Other Names Used

The name tag says EUGENE SLOCUM over a face that has cost eighty-one thousand dollars so far, most of it somebody else's.

The reunion committee printed the senior photos on the tags and laminated each one stiff and hung it from a lanyard the red of the old track. His shows the boy from 2006. The boy has wire glasses, and his chin runs back into his neck like it is hiding from the camera. Water pins his part flat. 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 Brandsma says. He claps him on the shoulder, whap, and holds him off at arm's length by the same shoulder. "Look at you."

Dusty is looking at a jaw that runs sixty-one thousand dollars on the explanation of benefits. A surgeon in Omaha cut the lower half of his face loose and slid it forward and screwed it back on with titanium. The insurance paid because the sleep study said apnea, and the sleep study said apnea because he lay flat on his back for it all night and let the chin do what the chin does. Four thousand two hundred came out of his own account. The lower lip came back numb and stayed numb. A paragraph he initialed on the consent form said it might.

The hair came off the back of his own head and went to the front in a clinic in Kansas City where the technician called him sweetheart from the numbing shot to the bandage, and the receipt says twenty-six hundred grafts at six dollars a graft. A laser in West Des Moines took most of the acne scars for forty-four hundred dollars, and a pea of tretinoin every night does the upkeep. The testosterone comes from a men's clinic between a plasma center and a payday lender, so the men in that parking lot are selling their blood, borrowing against the next check, or buying back their twenties at a hundred and forty-nine dollars a month. It arrives in a small brown vial labeled two hundred milligrams per milliliter, and once a week he draws it up himself 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 Zepbound took the weight. The gym took every morning before work for six years and gave him back a chest that two women at this reunion have already knocked on for studs.

Cut him open and he comes with serial numbers.

He has kept every receipt in a folder in Des Moines, with a tab for the surgeon and a tab for the clinic and a tab he labeled SWEETHEART, 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.

Every wedding in town ends up in the clubhouse at the municipal course, and tonight the class of 2006 does too. The caterer's teenagers have cleared the chicken. A chafing dish of Swedish meatballs sweats under a heat lamp for the people who stayed to drink. A DJ works the far wall. A banner over the bar says TWENTY YEARS in the school's red. He stands at the bar with a club soda and a lime.

Tara Meinholz puts her hand on his chest and leaves it there. "Look at you. 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 goes down the room like a queue. Dusty Brandsma carries his weight in the neck and a pinch of Copenhagen in his lip, and in the queue the neck alone would put him at Table 4, double the price of a healthy man, 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 color of a manila folder, and he would postpone her pending liver enzymes, and the lab slip would die in her purse. Photographs in dollar-store frames stand on the memorial table by the coat rack. Coach Bly smiles between the woman who taught Spanish and a boy from his class whose cause of death was a deer on Highway 92. 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 up the fat at Eugene Slocum's hip in front of the bleachers and let the spring go.

Snap.

He read the dial out loud to the gym like a mile time. The bleachers laughed. Dusty Brandsma said the name for the first time that afternoon. In the third row Crystal Ostrander crossed her ankles and put her hand over her mouth. A girl did that in those years when she wanted credit for holding it in.

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, reddens the cheeks, and grows a pale fuzz along the jaw. It moves the fat to the trunk and to the back of the neck and takes it off the arms, so her wrists come out of the long 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. Somebody who knew where her hair had gone sparse cut it short and expensive. The card on her lanyard shows the prom queen.

He knows the dose.

He reaches up and turns his own card on its lanyard so the boy faces the room.

She crosses the room with the can in both hands. "Gene."

In Des Moines he is Gene on the nameplate and the voicemail and the parking pass. In this town he has been Eugene on paper since the birth certificate and Slow-cum everywhere else from sophomore year on, and his mother still uses the whole thing. Crystal says Gene the way a pharmacist reads a name off a label. Her eyes stay on his face.

"Crystal."

"I know. I look like a thumb."

He drinks his club soda.

"Prednisone. Since Grace was born." The can shakes on the way up and shakes on the way down, and she lets it. "You were about to look at my card, so I saved you the trip. Everybody's been looking at yours all night. Then at you. Then at the card."

"And?"

"And you used to look at me like you wanted to skin me and wear me to prom."

The DJ plays "Hips Don't Lie." Dusty Brandsma tells a circle of men about a boat.

"You sat behind me in Chem," she says.

He took Chemistry fourth period in the other section from the teacher who let them watch movies. He turns the lime over in his glass with the straw.

"You still do hair?"

"Color. My hands won't hold scissors anymore." She holds up the one with the can in it, and the can agrees with her. "What do you do, Gene, that made you look like that?"

"Insurance."

"Selling?"

"Underwriting."

"Huh." She looks at his jaw. "So you're the one who says no."

"I'm one of them."

She looks at his chest, then at his hands, then at the club soda. "You don't drink?"

"It's a question on page four."

"I know what page four is." She sets the can on the bar behind her without looking for the bar, tunk. "I'm leaving at ten-thirty. I take my pills at eleven, and I take them in bed. You can come, or you can stay and hear about the boat."

He looks at the card on her chest. On it the prom queen has bare shoulders and all her hair. Crystal puts her hand flat over it. "Don't. You already did."