“I would not have picked this name,” Lena said as we were greeted by a bouncer outside the new bar. He took our IDs like he suspected we might be underage, which was not yet a compliment, but still annoying; a way for this city to make you feel like a child despite paying for yourself to be here.

I looked up at the sign above the door, a raw-edge wooden plank swinging gently off the brick building.

“‘Doll’s Eyes,’” I read.

She shrugged as she took her ID back. “If you ask me, that’s the name of a Halloween haunted house, not a craft cocktail bar.”

“It’s a poisonous berry,” I said, remembering the way their striking color—white berries with a black dot, clustered on a long red stem—stood out amongst the fall foliage like something from another planet.

The first time I saw them, on a branch in the back near the sugarhouse, I was a kid, attracted to them for their strangeness. When I reached out to touch one, my brother William grabbed my arm so hard it ached for days.

“If Mom and Dad don’t grow it, then don’t touch it,” he told me. I snuck back out there two days later—I wanted to lick it, see how my body would react to poison—but the stems were gone.

“That makes it a little more interesting,” Lena said as we walked past the bouncer and into the bar.

Inside was crowded and too dark, like they had forgotten to turn on one of the chandeliers. The decor made me feel a familiar kind of dizzy—wooden dining chairs hung from the ceiling, a collage of paintings of sixteenth-century women with their breasts out sat crooked along one wall, the wood floor was uneven like you were always on the verge of tipping over. The whole thing was a bit of a mind-fuck and made me feel confused in the same way I would get as a kid when we were punished and forced to stay inside for weeks on end. If the sun doesn’t touch your face for long enough part of you starts to question whether the sun still exists.

Lena and I posted up in the center of the bar, where two seats opened for us. Normally I would have assumed that was a coincidence, but I soon realized that’s just what happens to Lena. It would eventually be something that happened to me, too.

A bartender with a handlebar mustache and blue eyes that looked painted onto his face greeted us, the nose ring in his septum shifting slightly as he smiled. Lena never begged for attention. All she had to do was put her butt in a stool and her elbow on the counter and smile, the bartenders would be fighting to serve her.