Cheeks

Okay, I don’t know how it came up, but we were stretching each other’s cheeks, the three of us. “You can’t do it with mine, there’s nothing there,” she said. I grabbed my cheeks. “They’re so stretchy!” she said to me. She grabbed my cheeks. Then, “Aw, you have dimples!” she said next. She grabbed my friend’s cheeks. They stretched. “No, I bet you can stretch them,” I said, grabbing her cheeks. I couldn’t stretch them. They were lovely smooth and beautiful yet the moment I let go I realized they were at the same time creepily plastic. I couldn’t tell whether it was nice or disconcerting. Is this what your skin is like when you apply a pharmacy of chemicals to your face every morning? Does she even do this? Maybe she just has really nice skin is this is what really nice skin is like. Or maybe her skin will never wrinkle when she gets older because there will be no skin left to wrinkle, it having been supplanted by… whatever.