Geometry Pt. 1: Third Person Squared (Batter Up)
“…She thinks she might like the boy in the middle. She took a motorbike ride with him once (wherein she squealed appreciatively in a charming manner). She’s had a couple of decent “We’ve got friends in common, we probably have other things in common” conversations with him. She’s battered her eyes at him. She has pretty eyes, she’s heard…”
“Wait a minute…Battered her eyes?”
The author was slightly drunk.
“That can’t be right. It’s not “battered,” for Christ’s sake.”
She was just past the buzzed stage, having had to pinch pennies at the bar tonight and come home early, alone. She’d spent the evening watching two musicians she’d previously slept with play a show (they’re in the same band), sitting behind a friend of theirs that she thinks she might like. When she came home, she decided it’d be a good story. She likes writing rambling little tales of woe she pretends aren’t about her (God, does she love third person), but at least the stories are better than the songs she used to write. She really can’t sing to save her life.
“She thinks she might like the boy in the middle…” Ooh, good beginning. She’d smiled and managed a sip from her plastic cup of cheap screw-top wine without extinguishing her dangling cigarette (she thinks she looks really romantic when she does this, by the way). The words flew out in a dazzling, piquantly drunken manner…Love, longing, self-hate, a piteous but subdued hope…It was all there. She wrapped up her tiny opus with a flip, slightly despondent sentence (her trademark) and brushed a fragment of cigarette ash off her chest. The warm glow of accomplishment and $5 Chablis spread through her as she leaned back to read.
“Battered? That’s not right. What the fuck?”
Sad to say, it took her a good five minutes to recall the proper term was “Batted.” Then she couldn’t decide if the correct present tense was “Batt” or “Bat.”
That night she had nightmares about people dipping their faces in a mixture of eggs, flour, and milk (salt and pepper to taste), followed by the deep frying of eyelashes.
The image is still kind of haunting her.