Dead Eyed Girls

This wasn't in fact her best year. It would instead be the year something strange happened to her. Not an event specifically, (though she would argue it was triggered by a man in the street spitting in her face) but there was something off about her. She gradually developed a wandering eye, accompanied by headaches and dizzy spells. She could no longer look herself straight in the mirror, couldn't grasp her face as a whole. One night she went away to a cabin with a man. They went to walk out on the frozen lake. She was bundled in so many layers she felt like an astronaut bouncing across the moon, a beer in each coat pocket. Her toes were the only part of her that was cold. They hurt really bad actually, but she refused to say anything and waited until he decide they head back. When they got back inside, her toes burned as they slowly warmed again and she wished they would have just frozen off. She would have traded them if her face could just go back to the way it was. She had depended on her face, with its symmetrical eyes, because it was all she really had to offer anybody. Later she sat on the concrete floor in the basement while he chopped fire wood. She asked him if he thought they were friends. He wasn't sure what to answer. Maybe she was imagining things, but it felt as though he couldn't look her straight in the face anymore either.