3/27

brittney uecker
on
Girl Talk, “Bounce That”

(march danceness 00s)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

It's been 14 years since the events of this essay occurred, and writing it for March Danceness in 2024 was the first time I'd fully admitted to my actions and to the sickening mix of guilt and grief that I experienced as a result. The process of telling this story was ultimately a cathartic one, allowing me to forgive the scared, sad, and heartbreakingly young person I was in 2011. Will I ever listen to "Bouce That" again? Hell no. Will I be okay? I think so. —Brittney Uecker

Miasma: "Bounce That" by Girl Talk as the Tipping Point by brittney uecker

The same spring that you died, my sister, Shayla, and I had tickets to see Girl Talk at the Wilma Theatre. The night of the show, I met her on campus and we drank at her dorm before I drove us and her friends downtown. I didn’t have many friends of my own at that time, so I glommed onto this group of eager, naive freshmen. Though they weren’t much younger than me, the canyon of age between legal drinking age and not made them seem immensely so, and gave me legitimacy in their friend group as the one who could always bring booze. I was never sure if this should make me feel cool and wise, or desperate and pathetic.
After too many drunken screaming fights, I had promised you that I wouldn’t drink that night, that I’d give up alcohol for Lent. I clung to the lasting dying vestiges of my religion this way, in the ease of its hollow, quantifiable binary. But I had no actual intention of abstaining that night, a fact we surely both knew. To me, the only thing a promise meant was that I would make sure you didn’t find out.
We were at a rocky point in our relationship. I’d just transferred to school at the University of Montana and moved to Missoula, and you had just left your job across the state to be there with me. I had just turned 21 in a new city and was eager to go out and experience nightlife, something that you, at 24, were already over. You were ready to settle down, to entertain the prospect of being an adult, while I was still aching to sow my wild oats. Our age difference, our difference in upbringing, and our widely differing desires of what we wanted to do right now was beginning to show, and it was beginning to piss me off, make me feel entitled and antsy. Maybe if I knew that in less than a month you’d be dead, maybe I would have slowed down. Maybe I would have stayed home when you asked me to, soaked up the last of our relationship while I could. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Shayla, her friends, and I drank cheap blueberry vodka mixed with red Gatorade, drinks that stained our lips and tongues and burned all the way down, a violence in pursuit of intoxication. Beneath the Higgins Street bridge, the theater right above us, we took pull after pull from bottles in the trunk of my car and felt the vibrations of the traffic passing above and the chill of the river thrashing against the banks next to us. When we were thoroughly giddy with alcohol and anticipation, we made our way to the street above and shoved our way to the front of the line with no regard for the angry comments of the concert-goers behind us or the disappointed looks of the bouncers who nonetheless scanned our tickets and let us inside. The show had already started.
In the Wilma, my limbs were starting to get that heavy yet weightless feeling, my lips becoming loose rubber bands. The harsh lights and farty popcorn scent of the old-timey lobby made me fearfully nauseous, but I bought another round of drinks and barreled through, Shayla and her friends following like a line of drunken baby ducklings behind me. Giant solid-wood double doors gave way to the enveloping darkness of the theater itself, and a sloped walkway beckoned your body to break into a run that led right into the snarl of the pit. Just being in the place had an intoxicating effect, and as the show began, all sensations blurred into one amalgam of stimuli. Lights flashed all around, blinking and blurring and bathing everything in color. Objects flew through the air—bodies, beer cans, beach balls, an occasional toilet paper roll like a comet shooting through the sky. The crowd was a writhing, squirming mass of bodies, moving and breathing as a single being, something like maggots on a corpse, eating away, giving off incomprehensible amounts of heat, melting in a mass of decomposition, part living and part dead. A crowd like that presses against you in all directions at once, overwhelming to the point of numbness, so intense that you don’t even feel it anymore. For every other body, their sweat becomes your sweat, their voice becomes your voice, your breath becomes their breath, rising and falling as one rib cage. The music itself wasn’t so much music, but deafening, unrecognizable noise. There was no differentiating songs—it was all just dissonant noise and vibrations in your bones. I wasn’t even sure if I was listening to Girl Talk or one of the half-dozen opening acts.
Shayla got kicked out before Girl Talk even came on, and then multiple times after, the bouncer catching her wristband-less and double-fisting drinks I’d bought her. I didn’t go looking for her, but she somehow found her way back in. I’d like to imagine she climbed a fire escape, picked a lock, snuck in through some hidden entrance or secret passageway, but she probably just batted her eyelashes at a different bouncer and sweet-talked her way back. In a few weeks, that same sister, the one that dissolved Jolly Ranchers in Everclear and climbed a fire escape to sneak back into a concert she got tossed out of, would draw a picture of a rainbow with a set of crayons a nurse gave her as I’m saying goodbye to you for the last time in the ICU. It’s one of the purest things anyone has ever done.
At this point, I was beyond drunk, and beyond caring. I could feel holes being poked in my awareness, my memory leaving me as it was occurring. Time squished and stretched and didn’t really happen and it didn’t matter. I’d later wonder if someone spiked my drink or if it was an absurd contact high or if I was really just that drunk. I never reached that level of intoxication again and I never found out why.
Time jumps, spanning the chasm of a giant plot hole in the night, and suddenly we’re deep into Girl Talk’s set. I’m soaked in sweat, my senses are fucked, and I’ve lost Shayla and her friends, but it all barely registers. Though I’ve been pressed up against strangers’ bodies all night, suddenly one pushes up against me with distinct, targeted intention and I turn to look at a man, a boy really. He’s shorter than I am and shirtless, with a patchy beard and gap teeth, a beady distant look in his eyes. His skin is pale white and the undulations of his ribs and the sheen of his sweat glisten in the flashing lights.
Without pretense and without objection, he kisses me aggressively. It’s a welcomed force, his immediate probing tongue and pawing hands. His mouth is wet and sharp, each kiss like a bad shot of well booze. We are both so sloppy, the entire scene nonsensical. I know I have a boyfriend at home across the city, I don’t forget that for a second, but I’m consciously making this choice. I know my limits, and I’m willingly choosing to exceed them. I’d repeat this line all the time in those days and in the years to come, as if my intentionality made it a valid excuse, gave me some illusion of control. I know I’m breaking every promise I made—I’m drinking, and not just drinking, but self-annihilating. I drove drunk here, and I’m going to drive drunk home. I’m going to continue to kiss this boy I don’t know, this nameless, faceless not-you, over and over and over and over.
We kiss and we dance for who-knows how long. I’m facing away from the lights and noise emanating from the stage, because I haven’t cared all night what’s happening up there anyway. At one point, the boy lifts the glow stick he’s wearing on a cord around his neck, bouncing against his sweaty chest. It catches in his dirty blonde curls as he removes it and puts it around my neck. I don’t know why he does this, but after that night I’ll save it and put it on my rearview mirror. There, it will lose its glow, fade to a pale yellow, the same syrupy puss-yellow as the sample of your spinal fluid that the nurse will show me, rich and cloudy with white blood cells, indicative of the meningitis bathing your brain and very swiftly and efficiently killing you. Here it will hang until after your death, one of many objects spanning the massive, gaping void between the before and after of my life. Here it will bang relentlessly against the windshield like I’ll bang against the hospital walls when they declare you dead, when the doctor says the swelling in your brain is, in his calm, clinical words, “incompatible with life.”
I don’t remember leaving, don’t remember seeing Shayla again. Time just hops along like it has all night. I’ll drive home drunk after the show, aimlessly circling around town, just killing time avoiding going home to you because I’m ashamed and I’m sloppy and I’m a total mess. I’m not enough for you and maybe part of me knows that in less than a month you’ll be dead and the preemptive guilt is already manifesting, taking up all the space in my whole entire chest.
When I finally get home, you’re asleep on the couch, the muted television casting a pulsing glow against your open, snoring mouth. In retrospect, I hate that I am relieved by this but I am, relieved that it’s less time I have to spend with you, less time that I have to hide and lie about the whole night. I’m glad that you don’t have to see me drunk, and naive enough to believe that you’ll think I wasn’t. I go quietly upstairs and strip off my sweaty clothes and get into bed. I’ll spread out over the entire mattress and wrap myself in all the blankets and I’ll revel in what it feels like to be alone, a temporary but exhilarating freedom, not knowing that in less than a month you’ll be dead, and alone will be an endless, terrifying state in which I won’t be able to escape.
I only knew you for two years, but your death changed every day of my life afterward. I’ll quickly forget about Girl Talk and Shayla’s friends and the glow stick and the patchy-bearded boy like I’ll forget about a lot of things from that time, spots blacked out by self-protection and grief, lost in the mess of trying to reassemble my life after experiencing a death of this magnitude at the heartbreakingly young age of 21. But I won’t forget about coming home that night and leaving you alone on the couch. That memory is forever seared in all its infinitesimal and retrospectively agonizing detail. I still don’t think I’ve forgiven myself for it.
Somehow, this is the first time I’ve written about you.
I’ve learned a lot in the thirteen years since your death. I’ve grown up, and down, and up again, and sometimes down. I’ve learned to hold my alcohol a little better, and that I’m not all that good at drinking. I’ve learned to keep my promises, or at least which ones I need to keep and which ones warrant breaking. I’ve learned to take ownership of my mess, to forgive myself for my youth, for my grief, for all the things I did before I knew better. I’ve learned that your death doesn’t negate that I deserve forgiveness for not preventing it, for not treating you better while I still had the chance. I’ve learned I couldn’t have known.
I’m still scared of Girl Talk. I’m scared of this song. I can’t hear its jaunty introduction, its chaotic rhythm and schizophrenic singing without being violently thrown back into that fear, into the merciless sting of heartbreak at its most raw, the nausea of my shock, the shame of all the things I did in the throws of grief—the impulsive tattoos and the men I recklessly fucked and the copious amounts of alcohol I drowned myself in, anything to blur myself into an oblivion in which I could forget about you, could distance myself from all the ways I hurt you before you fucking died.
I’m scared of this song because it is an undeniable marker of when I knew my life was going to change, and I was about to dive into a miasma of pain. It was the moment when I knew things weren’t going to get better. Even though it would be weeks before I came home from class and you stumbled down the stairs in delirious pain and I drove you to the urgent care clinic that turned you away so I drove you to the emergency room and you begged the nurse to save your life and I watched you shit yourself in the hospital bathroom because your entire body was turning on you and the doctor stuck a needle in your spine and another doctor shaved your head and cut out a piece of your skull and I had to guess at your phone’s passcode so I could call your mother to tell her you were dying and I’d never see you conscious again, the night of the Girl Talk show was the tipping point. They are inextricably and forever linked.
I’m still scared of the potential of my recklessness. I’m still scared that no matter how deep and for how long it's been buried in the past, no matter what circumstance buffers its badness, that given the right alchemy of conditions, I’ll become someone I cannot trust.
That time of my life is like this song—a deluge, a blur, a million voices coming at you from every direction, so you aren’t sure what is real and what is a nightmare, what is your fault and what is fate’s. There is no structure, no certainty to this song—it just continues moving with no predictability, no purpose, giving you no indication of a beginning, a middle, or an end.
I’ve learned that everything is temporary, that like this song, it can change out of nowhere and cease without warning.

Brittney Uecker (she/her) is a school librarian and writer living in Great Falls, Montana. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Pithead Chapel, The Bitchin’ K, Taco Bell Quarterly, Long Story Short, HAD, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on a hybrid manuscript about divorce, desire, and the insatiable yearning for attention. She is @bonesandbeer on the internet.