drummer has long black dyed hair hanging in his eyes, no shirt. The bass player is an Asian kid I recognize from middle school. He played the saxophone back then.
Eric steps up to the mic. “We’re Torrent of Tears. I’m Eric. This is my house. Happy fuckin’ New Year!”
They start playing and it’s as bad as I feared—like if the members of Bush all got shot in the face and had their arms cut off at the elbow and still somehow managed to keep playing. Some boys are moshing right in front of me, grabbing each other’s clothes and throwing themselves around in wild fury.
I see another boy I know from the old neighborhood and suddenly I remember the woods.
Frigid air, the week off school between Christmas and New Year’s. A new blue sled, bought by parents unable to accept my new preteen status, abandoned at the bottom of the hill. The bark of a naked tree, sharp at my back, coat hitched up, his hand in my pants. I fought. A bloody lip.
Later, staring in the mirror at my swollen mouth, blood-shot eyes, I wondered if that was what it would always be like. That fucking sled never had a chance.
I push off the fake paneled wall and launches myself into the mosh pit feet first, a whirling dervish in combat boots and flannel shirt. I’m breathing hard as my foot connects with someone’s shin. I kick and flail my arms, using them like hooks to draw others close so I can pummel them with my fists. I’ve only had one beer, haven’t smoked any weed, but I have that feeling of recklessness, of not giving a shit if I kill every motherfucker here.
Someone falls and I stomp on their upturned palm, like crushing a flower, like crushing a cockroach in our apartment, and I feel nothing.
Then, Cal’s arms around my waist, lifting me out of the melee, carrying me still kicking up the stairs to the now deserted kitchen. Empty bottles and cigarettes floating in one inch of beer. I gasp for breath, leaning over the sink, thinking I’m going to puke.
Cal opens the stainless-steel refrigerator, stares for a moment and then grabs a green glass bottle. “Let’s go.”
Outside, crisp cold air instantly cools me off. I can feel my sweaty bangs freezing into weird shapes. Cal’s hand warm in mine, he leads me to the car. When he turns the key, the Pixies pick up where they left off before: “And the way I feel tonight/I could die and I wouldn't mind.”
Cal pulls the foil from the bottle and gently, more gently than I knew him capable, works the cork out with a soft “pop.” He takes a long drink, then hands me the bottle. “To us,” he toasts.
I take a drink, and it’s like liquid stars, like all the stars I can see in the black sky, even out here in the suburbs, have been condensed and bottled up just for us and I swallow and they pop pop pop down my esophagus and into my belly.
“Happy New Year,” I say.
Lisa McAllister is a poet and novelist from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her full-length debut novel Mother’s Little Helper was published in 2023 and her poetry chapbook Before and After: Poems of Love and Grief was published by Gnashing Teeth Publishing in March of 2024. She has been featured in many online and traditional anthologies and literary journals like deuce coupe, Big Hammer, and Blue Collar Review and has won multiple poetry and short story contests.
Find her at
