I have a student—a heavy-set kid, maybe 19 years old. He’s stout and round-faced. Thick, dark hair covers his ears and looks bent and tortured in the back, probably from sleeping. He never speaks in class, but I like his writing. It’s very horny. He wrote a story about a boy who goes on a vacation to Las Vegas with his parents. His parents buy a case of Miller High Life and stay in their hotel room and watch TV and drink the beer and get drunk. Versions of this have appeared in a few stories from this class. The parents in several of my students’ stories get drunk in what I interpret to be dismal ways. I drink, so I don’t like to think I’m thinking dismally about these characters because they’re drinking. But more quietly I do because I have my unfairnesses and the sight of two exhausted parents getting hammered in a Vegas hotel room while their lonely kid wanders the Strip turns up in sad shades of ochre in my mind.
My student writes about strolling the aisles of a souvenir shop. Not much description regarding that shop, but I’m sure it is a freestanding gift shop, not inside a casino, but next to a liquor store where guys hand out cards advertising nude girls. I’ve been to Las Vegas and bought a hat in one of these shops, and I remember the lighting was florescent and unflattering and the opposite of the party lights spinning over the Strip and tumbling through casinos. The souvenir shop lighting was no-shoplifting lighting. I settled on a black baseball hat. Embroidered in red across the forehead: I heart LV. Red brim. It looked okay, even under those lights, so I bought it. I didn’t steal it. And my girlfriend at the time bought an ashtray for her grandmother. It was 1950s mint green and had playing cards and rolling dice imagery stamped into the tray’s face. I agreed her grandmother might enjoy extinguishing her cigarettes into that ashtray.
My girlfriend called her grandmother Mommom. She probably still does. Maybe because this grandmother is her mom’s mom. Mommom liked to gamble on the slot machines out where she lived on the East Coast, and she always won. Maybe she still does. Hundreds of dollars in nickel slots was what my girlfriend told me. And this girlfriend of mine had the same luck. Or has still, I don’t know. I do know she liked to walk slowly by betting tables, watch a dealer cascade a deck of cards from one hand to the other. She’d place bills nonchalantly on the felt mat, easy as if she were ashing a cigarette.
We stopped at a roulette table. I stood next to her, so close her hair fell across my upper arm. The dealer, in vest and tie, nodded at her and at the other players. I don’t remember their faces because I just liked watching my girl and the tick tick of her brain, familiar with luck and how to appear unworried and disinterested in the cash at stake. Her eyes followed the bouncing marble. Watched it rat-a-tat while the numbers blurred by, then slowed then stopped. And just like that—I didn’t realize the betting had gone from beginning to middle to end—the dealer pushed a tall stack of chips at my girl, who nodded back, thank you, no big deal. She scooped her winning tower, slipped it into her coat pocket, glided away from the table. She wore a long dark coat, but the material was thin and soft, and when she walked, the hem caught air and floated up and flapped around the backs of her knees. Striding across the burnt yellows and oranges and deep blue shapes in the casino carpet, she held out her hand. I stepped up and took it in mine. This girl had pretty hands, I’m sure she still does, even though one of her pinkies was broken years and years ago and never healed properly, and so her left pinky is always bent. She would run her hand across my back and over my butt and down my legs, and I could feel the specific crook in her pinky applying its specific pressure, impressing a specific line into my skin.
The kid in my student’s story walks up and down the aisles of the souvenir shop, stopping at the “press me” merch, to let his fingertip decide which one is best to poke—those are his words. I’ve stolen them from his homework. He spots a woman from behind. She’s wearing a tight dress, in what I imagine to be an animal print. He pays tremendous attention to the tightness of her dress. He describes her ass in it. It’s round and juicy, but the thrust in his looking is galloping and hungry, and I picture my student in an extra-large T-shirt and droopy jeans and smashed sneakers, and I see his chest rise and fall with big breaths in his big clothes as he stands behind this woman in the bulb-bleached aisle of this shop. I see his thick hands, like paddles, and I can feel the sweaty itch in them, the scratching desire to place them on her.
That weekend in Vegas, my girl and I spent her chips on drinks at a nightclub somewhere on the Strip. I like the way she placed her broken pinky hand on the back of my neck. I like the way she looked at me while we danced. For a few moments or even a whole song, she grabbed all her hair and pulled it up off her neck, held it heaped at the top of her head. Then she dropped her hair, peeled off her shirt, tucked it into the back of her jeans, was hands-free and topless.
There was my girl dancing in her bra. Black satiny cups with black lace along the edges. Dancing men swiveled close. In moved hairy arms, shoulders, chests pressing tight and closing in around her. She leaned into to me, her breasts and neck against me, lips in my ear, and she whisper-shouted something like wet ham. I forgot to ever ask her what she meant by that.
The lights flashed carnivally, turning the dancefloor all colors. I pulled her close—us, dancing, drunk, music rattling our teeth. Strands of her hair clung to her neck. She swiped her palm across my damp midriff. It slid fast, her crooked pinky pressing hardest. Like striking a match.
Later we woke up in the casino, in the hotel, in the room, in the bed we’d booked, and didn’t remember getting there, neither of us did. From dancing to now, with no memory? We examined the facts like disbelievers. Counted and recounted drinks at the bar. Wondered if we’d fucked. Figured we had. Wished we remembered. In a wad on the carpet next to my side of the bed was the shirt she’d worn and removed at the nightclub. There was my bra strewn several feet from it, like it’d wiped out, face down in the carpet. Then we were laughing, shrugging, not minding at all. I was on my back and the sheets felt smooth and cool against my bare skin and the ceiling was plain and painted cloud gray. I rolled over onto her and noticed my vision fell several beats behind my movement. Then there were her eyes. The sunlight through the open draped window pinwheeled in them. She looked surprised and happy. I like to think of that particular look in that particular moment as hers for me. That look is like a song I loop in my head, sometimes even still.
The boy in my student’s story never touches the woman in the aisle at the gift shop. Never even speaks to her. But he gets close enough to smell her. Stands behind her for a few hot moments pretending to examine key chains, inhaling. She picks up mugs and turns them around in her hands. She has long nails painted darker than red. She practices drinking from the one with flamingos on it. Takes it to her mouth and tips it, like she imagines it’s full of coffee. When she returns it to the shelf, it has a smudge of lipstick on the rim. She walks slowly to the cash register, doing a lady-walk the narrator relishes. She buys a lighter. She leaves the shop. He wipes her lipstick from the cup onto his jeans—a red bolt over his right front pocket. He says she smelled like pumpkin pie. It’s been three years. He jerks off extra on Thanksgiving—steals the empty pie tin after dessert, locks his grandma’s bathroom door. And the lipstick won’t wash from his jeans.
My girlfriend and I checked out, and I pulled the brim of my new hat down low over my eyes. The sun on the long drag between our hotel and breakfast was high and fiery. At the diner I ate a puffy biscuit with white gravy, and my girl stacked a fried egg on her buttered toast, crossed it with bacon, lifted it to her mouth on her fingertips. I enjoyed this meal so much. On the way out, from a bowl on the counter near the door, I pocketed a book of matches. I have not been to Vegas since.
The day we broke up, a year or so after this trip, after a fight about I don’t remember what—dinner reservations, a parking ticket, how to properly recork champagne, about how I didn’t call, about how she didn’t call, about who was talking to what person for too long at which party?—the final fight about something tinny that scorched in the heat of whatever was burning beneath it, and before she left my apartment and got in her car and drove away from my life, she took her toothbrush from the cup in the cabinet above the sink in my bathroom. She dropped it in my bathroom trash. Red plastic with white bristles in a pile of Kleenex and next to two strands of floss. I noticed it later that evening.
For a long time I didn’t empty that trash. Walked into the kitchen, to the bin next to the fridge to dispose of used Q-tips, more tissues, an empty tube of toothpaste. I didn’t want to bury her red toothbrush. I also couldn’t look at it. For three weeks I practiced not looking down in my bathroom, ignored the linoleum and bathmat. While I stood at my sink, between the towel rack and the open jaw of my bathroom trash, I kept my eyes trained on a spider web in the high corner to the left of the showerhead. That toothbrush—it had been in her mouth.

Marisa Matarazzo is the author of Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Hobart, Unstuck, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor in the MFA Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design. She lives in Los Angeles and is nearing completion of a novel.