by Kami Westhoff
Watchers
That summer we were all Butt Rock and back seats,
shooting fuzzy navel wine coolers, Marb Reds pinched
between with our Too Hot to Handle lips. Jeans high and tight,
crotches snug against our triple-snap body suits meant
to make the boys behave.
None of us had died yet, so we all acted as though we
never would, let our boyfriends palm a breast in one hand,
cocked gun in the other. Sometimes they’d let us practice,
steady our wrists, slip their finger where they said ours
should go. We’d shriek at each blast, even though we saw
it coming, and they’d ease away the gun, say to each other,
Watch out for this one.
No one said a word, but we all knew what was going on
when Dressler cranked “You Shook Me All Night Long”
on his Alpine, grabbed the hand of one of the girls who
wasn’t one of us, maybe from the county or the reservation,
led her far enough into the thicket we could claim we didn’t
see shit and believe it.
A few years later, that same girl jumped off an overpass
during rush hour. Or was she the one who had leukemia?
Car accident? She could’ve been the one who got away
but couldn’t stop seeing ghosts. Maybe she never came
out of the woods.
When we think of those nights, these are the things
we remember: how we took care of each other—scraped
away lipstick when it smeared skin, steadied the sticky
bottles of wine coolers when we’d had too many, made curtains
of jean jackets when we had to pee. We remember ourselves
as the ones you better watch out for, but really,
we were just the watchers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kami Westhoff is the author of chapbooks Sleepwalker, winner of Minerva Rising’s Dare to Be award, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali. Her short story collection The Criteria is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Meridian, Hippocampus, Booth, Carve, Third Coast, Passages North, The Pinch, West Branch, Waxwing, and others. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.