Other Names Used

The name tag says EUGENE SLOCUM over a face that cost sixty-one thousand dollars to fix, most of it somebody else's.

The reunion committee printed the senior photos on the tags. They laminated each one stiff and hung it from a lanyard the red of the old track. His shows the boy from 2006. The boy wears wire glasses. The boy's chin runs back into his neck like it is hiding from the camera. The boy combed his part with water. Everyone in the clubhouse wears the year they were, and everyone in the clubhouse looks at the card, then at the person, then at the card again.

"Slow-cum," Dusty Rademaker says. He hits Gene on the shoulder and then holds him off by the same shoulder at arm's length. "Look at you."

Sixty-one thousand is the number on the explanation of benefits for the jaw. A surgeon in Omaha unbolted the lower half of his face, slid it forward, and screwed it back on with titanium, and the insurance paid because the chart said sleep apnea, and the chart said sleep apnea because he told his dentist he snored. Four thousand two hundred came out of his own account. The lower lip came back numb and stayed numb. The consent form said it might, in a paragraph he initialed.

The hair came off the back of his own head, twenty-six hundred grafts at six dollars a graft, and went to the front in a clinic in Kansas City where the technician hummed. The testosterone comes from a men's clinic in a strip mall between a Verizon store and a vape shop. It arrives in a small brown vial that holds two hundred milligrams to the milliliter, and he draws it up himself on Sunday nights at the kitchen table with the blinds down and puts it in the outside of his thigh, where the pamphlet says the nerves are fewest. The tirzepatide took the weight. The tretinoin took most of the acne scars. The gym took the hour between five and six every morning for six years and gave him back a chest that two women at this reunion have already tested the way you test a wall for studs.

Cut him open and the coroner finds serial numbers.

He kept every receipt, the surgeon's and the clinic's and the humming technician's, in a folder in Des Moines, and if he died tonight his mother could return him piece by piece for store credit and be left holding the boy on the lanyard.

The clubhouse at the municipal course holds the class of 2006 the way it holds every wedding in town. A chafing dish of Swedish meatballs sweats under a heat lamp. A DJ works the far wall. A banner over the bar says TWENTY YEARS in the school's red. He drinks club soda with a lime in it.

Tara Meinholz puts her hand on his chest and leaves it there.

"Look at you," she says. "What happened to you?"

"Nothing happened."

She laughs and takes the hand back to steady her wine. The men look at the card, then at his forearms, then at their wives.

He reads the room the way he reads a queue. Dusty Rademaker carries his weight in the neck and a tin of Copenhagen in his lip, and the neck alone runs Table 4 before the tobacco rate goes on. Tara Meinholz holds her wine in the hand that shakes, and the whites of her eyes have gone the yellow of old piano keys, and he would postpone her pending liver enzymes, and she would never send them. The memorial table by the coat rack holds photographs in dollar-store frames. Coach Bly hangs between a car accident and the woman who taught Spanish. He would have written two of them at Preferred.

A reunion is a room where everybody gets rated at once and nobody gets the letter.

Coach Bly owned a pair of chrome skinfold calipers with a dial on them. Sophomore year he pinched the fat at Eugene Slocum's hip in front of the bleachers, and the spring went snap, and he read the dial out loud to the gym the way he read out mile times. The bleachers laughed. Dusty Rademaker said the name for the first time that afternoon. Crystal Ostrander sat in the third row with her ankles crossed and her hand over her mouth, the way a girl laughed then when she wanted credit for not laughing.

She stands by the exit now in long sleeves with a can of Diet Coke and the face the drug built.

Prednisone rearranges a body. It rounds the face and reddens the cheeks and lays a fine pale down along the jaw. It moves the fat to the trunk and to the back of the neck and takes it off the arms, so the arms come out of the sleeves the width of a child's. It thins the skin to carbon paper, so whatever presses on her comes through in purple. It takes the bone. Her hair is cut short in a shape that costs money, by someone who cut for the thin places, and the someone was her. The card on her lanyard shows the prom queen.

He does not have to guess.

He came here for her to look at the card and then at him. He came for the pause between the two.