The Do-Over
by Evan Fuller
Copyright Evan Fuller 2015. All rights reserved. This is a quick-and dirty release so I'm not doing a whole copyright page, but imagine the standard legal language is here.
Foreword
I wrote The Do-Over in the summer of 2012. Between grad school applications; crowdfunding, finishing, and publishing Stray, graduating college; coming down with a couple minor diseases; and founding a startup that's received most of my focus for the past two years, I never got to give this this little book a full release.
I just dug up this most recent revision from November 2013, and I've decided to publish it now, as I'll have no other novels or long stories coming out by the end of the year. I could hold onto it longer and revise it a dozen more times, but I'm moving onto new things and figured it was time for the book to see the light of day. Write me at
[email protected]ail.com and let me know what you think.
Evan Fuller
October 2015
for Michaela
Over
The events preceding Jeanette Winters’ death are shrouded in uncertainty, not because there is any particular mystery but because, having only just died, she finds her memory in profound disarray. Her headache is murder: is it possible to be deceased and hung over at once?
Lying on her back, she shields her face against an ethereal light, straining to gather her meandering thoughts and recall exactly how she came to be here. As she peers back through the hours and liquor haze, a scene begins to take vague shape: dim light, ice in drained glasses, and Jimmy saying something about crabs.
“Name the three parts of a soft-shelled crab that you can’t eat,” he says, looking pointedly at Mona with three fingers raised.
“Umm.” Mona shrugs, her limited knowledge of crustaceans embarrassingly apparent. “Eyes, claws, and genitals?”
“Nah, you can eat the claws. It’s the eyes, lungs, and genitals.” Jimmy grins. “Of course, since those parts aren’t edible, you can’t cook the crabs with them still attached. So the way you prep the crabs is you sit down with a big bucket of live ones on one side and a big empty bucket on the other side, you take a paring knife, and you just work your way through the bucket.” He pantomimes for effect. “Eyes, lungs, genitals.”
Mona looks afraid for her eyes, lungs, and/or genitals. “I think that would be enough to put me off seafood forever.”
Jimmy shrugs. “You gotta remember two things. First, they’d do it to you too if they could. They’re nasty creatures, and they eat anything they can get their claws on, dead or alive. The other thing is that they’re just really damn stupid animals. They pretty much walk up on the beach and let you harvest them. So I don’t really feel bad about it. I figure, screw ‘em.”
“Well. I’m going to need another drink after that one.” Mona clears her throat and waves the bartender to their table. “What are you having, Jennie?”
Though present, dead Jennie has begun to see the conversation with relative clarity as she pieces it together, in-the-moment Jennie is distracted. “Hmm? Oh. Umm. Vodka. Vodka something. Vodka’s good.”
“A whisky sour and a vodka something,” Mona tells a perplexed bartender.
“Make it two whisky sours, bro,” Jimmy jumps in, “and a Coke for the square.” James, caught in the ruins of an imploding love affair, doesn’t look up from his cell phone to respond.
When the drinks arrive, Jennie’s spirits rally. Ethanol will be the first good thing that has happened today. “I feel like we need a toast,” Mona announces.
“Wait, wait, I got a good one.” Jimmy raises his whisky and motions at James and Jennie in turn. “To you two not moping any more for the rest of the evening.”
James glances glumly up from his phone, then back down at it.
“How about this?” Mona offers. “To living out the remainder of our twenties before having any children. I think it’s pretty noble goal.”
Jennie attempts a smile. “Cheers.” Half an hour later, they are three drinks in and Jennie feels like everything may actually be alright.
Half an hour after that, they are six drinks in and Jennie is crying in the bar bathroom.
She emerges from the bathroom and orders another cocktail to replenish her drained tear ducts. Upon returning to her friends’ table, it takes her only two attempts to descend successfully into her seat.
“Now, I don’t really know this Eliot dude all that well,” Jimmy begins when he sees her wet eyes, “but from what you were telling me earlier, I’m gonna go ahead and guess he’s a bit of an asshole. Now, I’ve known you long enough to say with authority that you’re not an asshole. So while tonight this whole thing profoundly sucks, it’s totally going to be the better deal in the long run.”
Jennie tries to summon a response, but words, much less cohesive sequences of words, are becoming hard to form.
Closing time arrives, and she finds that standing up is a superb adventure. Jimmy goes his own way; Jennie and Mona climb in the War Wagon with James. The War Wagon is a 1988 Caravan James uses to transport his band’s instruments. Jennie and Jimmy keep company with James for several legitimate reasons pertaining to his numerous virtues of character, but the benefit of having a sober friend to serve in perpetuity as the group’s designated driver is difficult to overlook.
Tonight, however, James cannot peel his eyes from his phone long enough to watch the road. “She’s tweeting about me,” he murmurs as the Wagon’s wheel hits the rumble strip.
After several failed attempts at verbal instruction, Jennie decides that to best ensure their own safety and that of countless other motorists, she had better confiscate the device. While James is in mid-text, Jennie reaches to snatch the phone from his hand, but—her coordination relaxed slightly by the seven drinks—she instead knocks it onto the floor between his feet.
James has time for a frantic glance in her direction and a shout of “What are you doing?” before he realizes that, in his distraction, he has taken the car off-course. He tries to brake as they approach the guardrail, but the cell phone has lodged itself between the pedal and the floor. The War Wagon collides with the rail at a speed of ten miles per hour, and because passenger-side airbags were not standard in 1988, Jennie’s head knocks dully against the dash. “I was trying,” she explains when she recovers, “to keep us from getting an accident.”
The next morning, in-the-moment Jennie has no recollection of the crash and blames her headache on having ingested a large quantity of alcohol. Present, dead Jennie rightly attributes it to a concussion, exacerbated by having ingested a large quantity of alcohol. So it is only in hindsight that she understands why, later that afternoon, she falls dead without warning.
Having pieced all this together, there is nothing else for present, dead Jennie to do but to make another attempt at opening her eyes. At first the light is literally blinding, but as her vision adjusts it becomes blinding in the common sense: quite painful to look at, but not a total impediment to sight. Its sources are the two open doors at the far end of the room, bright enough to render the ugly electric glow around her redundant as well as ugly. Rising with a soft cry of pain because having just died is very painful, she finds herself in the florescent-lit bus terminal of the Beyond.