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2018 Boys & Girls & God: Essays Alaina Janelle Symanovich

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

BOYS & GIRLS & GOD: ESSAYS

ALAINA JANELLE SYMANOVICH

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

2018 Alaina Janelle Symanovich defended this thesis on March 19, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Elizabeth Stuckey-French Professor Directing Thesis

John Ribó Committee Member

Bob Shacochis Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

For Chloe

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Versions of “The Girls We Love” appeared in Fogged Clarity and Ginosko Literary Review 17 “Faulty Hearts” appeared in Hawai’i Review 83 “The Dark Space” appeared as “Ready, Set, Go” in Entropy in September 2016 “Birds of Venus” appeared as “Venus Retrograde” in Little Patuxent Review 19 “Blood, Water, Sin” won the Winter 2017 Nonfiction Prize from Santa Ana River Review “The M Word” appeared in Fourth River 0.2 and won Best of the Net in 2016 “Ethereal Girls” appeared in Santa Ana River Review 2.1 “Holy Ground” appeared in storySouth 43 “In Transit” appeared in Quarter After Eight 23 “Me, Myself & Matthew Gray Gubler” appeared in Queen Mob’s Tea House in March 2017 “Shame, A Legacy” appeared as “Shame, A History” in Rubbertop Review 9

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... vi CHAPTER ONE – THE GIRLS WE LOVE ...... 1 CHAPTER TWO – FAULTY HEARTS ...... 17 CHAPTER THREE – THE DARK SPACE ...... 30 CHAPTER FOUR – BLOOD, WATER, SIN ...... 42 CHAPTER FIVE – BIRDS OF VENUS ...... 54 CHAPTER SIX – LUCAS & LEO ...... 65 CHAPTER SEVEN – THE M WORD ...... 74 CHAPTER EIGHT – ETHEREAL GIRLS ...... 95 CHAPTER NINE – HOLY GROUND ...... 102 CHAPTER TEN – IN TRANSIT ...... 127 CHAPTER ELEVEN – ME, MYSELF & MATTHEW GRAY GUBLER ...... 138 CHAPTER TWELVE – SHAME, A LEGACY ...... 148 CHAPTER THIRTEEN – PARALLEL (INTERSECTING) LIVES ...... 165 CHAPTER FOURTEEN – HEROIC SELF-PRESERVATION ...... 172 Biographical Sketch ...... 189

v ABSTRACT

Boys & Girls & God: Essays concerns itself with the intense and needless loneliness of the human experience. As David Shields writes (or, given the project of his book, likely

(mis)quotes) in his genre-bending treatise Reality Hunger: “I’m interested in knowing all the secrets that connect human beings. At the deepest level, all our secrets are the same” (27). I believe that secrets—my secrets, your secrets, your enemy’s secrets—are unnecessary, banal, and not nearly as earth-shattering or as well-hidden as you or I or your enemy like to think.

Therefore, my thesis aims to flout secrecy. Whether I’m writing against my or other people’s impulses to hide, I seek to create art that discomfits. I like to risk something when I write; in fact, risky writing is the only kind I elect to read.

Practically speaking, my anti-secrets thesis takes the form of personal essays that run the gamut of social taboos; I tackle everything from masturbation to religion (sometimes in the same essay), and I strive to let each essay’s content dictate its form. Some essays, for example, abide by the conventional narrative style; I look to works such as Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and

Mary Karr’s Cherry for inspiration on those works. Other essays, though, demand more dynamic forms: collage, quotations from outside sources, lists, text messages, and more. I love to juxtapose dissimilar genres and topics—for example, to examine sexual fetishes through an academic lens, as I do in my essay “Me, Myself & Matthew Gray Gubler,” or to muse upon abducted children alongside moving to Las Vegas in “Parallel (Intersecting) Lives.” For these quirky works, I look to contemporary writers such as Elissa Washuta, author of My Body Is a

Book of Rules; Roxane Gay, author of Hunger and Bad Feminist; and Maggie Nelson, author of

Bluets and The Art of Cruelty; the eclectic work of these writers reflects the same fearless anti- secrecy that undergirds this project.

CHAPTER ONE

THE GIRLS WE LOVE

The first time I watch Titanic I am fourteen, long haired and small breasted. I’ve never kissed a boy, never known a touch more risqué than my dad’s arm on my shoulders during movie nights. He and I watch endless films plash across our television, oblivious to a world wider than

Wege pretzels and Blockbuster rentals. Weekends flicker by in a strobe of blue light and laugh tracks, one that blips me from pre-K all the way to high school.

As the Titanic sinks, our basement throbs with darkness; cold prickles my skin and sidles under my cocoon of quilts. Tears roll down my cheeks as the credits roll over the screen, and when I look at Dad, his eyes are glistering like sea glass. We have the same barreling forehead, the same craggy Russian nose and chin. People never find my mother when they search my face.

An outsider might question why Dad and I bunker in our underground hideout, sheathed in ratty blankets on the threadbare couch, while Mom reclines on leather upstairs. Said outsider might find it strange that she lords alone over the high-ceilinged den with walls painted marigold. But I tiptoe past her lounger like a prisoner skirting the sheriff, and she keeps up with the Kardashians well enough to lose track of me.

Replaying Titanic in my mind, I see Rose and Jack making love in the backseat of a car; I see her telling him where to put his hands. Her palm smacks the fogged window again and again. Jack disappears into the cerulean sea, frozen and drowned for love. It’s as surreal a sight as my friends kissing their boyfriends, their hands nipping at belt loops and shirt buttons. I’m not lying when I tell those friends I think I’m asexual. At sleepovers, I straddle them for back massages during marathon rounds of Truth or Dare. They interrogate each other—who do you

like? Whom would you rather kiss?—as I trek over trapezii and deltoids, my fingers finding every sore spot. These massages exempt me from the game.

“Is love really like that?” I ask Dad, nodding at the screen where Rose and Jack were. I flex my palm, and in the television light it looks anemic, pale as a halved apple. I try to imagine it thrust against a window in a heave of passion, and I fail. I bury it back under the blanket.

Dad watches the screen fade as he considers my question. I repeat myself—is that really how love feels? Like you’d die for the other person?—and give up expecting an answer by the time he says, “Yes. In the beginning, at least.”

Only when I slide into bed that night, my legs goosebumping at the chilly sheets, do I wonder about the end.

***

Dad retires over Christmas of my senior year. He wants to savor my last few months at home, he says—to enjoy those seasons. Snowstorms pummel the state all winter, so we establish a new tradition: every morning that I wake to a two-hour delay, we brew coffee, stash our pockets with Kleenex, and set out for the nearby woods. In Timberland boots we lumber across miles of forest: five if the snow isn’t wet, if our matching Reynaud’s fingers don’t throb purple, if Mom won’t be too annoyed by our absence.

When Dad married Mom, neither of them knew what her Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease truly entailed. Only my grandmother had the disease—she, and a smattering of distant cousins

Mom never managed to track down. Mom only heard rumors of them: their trouble walking, their hands that deadened with age. Neuropathy isn’t uncommon in Appalachia, but CMT in a woman, and in only one child of five, is. As we hike through the woods, Dad tells me stories of venturing into the stacks of Penn State’s library with Mom. Like most university couples, they

went on regular dates. Unlike most couples, those dates included researching the incurable and degenerative disease that was crippling one of them.

“But why did you—” I cower from the question on my lips. My boots kick clots of snow into the air. I watch them bloom white, sparkle, then disappear. “When you read those things, why did you—?”

“Stick around?”

I nod, though Dad is too busy navigating the snowdrifts to look at me. I picture him poring over medical tomes as the sky glowers orange, as the sun dissolves over the wintry campus. He studies images of withered feet, high-arched and curling into themselves, and reads how one day his girlfriend will be unable to walk. To dress herself, hold cutlery or get on and off the toilet. Yet he reaches for her hand, his thumb tracing the crest of her first finger, and turns another filmy page.

“I stuck around because I was in love,” he tells the snow that banks the path. “Maybe I didn’t know what I was up against. Maybe I did. Maybe I felt bad, because your mom was there when I really needed someone, so I thought I should be there for her.

“And I know she feels left out when we go on these walks,” he says, guilt and condensation ghosting his mouth. “I do. And I don’t want to hurt her. But I can’t give up this time with you.”

The lines drilled deeper into Mom’s face every time we closed the door on her. There was the year she caught Dad ditching work to take me to matinees, Seabiscuit and Pirates of the

Caribbean and A Cinderella Story, our fingers glossy with butter; the year she discovered the luxury karaoke machine he bought me and stored in the basement, where she couldn’t go; the first year he attended Back-to-School Night as a single parent so we could traverse the building

quickly. Her silent treatments would last for days. She would accuse me of hating her, and him of enabling it, and I would come to understand the heavy cost of loving me. I promised myself that I’d never let anyone sacrifice for me the way Dad did; that if anyone suffered for my love, it would be me.

***

I find Dad one January afternoon contemplating his reflection in a glass of merlot. Since his retirement, the after-school hours have become the highlight of our days: we can spend time together openly because Mom is at work, not sulking in the next room. But Dad always reserves the red wine for dinnertime, when we dice vegetables and season meat together in the mellow kitchen light. He never drinks alone.

His eyes don’t meet mine as I enter the room.

“I’ve been reading First Corinthians,” he says. He settles his elbows on his knees, sighs a not-first-glass sigh. “‘If any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her.’ Seven-twelve.”

In eighteen years he’s never uttered the word divorce.

He smirks. “‘For the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children—” he pauses, rubs his forehead—“would be unclean; but as it is, they are holy.’

Seven-fourteen.”

The light tickles his hair as he bows his head, igniting reds and golds throughout the thinning russet. The top of him looks like Christmas again, like ribboned gifts and potted poinsettias. But his face is all winter, a furious one that threatens to linger far longer than a season.

“Divorce,” I sample the word, looking down at my wrists: two white willows branching from a rumpled sweater.

“She screwed me over on the life insurance annuity.” He ekes out a brittle laugh. “If I die first, I’m giving her a hundred percent of the benefit. But if she dies first—” the muscle in his jaw jumps.

I can finish Dad’s sentence in my head. Moreover, I know why Mom did what she did. I retract my wrists inside my sleeves, ashamed.

“And she lied about it, too. That’s the worst part. She acted like we were a team, like we were making the decisions together.” He bites his lip and drains the glass. “I’m sorry.

Forgive me.” He forces a small laugh, a wretched, wobbly one, and calls me by a pet name. “I shouldn’t drag you into this.”

“You can talk to me,” I promise, perching on the arm of the couch. Everything in this living room, the enclave Mom deemed “the fancy room,” looms oversized and overpriced: the custom-made chairs; the reupholstered loveseats where only company sits; the hand-painted china plates arrayed above the bureau. She wanted extravagant, so Dad agreed, even though we rarely host guests.

Dad doesn’t look at me. “No, I’ll be okay. I’ve got my investments—she can’t touch those. And I’ve got you.” He smiles, still dimly. “I know you’ll take care of me.”

“Daddy—”

“I shouldn’t say things like ‘divorce,’” he slurs. “I shouldn’t put you through that.”

I coax the wineglass out of his hands, something I’ve done more and more over the past few years. Mom doesn’t know how much he drinks: he ferrets the boxes away in the basement,

ones we buy when we claim we’re running errands, ones we pay for with cash. I tell Dad we can talk another time, when he’s feeling better, and I shut myself in my room.

I remember standing before my mirror, four years old, while Dad twisted my hair into a ponytail and clipped on a bow. I remember snuggling into his chest on the pilled basement couch, one ear tuned to the movie, the other to his stomach, which gargled like an undersea monster. I remember tucking the word divorce under my tongue since I was young, hiding it like the last sliver of a caramel, letting its sugar meld into my mouth.

***

We never continue the divorce conversation. Another storm pounds the town that night, an ice storm. As usual, as he has after every weekday snowstorm of my life, Dad escorts Mom to work so she won’t slip on the walk into the building. He always walks with his right hand clamped around her left arm, but in winter he looks extra grim, his mouth stapled shut in concentration.

I expect we will hike when Dad returns, but when the door careens open, rebounding off the wall, he’s wearing Mom slung across his back. She brays like the shot animals I’ve seen in nature documentaries, her mouth yowled open, jaw jutted forward. Dad staggers under her weight but manages to get her to the couch, then get ice, then change his mind and remove the ice and reload her in the car. When he phones from the emergency room, his voice is deflated almost to nothing.

In the weeks that follow, after the doctors call with the X-ray results (patella fractured in two) and Dad stops muttering to himself (I only looked away for a second, don’t know how I let her fall, don’t know how she went down so fast) and Mom’s wheelchair arrives (purchased, not rented), she announces her retirement. Dad stations her in front of the television and spends his

days bringing food, clearing food, adjusting her, readjusting her, taking her to the bathroom, adjusting her again. It is, indeed, a long winter.

Once Mom can bend her leg by degrees, she decides to call a realtor in Florida. Dad’s eyes look dewy when he breaks the news to me, but he’s tired—too tired to argue. She wants to go South, so he agrees, then returns to the kitchen to fix her dinner.

***

They settle into the retirement village of Mom’s choice. I email Dad before every phone call, and he arranges to elude Mom, to “run to the store” so he can talk to me. Occasionally, if she’s sunning on the lanai or busy on the computer, he slinks into the garage and talks to me from inside the broiling car. If Mom knew how often we conversed, she would disapprove, maybe even forbid it. At the very least, she’d demand to listen.

“I don’t think I could handle this marriage without the Lord,” Dad confesses one night.

It’s February and I’m pacing the neighborhood, eyeing the houses lit like jack-o-lanterns. Inside their cheery windows I see living rooms rainbowed with television light, kitchens where parents tag-team loading the dishwasher. The smell of steaks slicks the air around one home, and I close my eyes and pretend they’re Dad’s sirloins, grilling on the Weber behind our garage, their insides pinking as Dad tilts back a second glass of merlot. I pretend I don’t live alone, a college student haunting a drafty house that smells like dust and Lean Cuisines. I pretend Dad is walking beside me, long-divorced and happy, his voice a bell cutting the winter dark.

“Your mother won’t—” Dad sighs, a sharp crackle in my ear. “Can I say this? Forgive me if it’s too much information, but—your mother refuses to have sex. She won’t let me touch her.” He sighs again. “So I don’t, of course I don’t. Because God’s shown me how to get through it.”

The wind makes my contacts shards of glass on my eyes. “How?”

“You,” he says, calm. “I have you.”

“Daddy,” I frown into the night. “No.”

“I mean it,” he continues. “You’re my purpose in life. When I think back on it, and I ask

God why it all worked out like this—why I married your mother, why I found the Lord so late, why so much struggle—I realize, it’s you. The only reason I’m here is to support you. To send you off into the world.”

I gaze at the houses around me, bricked snug against the winter.

“I wouldn’t have married your mother, had I been a believer in college.” He says it as if he’s giving me a gift. “And then I wouldn’t have you. And that would’ve been the biggest tragedy I can imagine.”

***

Dad and Mom met in the lobby of Electrical Engineering East, where she flirted with him at the registration desk before summer classes. She never rose from her seat, so when he fetched her for their first date he couldn’t help but gape at the braces that clamped her calves. Her twiggy arms and fingers, features he’d thought lovely on such a tall woman, suddenly made sense. When he opened the car door for her, he thought to himself, she’s nice, but this is a one- time thing.

But he’d taken a gap between his sophomore and junior years of college, two years of crisscrossing the country in a freight truck, and found himself disoriented at Penn State. His classmates were young, pudgy-faced, stationary in the way of anyone who hasn’t spent months speeding over highways. So Mom went from a one-time thing to a full-time thing, and soon

enough Dad had a Master’s in electrical engineering and they owned a ranch house close to campus.

I meet Renee on the third day of my third year of college. If room 320 were on the other side of the hall, we would be able to see Electrical Engineering East through the warped window.

I never mention that to Renee, though; I sit inches from her for a month before I summon the courage to even look at her.

Maybe my whole life would have unfolded differently if she hadn’t breached that first conversation. Like those paper fortune-tellers I played with in grade school, maybe that pocket of myself would have remained covered if I’d never swooned over her eyes.

But I more than swoon over them: I look into her irises as someone would look over a cliff, my terror electric. Those brown eyes smolder dark as the glass of the first beer she pours me—my first drink, ever. She splits the amber bottle between two Ball jars and clinks hers to mine. From her balcony, I can see all the landmarks of my life: campus, the library, Electrical

Engineering East.

“I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship,” she says as I take my first gulp of beer.

And I lean against the railing, so lightheaded I might dissolve into her cigarette smoke and float away.

***

Renee loves another girl—she stipulates that from the beginning.

I love her—I tell her that by November.

Neither of these declarations matters.

As fall steeps into winter, I stockpile Orbit bubblegum in my backpack because it’s her favorite; I buy Bic lighters and pretend they’re hers, given me to hold, so her cigarettes always

burn bright. I lean left during proofreading exams, let her copy my perfect papers, and grin when she calls me her grammar hammer. I program my phone so hers is the only number immune to the “do not disturb” setting; her messages interrupt my classes and my sleep. We share my textbooks: I shuttle them to her several times a week, braving icy sidewalks for a few minutes’ conversation. I consider myself the luckiest girl on campus.

On her twenty-second birthday, we are the last two awake. The other party guests sprawl across the floor and the couch, their vodka-laced snores shredding the quiet, their cheeks dappled with mascara trails and the glitter Renee showered over everybody. It’s 4:30 in the morning, and we’ve reprised the old act: Renee shut herself in her room with the girl she loves, the unavailable one, who refused her. I wept on the balcony, looked over my campus touchstones and contemplated jumping, my feet naked on the frosty concrete.

My head cottonball-light, I curl up on the living room floor without a blanket. I don’t expect Renee to return, yet I’m awake and ready when she bends down beside me. “Come to my room,” she whispers.

Someone already splays across her bed, so we squeeze onto a beanbag, our spines arching like the crests of a heart as we make room for one another. She casts a duvet over us, tucks our feet in, then finds my eyes. Her pupils are wide as sunflower heads.

“Rub my back?” she asks. She rolls onto her side before I can answer, before a smile kisses every pore on my face. “Then I’ll do yours,” she mumbles into the beanbag.

“You don’t have to.”

I know she won’t, and it pleases me. As I sweep my hands over the contours of her neck, her shoulders, her vertebrae, I don’t want to tell her I love her—I want her to feel it. Don’t worry about returning the favor, I think, willing my hands to emote it. Let me do everything.

My fingers explore the threads of her shirt until, bold, I slip my hand beneath it. I rake my fingernails over her flesh, delighting in its tautness, its heat. I did this at sleepovers for years, for other girls, and it meant nothing. Now, as we whisper to one another in the dark, I understand what it means to put my hands on someone.

After many minutes, after the sky lightens and casts the room in aquamarine, I lock my knees behind Renee’s and curve my body around her back. Her heart pounds beneath my touch, and I hide my face in her neck.

For the night I am whole, happiness burning like tobacco smoke in my lungs. This, I mouth into the darkness, too quiet for her to hear. You. You are why I’m alive.

***

When Dad and Mom visit, I stay at home, not at the new apartment I’ve rented near campus—the apartment close to Renee and to my new life of beer and cigarettes and forgetting to call Dad. I notice him eyeing me all week, sifting through my words when I speak and staring after me when I leave the house. On the last night of the visit, I discover a neon-green note taped to my bedpost. We need to talk, it reads. Come find me.

He and Mom laze side-by-side on loungers, eyeballing the television in silence. I hesitate in the doorway of the den, clasping my elbow, wondering how to summon Dad without alerting

Mom. Eventually he notices my shadow bobbing against the opposite wall and scrabbles out of his seat. Mom furrows her eyebrows at him and he grunts something about his stomach, making a vague pained gesture. In my old bedroom, with the door closed, he folds me into his arms and suctions my ear to his chest.

“I miss you so much when I’m in Florida,” he sighs, holding me so tight that each breath pulls me in, then pushes me away.

“I know, Daddy.” But I have Renee now: the thought digs spiked shoes into my heart. I look away, guilty but not sorry.

“You love her, don’t you,” he whispers. “Renee. You talk about her all the time.”

Her name triggers an avalanche of memories: brown eyes slick with vodka; aquamarine light; snores like a music-box song coaxing me to sleep. I see the clay armadillo beside Renee’s bed, the postcards from her grandmother tacked around her desk, the chapbooks strung like

Christmas lights atop the bookshelves. Her cologne tickles my nostrils like the tease of a sneeze or the first gulp of beer. I feel her on my palms and in the tears wheedling out of my eyes.

“It’s okay if you’re together,” he says. “You can tell me.”

I groan, shake my head, lean away from his words. “We’re just friends.”

He spools me in, as if doing so will stitch me back together. “First loves are hard. And I can tell you really love her.”

I nod—a yes that beats the air like an errant Amen in church.

“There’s a part of us that never gets over that first love, I think. We carry pieces of them with us forever. But hopefully we bring the best of them, and forget all the rest.” He gives me a bracing squeeze. “Have I ever told you about Joanne?”

I wriggle out of his grasp, confused, and find his eyes. We both know he never mentioned a Joanne; her name smells red, more forbidden a word than divorce.

“We were high school sweethearts—crazy about each other. We never seemed to get the timing right, though; she always liked me when I was after somebody else, I was always chasing her at the wrong time. But when we managed to be on the same page, it was like nothing I had before. Or since.”

His hands knead my shoulders again, insistent as grief.

“And I never told anyone,” he says, “but a few years ago, she found me.” He reads the shock in my eyes. “Not in person; on Facebook. The day I made my profile—the day—she sent me a message. Within hours.”

Tears speckle his hazel eyes.

“And I replied.”

This time, I don’t ask why he’s telling me this. This time I hug him, because I already know.

***

When Renee’s ringtone wakes me in the middle of the night, I don’t hesitate to grab my keys. All she says is she’s at a bar, in pain from a bruised knee, and doesn’t want to walk to the bus stop. I scrape the sleet off my windshield, imagining Dad asleep in his lakehouse with the windows wide open. It would agonize him to see me skidding onto the slick, empty street, but I do it anyway.

My car’s tires struggle for traction on the roads’ patchwork of ice and powder. The storm raged in alternating bursts all day: freezing rain one hour, pluming snow the next, turning the town into a frozen layer cake that no number of plows could conquer.

Renee clambers into the car beneath the amber pulse of a stoplight, and the back wheels fishtail as I steer us toward the main street. We merge onto roads emptier than I’ve ever seen them, but I’m not afraid—not even when we crest Atherton Street’s steepest hill and see the snake’s tongue of road rippling before us. Since childhood, I’ve read reports of buses stalling and cars colliding on this slope, but I begin its descent calmly. If we spin out, at least we spin out together.

But we don’t—not as we pass the old Blockbuster where Dad and I began so many weekends; not as we near the liquor store where I waited for him to buy his merlots. I’ve waited for Renee outside that same store, replaced memories of Dad with ones of her: my dark-haired nymph clutching a box of Franzia and bantering with the cashier. I imagine a time when she’ll be gone, after the storm subsides and the traffic returns, and I wish that future away. I wish it could stay the two of us, the only girls in the world, mesmerized by the snow surges studding pearls across my windshield.

***

On Valentine’s Day, a message from Renee bathes my car in digital light. She tells me she’s been accepted to a school down South, almost as far as Florida. I stow the phone out of sight and merge onto a highway, fully aware I’m speeding, fully indifferent. As my car carves an eastbound path, I think of Renee’s balcony and the campus lights like birthday-cake candles arrayed beneath it. I wonder who will own that view once she leaves.

She asks me to drive her to the airport for her school visit, and I agree before she can finish the question. I want to be the last person she sees in Pennsylvania; I want to be the one by her side, even if that means taking her away. We peal out of town on a March afternoon in twin leather jackets, Renee deejaying the radio. Halfway to Scranton, she tells me to pull to the side of I-80, to the gravelly shoulder that slopes into still-dead grass. She says she’ll stretch her legs, smoke a cigarette. When I told Dad about her nicotine habit, he instructed me to never let her smoke in the car. “The smell will soak into the seats,” he warned. “It’ll never come out.”

That’s why I let her light her L&M inside, half-heartedly nudging the tip toward her open window between drags. I imagine the smoke, a cocktail of ash and breath, settling into the

interior. Like the salt puddles she tracked inside all winter, the ghostly bootprints I’ll never wipe away, her scent can stay in my passenger seat forever.

The car quakes as tractor-trailers whoosh by, swallowing us in their sound. I wince at every tremor, and Renee laughs at me and tousles her hair with her free hand. “You’re so scared right now,” she teases.

“My parents never did this,” I say, checking the rearview mirror. “Never stopped on the side of the road.”

But that’s not true. In November of my dad’s senior year, he drove Mom down route 26 to their favorite restaurant. As dusk peppered shadows over the scene, he maneuvered his

Mercury Monterey off the highway, telling Mom he heard something wrong with the engine— not to worry, he said, but he’d better check out that clunking. He wrenched open the hood, tinkered for a few minutes as she gazed at the foliage.

“Here’s the problem,” he said, clunking the hood back into place and bending down beside her window with a small diamond ring. “This little guy was stuck in the carburetor.”

What is a diamond, anyway, but carbon and heat? I watch Renee’s cigarette smolder, orange then gray then gone, and think it’s not so different from a precious stone. Maybe if the season weren’t still settled in cold; maybe if the wind didn’t nip so sharply beneath our too-thin jackets; maybe if there weren’t an endless summer awaiting her in the South—maybe then my heat would reach the carbon in Renee’s hand, turn it to diamond. Maybe then we could kindle something here, on the roadside, that would last.

***

Alone in Renee’s living room as another party winds down, I muse at my reflection in a

Solo cup of beer and wonder about the girls we love, and the ones we don’t. I wonder which is

the bigger tragedy as I pursue stranger after stranger on these nights, in black rooms that feel aquamarine.

Renee summarizes it best as she plucks the drink from my hand and drapes a blanket over my legs. Pity spikes her voice; I feel its icepick in my knees. She thinks I’m asleep, but I’m awake to hear her and the girl she will take to bed.

“She watches everything I do,” Renee whispers to the girl—not one she loves, but the one she’ll love tonight. “It’s so hard.”

In the morning when I wake, a pretzel on the pleather chair, I think of Dad in Florida, rising to the sun and to the woman who never cast Joanne from his heart. I think of Renee, asleep in the hands of a girl whom she will abandon. I think of her in the South, letting another girl pay for her cigarettes, scribbling in another girl’s textbooks, and maybe leaving that girl, too, in the end. And I fumble for a phone to call Dad, and I stifle tears when he answers on the second ring.

CHAPTER TWO

FAULTY HEARTS

Abby raised a wind-pinked finger, pointed at the smear of blowing leaves at the end of her street, and shouted, “Look!” Two figures were shuffling, hands in pockets, toward us. They edged into focus deliberately slowly: dark-skinned, thin-limbed Nathan Erikson and paler-than- eggwhites Andy Aumiller. In other words: my destiny, dressed in Wal-Mart jeans and a worn t- shirt, and destiny’s nasally sidekick. I looked at Abby and smiled gratefully, and she smiled back, grateful that I was grateful. From this afternoon forward—assuming everything went to plan—she’d be forever ensconced in my good graces.

There was only one reason why I was spending this late-October afternoon at Abby’s house and not at Nadia’s, my best friend’s, or Janelle’s, the girl I was obsessed with impressing, and that reason was Nathan Erikson. Every fifth-grader with a pulse knew Nathan was infatuated with me, and although I had zero interest in him as a person, I had every interest in being the first girl in my grade to secure a boyfriend. Regardless of what transpired between me and Nathan, history would remember us as the founding romantics of Radio Park Elementary’s

Class of 2004.

Of course, the occasion of nabbing my first boyfriend would’ve been more momentous if

I’d liked Nathan even remotely, even platonically, but I didn’t have time to sit around and wait for love. Not when curly-haired girls like Janelle were flouncing around the school in brand-new

Limited Too. Not when I had owlish glasses and a Three Musketeers habit I just couldn’t quit.

Nathan finally ambled close enough for conversation. Eyes on his scuffed shoes, he asked: “D’you wanna walk a little?” Not exactly dashing, but I couldn’t stand to be picky. For all I knew, Janelle was snagging a boyfriend right that minute.

I tilted my head and gave Abby a glare that said, plainly, go away.

“Andy,” she grinned, snapping to life, “let’s go over here.”

I had to hand it to Abby: the girl was smooth. As Andy plodded after her, I turned my attention back to Nathan, took a steadying breath, and said okay.

We walked to the end of the block where Abby’s semiquiet block intersected the car- blurred stripe that was Atherton Street. A sedan whooshed by, dizzying the dead leaves around our feet. The wind kicked an empty trash can into the middle of the road, where it lolled like a belly-up turtle. I wondered what was wrong with the dads in the neighborhood that they didn’t fetch their emptied bins. Maybe these houses, like Abby’s, were all dadless. Maybe this was where dadless kids came to live. I thought about asking Nathan where his dad was but resisted the impulse. At the rate Nathan strung words together, examining his family history would take hours.

When Nathan finally turned to face me, his eyes were bright, his lips purple from the cold. Maybe he thought the no-jacket look was suave. “I kind of like you,” he managed.

Duh, I thought. Out loud, I said: “Really?”

“Yeah.” Nathan swallowed once, twice, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a buoy.

“I like you, too,” I lied. Or was it a lie? I did like Nathan, in the sense that Nathan was giving me what I wanted. I liked Nathan a lot for giving me the title of First Girl To Be Desired

By An Actual Member of the Male Species. In that moment, I liked Nathan so much I would’ve kissed his purple lips if the idea of kissing a boy didn’t seem more embarrassing than getting caught peeing in the swimming pool.

Nathan rocked back and forth on his heels. “Would you want to, you know, like be my girlfriend? Or something?”

Would I?! Nathan knew so laughably little about me!—which, upon further thinking, was probably fortunate. I donned a shy smile, the smile I thought a surprised and flattered girl would wear, and said yes.

“Cool,” Nathan said and extended his goosefleshed arm toward me. I ogled the sea of bumps interrupting his skin. His knuckles and elbows were thatched and white, as if they’d been rubbed with chalk or had never seen a bottle of lotion. I couldn’t guess what Nathan was doing until his cold, bony fingers slithered around my wrist.

“Oh!” I tried to tamp down my eyebrows as they shot toward the trees. I’d forgotten that physical contact was, occasionally, part of the boyfriend bargain. I hadn’t thought that touching a boy would feel so painfully stilted, either; girls in movies always seemed enraptured when they were cloaked in a boy’s arms. And I’d never had a problem with touching people before: I’d shared a bed with Annie, hidden under blankets with Janelle, wrestled Nadia in the snow. My reticence to touch Nathan was not only humiliating, it was potentially devastating to my love life.

So, clenching my jaw, I cradled my hand inside Nathan’s to make our palms kiss. He smiled, letting me know I’d done something right, and I smiled back regardless of my skin’s erupting in nervous itches. We walked hand-in-cold-hand back toward Abby, who clapped and jumped in celebration. I knew why she was happy: her mission was accomplished; our best- friendship was cemented. I side-eyed Nathan and doubted I’d ever feel that ecstatic again.

***

Saturday, November 29, 2003: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” lit up our dining room as Dad draped red and gold beads around the tree. It was almost time to pluck the fancy glass ornaments out of their tissue-paper swaddles and hang them on the branches. I

skipped from the dining room to the kitchen and back again, my socked feet swiping the floor to the beat of the music. I kept pausing in front of the hallway mirror to admire my newly pierced ears. When I’d woken that morning, I’d just been another nobody with fat, beige earlobes. Now, twin peridot studs winked at the sides of my face, drawing attention (I hoped) away from my glasses and onto my Pantene-perfect hair. And, thanks to Abby’s discreet handling of what we’d deemed “the Nathan situation,” I was a single girl again, ready to catch the latest object of my affection: TJ Mitchell. Just thinking about him made my insides as glittery-gold as the bulbs on the tree in the other room. I imagined TJ, along with the rest of my classmates, raging with desire when they saw my ears on Monday.

“Need your help, kiddo,” Dad called. He was flat-stomached on the carpet, struggling to hide a skein of electrical cords under the treeskirt. Just then, the telephone—a.k.a my get-out-of- work-free card—rang.

I bounded through the kitchen and plucked the cordless receiver off the wall. I was hoping the caller would be Nadia requesting an afternoon hangout.

The sound of Abby’s voice deflated my hopes.

“Do you want to have a sleepover tonight?” she asked, her excitement embarrassingly clear. “I’m at my dad’s apartment.”

I frowned to myself. I didn’t want to miss the Christmas preparations, and I really didn’t want to spend an entire night with Abby.

“I’ll ask my mom,” I hedged, darting to my mother’s sewing room. Just to be safe, I left the receiver in the bathroom.

“Abby asked me to sleep over at her dad’s,” I whispered, staring accusingly at Mom as if the whole situation were her fault.

“Well, do you want to?”

I threw my hands in the air. “Of course not! But I don’t know what to say!”

Mom tilted her head and thought for a moment. “Tell her Nadia’s coming over here and that you’ll have to do it another night.”

“But what if I don’t want to do it another night?”

Mom shrugged. “Then say that we don’t let you go on sleepovers.”

I nodded and trundled my way back to the phone. “I’m sorry, but I already have company coming over this afternoon.” As soon as I voiced the words, I realized how cold they sounded. “But, um, I’d really love to do it another time.” No, I wouldn’t, I thought, hoping

Abby wouldn’t call the next weekend to collect on her promise.

When our call ended, I wandered back into the sewing room, my lips toying with a smile.

“Mom,” I said in my sweetest voice, “can Nadia actually come over?”

Mom didn’t even look up from her sewing machine. “I don’t see why not.”

I scurried back to the receiver.

***

When Monday morning rolled around, my newly pierced ears and I started the day by gazing at the Christmas tree in the predawn dark. The gold lights candied the living room with a warm glow, and the white-skirted angel atop the tree was so beautiful it made my throat ache.

When Dad called me to breakfast, he seemed distracted, and Mom’s eyes were glued to the newspaper even though she didn’t seem to be reading. Coffee percolated, its hisses and burps the only noises in the room, and I wondered if my parents were fighting. There should’ve been a law against fighting at Christmastime.

After I chewed my Cheerios, Mom sighed and looked at me for a long moment.

“Honey,” she said, “I have some really sad news for you.”

The milk-and-oats taste in my mouth soured.

“One of your friends died this weekend.”

A dull, sucking sort of throb opened up in the middle of my chest.

“We got the call last night, but we didn’t want to tell you right before bed.”

The only thought I could form was, not Nadia. It could be anyone but Nadia. Nadia had been at my house on Saturday! People you’d seen on Saturday couldn’t be dead by Monday.

“It was your friend Abby,” Mom said in a gravelly voice. “There was a carbon monoxide leak in her father’s apartment Saturday night. The police found them both on Sunday morning.”

I blinked, sat back in my chair, leaned forward again. It should’ve been me: the thought barreled through me, unbidden and clobbering as the hole in my chest. Abby had invited me to her dad’s apartment that night. Maybe if I’d gone I could’ve saved her—or maybe, somehow, I could’ve died in her place. I deserved death more than Abby did; I thought about the time I made her my “slave” for three days, how she’d accepted the punishment and done everything I’d told her to. I thought about the snotty way I’d informed her I had “company” coming over on

Saturday. I deserved death a thousand—no, a million times more than she did.

“I have to brush my teeth,” I said, stumbling out of my chair.

I locked the bathroom door behind me, gripped the counter with both hands, and stared my reflection in the eye. I didn’t look any different than I had when I’d woken up that morning.

When I woke up this morning, Abby was already dead.

I waited to see if tears would come. I held a staring contest with myself, willing a few droplets to leak out of my eyes, but none did. I reached for my toothpaste with a shaky hand and

started to brush too roughly. My dentist said that over-brushing would erode my gums, but suddenly that seemed like a fine idea.

As I gathered my backpack and walked to the bus stop, I realized that probably no one would notice my earrings. And I realized how unforgiveable such a thought was.

***

All the town’s parents tripped over themselves buying carbon-monoxide detectors.

Abby’s death started to seem as routine as a lice outbreak or a flare-up of the stomach flu: parents prepared and PSAed, busying themselves so there was no time for dwelling.

When my cat, Smokey, had died in September, my dad reacted just as industriously. He hefted a long cardboard box to the backyard, shimmied Smokey’s stiff corpse into it, and duct- taped the sides closed. Every time he shifted the box, Smokey’s petrified body zinged across the bottom and clunked comically against a cardboard wall.

I didn’t cry over Smokey; not then. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when I woke in the middle of the night and mistook my black stuffed animal for my beloved cat, that I felt the gavel- smacking finality of death. Smokey would never again prowl around the Hsi’s deck or mewl for food at the Winegardner’s back door or rub his face against my calves while I watched TV—he was dead. Fur-molting, bones-disintegrating, eyes-jellifying dead. I cried until my nose was bricked with snot, and then I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and cried some more.

***

Grieving became part of the fifth-grade curriculum right alongside Pennsylvania History and long division. The guidance counselor, Mrs. Pearsall, cleared her schedule so that anyone could talk to her at any time. The principal made a special announcement over the PA system.

The art teacher had us make construction-paper condolence cards for Abby’s mom. And, during

my flute lesson, the band director asked me and three other girls to play a special song at Abby’s memorial service. The four of us sat up straight on our metal folding chairs and nodded. To our left, the last chair—Abby’s—sat cold and vacant.

But the truth was, I didn’t know what on earth there was to talk about with Mrs. Pearsall, and I didn’t know what to write in a condolence card, and I didn’t want to learn the difficult song that the band director had chosen. (The song required each of us to play completely different parts, meaning that I’d basically be doing a solo performance in front of a huge auditorium, and I didn’t even know how to do a high F like the sheet music said to. Or was it a high G? If I couldn’t even read the notes, how did anyone expect me to play them?)

But the final straw came when my teacher told us to clear our desks for our science lesson. We were doing an experiment, a long and involved one that required painstaking measurements and an entire worksheet of questions. I would’ve rather licked the bathroom floor than participate. So, putting on my best heartbroken face, I trudged up to Mrs. Lorantas’ desk and said that I couldn’t concentrate because I was so upset about Abby.

The walk to Mrs. Pearsall’s was eerily quiet, and the hallways looked massive without their usual cacophony of students and teachers. I thought I could bolt onto the playground and make a mad dash for home and nobody would even notice. Or if people did, they’d say I was just grieving. You could get away with anything as long as you called it grief.

I took a steadying breath before knocking on Mrs. Pearsall’s door, which opened with a squeak. Mrs. Pearsall’s office was the sunniest room in the school, as if the administration thought that light would obliterate all our problems the same way putting an ant under a magnifying glass did. The sun didn’t seem to be having much effect, though: Kate was blowing

her nose, Quinn was hiccup-sobbing, and Hannah was staring at her hands as if she’d never noticed them before. And then there was me, feeling like it was just another Monday.

“Please sit, Alaina,” Mrs. Pearsall said. Then she turned her attention back to Quinn, whose tearful monologue I had interrupted.

“When my Mom told me,” Quinn continued, her voice hitching wildly, “I just curled up in her lap and cried. And I c-couldn’t stop.” She squeezed her eyes shut and let out a little gasp.

“I barely slept at all.”

I tried to imagine Quinn collapsing into a bawling heap; it must have been a terrific sight, like watching one of those Victorian women faint whenever something the slightest bit stressful happened. Since my ancestors were Russian and not English, I’d never stood a chance at inheriting the fainting gene.

“What about you, Alaina?” Mrs. Pearsall asked, leaning forward. She had ice-blue eyes and graying hair that fell halfway down her back. She definitely had the fainting gene. “How did you feel when you learned about Abby?”

I chewed the inside of my cheek. “It didn’t feel real at first.” It was one of the first honest things I’d said all day. As if determined to make up for that moment of candor, I added:

“But, all of a sudden, I understood what was happening and I started crying so hard. So hard.”

That weekend, standing on the shiny stage of the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center, I did what

I’d been doing in school all week: faked my way through. I played the easy notes on my sheet music, the notes lodged firmly within the bars of the treble clef, and I mime-played everything else. When the whole charade was over, Mrs. Pearsall hugged me backstage. The whole time I was hugging her back, I was thinking that a better guidance counselor wouldn’t be hoodwinked by a ten-year-old.

***

TRIBUTES AND CONDOLENCES1

hope for our greving parents.. / Dee Dee (passing by ) our children are gifts from god, its so very sad that our young ones are gone. Our great God is also sadden when they are gone from their loving parents,remembering that he lost his son in death also. (Jesus Christ). He knows how we feel.Be reassured that he promises us that he will resurrected countless millions of children in a paradise earth. And he will reunite them to their love ones(John 5;28,29) What a happy reunion that will be for Abigail and for her family and friends.How delightful..

Healing in our Hearts / Kayla Patek (Friend)

I'm so sorry. I lost my sixteen year old sister when I was ten. I created a memorial website honoring her. Will you please return a favor? Post a tribute or condolence on my site: Jessica- patek.memory-of.com. I am terribly sorry.

***

My dad always said you could spot a real snowstorm—as opposed to just a flurry or a teasing sky—by the mountains: if you could still see the crags of the Alleghenies on the horizon, there was no need to put gas in the snowblower.

The day TJ Mitchell asked me to be his girlfriend, the Alleghenies were one shade shy of invisible. The first flakes of winter whipped around us where we stood on the playground’s

1 “Abigail Yeagley Tributes, Condolences & Bereavement.” Memory Of, TelNET, abby-yeagley.memory- of.com/tributes.aspx.

grassy slope. TJ wore a red jacket, the kind that swooshed when his arms grazed his torso, and I wore a shiny black jacket with a faux-fur hood. TJ’s nose was rosy, and I’m sure mine was, too.

TJ wasn’t nervous like Nathan; he stood square-legged before me and delivered an I-like- you-and-want-to-date-you speech that must have been painstakingly rehearsed. (He confirmed, later, that his older sisters had indeed practiced with him.) I liked TJ because he had an accent I couldn’t quite place and because he was the funniest boy in class. And it didn’t hurt that he was roughly one thousand steps above Nathan on the social ladder.

How long after Abby’s death did my personal fairytale occur? Was it weeks, or just days? Had Quinn and Kate stopped bubbling up with tears at random moments? Had Mrs.

Pearsall stopped holding her walk-in hours? I’d like to say yes, but I don’t remember. I remember Abby dying, and then a flat gray haze, and then TJ. I wonder if my classmates remember their grief as more than just a blur; I wonder if that’s how you know you’ve grieved— by the harsh sharpness of those memories, by the way time slogged and stalled and refused to get on with it.

Here’s when I missed Abby most: when our math teacher scolded TJ in the middle of a lesson for talking in class. As she leveled him with her shrill condemnation, I realized that his mistake was half mine. As boyfriend and girlfriend, we were tied together; if TJ screwed up, I screwed up; if I succeeded, TJ got a piece of the glory. The thought shook up my stomach. I didn’t want to be tethered to TJ’s sinking ship any more than I wanted him coasting on my golden one. After all, I held the class record on the times-table speed test! I was the permanent teacher’s pet! I couldn’t associate with a boy who received public dressing-downs.

I had to break up with TJ, and I had to do it myself. I cornered him before lunch when he was erasing the blackboard for Mrs. Lorantas. His shoulders were slouched and relaxed; he

probably thought we’d grow old together in his parents’ house on Nantucket Circle. And maybe we could’ve—the house had a cool round submarine-style window over the front door that I adored—if he weren’t so immature.

“TJ?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t look away from the board. Chalk dust coated the side of his hand, and my eyes prickled—from dryness or dread, I didn’t know.

“I don’t want to go out anymore.”

He kept erasing. “Okay.”

Had Nathan been this nonchalant when Abby dumped him for me? I bit my lip, realizing

I’d never asked how the breakup went. She’d done my dirty deed and I’d barely managed a thank you. “Did you hear me? I said we’re breaking up.”

“Whatever.”

Maybe TJ was playing tough, putting on a show for his friends. I supposed it would be emasculating for him to burst into tears right there at the front of the classroom, but still, his would-be macho act told me I was wise to dump him.

In the end, TJ got his revenge by repeating the secret I’d told him on our telephone dates

(that I had a pair of pink-and-purple striped underwear), so I retaliated by telling everyone that he called his bathroom “the library” because it was the only place he did any serious reading.

Needless to say, we didn’t speak much for the rest of the year, and I wasn’t sorry when he moved away the following summer.

***

My final memory of TJ and that fifth-grade year is the unseasonably warm spring day when we were ushered to the playground and told to be quiet for Abby’s tree-planting ceremony.

Abby’s mother, Dena, was there, standing to the side of a skinny tree on the edge of the playground. The tree was perched in a hole a mere twenty-five yards from where TJ had asked me to be his girlfriend. I stuck my hands in my pockets even though I wasn’t cold.

The whole ordeal struck me as barbaric, even cruel. Dena acted breezy and gracious through the ceremony, smiling at her well-wishers and saying a few sweet words about Abby. I could barely look at her, I was so steamrolled by secondhand embarrassment. If I’d recently lost my daughter and ex-husband, the last thing I’d want to become was a spectacle for a gaggle of elementary schoolers. Why were we putting her through this? Whom were we really helping?

Was I alone in worrying about her? Did everyone else think we were doing something righteous?

At the end of the dedication, we stood single-file and waited to pour a shovelful of dirt on the tree’s base. Dena stood valiantly by, smiling and thanking every student who piled dirt onto her daughter’s memory. I didn’t look Dena in the eye when it was my turn to frown, mumble something about missing Abby, and pitch my requisite pile of soil. I thought Abby would never in a million years have wanted this. Then I thought: I’d never actually asked Abby what she wanted. I couldn’t remember one time when I’d caught her eye—her eyes were green, weren’t they?—and not been wanting—expecting—demanding something from her. Maybe it had happened; probably, it hadn’t.

Maybe Abby would’ve liked the ceremony.

Maybe I never really knew Abby at all.

CHAPTER THREE

THE DARK SPACE

Helen of Troy’s face is fabled to have launched a thousand ships. That’s nice and all, but my face launched three preschool boys racing across the playground, and given the lacuna in time and chivalry between Helen and me, I’d call our legacies even.

All right, so maybe our face’s legacies aren’t exactly even. But what my preschool self lacked in face, she made up for in confidence. Preschool was my summa alta. Preschool was the one time in my life when I was told unequivocally that I was beautiful, smart, and could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. No one told my preschool self that she had a muffin top and saddlebags, that she ought to play dumb around cute boys, or that, in too many people’s eyes, anything she wanted to be boiled down to either virgin, whore, or bitch.

Yes, preschool was that enchanted fairyland where I could dress myself (once, memorably, in two pairs of pants at once) and believe I looked smokin’, an alternate reality where I could choreograph a solo dance to the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” and perform it for my classmates with nary a thought of being mocked.

This was the brief period in my life when I was sensationally—okay, moderately— popular with boys. Those boys wanted me for my body and my mind. (That is, if my body were teaching them new dance routines or weighing down the other seat of the teeter-totter.) With my best friend, Kelty, I played dress-up and sang “The Song That Never Ends.” With Josh, I bobbed for apples at Halloween and quibbled over who had more than a fair share of Legos. And with

Jared I dashed around the playground, moving so fast I’d wonder if my brain were bouncing against my eyeballs.

But it was through my friendship with Kelty that I first began to understand the rules of boys and girls. I learned that it was “inappropriate” to beg to have a sleepover with Kelty. I learned that when Kelty and I dressed up in leftover Halloween costumes (him as a train conductor, me as Little Bo Peep), it was “unladylike” to strip off my t-shirt with wild abandon, even though Kelty didn’t get reprimanded for doing so. I learned to be pleased when my mom called Kelty my boyfriend and joked about us getting married, because only really special girls earned boys’ attention—really special girls like Cinderella and Belle.

This Disneyfied innocence, this blissful unself-consciousness, continued until my fourth birthday. Maybe that sounds pitiful, but I realize I’m lucky it lasted that long. For too many girls, it doesn’t.

***

On my fourth birthday, my parents invited our sprawling extended family to our house for an afternoon of cheeseburgers and orange soda and presents. My uncles deflated into La-Z-

Boy recliners with beers in their hands; my aunts flocked to the kitchen, each competing to see who could pour the most drinks or restock the most ice, elbowing after the title of Most Helpful

Guest; my cousins sprinted around the backyard and wrestled atop the mossy grass. But I shrank away from the hubbub. My brand-new Barbie and Skipper were crying for attention, and I had to attend to their imminent drama—namely that Skipper, the non-birthday girl, was jealous of

Barbie, the birthday girl.

My bedroom sat at the end of the L-shaped hallway that branched off the living room.

Over the hum of the air conditioner parked just outside my window, I couldn’t hear much from the rest of the house, and the rest of the house couldn’t hear me. That was how I liked it.

“Oh,” I crowed in my high-pitched Barbie voice, “I’d just love to try on my birthday dress! Skipper, isn’t it gorgeous?”

Brassy-haired Skipper said nothing. She hated Barbie, Barbie with her platinum hair and teeny-tiny waist. (Yes, Barbie and Skipper had identical figures in reality, but not in my imagination. In my imagination, Barbie eerily resembled my blonde, taut-stomached older sister, while Skipper had my paunchy middle and olive complexion.)

“Here,” Barbie chirped as I unclasped her dress and slid it off her plastic hips, “I’ll just slip into this and we can grab lunch. Maybe you can pay, Skipper, since it’s my birthday?”

Again, Skipper said nothing as I changed Barbie into the pink dress with sparkly silver hearts.

“And can I borrow your heels, Skipper?”

I plucked off Skipper’s silver heels before she could reply.

By this point, Skipper was about to flip her lid, and Barbie was as self-absorbedly smug as ever. I was so immersed in the brewing catfight, I didn’t notice my bedroom door being pushed open. But I noticed when four clunky sneakers tromped over my soft carpet. (This instantly struck me as a major offense, this shoes-wearing. My mother was many things, but tolerant of sneakers on her carpets she was not.)

I noticed, too, my door locking with a smart click.

The thick-soled black-and-white shoes insulted my brown carpet. I told the boys, my teenaged cousins, they’d better take off their shoes or they’d be sorry. They laughed, and the laughter made their shoes seem bigger, more threatening.

“We’ve got a present for the birthday girl,” the older one announced.

I felt my intestines braid together. I thought my cousins would give me a pinch to grow an inch, the way Arthur did to D.W. on her birthday, and I hated being pinched. I watched the boys walk toward me until their bodies rose up like skyscrapers, dauntingly high.

“Get up,” the older one said. The younger one said nothing, just hulked beside his brother in silent alliance. I noticed Barbie’s birthday dress was rumpled and the bulb of her shoulder was exposed. She was dangerously close to looking “unladylike.”

“Up,” my cousin repeated.

I shook my head, seemingly mute as Skipper.

My older cousin glowered at my younger cousin, and suddenly they descended, a tangle of hairy forearms and calloused fingers. My bedroom inverted and my long hair stood straight from my skull as the boys lifted me by my ankles and hung me upside down. The room went bubblegum pink as the skirt of my dress fell over my face. I realized my stomach and my legs and my flowered underpants were exposed for the boys to see! In that moment I thought I would implode from embarrassment. I wondered if I had a wedgie, if the boys could see the outline of my private parts (which Dad and Mom said never to show anybody) through my thin underpants—if, if, if.

My cousins were saying something, but I didn’t register their words. I was outside my body, looking down at my cousins’ tanned arms, staring in horror at my pale thighs and my private parts, now as baldly visible as the piggy bank on my bookshelf. (In a few years, another boy cousin would sleuth into my bedroom and steal a $20 bill from that bank and I’d cry to my dad about it and he’d force the cousin to write me an apology letter.) But at that moment the piggy bank was all but invisible to my cousins. I was the one ready for the taking.

I yelled for the boys to put me down; they didn’t. I attempted to flail my legs, which only made my upper body swing like a pendulum. So I stopped fighting. I listened to the brothers laugh. I couldn’t tell their laughs apart, they were so alike; my cousins wore their alikeness with pride. The younger brother always looked at the older brother like he was the best guy in the whole world.

And then everything went dark.

The only way I can describe it is that everything went as dark as it must have gone for

Barbie and Skipper each night when I put them in their drawer. For them, the world ended every night and didn’t begin again until I told it to.

I didn’t know the darkness had descended until it lifted. When it lifted, I found myself pretzeled on my Minnie Mouse comforter, my dress smoothed back into place over my body.

My cousins lingered beside the bed, fidgeting, with smirking, expectant looks on their faces.

Fear hit me like a muscle spasm and suddenly, without realizing what I was doing, I was rocketing off the bed, streaking across the room, fumbling with the lock on the doorknob. I expected to feel the boys’ rough hands on me again the same way I expected the witch who lived in the basement to grab me every time I skittered up the stairs. In the back of my throat was a lump that knew my cousins were going to trap me in the room with them. It knew it.

But they didn’t trap me: they stood motionless as I tore down the hallway, through the living room, out the screen door and into the too-bright midafternoon. August humidity wrapped around me like a damp towel and I felt my throat close up. I bent over and put my hands on my knees, wheezing. My aunt, the boys’ mother, crouched down beside me.

“Everything okay, birthday girl?”

My aunt was—and is—a good woman. She has plump cheeks and a forgiving smile.

She always brings multiple homemade pies to family gatherings, cream-filled ones like coconut and key lime that my dad exclaims are to die for. She gives amazing presents and warm, full- body hugs. I couldn’t look her in the eye.

“Your boys,” I heaved, my sweat-dappled forehead red and furrowed, “are very bad boys.”

My aunt laughed. The last time I’d said something like this, it was because her sons had used the word “turd” in front of me. I’d tattled on them for swearing, and my aunt had cupped my chin and told me to ignore them.

“Don’t I know it,” she said breezily. “What’d they do this time?”

But suddenly I was plastic, wordless Skipper. I cast my wide eyes on the concrete deck and tried to swallow. I couldn’t begin to say what the boys had done; I couldn’t begin to explain the darkness. All I knew was that one moment I’d been upside down, and the next moment everything had been dark, and the darkness could have lasted a minute or an hour or a year but

I’d never know for sure.

I shook my head at my aunt and waited until she walked away.

***

At preschool, I remained a hot commodity among my friends, and to my mother’s delight

I lasted months in the good graces of my “boyfriend,” Kelty. In fact, it just so happened that around my fourth birthday, Kelty began to fight with Josh and Jared over me. The boys’ attention made me feel just like Belle when Gaston was hounding her. (Except Gaston was scary and had evil eyebrows, whereas my towheaded preschool suitors were not and did not.)

The three boys came to this solemn agreement: every morning, they would line up in the mulch on the north side of the playground, and the boy who could cross the playground the fastest would be my boyfriend for the day. The race would start with the competitors shaking out their thin, ropy muscles while I toed a starting line in the mulch with my sneaker. Jared would stretch his neck, making his Brillo-pad hair gleam in the early sunlight. Josh’s lips would be thin. Kelty’s cheeks would be red before I even yelled, “Go!”

Jared always won. He was the natural athlete of the group, the one who would go on to play a sport in every season and win the affections of countless teenage girls. Josh would eventually lose his baby fat and secure a not-so-glorified position on the soccer team—defender, or maybe second-string goalie—and he wouldn’t, to my knowledge, remember me or those preschool races. But for a sweet and shining time, those boys fought for me, their elbows stabbing the foggy morning air, their chests swelling, their Velcro sneakers thwacking the soft ground. And one of them would win the day—the glory—the pride—and me.

And then, one Monday morning, everything changed. The four of us arrived at preschool to find the doors removed from each of the bathroom stalls. The teachers had come through on their threat: if we kids couldn’t stop slamming the stall doors, we wouldn’t have stall doors. This drama was far more important than footraces. It was all any of us could talk about.

Miraculously, I made it through the morning without having to pee, but then naptime arrived. As part of the teachers’ foolproof plan to prevent bedwetting (well, sleeping-bag- wetting) accidents, they always supervised a mandatory pre-naptime bathroom trip. They would line us up outside the bathroom and usher us, one by one, into the newly doorless bathroom stalls. Once we’d flushed our toilets and washed our hands, we were free to sleep.

I waited in the interminable bathroom line. My biggest fear—my greatest humiliation— was that one of my peers would catch me with my pants (literally) down. I’d already been close to pantsless (or past pantsless?) with my cousins, and that memory burned worse than iodine on a skinned knee. I couldn’t survive the humiliation of my friends whom I saw every day seeing me like that.

Despite my agony, the line for the bathroom crawled forward. Finally, Fat Jen gave me the sour-faced look that meant, “you’re up, kid.” The first bathroom stall was open. I made my way to the toilet, slid my bright-pink pants and Tinkerbell underwear to my knees, and plopped down on the U-bend. I listened to the deafening whoosh as the toilet in the next stall flushed.

To my horror, Jared—Jared!—emerged from the stall with the still-gurgling toilet. As he passed my stall on his way to the sink, he locked eyes with me for an agonizing moment. I couldn’t believe my luck. There I sat, bare-assed and blushing, while he got to be fully dressed and in full little-boy swagger mode.

And you can bet that Jared rubbernecked me a second time on his way out of the bathroom.

I’m not quite sure when the races to be my boyfriend disbanded, but it was shortly after the toilet-gawking incident. Once you’ve been seen on the porcelain throne, you just don’t feel much like a queen. You just don’t feel like someone who deserves to have boys racing to have her. You feel like someone who should sit quietly (with her pants up) and pray for better luck.

***

Because of the dark space in my recollection of my fourth birthday, I never knew exactly how much blame to place on my two cousins. What lines had they actually crossed? Was the hanging-from-the-ankles the worst of it, or…? I didn’t want to think past the “or.” In my girl-

mind, the “or” signified that maybe the boys had pulled down my underpants. As I grew older, I learned that the “or” could be something far worse.

But no amount of worrying about that “or” clarified my memory. There was still a space—of unknown size and weight—carved out of my fourth birthday, giving me an off-kilter fear that I’d been victimized or, worse, that I hadn’t been victimized and was just overreacting to an inexcusable degree. I couldn’t decide whether to pity myself or punish myself.

Time passed and I learned that my boy cousins—not the cousins who’d held me upside down; different boy cousins—were naturally fascinated with bodies, both theirs and mine. At one point or another I glimpsed every one of my boy cousins’ backs as they peed in their backyards. Once, I was propositioned by a second cousin to show him “mine” if (you guessed it) he showed me “his.” Another time, I unknowingly interrupted a cousin as he fondled himself in the bushes during the Fourth of July fireworks.

Knowing what I eventually knew about boys and their fascination with genitalia, could I hold a grudge against my ankle-grabbing cousins after so many years? Could I hold a grudge over a memory that was murky at best, blank at worst?

And here’s the punch-in-the-gut question: could I hold a grudge against a dead boy?

Because the oldest cousin, the one who orchestrated my “birthday gift,” died just before

Christmas 1998, just months after my fifth birthday. To the rest of my extended family, he’s a beloved memory to be mourned. To me? He’s someone I’m not sure how to remember, much less grieve. I’ve heard people tout how good he was, how he was intelligent, how he was active in Presbyterian Bible studies, and as I listen to that praise I feel myself turn rubbery and vacant as Skipper.

***

One day near the end of my preschool tenure, the rest of the class and I were clustered on the big carpet for storytime. We adored the carpet with its squares of blue and red, yellow and green; we adored sitting in an imperfect circle and listening to the teacher of the day (hopefully

Skinny Jen) guide us through a picture book.

I wasn’t sitting near Kelty or Josh or Jared. By that time, our odd foursome had disbanded. Instead I sat by a brunette boy named Graham. All I knew about Graham was that he often had a grape-juice stain above his upper lip, and he wore too many turtlenecks in primary colors, and he didn’t seem like the type of kid I wanted to be friends with.

As we kids tittered in anticipation of storytime, Graham scooted close to me, so close that

I could smell the Fig Newtons on his breath. I loathed Fig Newtons.

“Pssst,” Graham spat into my ear. His humid breath made my ear and neck grow moist, and I flinched. Undeterred, Graham leaned closer. “Pssst!” And then Graham’s fingers—which were just as damp and clingy as his breath—wedged beneath the waistband of my pants and underwear. I felt his small little-boy palm press against my left butt cheek, as if he were trying to give my ass a low-five. I could visualize the Fig Newton goo adhering to my body.

Incensed, I tried to wriggle away. I whisper-shouted for him to stop.

Graham didn’t stop; I felt his fingers moving, kneading my skin the way my cat did before settling on my lap for a nap. “I’m gonna touch your butt a hundred times,” Graham said.

His gummy fingers kept suctioning and pulling away from my skin.

Barbie would have gasped dramatically and waited for Ken to sweep in and save the day.

Then Barbie and Ken would’ve gone out to dinner and fallen in love and pledged their affection and loyalty to one another forevermore. (From a young age, Barbie was gunning for a diamond.)

Skipper would’ve resolved herself to Graham’s hundred touches. She would’ve whined to

Barbie about it later. (That is, when she could get in a word in edgewise. Barbie had a habit of babbling.)

I didn’t pull a Barbie or a Skipper. Instead I raised my hand in the air and waved it madly, drowning-swimmer style. “Graham is touching my butt!” I shrieked, not caring if every single preschooler and every single teacher heard. I wanted them to hear me. “He said he’d touch it a hundred times!”

Both the Jens looked scandalized. But they rushed to me without hesitation, Skinny Jen fawning over me, Fat Jen giving Graham her scariest stinkeye. In the end, the head of the preschool called Graham’s parents, and Graham was forbidden to sit next to me ever, ever again.

It wasn’t a radical punishment, but I hadn’t been searching for radical. I just wanted to be heard.

***

Occasionally I search for my dead cousin’s obituary, which is filed in the archives of our little town’s newspaper. My cousin died at age 18. I’m young myself, but even I think of 18 as something way back in the rearview mirror of life. My 18-year-old self was kind of sweet and kind of an asshole; mature for her age but also a big idiot; simultaneously bigheaded and insecure. In my memory, my cousin was A Man when he died, someone fearsome and untouchable. But really he was just a kid, just someone who never even got to be the age I am now. And he was even more of a kid at my fourth birthday party. And he either did something perverted to me or didn’t do something perverted to me, and I have to live with that either/or.

It’s better than not living at all, I guess.

The truth is that I still dissociate during sex—at least, that’s the term my therapist gives for the hyperaware, overthinking, out-of-body mania I feel when my girlfriend and I start getting intimate. I occasionally shy away from my girlfriend’s touch, feeling dirty and humiliated when

I know that she wants me and that I want her back. When I think of sex I think: degrading, undignified, animalistic. I can combat those thoughts, and I can walk myself through my hang- ups about intimacy; it just takes careful, diligent work.

But the work is worth it. The work is worth it because the work is all that stands between me and a plastic, immobile, Skipper-esque life. The work is worth it because my girlfriend’s eyes are the color of coffee with just a splash of milk and her inner thighs are decadent as buttercream icing. The work is worth it because her lips are always just-kissed pink and because she lets me blare “I Want It That Way” in the car and sometimes she even sings along. The work is painful, but it’s the necessary price of survival. It’s the starting line for everything else.

CHAPTER FOUR

BLOOD, WATER, SIN

Since my sister, Erica, and her husband, Jeremy, had moved to Dallas as newlyweds,

Erica had precious few opportunities to teach me everything I needed to know about young adulthood. (“Everything I needed to know” consisted of religion instruction—which Erica didn’t trust my parents to properly execute—and Cross Country training. As a former Cross-Country captain and current die-hard Christian, Erica cared immensely that I followed in her fast and holy footsteps.) Erica became rapacious during our twice-yearly visits, transforming my Christmas breaks and summer vacations into periods of intense self-improvement.

The July before my ninth-grade year, Mom booked a family vacation at a resort hotel in

Arkansas. I packed my journal and The Iliad, my much-dreaded summer reading assignment.

My sister packed her Bible and a variety of pink-hued workout gear.

“Things are different in high school,” Erica warned me one morning, twisting her hair into a ponytail as we left for a four-mile run. “You’re going to face spiritual struggles you can’t even imagine.”

Toweling herself dry after a post-run shower: “You might feel a little different than the other kids at school. I can only remember one boy from my high school—besides Jeremy, of course—who really walked with the Lord. It was a really awesome thing to see, but still, it was only one boy.”

Over diet sodas on the hotel’s patio: “I won’t lie to you about sex. It’s tempting, it really is, and there were times when it was such a struggle for me and Jeremy. That’s actually why we

didn’t wait until after college to get married. After six years, we just couldn’t hold out anymore.”

When Erica’s lectures ended, we read the Bible together in silence. Erica suggested I read Galatians, and Jeremy popped in periodically to ask if I had any questions about the text.

He’d just completed his first year at the Dallas Theological Seminary and was brimming with answers.

One afternoon, my family and I decided to explore the downtown strip near the hotel. We meandered over the cracked sidewalks, our skin sticky from the humidity, our noses assaulted by the tarry smell of car exhaust. Erica kept ducking into the nicer-looking shops, hoping to steal a reprieve from the heat. I followed her into Kathryn’s Antiques and Jewelry—a musty box of a place, all glass shelves and narrow aisles that made me acutely aware of my elbows. It was the kind of shop that sold birthstone necklaces and hand-blown glass kittens.

“Sissy, come here,” Erica hissed, poking her head out from behind a display in the middle of the store. “I found the perfect thing for you.”

I stepped carefully around a precariously placed vase. “Yeah?”

“A purity ring,” Erica said, holding up different bands and examining them. She gravitated toward the white-gold ones, the ones like her own wedding ring. “You don’t have one yet, do you?”

I shook my head.

“That’s great, then. You want one, right?” Erica didn’t look up as she plucked another band from its velvet pocket. “I like this one; it’s a little less flashy. Not as big. What do you think?” She slid the ring onto my finger. The delicate band was adorned with a heart bisected by a cross. Erica was already asking Dad for his Mastercard.

At first, I loved how the ring volleyed sunlight skyward whenever I moved. It was only when I shut myself in my hotel room’s bathroom that the ring struck me as menacing, no longer kissing me with sunlight but spotlighting me, policing me, popping me with light like bacon grease.

I plunked myself down on the toilet and pulled at my underwear. Stamped across the fabric, in red and blue and green and yellow and purple, was: all I want for Christmas is everything. The underwear was too thick for July, too tight for my ballooning butt, too threadbare to still be wearing. Plus, it made me recall the godless materialism of the holiday season, a topic that made my pastor’s ruddy jowls tremble when he railed against it. My purity ring winked ominously as I fumbled with the roll of toilet paper.

The hotel’s pilly toilet paper came up rusty. Not bloody, the way My Body, My Self had said it would, but sickly brown. (Wink-wink went the purity ring.) I frowned at the three misshapen blots at the center of my underwear. I thought: I finished Are You There, God? It’s

Me, Margaret four years ago! I’ve given up on my period! Shouldn’t it have given up on me?

My church friends had all gotten their first periods years before. Cara had busted out of her 34C bra the previous summer, and Jenna was always talking about cramps in the same excited way she talked about The Hills. Megan had even gotten her period before sixth grade!

They couldn’t be real, those penny-colored blotches, but they were. They were mine, given from God. They were God, or rather God’s message, telling me—no, warning me—that

He had His eye on me. That He was more vigilant than Erica; that He was closer than the ring on my finger.

Mom was thrilled when she heard the news. (She insisted that I’d “finally start to thin out” now that I was “a woman.”) Erica showed me how to use applicator-less o.b. tampons,

conveniently forgetting to mention that 99.9% of women use applicators—which, I would find out a decade later, make the job down there much easier. Dad kept grinning and making comments like, “Should I order a Bloody Mary with dinner?” and “Maybe the restaurant will have red velvet cake!”

But I stared stoically at my purity ring and shut out my family’s chatter and understood that nothing—not my period, not my virginity, not my impending high-school career—was a laughing matter. How could it be, when God’s eye was smothering me, when I was one slip of

His hand away from suffocating?

I abandoned my jog mid-stride, letting my shoulders slump and my hands clutch my hips as I surrendered to the hill. Erica had said Cross Country would challenge me, had canopied her voice over the he-hers of my asthma attacks to warn me about it, and still I was unprepared.

August was scorching the county mercilessly, its heat only relenting for murderous thunderstorms that forced our two-a-day practices inside. The coaches worked us just as hard indoors, though, commanding us to hold planks and V-sits until our bodies gave out on the gritty gymnasium floor. The worst part of practices, I decided, was whatever our coaches were demanding at the current moment. There was no easy, just different shades of pain.

“Come on, don’t quit now,” CJ said, appearing out of nowhere. I had noticed her a few miles ago, running slowly and laughing loudly with the other captains. CJ never broke a sweat at practice, yet managed to run sub-23-minute races, her blond ponytail a shock of lightning as she tore from the starting line. She exuded strength like no girl I knew, not even Erica. Erica couldn’t do a pull-up or hold a three-minute plank or secure a scholarship to West Point.

I shuffled my legs to match CJ’s stride and we crested the hill together, pressing forward into the endless humidity. CJ spoke since I couldn’t. “It really does get easier,” she said. Her hazel eyes were sprinkled with gold.

I made a hangdog expression and CJ laughed. “It does,” she repeated. “I remember my freshman two-a-days—terrible. But you get used to it.”

I shook my head, willing air into my lungs. “Even Gigi?” I’d never met anyone with a more terrifying gaze—or more muscled quadriceps—than our assistant coach.

CJ laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about Gigi. I’ll protect you from her.”

I blinked. I liked the thought of CJ protecting me. I liked it a surprising amount.

When the run finally ended, CJ and I stretched in the shade of a big oak tree. The boys’ team jogged past us, their skeletal chests translucent in the morning sunlight.

“They’re so weird,” CJ said as one of the boys shouted, off-key, the lyrics to an old

ABBA song. The other boys joined the caterwauling in an ear-splitting avalanche of noise.

“Kind of cultish,” I agreed. “They always move in a big pack.”

“You have no idea,” CJ lowered her voice. “Paul Wells told me they shower together.

After practices. Like just blast music and all run in there together.”

My eyes widened, imagining the mass nakedness: waves of flesh undulating in the pink- tiled room, Spartan except for the rusted spigots spaced along the walls.

“Paul Wells,” I echoed. I’d heard about boys like Paul, even though as senior class president his social circle spun as far from mine as possible. “Isn’t he—?”

CJ nodded, watching the boys disappear from view. “Yup.”

I folded over for a hamstring stretch, grabbing handfuls of grass in my flushed palms.

“And that’s not awkward? The shower thing?”

CJ bent down too, her ponytail cascading close to my cheek. “Who knows. All he told me is it’s like one big dance party.”

CJ and I didn’t discuss Paul Wells or his sexuality again, but I found my mind skulking back to that conversation many times when CJ and I changed into our running clothes or waited in line for the bathroom. I wondered how the boys could sing and holler and dance together naked, and then make eye contact in the hallways the next day as if nothing happened. As if they hadn’t gyrated together as the faucets rained overhead, as if they hadn’t laughed and sang lay all your love on me in the midst of each other’s exposed bodies. Then I wondered about CJ and me in the shower, if we could rinse our hair and sing songs and then wave hello afterward as if nothing had changed. I wondered if CJ’s hair would glint like bronze as the water saturated it, if it would cling to the nape of her neck and the curve of her shoulder blades. I wondered what CJ would do if I traced the water as it rivered down her back. Would her skin shiver with goosebumps? Would she push me away? Would she pull me in?

I started keeping my Bible on my nightstand, and then in my locker at school. I needed it for the same reason I needed my purity ring: I needed to remind my roving mind of God’s omnipresence. He was hearing my thoughts—all my thoughts. And I didn’t need another inauspiciously timed menses to make me understand that He was displeased.

Erica’s phone calls kept coming every week, doggedly as the dawn. I closed my thoughts about CJ behind a hermetic seal when Erica’s voice was in my ear, sure that my sister could detect sin in my heart. I couldn’t understand why I was struggling with impure thoughts. I was at Erica’s old school, on her old Cross Country team, settled in her old bedroom. And I had her constant advice to boot. And how could all that not be enough?

For my high-school graduation present, my two best friends and I took our first vacation without our families. We couldn’t stop giggling as our bus barreled toward New York City; everything, from the bushy-bearded Hasidic Jew who offered Jimin bubblegum, to the stranger who fell asleep on Lauren’s shoulder, seemed hilarious in the wake of our adventure.

Have a great time sissy, Erica’s text read. Can’t wait to hear all about it.

I was surprised that Erica remembered my trip. Ever since Jeremy had switched from studying theology to studying law, and Erica had traded her engineering job for stay-at-home motherhood, their lives had constricted to almost exclude me. Our relationship survived best when I visited: I could accompany them to church, where Jeremy volunteered as an elder; could babysit their daughter while they hosted Bible study; could deejay the Veggie Tales music while

Erica made dinner. I’d return from those sojourns exhausted, albeit proficient in speed diapering and Bible quoting.

Jimin shook the back of Lauren’s seat, her elbow nearly dislodging the cell phone from my hands. “Move back with us,” she whispered, tapping Lauren on the shoulder. Lauren’s seat partner hadn’t stirred when the driver sped over a pothole or jammed the brakes before a merge, and his head hovered dangerously close to her shoulder again. “Just sit on our laps. You weigh, like, ten pounds.”

“I was waiting for you to ask,” Lauren smiled, maneuvering out of her seat and crawling over Jimin to sit on my legs, her back flush to the window. Her seat bones dug into my thighs, their needle-sharpness the only downside of her lithe dancer’s physique. “And you won’t regret it because, wait for it—” she clawed through her purse “—I’ve got mangoes!”

I laughed as Lauren waggled a Tupperware container in my face, popping its lid to display the slivers of yellow fruit. Lauren and I had first bonded over fruit during lunch hours in the darkened eaves of the auditorium. The first time she invited me to sneak up there for secret meals, I marveled at the foods she packed: plump raspberries, electric-green kiwis, dewy sections of blood oranges. I loved most when she brought blackberries. She would pluck them out of the

Tupperware, fat and glistening, and roll them around her mouth, her eyes fixed on me as I rambled about my day. She listened to every word I said, drawing me out on taciturn days and laughing with me on ebullient ones. Sometimes when we’d eaten all the food we sprawled out over the worn carpet and gazed at the unlit spotlights. Sometimes I’d roll over and tickle her taut stomach, whisper teasing words in her ear. Teach me to be a sexy ballerina, I’d say between giggles. Sometimes she’d tilt her face so her olive cheek kissed the carpet and say, come to dance class with me.

But only sometimes. Other times, our friends joined us, and on those days we sat up straight and chewed our food quickly and discussed AP tests.

“I also brought a loaf of sourdough,” Lauren said, rummaging through her bag, her long hair tickling my forearm. “Just in case.”

“You would, Lauren.” I made a teasing face and poked her thin waist.

“I feel carsick,” Jimin said, her head lolling on my shoulder. Her eyes closed, leaving

Lauren and me virtually alone.

“I’ll put these away,” Lauren whispered in my ear, nodding at the mangoes. “We learned in Physiology that even talking about food can activate the salivary glands.” That was what I loved about Lauren: she had the answers to everything. To the rest of the world, she probably looked like a normal seventeen-year-old girl, but in my eyes she was ethereal, effervescent.

By the time we arrived at Hotel Carter, Jimin looked alarmingly pale but at least she’d kept her breakfast down. We’d booked our dingy room for the low price, not the atmosphere; we’d decided the Times Square location mattered more than luxury. We’ll have to check for bedbugs first thing, Lauren had warned when she filled out the reservation information. I’d twirled her hair around my finger, insisting everything would be fine as I watched the brassy strands reflect the light overhead. I always fiddled with Lauren’s waist-length hair; sometimes she cascaded it across my legs, closed her eyes as I braided and unbraided it to the soundtrack of a Broadway musical. Les Mis and Cats were her favorites.

New York overwhelmed me, but not Lauren. “All these people,” I said, pushing back my cuticles as we cut a path through the congested sidewalks. “I feel like I’m in one of those movie scenes—you know, when a character has a panic attack? And the background noise gets louder and louder until the person can’t even think?” So Lauren grabbed my hand and navigated us both around the bustling sidewalks, teaching me how to weave around slow walkers and dodge the snaking food-cart lines. In the shadow of a skyscraper I noticed how truly short Lauren was—

5’2’’ seemed more significant back home; it seemed on par with my 5’9”, on par even with the clouds. But, in reality, Lauren was way below the clouds, down on earth with everyone else.

And so was I.

On our last night in the city, Lauren, Jimin, and I retired early to the hotel.

“We’re such dorks,” I said, drunk with laughter. “Going home when it’s still light.”

“And yet all I want to do is get in my PJs and have a slumber party,” Lauren said, hooking her arm through mine.

Unbelievably, I was the one who suggested what happened next. I shocked myself by voicing my idea; Lauren shocked me with the alacrity of her agreement, effortless as water flowing downhill.

“I’ve always wanted to do something,” I said shyly as we sat cross-legged, all three of us crowded on Lauren’s bed. “Like…like a rite, or a baptism, or something.”

Jimin blinked. In her signature deadpan voice, she asked, “What?”

But Lauren didn’t laugh at Jimin’s joke. Instead, she looked me straight in the eye.

“How so?”

I was thinking of a book I’d read, a paperback whose pages I’d fingered until they felt soft as skin. I was thinking of the book’s three heroines, the ones who swam naked to a rock in the middle of a lake and made offerings to the gods and goddesses. I’d always wanted that sort of magical life, a life where best friends smoked pot and sneaked out in the middle of the night and swam nude under a full moon.

My idea was crazy, mortifying, irrational.

And Lauren agreed to it.

We were doing this, I rationalized to myself as Lauren turned the bathtub faucets, because we both loved mythology. As the showerhead sputtered to life, I told myself: we’re doing this because Lauren once confided to me that the Icarus story terrifies her; because one night, when we were messing with a Ouija board, she squeezed my hand and whispered, imagine being burned by the thing you loved most. When all you wanted to do was see the sun. As steam thickened the bathroom air, I convinced myself that The Rite was only happening because of

New York, because of the deliriously sinful energy of the city, because of the anonymity, because of the people with crazy-colored hair, because of the strip clubs and streetwalkers. The

Rite was happening for a host of reasons, none of which implicated Lauren or me or either of our futures.

Jimin read a magazine on the bed and laughed uneasily when Lauren and I stripped down to our underwear.

“I’ll grab extra towels,” I said.

“I’ll take my contacts out,” Lauren said, reaching for her makeup case.

I froze mid-step. “Wait, what? Lauren!” I fumbled for my own contact solution. “You need to tell me these things! If you take yours out, I can’t leave mine in.” What would it have meant, I worried, if I’d seen Lauren’s body when she hadn’t been able to clearly see mine? Why hadn’t I thought to remove my contacts?

“Okay, I’m jumping in,” I said, screwing the contact case closed. I needed to escape the drafty hotel room, needed the blistering heat of the water and the muggy, torturous-on-asthmatic- lungs air. I needed out of my head for a while.

Lauren and I barely fit in the narrow stall together. We had to grasp one another’s shoulders for balance every time we rotated out from under the spray. It took Lauren a long while to lather her hair, to knead the shampoo throughout, to rinse it away. By the time she finished, her shoulders flamed from the hot water. It was my turn to rinse the shampoo from my hair, but instead of trading places with me, Lauren lingered under the showerhead, letting the water stream down her temples and suspend prismatic in her eyelashes. Thin, hot tributaries meandered down her breasts and hipbones, carving daring little paths I wanted to trace. But I didn’t. I raised my eyes, noticing how Lauren’s hazel eyes hesitated before daring to meet mine.

I wondered who besides Lauren’s parents had ever seen her naked and soaking wet; I assumed no one had, and I marveled at the grace of being allowed into such an intimate moment. My

throat bow-tied closed as if I were in the throes of another asthma attack, but this time I didn’t panic and hope for it to end.

“Switch,” Lauren whispered. And, eventually, we did.

We never discussed The Rite; neither with one another nor with Jimin, who didn’t look up from her magazine until we’d both donned our pajamas, until I’d hung the last towel.

On the bus ride home, with Lauren balanced on my lap, we talked about college: what we hoped, expected, feared. We talked about our friend Sarah who was taking a gap year in

Morocco, about how maybe she’d meet a handsome African boy and stay there forever. Jimin fell asleep and Lauren and I talked about other boys, the boys we imagined for our friends and the boys we imagined for ourselves. I told Lauren that I hoped to meet a nice Christian boy and marry before age 22, just as Erica had. Lauren said she couldn’t dream of marrying that young.

My thighs prickled and numbed under the weight of her wraithlike figure, and by the time the bus pulled into our hometown, I couldn’t remember—or maybe I was afraid to remember—how it felt to have my entire body alive.

CHAPTER FIVE

BIRDS OF VENUS

“There’s no such thing as fiction.”

Renee said it often, her face set hard enough that I believed her. She built worlds with her words—not just in her poems and stories, but with every sigh and exhale. The myth of her intoxicated me.

When I began writing nonfiction alongside Renee, I shielded myself behind second- person language. You do this, you think this—my stories stuttered out like commands. Renee told me to “grow a pair.”

She also told me that she rooted for me (or, rather, for the fearful you of my nonfiction).

Unfortunately, that was “not a good instinct for the story.”

***

The first time I told Renee I loved her, her mouth stapled in frustration.

“You don’t,” she said. “You like me because I have short hair, and because you think

I’m exciting. And don’t finish that,” she said, pointing to the forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor she’d bought me. It was the second drink of my life, and I’d accepted it from Renee like a sacrament. Even months later, after learning that Hurricanes only cost three dollars, I felt blessed by Renee’s generosity. My gratitude, like debt, grew with time.

Renee tapped my Hurricane, a warning chime, before she slid back to the party. I flitted over to her best friend, Perry, who was quickly becoming my best friend. For some reason, flamboyant, ostentatious Perry liked me. He would soon be taking me to parties more often than

Renee did, showcasing me to the university’s queer community with a zeal I wouldn’t realize was ominous. Perry smiled when he saw me and challenged me to finish my drink.

“Renee said I shouldn’t,” I slurred. Drunkenness made me feel caged in the space between laughing and crying.

“Fuck Renee,” Perry knit his eyebrows together and clinked his bottle to mine. “She’s not the god of you.”

I laughed as I fit my lips to my drink. I laughed as I swallowed. I laughed as I blinked and saw shards of glass at my feet and understood that the shattering came from me, dropping my drink.

“Oh, no,” Perry said, sounding close to a yawn.

“I was so close to finishing,” I told the glittering glass on the lawn. I bid goodbye to the pieces that Perry kicked into the grass off the patio.

“We’ll get you another,” he said. When another boy suggested I lay off the alcohol,

Perry laughed. “She’s fine,” he said, scanning the table for more beer.

“I’m fine,” I echoed.

***

Tattoos decorated Renee and Perry’s bodies. Renee had them on her arms, calves, scalp.

Perry had them on his shoulders and back. One Thursday afternoon, I announced to them that I would get a tattoo, too. I just didn’t know what, or where, or why.

I skipped my afternoon class to walk home with Renee and Perry. We stopped in a store where Perry had been caught—or almost been caught; I could never remember—shoplifting. He bought a tank top to wear to a concert that night; Renee bought bright-green socks patterned with topless women.

When I told Renee I wanted her to pick out my tattoo, she hesitated before refusing.

“I’ll take you,” Perry offered, suddenly alert.

***

When I told Renee I felt shy about sex—writing about it, talking about it, everything about it—she told me to read Anais Nin. Little Birds. I found the coffee-stained copy on the third floor of the library. My lips parted as I read the complete title.

Little Birds: Erotica.

Shortly after, I threw my first party ever, because Renee said she’d come. I found an overage person to buy me a case of beer, a bottle of Absolut, and a Hurricane. When Renee rooted through my fridge, she found the Hurricane and held it up eagerly.

“Is this yours?”

I could see how she wanted it, so I said no.

“Are you sure?”

I said again, she could have it.

“But it’s not your drink?”

I nodded, refraining from saying that she could have whatever was mine. But I saved the bottle cap she left on my kitchen counter, the bottle cap that wobbled like a little black world. I saved the empty bottle from the recycling bin, too.

After two in the morning, when everyone had left except Perry, who’d passed out on my bed, Renee perused my bookshelf. Before she arrived, I’d turned one book so its spine faced inward. Of course her eyes flew to it, and she pulled it out of hiding.

“Little Birds,” she read, giving me a long, slow look. “You actually got it.”

I swallowed. “You told me to.”

Her smile was warm, and sober. “That’s—” she shook her head. “That’s, like, the biggest compliment ever.”

Because Perry had claimed my bed, Renee and I stretched out on the floor. Because

Perry wrapped had himself in my sheets, Renee draped us in my feather duvet.

Because Renee laced her hand in mine, I fell asleep holding her.

***

Among the birds associated with Venus are the dove and the sparrow. The dove, the symbol of love, is especially sacred to her. Doves draw her chariot through the sky; doves may have protected the egg that bore her.

As for the sparrow: passer, deliciae meae puellae, quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere.

Sparrow, my lady’s pet, with whom she plays while she holds you in her lap.

Did Catullus mean sparrow, the fragile bird? Or passer, slang for penis, figure for lust?

For Venus is both dove and sparrow, love and lust.

***

The Monday after my party, after falling asleep to the latex feel of the Band-Aid on

Renee’s finger, Renee announced that she had a date with someone else. We were studying together in a café. She didn’t look at me as she debated which restaurant to take the girl to. She was more terse than usual, avoiding eye contact when she said goodbye too soon. She didn’t mention my party at all.

***

On a rainy afternoon when the trees were newly bare, Perry took me to Tattoo Mark’s. I brought a printout of a simple tattoo: a birdcage for one forearm, freed songbirds for the other.

Perry pointed to a peacock on the shop’s wall and said, sure, he’d take that.

“To continue my bird theme,” he told me, gesturing to the other tattoos on his back. He smirked. “This one’ll be the king cock.”

I let him go first, watching mesmerized as he laid himself across the table. His eyes bored into the wall in front of him, milky and unfocused. He looked as if he might fall asleep at any moment. He looked as if he felt nothing.

When the tattoo artist blotted all the blood off Perry’s upper back, and taped him shut, and sanitized the table, it was my turn. I gave him my forearms with the solemnity of sacrifice.

I winced at the rubbing alcohol, cold on my unbroken skin.

I only objected once: when the tattoo artist demonstrated where he would place the birdcage. Centered on my forearm, right-side-up to the world, upside-down to me.

“Shouldn’t it—” I frowned at him. “Should it face me? I mean, is it for everyone else, or is it for me?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Of course it’s for you—it’s on your body. But do you want everyone to look at you and wonder why you’ve got an upside-down birdcage on your arm? No.

You don’t.”

“He’s right,” Perry called from the waiting area. When I glanced at Perry, I understood that I should make no more interruptions.

I tried not to wince as the needle bit my skin. I tried to look as impenetrable as Perry, staring past the pain into an emptiness no one else could see.

***

Soon after, trudging through the rain to my apartment, I watched my phone light up with a call from Perry. He invited me to dinner, told me when and where to pick him up.

Tucked together in an Olive Garden booth, Perry and I picked at our pasta and talked about love. He’d never experienced it, he said. Not being in love. When I asked him if he wanted to fall in love, he said he didn’t know.

“The gay stereotype is pretty true,” he said, shrugging. I watched the bones of his shoulders and collarbone flutter. He was so thin. “It’s more hookup culture. Not really relationships.”

It stunned me that the more I pressed, the more ways I contorted the question but don’t you want to fall in love?, Perry appeared as blasé as ever. When I brought up my anger toward

Renee, he wasn’t interested in that, either.

***

Regardless of how much—or how little—attention Renee paid me, Perry’s was constant.

We talked for hours online; he started inviting me more and more places without Renee. Before random house parties or basement raves, I’d slip him a twenty and linger outside the beer store while he bought our drinks, and then we’d scurry to some unremarkable hovel somewhere, listen to music I’d never heard before, hold shouted conversations with stranger I’d never see again.

***

Renee flew south for Christmas break, leaving Perry and me alone as the new year rushed toward us. Frost rimed the empty sidewalks that I traversed, alone, day after day. With nothing else to do, I let my feet match the beat of my thoughts, continually returning to Renee’s last night in town.

At the last minute, I’d decided to buy her a Christmas present. I darted from shop to shop on the downtown strip, my nose pinking and eyes smarting from the cold. On my last stop, the art-supply store where Renee once worked, I found a change purse, palm-sized and shaped like a songbird. The bird unzipped down its spine, revealing a hollow pocket dyed gold. Into that golden womb, I nestled a letter to Renee.

Hurrying to Renee’s apartment, I imagined her dutifully removing the bird from her backpack on the airplane, flattening out the letter on her fold-out tray.

Open on the plane, she’d read again, taking in the nervous swoops of my ls, the tails on my vowels. That way we’re both up in the air. She’d smooth the creases of the paper, break the envelope’s seal, and then—high above the Earth—she’d understand.

But she never read my letter. She left town without noticing the bird I left outside her apartment.

***

Sunday, December 21, 2013: the Winter Solstice, the year’s longest night and greatest darkness. At 9:53 p.m., Venus moves into its forty-day retrograde.

***

On the night of the Winter Solstice, I waited outside the restaurant where Perry worked, hands huddled in the pockets of my parka. Lampposts illuminated circles of empty sidewalk and the wind gnawed my cheeks. The waning gibbous loomed overhead as Perry exited the restaurant, lighting a cigarette he wouldn’t finish.

It was my first time at Perry’s; usually we stayed at Renee’s, downtown, or we went separate ways after a party. The neatness of his bedroom unsettled me; for the first time it occurred to me that Perry had a home—Perry, who referred to women professors as “geriatric whores” and told me to decline dates via “a dismissive jerking-off motion”; Perry, who joked openly about staring at our classmates’ crotches when we circled up for discussions; Perry, who once said something nice to me, then stared at me in utter seriousness and said, “you know I just complimented your soul, don’t you?”; Perry, who seemed to hold all the power in the world. He

had an unwrinkled duvet and Christmas lights on his walls and a poster of his favorite professor over his bed.

We rotated picking the music, laughing as the alcohol whooshed through our veins. As my blood turned to lava and my head started to spin, I put on some favorite childhood songs, shrieking with laughter when Perry knew all the words. We donned sunglasses in the semidarkness and posed for pictures on the bed. In retrospect, looking at the photographs, I’d think we looked almost like twins.

And then Perry’s laptop was shut and our drinks were empty and I was standing, unsteadily, before the bed.

“Nighty-night time,” Perry announced, striding to close the door. “You want the inside or the outside?”

I was already crawling to the inside, my left foot colliding with a stack of chapbooks at the foot of the bed. I mumbled an apology, my eyes already shut. They stayed shut as I felt

Perry’s hand on mine, his fingers stroking my upper arm, his mouth on my mouth. He was familiar—he was, after all, the second person I’d ever kissed. One night outside my apartment, he’d crushed his cigarette underfoot and kissed me deeply, his tongue wrapping around mine; he’d pushed me backward until I was flush against my sliding-glass door. It had made me recall a bird that once swooped against the kitchen window at breakfast. The bird collided against the glass with a hollow ping: a higher, drier sound than I’d expected. I never knew if it died upon impact, or when it hit the ground. My dad scraped it off the ground with a shovel.

But that night in his bed, Perry’s mouth on mine was insistent. We weren’t pressed against a window: we were covered in darkness. No one knew where we were except Renee, half a country away.

Perry was pulling my pants off; Perry was scooting down the bed; Perry’s tongue was making its familiar loop-de-loop motion, but now in a new place. What shocked me more than his actions was the miracle of his desire. Perry was gay, or so he said. But I thought of him complimenting my soul; another time, saying I had a great laugh. I felt off-balance, but from the sex or the alcohol, I couldn’t judge.

And then it was real sex, him inside me, and I didn’t know the sounds to make so I said nothing at all. Listening to Perry panting, his mouth inches from my ear, sent shockwaves of embarrassment through me. I wondered how I’d face him in the daylight, if it ever dawned. It didn’t feel like it would.

Finally, Perry sighed, and I felt him move out of me. “I won’t come,” he whispered.

“It’s okay if you do,” I said, knowing I wasn’t ovulating. But he shook his head, grappled for his underwear.

“Beddy-bye time.” Sleep tinged his voice already. When I woke in the middle of the night, dazed with a headache, I felt cold all over. Perry lay cocooned inside the sheets and duvet; only my right foot was covered. And I realized, shivering, why my sister had always warned me about sex, why she’d wanted me to wait. On her wedding night, she’d gotten a suite at the priciest hotel in town. Her husband had sprinkled rose petals on the floor. They’d slept in a king-size bed, both of them warm, and the next day they’d flown somewhere even warmer.

***

My first appointment of the new year was a host of tests: chlamydia, gonorrhea, pregnancy. All were negative. Soon enough it became a joke with my close friends: imagine, having Perry’s baby. A gay poet and lesbian memoirist for parents—the poor kid.

It was the worst-case scenario in everyone’s mind, but still funny, somehow.

***

Perry and I didn’t begin a relationship, though we did continue to sleep together, especially after Renee told me to “leave her life entirely.” It was a silly fight that snowballed into a fierce hatred. Renee no longer remembered me holding her when she cried over a broken heart, no longer remembered me buying her breakfast and cigarettes. I wondered if she remembered the night I gave her glasses with Jesus holograms on the lenses, or the night she told me we were best friends. I wondered if she remembered the night we held hands, or the night she kissed me.

All it took to get myself dumped was writing about those nights. It seemed Renee no longer wanted me to write nonfiction; she no longer hated my second-person shield. She didn’t want me to grow a pair, after all. She wanted me to stick to fiction.

But Perry sought me out. We drank blackberry whiskey on his couch, and he promised me that if he’d believed Renee’s side of the story, he wouldn’t still be seeing me. His words warmed me more than the whiskey. After hearing them, I went happily to his bed.

The next morning, he, too, ghosted me.

***

It was a friend of a friend who told me Perry was HIV-positive. My world stuttered in its rotation, locking me in my own solstice (Latin for “sun set still”).

The Oraquick test is a simple swab: a loop over the gums, then a soak in a solution for 20 to 40 minutes. Little lines cross the stick, just like a pregnancy test, but they stand for death, not life. Negative is a hard, purple line next to the C, and nothing else. Positive is two lines. No matter how faint, any line next to the T is enough to snap the earth beneath your feet—enough to send you falling, past Hades’ chariot, lower than anyone deserves.

***

If there is no such thing as fiction, then this gets to be my story: Perry contracted HIV after we last slept together, and was too ashamed to tell me. That’s why he cut me out of his life—because he was infected and I, as I eventually learned, wasn’t. And he was in love with me, too. He couldn’t bear to look into my eyes when he said we couldn’t be together. He wasn’t gay after all, at least not where it concerned me. He blabbered about me to Renee, endlessly, so much so that it drove her crazy, so much that it rekindled her old love for me, so much so that she still dreams of me, even now.

Since there is no fiction, it must be true.

CHAPTER SIX

LUCAS & LEO

With a cringe, accept Lucas’ Valentine’s Day gift: a candy-filled baton festooned with streamers of pink, red, and white. Pretend not to notice Lucas giving the same gift to Leo.

Every other second-grader is judging Lucas for giving another boy a valentine—and not even a normal card-and-lollipop duo from CVS, but an actual gift that cost actual money—yet Lucas is oblivious to their scorn. Lucas is the definition of social suicide.

Lucas is also one of your best friends; you and he and Leo have a favorite pine tree under which you congregate every recess, and the three of you brave the humiliation of P.E. together, and Lucas makes you feel like all your jokes are gold.

But none of that makes Lucas any less of a loser, and the extravagant Valentine’s Day gift is but the tiniest taste of his loserdom. Lucas wears a lot of clingy turtlenecks in questionable colors—mauve, scarlet—and in P.E. he jogs like he’s got jelly for joints. One time he even cried. In class.

Not that you and Leo are spectacularly popular—you’re about to size out of the juniors’ department, and Leo’s a target because he’s a figure skater—but at least neither of you were caught picking your noses during SSR or shrieking at the sight of a Daddy Longleg on the spiral slide. You and Leo have your heads on straight, so you two are relieved—grateful, even—when

Lucas’ family moves to California at the end of the school year. By the following September,

Lucas fades to a lisping, sharp-elbowed memory, and you and Leo are better poised to begin the social climb.

***

By ninth grade, you’ve made some progress: you’ve learned to cover the zits that made a

Rorsach Inkblot of your face, you’ve whittled down to a respectable size eight, and you’ve almost completed orthodontic purgatory. Leo hasn’t made as much progress. Leo’s blond hair resembles an unkempt sheepdog’s, and he still fields a lot of gay jokes despite having ditched the figure-skater act years ago. He orbits a semi-popular girl clique, which is a pro because he never seems lonely, but a con because it only fuels the gay speculation. When you and Leo reunite in health class, you choose seats in the back row and survive by mocking everyone else: the jocks with their gelled hair, the girls with their straightened hair, the teacher with his thinning hair.

When the hair jokes grow old, you and Leo turn to the Internet for entertainment. You stumble upon a website dedicated to embarrassing stories, and together you laugh and gasp and debate the veracity of these tales. (The most outrageous story, “Caught in women’s panties,” features a 16-year-old protagonist who is beat up, pantsed, called a fag, spanked, and whose flaccid penis is flicked…all by a group of petite female classmates. (Yeah, you and Leo call veracity into question quite often.))

Maybe you wouldn’t have survived health class without Leo. After all, the teacher— whom two dub Mr. Ratface—is rumored to be a little too fond of his female charges, and the sophomore who sits next to you always casts protracted stares at your nonexistent breasts as if he thinks they’ll just explode into being, airbag-style. So maybe—sort of, a little bit—you owe Leo for getting you through. But you don’t owe Leo for letting his hair get so ragged and greasy, or for texting you nonstop—like, nonstop—or for babbling so loudly in Study Hall that you both get reprimanded.

Ultimately, you decide you don’t owe Leo anything, and you rant to your friends about how clingy he is. He hears of your insults, as you expected he would, and that’s that. He moves

to a different seat in health class and you deal with the boob-ogling sophomore alone. And you’re fine with it, you really are, because Leo could’ve avoided the whole situation if he’d just relaxed and let you breathe, for God’s sake.

***

During your first week at Penn State, you and Leo latch onto one another like middle- school girls on their way to the bathroom. Who knows how you two reconnect—it might have been in a dining hall, outside a classroom, on your way out of the gym; the point is, once again, you’re all the other has. You linger over dinner moaning about your roommates, your calc professors, your utter friendlessness. You text one another during the suffocating silence before a class begins. You study side-by-side in the library.

So, when Leo suddenly and unceremoniously exits your life, you text him frantically.

When those texts go unanswered, you call. When those calls go unreturned, you resort to

Facebook Messenger like the desperate dolt you are.

10/06/2011 10:04 P.M.

ALAINA: Are you ignoring me on purpose? I’ve been sending you texts and

voicemails…for a few weeks…if our friendship’s over then why don’t you just

say it? This whole pretending-I-don’t-exist thing isn’t exactly classy.

11/09/2011 8:00 A.M.

ALAINA: Hey, I’m worried about you. How are things going? Is school okay?

04/04/2012 4:41 P.M.

ALAINA: Are you avoiding me because you dropped out of PSU? Maybe you

haven’t, but I never see you around and you’ve been M.I.A. for months.

Next school year, try not to show how excited you really are when Leo deigns to send you a response. Read his story—even the bits that worry you, the bits like withdrawing from classes and small mental breakdown—with a cool, appraising eye. Remember that even though you were diagnosed with clinical depression and had to start popping Prozac with your morning

Cheerios, you didn’t withdraw. (You wanted to, though—you asked your dad how he’d feel if you worked at Olive Garden for the rest of your life—but you don’t admit that to Leo.) As you read the final paragraph of Leo’s apology, try not to pity him more than you pity yourself.

09/23/2012 12:36 A.M.

Speaking of feeling... I really did feel bad for just falling off the face of the earth

with you last year. You were like my only support at school and knowing you

were having some troubles adjusting to things and having doubts made me feel a

little better while I was there. But I just didn't know how to handle it, much less

try at the time to explain it to you when I didn't even know how to explain it to

myself. I hope you can forgive me. I'm sorry and I know I was a bad friend when

you just wanted to help me and were concerned for me. So really thank you and I

appreciate having someone that I know cares about what happens to me and all

that.

Wait a year before you let things go totally back to normal with Leo. Once you’ve started your Masters coursework and made enough friends so you aren’t constantly flirting with social bankruptcy, trust Leo again with your full friendship. Let yourself feel comfortable— oddly comfortable—and happy, and secure—with him. Enjoy how things are smooth for a solid millisecond.

And then, go gaga over a girl in your Master’s program and bask in the infatuation that feels like two gallons of Sprite in your stomach. Hide your feelings from everyone except Leo.

Hide your feelings meticulously; don’t even let on that you know who Macklemore is (“Same

Love” what?), and be sure to claim the treadmill at the Y that faces the Fox News TV. Hide, hide, hide, and then regurgitate all your pent-up gayness on Leo and let him walk you through the coming-out process. (Feel irked, though, when he doesn’t reciprocally come out to you.

(Let’s be honest: you suspected he might. You secretly thought his schoolyard bullies’ hunches were spot-on.))

(Im)patiently wait the weeks it takes for Leo to come out to you. When he finally admits that, yes, he’s gay, and no, he didn’t feel it was necessary to tell you before, feel justifiably scandalized. After all, you and Leo were best friends in second grade and (for a few weeks in) ninth grade and (for a month in) freshman year! You can’t believe Leo wouldn’t bare his soul to you. After all, whom else did he have?

Recover speedily from this affront, since, let’s face it, Leo is your first and only wingman on the gay scene. Appreciate how he talks you through all your anxieties and rarely interrupts

your monologues with pesky details about his own thoughts or feelings. He’s the best friend in your personal rom-com: his sole reason for existing is you. And as you grow closer to your crush, Renee, and her best friend, Perry, Leo is never farther away than a text message. He hears about the time Renee kisses your cheek, the time you two fall asleep hand-in-hand on your bedroom carpet, the time she yells herself hoarse about how she’ll never really like you back, the time she apologizes and assures you you’re her best friend. Leo learns so many details about

Renee, he could probably write her biography.

But then Leo does something inexcusable, something no rom-com sidekick would dare to do: he falls in love.

And his crush has the decency to like him back.

Never in the history of rom-coms has such misfortune befallen the heroine. You sulk as

Leo talks about his new love, a chiseled swimmer with richer-than-rich parents. You listen to the story of how Leo and Swimmer Boy’s flirtation evolved from study sessions to drunken hookups. Leo thinks this guy might be the real deal, and you’re so jealous you could sweat blood.

Swimmer Boy promptly breaks Leo’s heart, though, which tempers your rage. But what doesn’t temper your rage is Leo’s sudden need to rant about his broken heart. You’re patient for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but, geez Louise, Leo won’t lay off the moping! The obsessing! For as long as you’ve known Leo, he’s been secretive and aloof, and you’re praying to the sun and stars that he’ll stumble across that old personality soon. You’re supposed to be the obsessive one in the relationship, and you’ve got plenty to obsess over as your friendship with Renee and Perry takes off. You’re partying with them every weekend, and you’re starting to feel as if you really are Renee’s “best friend,” and one night Perry even smiles at you and says

you’re “just a really, like really, good person,” and then he reminds you that he’s just complimented your soul and that you should feel pretty grateful. And you do feel grateful, you truly do.

So amidst all this Renee-and-Perry magic, Leo can’t reasonably expect you to have time to mourn Swimmer Boy again. He just can’t. So, when he texts you in the middle of a boozy

Cards Against Humanity game at Renee’s apartment, indulge your irritation. You can’t be blamed for groaning at the sight of Leo’s name on your iPhone again. You can’t be blamed for calling him a clingy stalker; for goodness’ sake, you’d tell Christ and his Second Coming to get lost if they interrupted one of your Friday nights with Renee!

You can’t be blamed, either, for the black look in Perry’s eyes when he tells you he’ll

“take care of” Leo. You can’t be blamed for how sexy Renee looks when you hand her your phone and tell her the four-digit passcode. You can’t be blamed for not listening when your sober friend tugs your arm and asks if you’re sure you want to surrender your phone to Perry and

Renee. You can’t be blamed for any of this because you’re not you when Renee’s around— you’re better than you. You’re the laughing, tattooed, friends-with-the-cool-kids girl you always wanted to be.

So, drunk and smiling, (blamelessly) read what Perry has sent Leo:

I imagine you ten years from now, a hundred pounds heavier and sticky with your

own cum in a shitty duplex, friendless and depressed. You turn my stomach, you

failure. I hope your mommy will still love you.

***

The next morning, through a hangover and sleep-crusted eyes, reread Perry’s texts. Even in Renee’s tiny bedroom—the bedroom with Christmas lights you helped hang, the bedroom with the handpainted TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES poster, the bedroom where in a few weeks

Renee will invite you to sleep—even there, you can’t wave away your nausea about Perry’s words. You don’t deserve to. You aren’t badass, you aren’t special, you aren’t titillated by your newfound coolness. Who are you? (Someone who’ll never be Leo’s friend again, that’s who.)

Listen to Renee crack open a beer. Let the metal yawning jerk you back to 11:00 a.m.,

January, gray-sky Saturday. Let Renee and Perry shepherd you to lunch at Chili’s, then to a convenience store where Renee points out a glittery green beanie you should buy. Buy it swiftly.

Back at Renee’s, pose with her and Perry for a photo. Watch her don oversized aviators, pop her collar, and sneer at the camera. Try to look like you belong next to her. Smile gratefully when she uses the picture as her Facebook profile photo. Accept the deluge of new friend requests you get, and, more importantly, accept that being Renee’s lackey means something—not just to you, but to the world—and that “something” is better than Leo. It has to be.

Stop thinking of Leo. Thinking of Leo makes you remember Lucas, blue-eyed Lucas, extending that expensive Valentine’s Day gift to you. Makes you remember coughing, blushing, barely mumbling a “thanks” because you were so convinced that the whole class was judging you. (You were so convinced that if Lucas could stop being so soft, so kind, if he’d just toughen up and buy some manlier clothes, then he wouldn’t attract so many stares and jeers and “what are you, gay?”s. But he couldn’t toughen up. Or maybe he just wouldn’t.)

Does Lucas even remember you, after all these years?

In a few years, will Leo? (Do you want him to?)

Feel perversely relieved when Renee and Perry terminate your friendship. Naturally,

Renee sends your official dismissal via text:

Alaina, because I know myself to be more than you ever will be, I’ll say: I think

you deserve the worst the world can give you. I think you’re crazy.

Perry simply disappears. You aren’t sure what happened—did he tire of you? Did Renee make him ditch you? Or had you been, to use your signature insult, just too clingy?

Diligently fight to regain Perry’s affection. (Don’t fight for Leo’s; don’t even think about

Leo. Swaddle your memories of Leo with caution tape and avoid them.) Text Perry, call Perry, even make a pathetic Hail Mary to Perry via Facebook. Don’t be surprised when Perry gives you the ending you sincerely deserve.

05/04/14 5:31 P.M.

ALAINA: You called me twice today. Butt dial?

PERRY:

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE M WORD

No one taught me how to masturbate. I didn’t need to scour outdated issues of Cosmo, brave the late-nineties Internet, or smuggle The Joy of Sex out of the library, to learn my way around the body. I knew myself like a map, knew how to work the land with my hands. Even in preschool, I was a little orgasm factory, churning out pleasure with stunning finesse for someone who believed she peed out of her vagina. I didn’t have a language with which to talk about sexual things, and I didn’t want one. Just like Dr. Seuss said one fish, two fish; red fish, blue fish, the situation “down there” seemed simple: one hand, two hand, WOWZA. No discussion needed.

So, one autumn evening, I toddled into the kitchen as Mom and Dad prepared dinner.

Our kitchen glowed the yolky color of a fried egg, as did every room in the house, because Mom insisted that a neutral color scheme was calming. Our lives were a wash of creamy yellows, anemic in the omnipresent Pennsylvania dusk.

I ambled up to my dad, casually massaging my pubis through my pants. Shock fanned over his face, but his voice was calm when he asked what I was doing. He was used to my strange logic: I carried around a tattered copy of Red Velvet for “resurge:”; I rushed to our sliding screen door at the end of every infomercial to find “the number on your screen”; I believed ham came from a bird, misunderstanding “ham hock” as “ham hawk.”

“I’m peeling,” I said, kneading myself. “Like a banana.”

My dad’s response doesn’t matter. What matters is that I don’t remember my Mom reacting, not laughing or rolling her eyes or even reprimanding me. And maybe she did confront me—maybe she bent down on her throbbing, misshapen knees and explained not to fondle

myself in public, and maybe we hugged afterward and laughed about my banana comment like actors in a sitcom. If so, I let that memory evaporate years ago. Like most things concerning my mother, I wanted it out of my hands.

***

A few years later, Mom forbade me to continue watching my favorite cartoon, Rugrats. I was turning into Angelica, she said. Angelica: the brat. The show’s villain. And, apparently, the lone obstacle to us living in perfect mother-daughter harmony.

I saw a slew of obstacles, and none of them looked like a pigtailed kindergartener. The worst one, I kept a secret, letting it boil me alive. I never told anyone that when I thought about

Mom, I’d burn myself all over again with the memory of the time Dad left for a days-long business trip, and I was alone in Mom’s care. I’d remember her giving me one sliced pear for breakfast, because I was chubby and Dad wasn’t around to curb her skinny crusade. I’d remember eating that pear in little rabbit nibbles, hungry and humiliated for being hungry, gnawing at the pulp dangling from the stem when the last slice disappeared. And I’d remember going to school with my stomach—my fat, flopping, out-of-control stomach—groaning out evidence of how disgusting I was. That grumbling hunger, stifled with a sharp punch to the gut in Mrs. Ford’s art class—that’s the sound of self-hatred. That’s what Mom taught me.

One day later that year, while Mom did laundry, I holed up in the basement and blared

Rugrats and masturbated right there on the carpet. Because of her disability, Mom couldn’t get down the stairs to catch me in the act. I orgasmed repeatedly, my face pinched in ecstasy as the show’s theme song plinked on.

***

Before I knew what being “turned on” was, I knew that humiliation turned me on. My orgasms swelled the highest, like the soaring screams of a teakettle, when I screened nightmares in my mind. Nudity, incontinence, public shaming—they made me gasp for breath.

Years later, when I became a long-distance runner as part of my personal skinny crusade,

I’d find the exact opposite. To finish a challenging race, after my sides stapled with cramps and my legs started to quake beneath me, I needed to visualize triumph. The fifth-grade boy who, as a joke, asked me to be his girlfriend? He was chanting my name. The seventh-grade kid who called me fat? Blue in the face, he was rooting so loud. The girl who gossiped about me in ninth grade? She’d made a puffy-paint poster with my name in neon green. And the last person, the one stationed right in front of the finish line: Mom.

She was screaming, I’m sorry.

She was screaming, I was wrong.

She was screaming, I love you.

Whether masturbating or racing, I always finished well.

***

Christmas of my fifth-grade year, I unwrapped two books under the tree (in front of my father, and my sister’s teenage boyfriend): The Care and Keeping of YOU, and My Body, My Self for Girls. The first book, issued by the American Girl company, was a watered-down, cartoon- illustrated volume filled with tidbits of advice such as “never shave dry!” The second book contained the juicy information. Right there in the glow of the tree’s multicolored lights, I flipped to the final chapter, “The Big M.” My sister, Erica, laughed as she read over my shoulder; her boyfriend found a crick in his neck that demanded his attention.

But I should give Jeremy—the boyfriend—more credit. For someone hailing from a family of conservative Indiana farmers, he’d adapted well to my family’s dynamic. For instance, my Dad’s hobby of making every wrapped present a “mystery”: wadding up items like underwear and bras inside cardboard toilet-paper rolls, so we wouldn’t know what to expect when we picked up the oblong gifts. One year, Jeremy watched Erica pop fourteen pairs of sheer

Victoria’s Secret panties out of fourteen Charmin cylinders.

Receiving those two books from Mom counted as The Talk, I suppose, since we never discussed anything within their covers, or acknowledged that she’d gifted them at all.

***

The Informal Talk—the preview to The (Silent) Talk—happened in the parking lot of a

Wal-Mart in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I was five, sitting in our minivan with my knees jammed in the back of Mom’s seat. We’d rolled the windows down, letting the nighttime humidity crawl inside. I sweated inside my khaki shorts as Erica, Mom, and I waited for Dad.

“What’s taking so long?” I slouched lower in my seat. I knew Mom hated the feeling of my knees piercing her seatback, so I pressed harder. She always reclined to a ridiculous degree, even when I would reach my adult height of 5’9’’ and be forced to sit with my knees pinned down.

“Must be a long line,” Erica said. I knew Dad was inside buying her O.B., one of those robin’s-egg-blue cardboard boxes she stashed under the bathroom sink. But I didn’t know what

O.B. was, or what was so special about it that we’d leave the condo for it at nine o’clock at night.

So I asked.

And there we were: three women, two generations, one family, trapped in a car in the sticky summer heat. And I’d asked what tampons were. And my mom sat silent.

“Girls use them,” Erica explained, her eyes darting from me, to the back of Mom’s head, to me. She dragged out her syllables, as if giving Mom time to catch up and take over. “For their periods.” She glanced at Mom again. “Sissy, do you know what periods are?”

I didn’t. I’d seen the paper-wrapped white sticks Mom carried in her briefcase in Ziploc bags, but I’d never wondered about them. Except maybe to speculate that they looked like a pretty bland kind of candy. Not like the colorful packages I eyed in the grocery-store checkout line.

“…and you just stick it up there,” Erica said, motioning with her index finger. “In the…” she grimaced, “vagina.”

“The sex hole?” I asked, remembering what Nathan Erikson said on the playground. He knew all about sex, like that oral sex meant the guy peed in the girl’s mouth. After listening to him, I understood why Erica was had taken a vow of abstinence.

“Yes,” Erica raised her eyebrows. “The same one the boy…enters. During sex.”

The corners of my mouth sagged in horror. I imagined a man thrusting himself into a woman, the way Dad stabbed a meat thermometer into roasts in the oven. I imagined the juices spilling out of the woman, red then pink then clear.

“He just shoves it up there?”

At that point, Mom laughed. Breezily, as if we were three gals gathered at quilting club, gossiping about our husbands. “It has to get hard first,” she said. Erica covered her face with her hands and groaned. “Otherwise it’d be like trying to shove a piece of spaghetti up there.”

Erica screamed with embarrassed laughter and I stared, horrified, as Mom laughed herself back to silence. I wondered how hard it got, still visualizing the metal spear of the meat

thermometer. When Dad trundled out of the store, plastic bag in hand, no one breathed a word about our previous conversation.

***

I evolved into my role as the odd one out: the inevitable fifth wheel that my family couldn’t do without, but couldn’t do much with. Erica had Jeremy—from her sophomore year of high school onward, she was part of a They. (Peanut butter and jelly, salt and pepper, Erica and

Jeremy—some pairings are just heaven-sent.) And Mom had Dad, always. Her disability required it. Anywhere we went, his hand vised her upper arm, steadying her every step.

In my favorite daydreams, I had somebody, too. Not because I felt lonely—introverted to the extreme, I preferred to be alone. But having “that special someone” would make me special, too, as special as Erica in her expensive prom dresses. Mom fawned over the custom-tailored, size-four dresses that hugged Erica’s ribs tight and swished around her ankles.

When it came to prom (or anything, really, that involved Jeremy) Mom incinerated Life

As We Knew It and served up a new normal. She stocked Jeremy’s favorite foods in the pantry; she prepared wild-caught salmon and grilled sirloins when he ate with us; she booked vacations to Disney World, the Caribbean, California. Mom cared what Jeremy thought.

In second grade, I sulked to Mom that Elliot Vincent-Killian, an older boy I knew only vaguely, had called me fat. As I placed three slices of Kraft American cheese on my TV tray for lunch, Mom clucked her tongue at me.

“Three slices of cheese, huh,” she frowned. “If you eat like that, you’ll really be fat, like that Elliot boy said.”

***

My Care and Keeping of YOU book, with its smiling cartoon teenagers, promised me that every body was beautiful. The American Girl brand cared about self-esteem. As a fifth-grader, I longed to believe it. But in the back of my mind—or sliding cold fingers beneath my belt—was

Mom.

Every time we shopped, Mom insisted on accompanying me in the dressing room. Gap caused the least anxiety, because its walls were floor-length, soundproof. Nobody could hear the knives Mom threw behind those doors. Old Navy was the worst.

I would follow Mom’s unsteady gait across the thunderstorm-colored floor. Every dressing room we passed, I could hear the women inside—this is too tight, that’s too revealing, this is the one! I’d slam our door, but I couldn’t stamp out the sound of Mom’s voice as she barked her orders. She insisted we start by trying on the jeans. “Because they’re the hardest,” she would say, frowning, seated and staring as I undressed. If I asked her not to watch me undress, she’d get angry. I felt her eyes on my thighs. I was always the biggest kids’ size— sixteen, eighteen if they carried it.

Eleven years later, I still avoid the sight of my naked body in the mirror.

So the pants ritual began: could the fabric fit over my legs? Did the buttons close? If not, a protracted sigh. If yes, the humiliation began. Could I squat down? (Eyes on the folds of my stomach.) Could I bend over? (Eyes peeled for a bulge around my sides.) Could I sit comfortably? Lift up your shirt when you sit; let’s see if the waist strains.

And the final test, when I’d suffered all the others: could Mom fit her hand inside the waistband? Two or three frigid fingers, knuckles gnarled from her disease, nails sharp. She’d jam her hands inside the pants and feel my circumference. She’d touch all the contours of my body, everywhere fat laid its claim, and sit back, sigh.

Then she’d decide whether or not she liked the pants.

***

In seventh grade, Mom caught me masturbating. She came home early to find me on my stomach, cheek to the carpet, hands burrowed underneath myself as an after-school special blipped across the screen.

“What are you doing?” she cried, her keys like breaking glass as they hit the marble countertop. “Why are your hands down your pants?”

I jumped up and clutched my lower abdomen. “Stomachache!” I shuffled to the bathroom like someone in a Pepto Bismol commercial. “Diarrhea!”

After a few deep breaths, and a few strategic flushes of the toilet, I trudged back to the living room, cradling my stomach for effect.

“I just feel terrible,” I shriveled up my face, feigning pain.

I never knew if she believed the lie. All I knew was she acted as if she did, flipping through a magazine and mumbling that I should take an antacid.

***

At dinner, age twenty, I ordered a grilled chicken salad—no dressing—while my date ordered a swiss-and-mushroom burger.

“Make me feel huge, why don’t you?” she joked, biting off the top third of a fry.

I laughed and tried to cross my legs under the table, but my swollen knee stopped me. If it weren’t for the tendonitis, I would have run eight miles that morning, not walked them. Then maybe I’d be at my goal weight.

I examined my date’s body while she ate. She couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and five pounds.

Loading my fork with lettuce, I avoided the croutons.

***

The summer before ninth grade, Mom booked our family, plus Jeremy, rooms in a towering resort at the base of Ouachita Mountain. Each morning, Erica and I ran four miles over the sinuous trails, her stride brisk, mine stuttering in time to my wheezing chest. I knew I’d never be the Cross-Country star Erica was, but since preseason practices were starting in a month, I fought to keep up.

One afternoon, punishing my sore quadriceps on a hike with Dad, I felt sweat beading inside my shorts. I attributed it to the Arkansas sun, but when I shut myself in the bathroom, I found rust-colored stains on my underwear.

“Hey,” I whispered, cornering Erica as she rifled through her open suitcase. Shirts and socks rippled around her rooting hands. “Do you have any pads?”

The ripples froze as her eyes found mine. “Sissy!” Erica’s voice sounded delectable, like warmed honey. “Did you get your period?”

I nodded, flushed and torn between laughing and crying as Erica pulled the familiar robin’s-egg box out of her bag. Back in the bathroom, one thought itched at me: when you get your period, you stop growing. Mom had said it loads of times. I’d felt grateful that, less than a month shy of my fourteenth birthday, I hadn’t had my menarche (a My Body, My Self for Girls term for a girl’s first period). I held out hope that, one morning, I’d wake with my feet hanging off the foot of the bed. I held out hope that I’d “thin out,” as Mom said. The blood between my legs soiled that dream, blot by blot.

Erica demonstrated how to insert the tampon as I chewed my lip. At my last doctor’s appointment—the last one I would ever allow Mom to accompany me to—I’d sat on the crinkly white sheet as the nurse recited my basic information.

“You’re at a healthy weight for your height,” she said, holding up her clipboard as proof.

She read my blood pressure, temperature, and promised the doctor would be in shortly to conduct my physical.

In the interim, I tried not to squirm. The paper beneath my thighs announced my every movement. Like a human Rice Krispy, I snapped, crackled, popped.

“Hmph,” Mom grunted, brooding over the nurse’s chart.

“Everything sounds good,” I said, staring at the spot on my kneecaps I always missed when shaving. I formed every word as carefully as I’d shape cookie dough. “She said I’m a healthy weight.”

Mom frowned. “Eighty-fifth percentile for weight,” she sighed. “That’s pretty high.”

She stretched out the “pretty” on her tongue, long and sticky as taffy. I hated when she spoke

Appalachian: “sam-wich” instead of “sandwich,” “yew-man” instead of “human.” I longed to look into her pinched face and say I hated pret-ty much everything about her.

“…and you just shove it up as far as you can,” Erica said, discarding the tampon from its plastic wrapper and fanning out one end like a skirt. Bell-shaped, it reminded me of the Jingles chocolates Dad bought every December. But bigger, and drier.

“Will it hurt?” I held the little bell in my hand. It weighed less than a chocolate. I figured I’d enjoy it less, too.

“Only if you don’t get it up high enough,” Erica said. She claimed inserting tampons manually—without an applicator—was easiest. Not knowing what an applicator was, I trusted her.

An hour later, Dad found me laid out on the bed, legs and arms splayed snow-angel style, focusing on keeping my lower body motionless.

“The curse of woman is upon me,” I groaned, flinging my arm over my eyes. Dad’s face lit up with happiness, jack-o-lantern style, as Mom wandered into the room.

“What?” she asked, looking from him to me. “What’s going on?”

“Laney got her period,” Dad said in a hushed voice, holding back a laugh. He looked as proud as he did when I crossed the finish line at track meets, even if I’d come in dead last (which

I usually did).

Mom tensed, the way she did when our kitchen’s smoke alarm blared mid-recipe. “Did you use something?” she asked me.

“Erica gave me a tampon,” I said, pretending to wince so I didn’t have to look at her.

“But it hurts so bad.”

“It’s not in right,” Dad said immediately. He strode over to Erica’s suitcase, grabbed the box of O.B., and handed me another tampon. I wrinkled my nose at it, imagining the burning between my legs intensifying. But I took it, glad Dad had stepped up so I didn’t have suffer eye contact with Mom during this conversation. Because of Mom’s disability, Dad had played a larger-than-normal role in Erica’s life, and he was ready to play it for me, too. I appreciated that he knew a lot more than just where CVS stocked feminine products.

“Really get it up there,” Mom called as I shut the bathroom door. At the sound of her voice, I punched the lock on the handle. Then, remembering Dad’s and Erica’s advice, I put one

foot on the toilet seat, exhaled, and tugged at the string threaded inside me. Like ringing a bell, I thought, gasping as the burning sharpened, then subsided, leaving only the echo of pain.

***

When sixth grade arrived and I switched from Radio Park Elementary to Park Forest

Middle School, Mom switched our family from normal life to diet life. It began with a paperback volume on her bookshelf, but soon enough The Schwatzbien Principle was everywhere in our home. It was in the cupboard, suddenly emptied of crackers, pretzels, pasta.

In the pantry, where low-carb chocolates roosted beside low-sugar Jell-O powder. In the fridge, where eggs, cheese, and meat abounded.

“Carbs are the key,” Mom coached me, “to fat storage. It’s like they open doors in your cells that tells them to store fat.”

And: “Cellulite is the fluffy fat, the kind that looks like cottage cheese. You get it from eating carbs.”

Handing me a lunchbox: “School lunches pack in over eighty grams of carbs. That’s more than we—” broiling me with a stare—“want to eat in a day.”

In middle school, I learned to keep my lunch inside in my lunchbox as I ate, only letting bites be exposed in the second it took them to travel from Ziploc to mouth. I wanted to avoid my classmates’ questions, which proved impossible. Why did I eat rolls of turkey, instead of sandwiches? Why did I have low-carb faux-peanut-butter cups instead of Reese’s? Why did I have diet sodas in every flavor imaginable, from orange to cream to ginger ale?

In college, when I moved out of the house, I was most exhilarated by the freedom to eat every meal alone. In my apartment, door locked and lights off, no one questioning me or teasing me or even knowing that I existed.

***

“Just what are you trying to do here?” Mom’s voice hacked through the atmosphere at

The Cheesecake Factory, butcher-knife blunt.

“Mom,” Erica said, squeezing my hand under the table. I squeezed back, trying to siphon as much heat from Erica as I could. I hadn’t taken off my bulky coat, even though we’d been in the restaurant almost an hour. “Calm down.”

Mom’s mouth curdled as she looked at my chopped salad: a small pile of vegetables, raw, bare of dressing, as I’d requested. I’d guzzled Diet Coke since we arrived, filling myself with carbonation, imagining the little bubbles expanding inside me. I planned to chug as many glasses as it took to feel full before the dreaded dessert course.

“That’s not a meal,” Mom said, her tone ratcheting higher.

“Laney’s fine,” Dad said, looking around to see if other diners were watching. “Let her eat what she wants.” When Mom opened her mouth again, the muscle in Dad’s jaw twitched.

“Let it alone, Sharon.”

I stared at my plate, eating one diced tomato at a time to prolong the meal. Since tenth grade, since my shin stress-fractured for the first time and my period disappeared and my hair thinned, Mom and Dad had been on high alert. They didn’t talk about my eating disorder, but they watched.

That night in eleventh grade, skinnier than I ever dreamed, I swallowed a smile as I chewed my piece of diced cucumber exactly twenty-four times. Because even though everyone was watching me, they were glaring at Mom. I might have been sick, but I was not the problem.

***

In the months before my Junior prom, Mom steered the conversation toward boyfriends with her usual subtlety.

“Is Jessie still with Graham?” she asked one night at dinner, eyes on her plate.

I chomped down on my bite of chicken, hard, chewing it to mush. After a long pause:

“Yup.”

“You know, it might be fun to double-date. That’s what Erica and Jeremy did.” Mom put down her fork. “Mark, you remember—who’s that nice boy that went to the prom with them? Miles? Mike something? And his date—Andrea?”

“I’m going with Jessie and Lauren,” I raised my water glass to my lips like a shield. I knew to take continuous gulps while eating: to induce fullness and impede conversation. “We’ll meet up with Graham there.”

“But wouldn’t it be fun to go with a boy,” Mom said. “Surely Graham has a friend who’s looking for someone.”

Several nights later, I set down my fork in triumph, leveled my gaze at Mom, and told her

I had talked to Graham’s best single friend, Christoph Schlom.

“He had a crush on Sarah, but was too shy to tell,” I smiled. I felt the meanness brighten my features as Mom’s sagged in disappointment. “So I asked her to prom for him. And she said yes!”

***

In college, the media propagated the new holy grail of thinness: the thigh gap. Girls longed for two toned, twiggy legs that didn’t touch—not even at the tippy-top, where most women’s anatomies dictate that thighs belong and gaps don’t. I scoffed at the trend when I read

about it on the Internet, eating baby carrots alone in my dorm room. The thigh gap was nothing new; I’d been agonizing over it since middle school.

I remembered the spread in Seventeen magazine that triggered it—an article about problems “down there,” as vaginas were coyly referred to. Accompanying the text about yeast infections and off-color discharge was a cropped picture of a model, from lower abdomen to mid-thigh, her underwear filling the bulk of the page. But I wasn’t fascinated by her panties; my eyes shot to her pristine thighs, taut, tanned and separated by a full inch. When I looked in the mirror, I could only make my thighs separate if I gathered my fat in my fingers and pulled it out of sight.

I mentioned the thigh gap to my parents in the car one day, the magazine article seared into my mind. “But that’s so unrealistic,” I studied my jeans, all the bulges I disliked.

“Everyone’s thighs touch.”

“When I stand, my thighs don’t touch,” Mom said from the passenger seat. She stared straight ahead as she spoke.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say but you have Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, and all your leg muscles have wasted away! I didn’t say but you’re not normal! I was so silent, so still,

I might not have been there at all.

***

I defeated nature during my freshman year of college. I reversed biology’s sinister march toward breasts and hips and thighs; I triumphed over hunger; I grew too lean, too strong, for any of my pants or belts. Sometimes I wandered into clothing stores and tried on small sizes, but I never bought them. Even when I slid into size-zero skinny jeans at the Gap, I left them folded on the bench in the dressing room.

Because what if you outgrow them, I chided myself.

Or what if you can get smaller.

***

I never got smaller than 109.6 pounds, roughly the weight of my fifth-grade self. I was never more proud than when I wrangled back a smile in the hepatologist’s office as he said: “We tested for everything that could cause elevated liver enzymes, and everything came back negative. We think it’s the anorexia.”

I thought back to all the nights I’d touch myself while falling asleep. They weren’t sexual touches—I lost the drive for those. Instead, I’d trace the topography of my hipbones, fragile as icicles; the concave of my stomach; the delicate ridge of each rib. In the morning, I’d turn around in front of the full-length mirror and watch my back as I breathed. Exhale: normal.

Inhale: every rib, in sharp relief. I’d never known I had so many bones to see. As the months passed, I kept seeing more.

“This—” the doctor gestured to my body. I flexed my stomach muscles, since I had no fat left to suck in. “This is too thin.”

I walked out of his office into the caramelized June sunshine, shivering but elated. I was, officially, sick—I had EDNOS stamped on my file, referrals to two more doctors, orders for another round of blood tests. Besides elevated liver enzymes, I had the low blood sugar of a pre- diabetic, a sluggish heart rate, and several vitamin deficiencies. The doctors thought I’d be infertile, at best. At worst…they trailed off, their mouths stapling shut to hold back the truth.

They didn’t say, outright, “you’re killing yourself,” but I tasted the blessing of that verdict on their tongues.

For the first time, I felt proud of myself. So proud of myself, I thought I might not want to disappear, after all.

***

My nutritionist, a blonde woman named Heather, who wore pencil skirts and stilettos.

She was the kind of flawless my mom could respect, even when Heather ordered her not to talk to me about anything food- or body-related. No comments about other peoples’ figures, positive or negative. No comments about eating, mine or hers or anyone else’s. No judgments about amount of, type of, time of meals. Essentially, no communication at all. Sorry, Mom: doctor’s orders.

***

It started with an apple. Fourteen months after that meeting with the hepatologist, and twenty pounds heavier, I watched a muscled bicep as it strained against the confines of a jean- colored button-down: apple to lips. Contact, crunch, chew. And the smell of cologne, like the cinnamony scent Jeremy used to wear, the one that had soaked into every pillow of our guest room. Jeremy had spent so many nights at our house when I was young that I associated his smell with Sunday mornings, sunlit kitchens, runny eggs and buttered toast. He and Erica left for college before the Schwarzbien craze started, so my memories of them are as inviting as

Olive Garden breadsticks.

I tried to pay attention to my professor instead of watching that apple disappear, bite by bite. What captivated me most was the raw strength of that bicep: strong enough to wrap around me and hold me tight, but buttery with the scent of apple pie. In contrast, the plush thighs, held tight in corduroys. Thick where they met at the top, then lean through the legs and crossed at the ankles.

She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen: the pure marriage of power and grace.

She was someone who could fight and love, I thought. And she took up the perfect amount of space—she set the standard for the perfect amount of space. She was not a man, like my Mom had in mind. She was better; she was magic.

I didn’t have any words to offer her, though I couldn’t resist speaking to her. I craved her. I wanted her to hear my voice and hold me in her thoughts.

“You know,” I said after class. I walked a halting half-step behind her as she moved toward the door. “You’re eating that apple wrong.”

She raised her eyebrows, looking from me to the apple core balanced between her thumb and index finger. Her bite marks covered the surface, illuminating brilliant spots of white beneath the red skin. “Oh yeah?”

I nodded. “If you eat it from the top down, instead of around the sides, you can eat right through the core.” My face simmered in the moment my eyes caught hers.

“There’s got to be a metaphor for cannibalism in there somewhere,” she said, and strode out of the room.

***

She could cook. She danced while she fried eggs, using almond butter instead of oil and shaking her hips to electronic remixes of popular songs. She made meatballs and fajitas when she was drunk, pans sizzling under her gyrating arms, swigging malt liquor between stirs. The most elaborate meal she made for me: Atlantic salmon, baked with rosemary and apples and pine nuts, served over tri-color rotini, as we drank beer after beer. And in the morning, when we went out for breakfast, she understood why I only ordered carbs.

***

Over Thanksgiving break of that year, that magical year, I asked Dad to take a walk with me. We carved a mushroom-shaped path through the woods, five miles of snapping twigs and crackling leaves. Over the noise of our footsteps, I told Dad I was gay.

He said he already knew. And so, as of the month before, did Mom.

“I always suspected that your mother might like women, too,” he said, as casually as he’d test for ripe pears in the grocery store. Is this one soft enough? This one might be okay. But he was talking about my mother, not a firm fruit.

“Well, she doesn’t really like sex,” he explained, when I gasped. Hands in his pockets, he looked unperturbed by the conversation. “And she always had very—close—relationships with women.”

“But, anyway, she insists you’re not gay,” he said. “Though she agrees that some people are born that way. Just not you.”

As we sliced through the cold, rounding out the miles toward home, I wondered what it would be like to be Mom. So defensive, so cornered. Everyone—all the doctors, the nutritionists, her husband, Erica and Jeremy—agreed that my eating disorder was not my problem. And they looked at her, silent, when they said it. I wondered my sexuality would be served the same way: cold, with a side of judgment.

The phrase “getting your just desserts” came to mind.

***

At my lowest weight, Heather asked me to write a letter to Mom, for my eyes only. It ended: “Don’t draw attention to my food intake. Don’t try to be involved. Don’t even compliment me. Please, try not to see my body when you look at me.”

***

At Mom’s retirement party, thrown in April of my senior year of high school, I wore a matching dress and cardigan from a department store, plus nude heels left over from prom. My hair fell past my collarbone, and baby-doll bangs feathered my forehead. I’d painted my toenails: a subtle rose, just shiny enough to be unnatural. In a few years, I would let my hairdresser shave the sides of my head; I’d throw away my tubes of lipstick and buy pants from the men’s department, sweaters from Goodwill. But for Mom’s party, I dressed demurely. I smiled sweetly. I was silent.

Everyone from Mom’s office, along with Erica and Jeremy and their eighteen-month-old daughter, Ella, crowded into the restaurant. My mother’s assistant, Darlene, had reserved a private room for us. Plastic flowers adorned every available space, in line with the Hawaiian theme my mother—inexplicably—requested. I thanked Darlene when she draped a lei around neck, forcing myself not to fidget as the back of my neck erupted in itches.

Objectively, I knew my mom was pretty. She dyed her hair a rich auburn, kept it trimmed and curled and sprayed to perfection. Her features were symmetrical, even pleasing: button nose, not too fat; even lips, not too thin; high cheekbones. She knew where to stroke bronzer and where to swirl blush, and despite the disability that left her fingers clumsy and shaking, she applied mascara every morning. I could rattle off those facts about Mom as a food critic could analyze a dish—passionless, precise, informative. But at her party, watching her laugh with the office ladies and whisper with Darlene and hug her longtime boss, I saw Mom’s beauty. I saw a woman who, without a college education, held a position that required a

Master’s degree. I saw a woman with friends who knew her secrets, who ate lunch with her every day, who brought her coffee on rainy mornings. I saw a woman in a tailored Talbot’s suit

who’d counted her calories and carbohydrates for years, just for moments like these. Just so her thighs wouldn’t touch when all eyes were on her.

Because we were in a large group, we could only select from a limited lunch menu. I picked at my chicken dish, nauseous before the first swallow because I knew the entree had been cooked with cream. Two hours after the party, I would lace up my running shoes and sprint into the woods near my house. I would run several miles before collapsing to the ground, fingers down my throat, willing my roiling stomach to seize. It wouldn’t; it would take me years to master the art of purging (and when I finally did, I would regret it). But before all that, I pushed the chicken around my plate, and over clinking forks and scraping knives, I heard the whisper of one of my mom’s coworkers.

“My goodness,” the woman said to Mom, glancing at me, Erica, Jeremy, and Ella.

“Sharon, you just have the perfect family.”

And I watched the smile spill over Mom’s face, running free as an egg yolk broken out of its shell, and said nothing.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ETHEREAL GIRLS

I understood—instinctively, if not denotatively—the word ethereal before I stumbled across its definition during junior-year SAT prep. Ethereal: extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world. Ethereal: it’s the silver ribbon of sound that threads the air when Elise reads her lines for Pandora’s Box; the twist of Lauren’s hair in its ballerina bun; the cowlick in Meghan’s hair, the one that sets off her heart-shaped face like a shower of sparks. Ethereal is the China-doll skin of Emily’s neck when she bends over her algebra homework and the thrill of my sister’s Clinique Happy perfume. You call a girl ethereal when her eyelashes dust her brows, the way Julie’s do, or when a glance at Ella’s limbs makes you think of willow trees.

All my girlhood, I wanted to be ethereal. I wanted that watermark—that one perfect freckle, that dainty wrist-flick, that je ne sais quoi so many girls wear like pearls—as much as I wanted to be loved by the girls who had it. I thought of Carrie Ann’s cerulean eyes and Raquel’s electrifying laugh and wanted to cup that beauty in my palms like a lightning bug. Long before I knew I loved girls in a romantic way, I knew I loved them in an important way. The way that I loved the smell of changing leaves, or the crunch of a perfect Honeycrisp, or taking that big breath before blowing out the candles on my birthday cake. The way that I longed to love myself.

One day in second grade, I stumbled across a white hardback book in the nonfiction section of the library. Witches & Magic-Makers, the cover hollered in red block-script. Beneath the title stood a robed man with a long white beard, one hand contorted in a wizardly way, the other holding open a spellbook. Beside him were a cauldron, a broomstick, and a black cat. The

book, chock-full of incantations and potions, was my custom-made birthday present from the universe. It was my chance to bid adieu to the piddling magic of Sabrina and Harry Potter and enter the clandestine, cobwebby portal to real magic.

Brimming with anticipation, I dimmed the lights in my bedroom and hunkered down cross-legged on the carpet. After hours of painstaking indecision, I decided that the first potion

I’d attempt would be “Aromatic Magic.” The book hailed it as an old favorite for attracting love, and I had a lover lodged firmly in mind. Scott Nichols was the most popular boy in Mrs.

Roberts’ class— he beat all the boys in gym class, no matter the game. And he had gelled hair that gleamed under the fluorescent classroom lights. Plus, with Scott Nichols as my boyfriend,

I’d automatically be the most popular girl in class.

I followed the book’s instructions as well as I could: I gathered sage, rosemary, and thyme (all McCormick’s brand, all pilfered from the kitchen cabinet) and dumped them in a green plastic bucket (after all, I didn’t have a “satchet bag” in which to keep my herbs) and sloshed in a few cups of water (the instructions didn’t call for water, but how, I reasoned, could a potion be dry?) and stirred the mixture with my mother’s best wooden ladle. I didn’t have bergamot oil to drop into the potion every seven days, and I couldn’t very well keep the bucket under my pillow or next to my skin, the way the instructions said to, so I just sat it under a pine tree in the backyard and hoped for the best.

Days blurred into weeks as I waited for Scott Nichols to realize his dying love for me. I figured it must be buried way down deep in his heart—it had to be, since it was taking him so long to find it. (Sixteen years later, he still hasn’t discovered it.) I waited for Scott Nichols all autumn, and all throughout the slush of winter, and then I unclenched my hopes and let them

stagger away. When I rediscovered my green bucket the following year, it was brimful with rainwater and speckled with mud. I dumped it out lest the standing water attract mosquitoes.

So Witches & Magic-Makers wasn’t my key to ethereality—fine. I turned to my imagination for magic, certain that if the ever-so-wise narrator of Matilda was to be believed, we only use a tiny portion of our brains. If I could break out of that tininess, I knew I could be as powerful—maybe more powerful—than my hero, Matilda. All it’d take was focus.

My best friend, Nadia, became the tortured bystander to my quest to ethereality. First, I told Nadia that I had the rare and marvelous ability to see invisible people. In fact, certain people could actually choose to become invisible, and they liked to hang out with me. Aaron

Carter was one such person. After a few days of meeting Aaron on the playground during recess, I confessed to Nadia that he’d asked me to be his girlfriend.

“There he is,” I’d whisper, pressing my palm against the window of our second-floor classroom. “Don’t you see him? On the jungle gym? He’s waiting for me.”

Nadia, bless her soul, always kept a straight face when she said that, no, she couldn’t see

Aaron, but boy did she wish she could. And I would sigh and smile—with only a modicum of smugness—and tell her that if she focused, she could develop my special powers, too. It’s a testament to our BFF-ship that we kept up the Alaina’s-seeing-invisible-boyfriends ruse for months.

Eventually, though, Aaron and his antics grew stale. When winter suffocated our town, leaving the playground patched in frost and mud and the sky the color of stainless steel, I knew

Nadia and I needed an extra dose of magic in our lives. So, one recess, I led Nadia under the big oak tree in the corner of the schoolyard and told her I had a secret.

“This tree,” I said solemnly, placing one ungloved hand on the cold trunk, “is the Tree of

Life. It’s the portal to another world.”

How Nadia didn’t roll her eyes, I’ll never know.

“Place your hand on it like this,” I said, nodding at her, my eyes wide. I waited until she complied. “All right, now, close your eyes.”

When we opened our eyes, we were in an alternate universe. Yes, everything looked the same, but it wasn’t: the skies were grayer, the air was more billowy, and we were witches. We could control the weather and cast spells that our classmates couldn’t see and wage wars against invisible monsters. We adventured over the barren, windy hills, pretending to be battered by storms no one else could sense, and we cast away demons that swooped down from the clouds and banished rival witches who lurked in the woods. We tried to topple power lines via telekinesis so our school would get an early dismissal. We avoided ice because it was infested with Blizzaks (which were, incidentally, the name of my dad’s snow tires, but Nadia didn’t need to know that)—shape-shifting black demons that would rise out of the ice and devour us.

But eventually being witches got boring. Spring came and suddenly the playground didn’t seem the least bit eerie or enchanted. The grass was thickening and the birds were returning and everything looked depressingly suburban, depressingly normal.

And then I happened upon the book Ella Enchanted, and my sense of magic was renewed. I hurried to find Nadia.

“Nads,” I squealed, “I have a secret! But you can’t tell anyone.”

Nadia, now older and wiser, raised her eyebrows.

“I’m cursed.” I waited for this confession to trigger an avalanche of emotion on Nadia’s part. After a few moments of her non-reaction, I forged ahead. “I have to obey any command anyone gives me. Like, if someone told me to do a…a backflip, I’d have to do it.”

Nadia’s mouth hardened into a flat line. “Then do a backflip,” she said in a monotone.

My heart stalled.

“What?” I blinked at my best friend. “Here? You’re really gonna make me do that here?”

Nadia nodded. “Yup. Right here. Do it now.”

I dropped my eyes to my laminated desk. I didn’t do the backflip, and I never brought up my “curse” ever again.

But my nagging need to be ethereal, like a stomachache that wouldn’t go away, sat with me through all of my schooling years. My vision of ethereal changed from wielding magical powers to simply having clear skin and fitting into a size four at American Eagle. Ethereal meant observing and obeying the social order. It meant watching the track team’s sprinters shoot around the track like the arm of a human Ferris wheel and admiring the girls’ chiseled stomachs and metallic bras and taking notes on how to be more them and less me.

I realized I would never be as enchanted with myself as I was with the girls around me, and for the first time in my life I felt truly cursed. Why did I have to be a laundry list of flaws and shortcomings? And why was I so blah, so me, when every other girl got to be silhouetted with starshine, dappled with charisma, candied with the scent of September?

I brooded through the beginning of my college years, hawk-eyeing other girls’ bodies— always better than mine, scrutinizing their personalities—always more bubbly than mine, and festering in self-pity. My therapist attributed my fascination with other girls to low self-esteem,

and I figured that since she had three diplomas, she must be right. So I kept pining after the girls around me, now not only adoring their bodies and minds and hearts but also their well-developed self-esteem, and I resigned myself to a life of miserable adoration.

And then, fast as casting a spell, I was stolen from my sorry world and dropped into what felt like an alternate universe. The magical ending came when I was sitting at a laminated desk, eyes down, trying not to look as inferior as I felt—a girl walked in and showed me a magic I couldn’t ignore. I looked at her and I thought: oh. She answered questions I hadn’t realized I’d posed.

What separated this girl from Elise and Lauren and Meghan and Emily and Julie and every other girl who’d ever sent shockwaves through my soul? Nothing. Everything. She wasn’t as pretty as Emily or as lithe as Lauren or as sweet as Meghan. To be honest, she wasn’t pretty or lithe or sweet at all, and yet one glance at her confirmed that my life was rewriting itself.

You see, this girl was openly queer.

Just by existing she showed me how to locate my own ethereality. She didn’t come from ivory-sidewalked suburbs where the biggest scandal around involved which families had skipped

Easter service or whose parents were considering divorce. She didn’t shop at Hollister or

Abercrombie in meek deference to her better-liked peers. She had short hair and look-at-me biceps and a smile that made my insides feel like a bottle of champagne just uncorked.

Truthfully, I knew nothing concrete about this girl, didn’t know if she’d break my heart or remake it, but I wanted to find out. I wanted her magic, but mostly I wanted her. And I dared to wonder if she might want me back.

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If there is anything ethereal about me, it’s my queerness, it’s my ability to see a brown- haired girl and suddenly understand the definition of sacred, it’s the way I can read a map of the stars in my girlfriend’s fingerprints. I will never be as enchanted with myself as I am with the girls around me, but I will always be enchanted by the way my girlfriend’s lips dismantle me and complete me in the space of a kiss. And maybe I’ll never master telekinesis or harness the wind or concoct a potion, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe those aren’t the brands of magic I was missing, or was wanting, at all.

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CHAPTER NINE

HOLY GROUND

Outro2

After a semester in London, Emily wears her hair short, her clothes black. She’s haloed with a confidence more potent than the freshman boys’ Axe and Old Spice. I don’t know how to exist around her anymore, so I’m quiet when she slides into the bar booth where my friends and I sit sardined.

It’s winter again—in this town, it’s always winter—and I’m drinking too fast. Emily’s telling some story of some boy who tried some tired pick-up line on her. Vodka lacquers my tongue, esophagus, stomach. All eyes are on Emily—and why shouldn’t they be? Everyone’s missed her; presumably, I am part of everyone—yet my eyes worship the tray of fries in the center of the table. Masticated potatoes plaster my back molars. Emily says something witty, sparks a smatter of laughter that I pretend I’m too busy fiddling with my phone to hear. Salt stipples my lips.

At the end of the night, gilded with alcohol, I muster the courage to address Emily directly. We haven’t communicated much over the previous months, save several weepy texts.

We came to the decision—mutual, mature—that we can’t be around one another without summoning old demons. When we speak, Emily’s façade is pure grace: glowing skin and glossy teeth and needle-thin thighs. I say something about how long it’s been, and we exchange a tipsy

2 The essay is inspired by Taylor Swift’s “Holy Ground,” from the album RED (2012).

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hug, and she says something about how we need to hang out, and I smile because I know we won’t.

On the mile-long walk home, the wind flings me back to this sidewalk on a different night, an autumn night, a night when Emily was halfway across the world and I was coming undone to a friend who smelled like home.

I told my friend: I see her everywhere.

The friend had asked, Who?

Renee, I’d wept. Renee, Renee, Renee. Her name was barbed wire, each syllable its own spike.

My friend warned me that sadness—like alcohol or Adderall or adoration for a girl who moved to Alabama without saying goodbye—could be addicting. My friend said not to fall in love with my grief.

I tried to fall in love with that friend, just to see if it would help, but my heart didn’t move that way anymore.

My heart still doesn’t move the way it used to. I trek over a sidewalk graffitied with rusty-gold paint, unlock my apartment door, and wonder if Emily’s still at the bar. Or maybe she’s smoking pot on a couch in someone’s basement. Or maybe she’s whispering to a cute girl under a streetlight somewhere. Or maybe she’s kaleidoscoped in the bright lights of a club, her arms stretched overhead, laughing, happy, dancing.

I don’t dance anymore.

Chorus

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A year earlier, Renee officially cuts Emily and me out of her life. Renee takes the modern approach to dumping Emily (a quick text, a cold shoulder) before moving on to a new girlfriend. Before, Renee was always courteous enough to break the news to Emily in person.

But at least Renee still feigns civility with Emily; she does not pay me the same courtesy.

Instead, she accuses me of sexual assault.

Emily tells me of Renee’s accusation over a muffin at Starbucks. I stare at my coffee, hearing the words rape and press charges and police without processing them. My mind ponders the slush on the road outside: how gritty it is, like cat litter; how I’d love to caulk my mouth with it. Maybe it would clog my throat and suffocate me and I’d die in a cacophony of guttural, gravel-filled wheezes.

Sugar crystals glisten atop Emily’s untouched blueberry muffin. My parents love blueberry muffins. How will I tell my parents their daughter’s a rapist? Colbie Caillat plinks in the background, unsleeved Styrofoam sears my palm, and my mind forgets I’ve never actually raped anyone. Emily reminds me I’ve only had sex once in my whole life, and it wasn’t with

Renee, and Emily insists I would-never-could-never-will-never be a rapist, and I stare at her like she’s something disgusting. She should know better than to befriend a rapist.

“Are you okay?” Emily asks in a voice that tells me I shouldn’t be. “I mean, Renee’s just making a big deal about this because your essay beat hers. Everyone knows you didn’t ‘assault’ her.” Emily’s air quotes are limp. “Your essay says it outright: you gave her a back rub. Which she asked for. That’s not assault.”

I wring my car keys in my palm, hearing their cheery jingle. “Let’s drive,” I say, pushing back my chair. Its feet scream as they rake the tile. “Let’s go somewhere. Anywhere you want.”

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Emily looks at the table. “Actually, I have to go back to my apartment.” She picks at a cuticle. “My parents are making me come home for a few days. They’re worried about me.”

Irrationally, I think: Emily’s parents are psychic. Emily’s parents have divined that their daughter is in the company of a rapist.

“But we’ll hang out as soon as I get back,” Emily promises.

A beat of silence smacks the space between us.

“If you could just take me back to my apartment?”

Bridge

Two weeks before Renee accuses me of sexual assault, Emily and I buy a bottle of gold spray paint from Lowe’s. (Emily also shoplifts a few seed packets: sunflowers, because they’re my favorite, and Brussels sprouts just because. Since Renee has started icing Emily out, Emily’s fingers have grown progressively stickier.)

Emily and I sit on my apartment’s hard carpet and eat gummy worms, chocolate nonpareils, Hostess cakes. We take shots of vodka. We stalk Renee’s social media.

“D’you think Renee’ll ever forgive me?” I ask idly. I’m wearing sunglasses even though it’s midnight, even though my one lamp barely brightens the room. Renee always wears sunglasses when she gets drunk, and I can’t bear to relinquish that affectation.

Emily unwraps another Hostess. “Renee doesn’t like to lose,” she says as gently as possible.

Once again, I wonder why I had to go and win that award, why my essay had to beat

Renee’s, why I’d thought first place and $1000 were more important than pleasing my best

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friend/first love/puppeteer. Renee wanted to be the best writer in our program, and I’d wanted to be her best friend, and all I’d had to do to maintain that equilibrium was nothing. And instead

I’d gone and imploded my own joy.

A grimace skirts Emily’s face. “I think—” she faithfully avoids my eyes—“I think what bothers her the most is how much you write about her.” Emily crinkles the chocolate-spotted wrapper. “She feels like she’s the reason you won.”

I can’t argue with this. My philosophy about love—and I love Renee, everyone knows this—is that it’s uncontainable, indelible, irreversible. Of course I write about Renee; I write about her as naturally as I buy her coffee and cigarettes and gum and whatever else she wants, as unquestioningly as I stay up late when she needs a ride somewhere, as gladly as I loan her the textbooks I need to complete my homework. She’s worth endless essays, just as she’s worth my bank account and my Circadian rhythm and my GPA.

“Maybe you should let her read the essay,” Emily continues. “I mean, she thinks it’s, like, entirely about her. Maybe once she reads it, she won’t be as angry.”

There’s this unspeakable song between Emily and me, this melody we can’t ignore: that

Renee wouldn’t know anything about my essay—save that it beat hers—if it weren’t for Emily.

If Emily hadn’t let Perry, Renee’s best friend, glimpse my pages and tell the world about them.

If Emily had protected me better.

But, in all fairness, I hadn’t always protected Emily, either.

“I might send the essay to Renee,” I say, turning the idea over in my mind. It’s not as if it could make things worse.

What gives me pause is remembering the naked ache of the essay, the way I called Renee my miracle, someone who looms larger than life, how I described feeling like an art connoisseur

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ravishing a master’s sculpture when I gave her a back rub, the way I said I held her scent like incense in my lungs, how I deemed sleeping next to her the truest nighttime prayer I’ve ever prayed.

But that was only one page of the essay—the other pages, about my parents’ fraying marriage, about my strained relationship with my mother, would surely show Renee she wasn’t

“the reason I won” first place.

“I think it’ll help,” Emily agrees. As if toasting to the idea, we both consume another shot of vodka.

When we stumble out my apartment door and spill onto the street, everything looks heavenly. Streetlights are windows into the sublime, and the sky is God’s inkwell overturned.

My cheeks feel hotter than the stars.

I struggle to wrest the cap off the spray paint, so Emily takes it from me. With one awesome whack against an oak, the cap goes soaring. Emily shakes the bottle and the chatter of rattlesnakes fills the night. The paint hisses as it hits its first target: the tree trunk.

FUCK RENEE glisters into existence, a golden blister on the cold bark.

“Your turn,” Emily hands me the bottle warm from her palm. I skitter over to the sidewalk, stoop down, and in my best cursive swirl: FUCK RENEE.

We brand FUCK RENEE onto the sloped gravel of the parking lot, onto the center of the road, onto the the Ts of several intersections. When we clamber back inside, exhausted and fume-dizzied, neither of us can hide a smile.

The next morning, over coffee, we feel the weight of what we’ve done.

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“Listen to this,” I say, my fingers clacking on my computer’s keys. “‘Penn State student accused of spray-painting anti-Semitic messages at fraternity.’” I gape at the article. “This was only a few months ago.”

Emily’s lips clench. “What happened to him?”

I scroll down the page. “He got arrested…he’s facing trial…charged with ‘criminal mischief and disorderly conduct.’”

“Yeah, but we didn’t write anything anti-Semitic.” Emily crosses one skinny-jeaned leg over the other.

“We still wrote ‘fuck’ in a school zone!”

“I thought you said it was near a school zone, not in a school zone.”

I roll my eyes. “Kids are still going to see it!” I press my fingers to my eyebrows, the pinprick points where headaches always brew. “God. Imagine telling our parents we’ve been arrested.”

Emily chews the inside of her cheek. “You think the police’ll be able to see us on traffic cameras?”

The idea has never occurred to me. Sure enough, though, we spray-painted near a major intersection; it isn’t ridiculous to assume there’d be a camera watching. “Shit.”

“Well, you definitely shouldn’t hold onto that paint,” Emily lowers her voice. “We need to get rid of the evidence, like, now.”

A smile untangles on my face. “Like a body dump?”

“Like a body dump.”

It’s as good an excuse as any to miss my Thursday class with Renee. Emily and I beeline away from campus, pile into my Civic, and take the salt-bleached roads too fast. I’m taking us to

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my safe place—though isn’t that where criminals always flee in times of strife? I’ve watched

Law & Order: SVU; I should know better—and Emily’s cradling the bottle like a baby. We’re caught between anticipating police lights in the rearview mirror and eye-rolling our own theatrics. But maybe this is how all lawbreakers feel: a little hunted, a little hysterical.

I pull off the road at the entrance to State Game Lands 176. Pebbles and dead leaves crackle until my tires. I kill the engine.

“Wow,” Emily raises her eyebrows. “So this is your place?”

I nod. I can’t begin to guess how many miles I’ve run, walked, and biked in these woods.

I’ve always come needy to this sanctuary; that’s how I know I can trust it with one last request.

Emily follows me over the terrain of the snaking trail. I lead her up a hill, down a scarce and scraggly path, and into a brown pocket of the expansive woods. Emily’s wearing flats, but she doesn’t complain. She’s one of the few girls I’ve let into this world.

Together, we give the paint back to the earth, as if the can truly contained a precious metal and not just aerosols. Leftover gold still speckles my fingertips, dances there prismatic.

I’m silent on the walk back to the car, but unburdened somehow; I’m with Emily, we are together. After all that we’ve been through, we are still we.

Chorus

A handful of weeks before Emily and I desecrate the town with Renee’s name, we spend our Spring Break together, alone, in New York City. Renee’s in the city too, but she’s partying with Perry and a new crush and she’s made me promise not to let Emily intercept them. (Emily,

Renee’s ex and current friend with benefits, is not taking kindly to Renee’s flirtation with this

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new girl; Renee acts flabbergasted by this. As Renee’s best friend, I’m obligated to take her side.)

Several days before I drive Emily to New York City, I drove Renee to her mother’s house on the northeast side of the state. The drive was long, three hours with traffic and turnarounds, but I’d have driven across the country for alone time with Renee. I didn’t mind that she babbled nonstop about her new crush or that she smoked L&Ms in my passenger seat. I scrambled happily after any scrap of her, no matter how jagged or evanescent.

With Emily, on the drive north, I don’t discuss Renee; Emily knows Renee’s about to oust her—permanently this time, not like January. Emily doesn’t ask what I’ll do when Renee exiles her. To tell the truth, I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t dare challenge Renee’s authority.

Instead of talking, I play a CD I curated specially for the trip. John Mayer’s “Slow

Dancing In a Burning Room” gives Emily pause; she lowers the volume.

“I read this lyric that reminded me of Renee,” she says, eyes steeled on the gray New

Jersey trees. “It’s something like, ‘the room’s on fire and she’s fixing her hair.’”

I change the song.

We check into a seedy hotel in Times Square, drop our bags on the scuffed carpet. We don’t have concrete plans for this trip, just three dreamy days of wandering the streets and feigning happiness. Emily makes a game of stealing trinkets—clothes, sunglasses, card games— from stores we visit. Prolific winds push us around. At night, we are relieved to retreat to our hotel room with a stash of candy and the handle of vodka that Perry bought for me.

We drink the liquor recklessly, our stomachs flaming with alcohol and Swedish fish.

Sitcoms flicker on the television, but we ignore them. We play one of the card games that Emily swiped from Barnes & Noble. We marinate in our drunkenness.

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And then the overhead lights are off and Emily is scuttling over me, all soft hair and glassy eyes. She wrestles my shirt off, nibbles my stomach, kisses me hungrily on the mouth. I know she’s thinking of Renee. She knows I’m thinking of Renee.

Emily’s mouth hovers over my belly button. “Do you want me to fuck you?”

I do and I don’t. I’ve only ever been with a boy, but I don’t want Renee’s girl; I want

Renee. I want her to realize she doesn’t need to keep scraping up girls like spare change. I’ve seen her at her worst—I’ve heard her rant and rave about the supposed “loves of her life,” I’ve watched her scald her stomach with cigarettes, I’ve been the target of her drunken harangues— and I’ve stayed. I’m waiting to cash in my loyalty like currency, to trade in these miserable months for a fairytale salvation.

“I have to pee,” I lie, sliding out from underneath Emily. I lock myself in the too-bright bathroom and wish for my shirt. I linger on the toilet and, when I finally wipe, I realize I’m dry as a communion wafer.

Emily has passed out on top of the covers. I nudge her, my voice low. “Hey, let’s get you into bed.”

She blinks. “What time is it?”

Before I can answer, she claps a hand to her mouth and scrabbles upright. She just makes it to the toilet before her stomach ejects its contents. When she finishes, she sits heavily on the tiled floor and rests her head on the edge of the tub.

“I need a shower,” she says, sounding hearteningly sober.

Wordlessly, I start the water, adjusting it to a comfortable temperature. I avert my eyes when Emily tugs off her clothes and hauls herself into the tub. She sits under the spray, head back and eyes closed.

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“I’ll check on you in a few minutes,” I mumble, ducking out of the bathroom. From the sound of things, Emily has started to cry.

The bedroom smells faintly of vomit. Sullenly, I text Renee, hoping she’s still awake.

She doesn’t reply—she hasn’t replied to me in days. In a few minutes, I help a half-asleep Emily out of the shower. I try to goad her into drying herself off, maybe putting on some pajamas, but she ignores me and crawls into bed. I clean up the bathroom and get ready for bed and lie awake, hanging my last hopes on a late-night missive from Renee or, at the very least, Perry.

None arrives.

In the morning, Emily wakes panicked. “Um,” she blinks, peeking under the covers at her body, “how did I get naked?”

“You took a shower.” I pick at the unraveling threads of the comforter. “Well, first you threw up. Then you took a shower.”

“Oh.” Emily bites her lower lip. “So we didn’t—?”

“No! No.”

“Oh. Well,” Emily clears her throat, “sorry you had to take care of me.”

“I’m gonna shower,” I say, desperate to extricate myself from the awkwardness. I check my phone, wondering in vain if a message from Renee arrived while I was asleep.

Emily can barely look at the bagel she orders for breakfast. Anxious, I wolf down a whole omelet and a side of toast. My phone sits expectantly on the table.

“I think Renee’s mad at me,” I say. “She won’t text back.” The last time I saw her was at her mother’s house. We’d eaten home-fried chicken wings and talked until midnight. I’d helped her stepsister with her homework. In the morning, I’d driven the three hours home alone.

“Um,” Emily grimaces, “about that. See, I think I might know why she’s mad.”

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The white noise of panic whorls in my ears.

“Remember how you gave me a copy of your contest entry? That essay about your parents?”

I nod, too tense to blink.

“Well, I was reading it the other day and Perry came up behind me.”

My lungs puncture and deflate.

“And he, well, took it from me.”

My blood turns to dust in my veins.

“He said he wouldn’t tell Renee anything about it, though. He promised.”

“And he must have kept his promise,” I say numbly, “until four days ago.”

“She’s probably just drunk somewhere and her phone died,” Emily reassures me.

“Or…well, it’s not like she’ll be mad forever.”

“And it’s not like I’m definitely going to win the contest,” I add. “She’ll probably win and then everything will be fine.”

“Yeah,” Emily says in a voice genuine as cubic zirconia.

The drive back to campus is muted. I drop Emily off at her apartment, then rush home to change into running tights and a battered pair of sneakers. I crisscross the town, covering eight shaky miles. My vision bobs and blips as if I’m watching myself on a grainy projector.

Tuesday morning, as I walk to the café where Renee holds her office hours, my childhood asthma resurrects itself. My throat constricts painfully when I see Renee’s usual seat empty. I wait, time passing languidly and dreadfully as the moments in the doctor’s office before a shot.

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Renee arrives and says nothing, doesn’t even glance at me. She unpacks her things, plugs in her computer, digs a pen out of her backpack.

“You’re mad at me.” I mean to whisper; it comes out as a whimper.

Renee’s mouth crimps. In a smarting, matter-of-fact tone, she proclaims: “You fucked up.”

I bumble through a laundry list of apologies, excuses, appeals. Half of me knows that my talking is only aggravating Renee more, but the other, wiser half knows that I need to face her wrath if I want back in her good graces. Renee resembles the Old Testament God in that way— her forgiveness comes at the heavy cost of sacrifice, penitence, pain.

“You used my name in your story,” Renee spits3. “I literally just had a conversation with the cohort at Alabama about this—you never use someone’s real name when you write about them. Never.”

I open, in vain, a fresh vein of apologies.

“I’m sick of being your muse,” Renee continues, her face aflame with holy fury. “Find something else to write about.”

My muse. I mull the word over in my mind. Muses are supposed to be goddesses, maddeningly ephemeral but paramount to creativity. Is that all Renee is to me? Is that at all what Renee is to me? A muse is kind; a muse is helpful. I adore Renee, but even I can’t keep a straight face while calling her kind or helpful.

Renee keeps me in an excruciating purgatory for the next few days. Her glare is dry ice: when she scrutinizes me, I feel my skin sizzle. I’m cautiously optimistic, though, when she invites me to hang out in her favorite hookah lounge a few days later.

3 All names in this essay have been changed.

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She’s with Perry and the new crush, the girl they took to New York. This girl must have heard my name raked through festering manure, but she’s somehow still gracious to me when I sit down. I can’t say the same about Renee, who’s chain smoking like she wants lung cancer tomorrow.

“So,” Renee finally says, her voice loud and abrasive as when she’s drunk, “how was your little vacation with Emily?”

“It was fun.” My chipper voice belies the nauseating way my intestines braid together.

“Yeah?” Renee smirks. “Did you guys fuck?”

I freeze, thinking of the sloppy kisses Emily doesn’t remember. “Of course not.”

Renee smirks. “I told her to watch out, that you’ll probably get a crush on her.”

I sift through my backpack so I don’t have to look at the flaming coals that have replaced

Renee’s pupils. After an hour or so of working, Renee softens toward me a little. Her jokes mellow to the point where they burn, but no longer blister, the skin.

When the new girl gathers her things to go to class, Renee drinks in her every movement.

She sighs once the girl’s out of earshot.

“You know what I love about her?” Renee asks, leaning toward me. Her eyes are all combat.

She’s waiting for me to ask, “what?” Ashamed of myself, I obey.

“She never romanticized me,” Renee says slowly. “Never made me out to be something

I’m not.”

Something in me—something thin and brittle as a match, but something nonetheless— snaps. I meet Renee’s glare and don an exaggerated, blow-up-doll stare of surprise. “No!” I gasp. “People do that to you?”

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Perry lets out a loud guffaw. Renee sneers at me, then slides out of the booth. To punish me, she sits at another table for the next half-hour, flirts with the random girls there. Perry can’t stop grinning. My bravado dimming, I look down at my homework, trying to seem diligent and innocent and like someone Renee shouldn’t decide to crucify.

Pre-chorus

In February, against her better judgment and my frantic prayers, Emily entrenches herself in friends-with-benefits territory with Renee. Emily swears she’ll never really trust Renee again, insists she can sleep with her ex without her heart slipping into the mix, and I nod and swallow my worries for her. I know better than anyone how annoying it is when well-meaning people proselytize about “dangerous Renee.” I know a sermon is the last thing Emily needs.

But Emily begins unraveling in obvious and visceral ways. On Friday nights, when Perry and Renee and I get sloshed on malt liquor and dance barefoot to Fleetwood Mac, Emily drinks like it’s the end times. She’s always the one to throw up. Often she slips away in the middle of a song, leaving behind the thrum of “Seven Wonders” to lie on a bedroom floor somewhere and cry. And then she pops back into the party like nothing’s wrong, like salt isn’t dusting her cheeks, like it doesn’t bother her at all to grind against Renee. And Renee holds Emily so close, wraps her olive fingers in Emily’s black hair, goads Emily to sit on her lap. Giddily drags her to the bedroom every morning around 3:00 a.m. Yet somehow, for all that kissing and touching and fucking, doesn’t notice the resolute set of Emily’s lips come breakfast.

One drunken night, Emily locks herself in Perry’s bathroom and takes a lighter to her arm. The scar is oblong and fascinating. When she shows it to me, I stare for a long time.

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Renee says she feels bad about this.

Renee says she feels bad about a lot of things.

On another drunken night, Emily dissolves again, this time in Renee’s apartment. Renee is in the kitchen deejaying the EDM the loves so much. Emily and I sneak into the bathroom, speak in hushed tones. I don’t want Renee catching me intruding in her business, and Emily doesn’t want Renee catching her in a moment of weakness. We both know how quickly Renee could foist us from her inner sanctum.

“I was standing on the balcony,” Emily says, her voice husky, “thinking about what it’d be like to jump off.”

I flicker to life with a brilliant idea. “Wait here,” I whisper, extricating myself from the cramped bathroom. I riffle through my backpack, tossed haphazardly by Renee’s front door, and wriggle out a sheath of papers. I slink back into the bathroom, undetected by Renee.

“Here.” I hand Emily the copy of my essay. “Don’t show it to anybody, okay?”

Emily frowns, confused. “Why…?”

“Read it,” I insist, “and you’ll understand.”

I’m thinking of the line on page eight, the line where I mention standing on Renee’s balcony, weeping, contemplating jumping. I’m thinking Emily will read my words and know she’s not alone. I’m thinking I, too, know how it feels to brood on the fifth-floor balcony in winter air and stare at the raucous, tipsy crowd below and feel so far from them, and yourself, and Renee, but then go back inside and dance anyway.

Verse 2

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It’s the dregs of January, I’m pleasantly drunk, I’m wearing one of Renee’s cozy old sweaters and sitting crosslegged on the floor of her living room. And I’m impervious to jealousy when Emily flounces through the front door. I keep my eyes steeled on my beer, aware that

Renee is gaging my reaction, hoping I’ll have a reaction. I won’t give her the satisfaction; I’ll show her I’m fine, fine, more than fine with her ex trampling all over our Friday night.

See, I’ve beat Renee at her own game. I’ve memorized her schemes: she pines over an ex-girlfriend one night, declares her love for someone new the next morning, fucks someone else by nightfall. And then she waits in the wings of life for chaos to descend. She flames her hazel eyes wide and declare she has no idea why so-and-so has feelings for her, no clue why what’s- her-face claims she’s been led on. Renee believes the world is infinitely unfair to her, and I believe she’ll keep me by her side forever if I just keep agreeing.

So I smile blandly at Emily and turn to Perry and doggedly make conversation to prove just how unbothered I am. Emily’s floating around like a princess, like someone Renee’s really going to get back together with, and my sole consolation is I know Emily’s only here because

Renee’s other ex declined the invite.

A few drinks later, when the room starts tilting on its axis and our voices crescendo to high drunkenness, Renee’s other ex—Jess, the gorgeous blonde she dated for, like, ages— stumbles through the door. The atmosphere turns hot and metallic as blood.

Renee extracts herself easily from Emily and hugs Jess, invites her to sit. Renee seems to forget that we were in the middle of playing Bananagrams—but maybe that’s just as well, since after I beat her at it a few times she looked ready to challenge the drywall to a fistfight. Renee hurries to get Jess a drink, and the two of them slip away to the couch. Emily picks at a piece of lint on her sock. Perry seems enthused about the brewing conflict.

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“So, Emily,” he says grandly, leaning toward her. Emily manages to tear her eyes from the floor. “Should I call you Emily? Or do you prefer…I don’t know…Miss Saigon? Empress

Wu?”

Instinctively, I gasp—then blush. Neither Renee nor Jess seems at all perturbed by

Perry’s “jokey” racism. Even Emily takes the offense in stride, countering Perry with a laugh and a sharp retort. I try to contort my expression into something appropriately apathetic, lest

Perry and Renee think Emily is better suited to being their third wheel.

The night rambles along evenly until, with harrowing brilliance, it bloats and explodes supernova-style. Disaster ensues when Emily moves Jess’s purse off the couch “in a bitchy way” (or so Renee claims when she retells the story). Emily and Jess exchange words, then barbs, and then Emily is scampering out front door and Jess is turning her wrath upon Renee.

I’m hiding in the kitchen when Jess and Renee launch into a deafening shouting match that ends with Jess breaking something valuable of Renee’s while Renee weeps.

But Saturday morning dawns bleary and unremarkable. Perry, Renee and I wake to the chime of Jess’s cell phone: it’s her boss, berating her for being late to work. It’s 9:00 or 10:00 when she hurtles out the door, Renee cackling at her anxiety. The previous night’s fight seems to be forgotten, or at least filed away where no one need ponder it. Perry and Renee instruct me to drive them to Cracker Barrel, where they order big breakfasts of biscuits and gravy and trade jokes about Emily. From the way they deride her, I doubt I’ll lay eyes on the poor girl again.

Impossibly, Emily crash-lands into my life again a week later. Renee invites her to tag along to another Friday-night escapade, and I shrug as if I can’t see any downsides to that plan.

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“One thing, though,” Renee adds, lighting a cigarette. “Perry and I are going to the symphony from 7:00 to 9:00, so you and Emily can just hang out in my apartment ’til we get back.”

Dread swells in the back of my throat. “We can’t just meet up after?”

“Nah, we’ll pregame the symphony together,” Renee says decisively. “It’ll be fun.”

I wonder at the wisdom of Renee’s cloistering Emily and me together, but I don’t dare say anything. Renee will chalk up any protestations to jealousy, and as Renee’s best friend I’m supposed to be above jealousy. So I gamely follow Renee to her apartment after our last Friday class, let her hand me a beer, and fake a smile when Emily knocks on the door. I pretend not to notice how Renee has erased the previous weekend and every derisory comment she crafted at

Emily’s expense. In a moment that stings like a paper cut, I understand that Renee doesn’t love

Emily, but that she’ll still choose her over me.

I pick at the quilted cushion in Renee’s living room and let her steer the conversation.

All too soon, she and Perry are zipping winter coats and tugging on shoes, and I’m left looking at

Emily, unsure what to do with my hands. Emily suggests we get dinner at the Italian place down the street, and Renee laughs and mockingly wishes us a good time on “our little dinner date.”

But our half-drunkenness tides us through the evening, and by the time we stumble back to Emily’s apartment to wait for Renee, we are giggling at new inside jokes. We’ve learned that our birthdays are exactly a month apart, that we both adore the Jane Austen novel Persuasion, that we’re both English majors, that we’re both obsessed with journaling…and we laugh, without bitterness, about the obviousness of Renee’s “type.” We find it hilarious that we are stock-issued and unremarkable as dolls.

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“Let’s do shots,” Emily announces. I’m splayed on her couch, sucking on a cherry lollipop, marveling at how Emily’s apartment feels so much friendlier than Renee’s. “I’ve got this lemon vodka stuff. It tastes like drain cleaner.”

“But…will Renee be mad?” I cast Emily a meaningful look. After all, Renee’s the one who always orchestrates the imbibing.

Emily bites her lip. “Well…we’ll just pretend to be sober when she gets here.” She pulls two glasses out of the cabinet. Vodka glug-glugs and we’re both giggling in anticipation.

“Cheers,” she says, clinking her glass against mine.

“Cheers.” And I accept the liquor gladly: the way the fake citrus tangs in my mouth, the way the alcohol paints my throat gold with heat. Emily, my co-conspirator, mirrors my goofy grin.

We swallow shot after shot.

Verse 1

The week after Christmas: I’m squatting on Renee’s bedroom floor, threading bendy black rods through the tubing of a half-erected tent. One of the rods catches on a seam; when I struggle it free, it shoots through the tube with a slick smooching sound.

“You really don’t have to do this,” Renee says, her voice itchy as burlap.

I shrug. “It’s no biggie.”

Renee’s friend Amber, whom I met just hours before, harrumphs. “Seriously,” she calls from behind the tent, “you owe me for this shit.”

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But Renee doesn’t glance at Amber; her eyes envelop me, and me alone, and for the skinniest second I think they hold something like mercy. “You really don’t have to,” she repeats.

I crawl back in the lopsided tent without responding. The teal fabric shudders as Amber forces the third corner together. “Okay, Alaina,” Amber announces, “I’m gonna need you to push up from the center.”

Amber, an avid camper, has apparently set up countless tents over the years—though never, she said with a laugh, in someone’s bedroom. But this is Renee’s holiday gift to Emily, a way to woo the new girlfriend with the unrequited love of camping. Renee’s master romantic plan is that tomorrow, when Emily arrives for a mid-winter-break consummation of their new relationship, she’ll find a Christmas-light-festooned tent set up as a surprise for her.

I crouch in the static-charged enclave, my thin wrists branched out above me. In the eerie green light of the vinyl, my hands look more chapped and pallid than usual. A week earlier, over

Christmas Eve dinner, my mother chided me for losing so much weight. My dad just looked at his food, mute except for his crow’s feet, which were suddenly etched deeper and screaming louder than ever before.

“How fast should I push?” My voice sounds dense and muffled, as if I’m calling to

Amber from somewhere far underwater.

“Go slow. To the halfway point.” Amber sounds out of breath as she wrestles the fourth pole, trying to lodge it in its corner. “Keep going, now. All the way.” Finally, there’s a snap and the tent’s skeleton gives its final shake. “Done!”

I blink at the teal-and-white dome overhead. Just above me is the intersection of the two main poles, the cross forming the four crucial spines of the structure. The stuffiness in here makes me feel somehow more alive.

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And then Renee is in the tent with me, gazing up with me. In a strange voice, she says,

“Thank you.”

I imagine Emily flat-backed and orgasming and staring at the exact place I’m staring now. “You’re welcome.”

Less than two weeks later, during the frigid first week of the spring semester, Renee texts me and asks for a ride home from the hookah bar. She gives me a time and tells me to come inside to get her. I wonder why she can’t just walk to the parking lot, but I do as she says.

I descend the stairs into the smoky basement, blinking at the darkness. My eyes find

Renee and Emily on a pew in the middle of the room. Emily rakes her hand across her cheeks, trying to hide her tears from me. Her head slumps from her neck like a wilted lily. Renee looks relieved when we make eye contact.

“You ready?” she asks, already on her feet.

I furrow my eyebrows. Of course I’m ready—I’m here for her, not the other way around.

But I just nod, playing along with whatever scene she’s creating.

Without a goodbye to Emily, Renee leads me up the stairs and out into the cruelly cold night. I look at her sideways as she collapses into my passenger seat and sighs wearily.

“Everything okay?”

Renee raises her eyebrows. “At least that’s over. Break-ups are never fun.”

My jaw nearly unhinges. I gawk at Renee for a few seconds, forgetting to crank the engine. “You guys broke up?” I want to, but don’t, add: and you had me walk in and get you afterward? I wonder how many mental daggers Emily is launching at me in this very moment.

Renee grimaces. “Yeah. Oh, hey, I meant to ask—can we stop by my apartment on the way to Perry’s? I want to grab my laundry.”

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I blink. “Sure.”

We are halfway to Perry’s, Renee’s hamper tucked neatly between her legs, when I remember the package in my center console. I wait until a red light to dig out the plastic pouch.

“I got you something,” I say shyly, holding out the gift for Renee. “Consider it a late Christmas present.”

I’d ordered the gift weeks ago, but hadn’t had the nerve to give it to Renee. Not when she’d asked Emily to be her girlfriend two days before Christmas.

“What is it?” Renee asks as she pulls the wire sunglasses out of the package. She gasps when she sees the lenses. “Holographic Jesus sunglasses? No way!” She slides the glasses on and yanks her visor down to examine herself in the mirror. “These are the fucking best!

Where’d you find them?”

“Just, like, at the Dollar Store,” I lie. I actually special-ordered them online. I Googled

“holographic Jesus”—because Renee had a holographic Jesus poster in her apartment that she adored—and searched for a while before I found the glasses. But I’ll die before I let Renee know I care that much.

Renee admires herself in the vanity mirror for a long time. “I remember when I first met you,” she muses. “I thought you were so weird.”

I blush. “Well, I was weird.”

Renee laughs. “And now you’re, like, one of my best friends.”

Those words pummel the gong in my chest, make all my nerves reverberate. “Really?”

This is too much; this is grace upon grace upon grace.

“Yeah,” Renee says, nonchalant. “After Perry, you’re my best friend.”

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Intro

I feel my heartbeat behind my eyes as I knock on Renee’s front door. I glance down at my plain navy sweater, blue jeans, and black loafers. Is this what college students wear to parties? I’ve never been out partying. I’ve never had alcohol, save a few condoned sips of my dad’s red wine last August; it tasted like thick vinegar.

I am walking into Renee’s world blind, but all that matters is that I’ve been invited to walk into it. Renee has invited me to walk into it.

Renee’s door sweeps open and there she is: shorn-short black hair, wide hazel eyes, coral lips. I’m spellbound. “You look beautiful,” Renee says, and I want to believe her. She leads me through the living room and out onto the balcony. Perry sits in an Adirondack chair perched against the wall; five stories below us, the town billows out, a patchwork quilt of college students and dimly lit parties. I realize that this balcony, with its cement walls the texture of cottage cheese, is the place where Renee’s Facebook profile picture was taken. In the picture, Renee and

Perry scowl at the camera lens. The oddness of the photograph made me wonder about Renee, about Perry, about what they did and said and thought when they weren’t cooped up in class with me.

And now I get to find out.

Renee pours me my first beer, watches as I take a sip, instructs me to drink it quickly.

Perry rotates between shuffling the music on Renee’s laptop and smoking a cigarette. From this balcony, I can see all the landmarks of the town: the library I frequented as a child, the restaurant my family always visited on New Year’s Eve, the stadium where my high school’s football team played on Friday nights. If I look down, I can see everything.

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But I don’t look down; I look at Renee. She pours more beer for me and waits for me to finish it.

In a few minutes, she’ll announce that we’ve got a house party to attend and she’ll lead us through the oddly warm October night to a ramshackle yellow house. She’ll skitter to the basement, crank the music so loud I’ll think I’m hallucinating, strip down to her sports bra and cargo shorts. The music will eddy around us, fast and disorienting. Perry will pass me a bottle of whiskey and watch me gulp from its gaping neck. Our shoes will be afterthoughts in the corner. Finally, after two many whiskey-washed songs, Renee will lock eyes with me in the half-darkness, dance her way across the room, grind her hips into mine. We will dance and we will pant and we will sweat and we will strike into a fire descended from heaven—or, maybe, ascended from hell. We will become something bright, savage, holy.

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CHAPTER TEN

IN TRANSIT

Early 2000s

I am young, no more than seven or eight, and I am filling the drive to my aunt’s house with daydreams of a little sister. I look at the melted crayons in my cupholder, the lava spill of

Indigo and Inchworm and Maximum Red. I look at my sister, Erica, with her hair of Banana

Mania and her shirt of Carmine. She is beautiful even with her chewed-bloody fingernails and her pimply cheeks.

I’m daydreaming of my 44-year-old mother announcing another pregnancy, of finally becoming an Erica to my own little sister. Based on my parents’ naming formula (Erica

Rachelle, Alaina Janelle), I posit that my little sister will be Amanda Michelle or Alyssa

Gabrielle or Emily Noelle. I will walk Amanda/Alyssa/Emily to the bus stop as Erica did for me, and braid her hair before church as Erica braided mine.

I need a little sister of my own now more than ever, because now Erica has a boyfriend who’s threatening the end of her and me. Erica started dating Jeremy when I was six, and now they’re inseparable. They go jogging together and put acne medication on each other’s backs and I found pages in Erica’s diary where she told God that Jeremy made staying abstinent really hard. Yes, Jeremy is taking over, and the only good thing about him is that he’s permanently replaced Erica’s former best friend. (The former best friend had Raw Sienna hair and a beaky nose and I’d dreamt of her naked more than once. If she could poison my dreams like that, then clearly she’d needed to get the boot.)

All in all, I think I’ve learned enough from Erica to become a big sister in my own right.

I think I could show Amanda/Alyssa/Emily how to become the right kind of girl.

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2009

I am sixteen and breathless with laughter. My three best friends and I crash through my front door, our cheeks windbitten from the December afternoon. I look at the three beauties around me and marvel that I found such a magical, unlikely group. Jill is lithe and feminine,

Kelly is artsy and androgynous, and Veronica is someone new every day. Each of them is more exciting than I am. (Just weeks ago, Jill’s boyfriend fingered her in an empty classroom, and

Kelly’s friend confessed to being bisexual, and Veronica…well, everything Veronica says is a wild lie, but I like those wild lies.)

My bleating telephone interrupts us. I grab the teal receiver—my reward for being

Erica’s math tutee the summer after fourth grade—and Erica’s voice crawls into my ear.

“Sissy?” A smile crimps the word. “My water broke.”

I make bug eyes at my friends. “You’re having the baby?” Jill, Kelly and Veronica clasp hands and start bouncing on their toes.

“Erica’s having the baby!” they squeal.

“Yes,” Erica says, her voice calm and sweet as sugarwater. “I’m in the hospital, and

Jeremy’s on the way.”

“Erica’s having the baby! Erica’s having the baby!” I can’t keep track of which friend is chanting, or if they all are; they flit around me so quickly, they blur into one.

I want to ask Erica if it hurts. Instead, I say, “I love you” and rush to call Mom and Dad.

We drive the five hours to Ohio through an ice storm. By the middle stretch of the trip,

I’m convinced that I won’t survive to meet my niece. I see upside-down car after upside-down car on the median, sometimes two of them after sharp curves. I ponder the slate sky and wonder

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if my niece—whose name is Ella; who was born just after 1:00 a.m.—will ever know anything about me.

But we don’t die. We check into the Hyatt, throw our suitcases on the patterned carpet, and speed to St. Ann’s. The hospital room is dimly lit and its window looks down over a construction zone. Erica looks worse than I’ve ever seen her: bloodshot eyes, bloated face, ballooned body. She’s retaining water from the emergency C-section. When she speaks, it’s like gravel crunching under tires.

“Sissy,” she closes her eyes. “You made it.”

Mom and Dad are behind me, so I’m the first to glance at the wrinkly bundle on Erica’s breast. Ella has a fiery scratch on one cheek and her forehead is furrowed. Her nose reminds me of a little thumb.

“Hi, Ella,” I whisper, my fingers grazing her white blanket. Ella is impossibly small— barely five pounds—and I am afraid to touch her skin. I feel oversized and clumsy. I can’t elucidate how I feel about her warm cheeks or her heartrendingly thin fingernails. Sappy lyrics come to mind. I want Ella to know that I love her already, that I’ll always stand up for her, that

I’ll protect her through anything. I don’t know how to convey these things.

2012 & 2013

I am 19 when Erica gives birth to twin boys. I don’t drive to the hospital this time, though I save the pictures that Jeremy texts me. I delay visiting the twins because I am busy, and then because I am apathetic, and then because I fall in big-time love with a girl and I feel like it’s tattooed across my face. The twins are four months old before my parents successfully force me to see my sister.

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In some ways, I think that confessing everything to Erica could save me. I think that if

I’d confessed all those years ago to dreaming about her friend naked, Erica could have snapped me back into place. Like the shoulder I dislocated when I was three: it only took the doctor one jerk to put it right. Sure, the joint still rolls in cold weather like tumblers of a lock, but it’s mostly better.

But in other, realer ways, I don’t want Erica to save me. As I watch Erica sing “Jesus

Loves Me” with Ella, as I hear one of the twins chuck his bottle and the other shriek over a wet diaper, I feel suffocated. I forget what an unforced smile feels like.

Erica wakes me at 5:00 a.m. every morning for an hour-long jog. We wear sweatshirts because it is newly October and eerily cold. (Eerily because, just weeks ago, as I sipped beer on the girl I love’s balcony, I marveled at how eerily hot it was. Auspiciously hot, I’d hoped.)

Erica asks why I relinquished my position as a Bible-study leader on campus. I tell her I got too overwhelmed with schoolwork. Erica asks if I’m keeping up with my friends from church. I tell her, sure. The lie bubbles up as easily as hydrogen peroxide on a wound.

And then Erica asks me if I’ve met any special boys in church, and the lies dry up.

“Lately,” I say, pacing out my words to the beat of the run, “I’ve felt strongly convicted that marriage isn’t right for me.”

Conviction is good; conviction is legitimate. Christians are always tossing the c-word around.

But rejecting marriage is neither good nor legitimate. Erica and I know implicitly that when we speak of boys, we’re speaking of Christian boys, and when we’re speaking of Christian boys we’re speaking of dating Christian boys with the intent of marrying them. That is our script, and it’s not my right to deviate from it.

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Erica gives me a chance to backtrack when she asks, “Why do you say that?” She wants me to invent an easily righted wrong like I’m afraid I won’t be a good wife or I’m worried about the pain of childbirth. Some maggot-fear she can squelch underheel.

“I just feel like it wouldn’t be fair…to any husband.”

Her silence screams.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” I mumble. “I’m just not…attracted…to men. Not that

I’m attracted to women, of course.” I try to play the selflessness card: “And it wouldn’t be fair, would it, to tie some nice Christian man down? When he could have a wife who wanted to be a wife?”

“I think you need to pray about it,” Erica says in a voice that sucks all moisture from the air. “If you feel God is calling you to singleness, like the apostle Paul, then that’s fine.”

I know my sister well enough to know that we won’t end this conversation at “fine.”

“But,” she says sharply, “if there’s some kind of sin in your heart that you need to repent of, then you need to pray about that. I think it’s important to examine your motivations here.”

My motivations. What are those, exactly? My mind shows me dark hair and Burnt

Umber eyes and Tickle Me Pink lips.

“And something to keep in mind: plenty of my friends don’t like sex, and their marriages are fine. I know a girl who was so terrified of sex, she and her husband couldn’t consummate their marriage for two weeks after their wedding. Every time they tried, she was just—you know—hysterical. But they worked through it. A lot of prayer, Sissy; that’s what it takes.”

Christmas 2013

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Erica’s gift to me: Extravagant Grace: God’s Glory Displayed in Our Weakness by

Barbara Duguid

Description: “Why do Christians—even mature Christians—still sin so often? Why doesn’t God set us free? We seem to notice more sin in our lives all the time…”

I asked for: a subscription to The Paris Review

20144

Dear Ella,

There’s so much I don’t know, but I want to teach you things anyway. I want to teach you all the lessons you won’t learn in your Christian homeschool co-op. I want you to know I didn’t abandon you. I was there from the beginning, I swear I was, from the day you were born: during an ice storm, the first one of 2009. Grandpa drove the interstate at forty miles an hour just so we could see you. We couldn’t wait for the plows.

Your mom looked terrible after the emergency C-section. I helped her get out of bed the first time; she doesn’t remember crying and clutching her middle and collapsing against me, but I do. I remember how her face crumpled in pain because it almost cut me in half, too.

Your dad needed to study for his law school finals, so I spent the night in your hospital room on the scratchy foldout couch. Your mom asked me to help her with your nighttime feedings; she was so nervous about breastfeeding, so stressed you wouldn’t latch on and she’d be

4 Unsent since January 2014.

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at fault. I barely slept, anxious I wouldn’t be ready when she needed me. I crawled in bed with her when you arrived, tickled her forearm so she wouldn’t fall asleep with you in her arms.

I was your first babysitter, Ella, the first person your mom trusted to watch over you. She left the Food Network playing on the television while she and your dad ran errands, and you fell asleep on top of me, your little hand clutched in a fist over my heart, and I wondered if you could feel it beating as you fell asleep. You slept like that, immobile, for hours. I hate Iron Chef but I sat through a marathon because I didn’t want to disturb you, didn’t want your fist to stop giving my heart high-fives.

I thought I’d be there for everything: birthdays, Christmases, piano recitals. I planned to be there. Your mom and I daydreamed about me renting an apartment down the street from you, popping in at your house every- and anytime. I promised her you’d be the flower girl at my wedding—I promised that before you could even walk, let alone hold anything in your hands.

If I ever have a wedding, I still want you there, if you’re allowed.

I want to see you, Ella, today and every day. But more than anything I want to be the aunt who inspires you to be brave, because I know the kind of daunting walls you live behind. I lived behind them, too. I was scared, too, Ella; more than you know. And I can’t live silently or safely anymore because that’s not how I want you to live. I want to see you, but I need to respect myself. More importantly I need to be someone who deserves your respect.

Love,

Aunt Laney

2016

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I am 22 when Erica finds out that my girlfriend and I have moved in together. I finagle excuses to avoid seeing Erica and Jeremy and their (now four) children for the next year and a half. I miss the bulk of Ella’s sixth year, and I regret it but do nothing about it.

When my parents orchestrate a short visit with “the whole gang,” I dread it for months. I tear my fingernails until they’re tipped with blood. I’m curt with my girlfriend. I whine to my therapist that I hate not knowing what will happen when I see Erica, that I hate how we’ve never actually discussed my sexuality, that I hate wondering if, at any moment, she’ll launch into some horrible come-back-to-Jesus spiel.

I drop my girlfriend off at a hotel a few minutes from my parents’ house. She didn’t want me to drive the three hours on the highway alone, but the Waterfront Inn is as far as her concern takes her. She fears meeting Erica, and I fear Erica meeting her. Something tells me that Erica wouldn’t appreciate my girlfriend’s unshaven legs, her backwards baseball cap, or her constant craving to have a skateboard under her feet. I don’t appreciate that I can’t share whole swaths of my life with my sister, but my feelings don’t seem to be our family’s chief concern.

My role in this visit is to smile, act heterosexual, let my sister say anything she wants about the

Gospel, and never make the slightest comment or allusion or insinuation about my “lifestyle.”

I pull into my parents’ driveway and turn off the mopey Taylor Swift song that’s gotten me this far. I wonder how long I can sit in my closed-up Honda before the central Florida heat kills me. Babies die quickly in cars, but maybe that’s just because they’re small? With my luck, my stubborn gay body would last weeks in here. I’d set the world record for heat endurance.

My dad pads out of the house and waves, foiling my perish-in-the-car plan. He pulls me into a lingering hug and says he’s glad to see me.

“I’m not,” I twist out of the hug. “I’ve been so nervous about this.”

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Dad, forever the staunch optimist, waves my fear away. “Don’t be. It’s not as bad as you think.”

As bad. So it’s still somewhat bad.

Just then, Erica and Jeremy’s minivan swoops into the driveway. Apparently they needed to make an emergency trip to Wal-Mart for new pool toys. Erica scrabbles out of the car and clobbers me with a hug.

“Sissy!” she exclaims. “Oh, I’ve missed you so much.”

I swallow my feelings about this supposed “missing” and hug her, and then Jeremy, and then her again. In my head, I’m saying: I’m gay and you think I’m going to burn in Hell! Out loud, I say: “How was Wal-Mart?”

Awkwardness abounds as Jeremy and Dad start to unload bags from the minivan. I move to help, then realize there’s nothing left for me to carry; my family is managing perfectly fine without me. I wonder what my girlfriend is doing back at the hotel, if she’s lounging in the room or skateboarding down some street and garnering glares from passerby.

I tiptoe into the house, wary of waking the three napping children, and make a beeline to

Ella on the screened-in porch. She’s working on an alphabet puzzle and has a princess doll tucked under one arm. When I call her name, she stands up and smiles an open-mouthed smile and for a few moments she’s so excited she can’t speak. And then she skitters over to me and throws her sylphlike arms around my waist and I pick her up and marvel at how tall she is. I tell her she’s a string bean, and she laughs and calls me silly.

“Look, Aunt Laney,” she says, holding up her doll. When she says my name, I remember that mine was the third name she learned—the first being Mama and Dada—and for a few years it sounded more like “A-nee-a” than “Aunt Laney,” but I understood it just the same. I smile at

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her doll, a stuffed Sleeping Beauty. “Look! First it’s this, and then…” Ella flips the doll’s skirt over her head, revealing a redheaded girl in a green dress, “now it’s Ariel!”

I squat down to Ella’s eye level and listen to my knees let out loud cracks. “Ella Belle, that’s so cool. Is Ariel your favorite princess?”

Ella grows serious. “My favorite princess is Aurora,” she says, flipping the doll back to

Sleeping Beauty and holding it up as evidence. “And my second favorite is Cinderella, and my third favorite is Ariel.”

I make a mental note to buy Ella some Aurora/Cinderella/Ariel merchandise. “Can you guess what my favorite princess is?” I ask.

Ella smiles and shakes her head shyly.

“My favorite princess kind of looks like me,” I hint. “And she loves books…”

“Belle!” Ella squeals. “Belle is your favorite? I love Belle, too. She’s my fourth favorite princess.”

“You know,” I say, twisting one of Ella’s blonde curls around my finger, “I think you have a book at your house that used to be mine. You know the Beauty and the Beast book? It’s purple and has a lot of pretty pictures?” Ella nods and bites her bottom lip, another excited smile rising on her face. “I used to love that book.”

“I love that book, too,” Ella says, scooting closer to me.

Ella and I spend the bulk of the weekend coloring and writing. Ella uses sheet after sheet of creamy painting paper, even after Jeremy scolds her for being wasteful. I don’t scold her; I understand why she feels a little reckless, a little celebratory. I feel that way, too.

I give Ella “writing assignments” (“what was the best part of today?” “what are your favorite foods?”), promising they’re the same assignments I give to my college freshmen. When

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Ella scribbles out her answers (“I licke wotermelin becos it is joose and macaroni becos it is cheese”), I assure her she’s brilliant. I tell her she should mail me letters, send me her artwork,

FaceTime me, call me, anything. I worry that she won’t.

After the visit, my girlfriend and I throw together a lavish care package for Ella. We buy colored pencils, crayons, markers; we fill our shopping cart with painting paper and spiral notebooks and tomes of princess stickers. We buy a magenta greeting card, and in it I tell Ella my biggest surprise: that I’ll come stay at her house this Christmas, that we’ll be together again before she knows it. Erica still hasn’t launched my Christ-or-bust intervention, and I’m still not comfortable being a guest in her house, but Ella doesn’t know if I’m uncomfortable or not; all she’ll know is if I cared enough to come, or I didn’t.

The shipping for Ella’s package costs $17.23 and takes five days, not counting Sunday.

Five days is longer than I’ve spent with Ella all year. I wonder if Ella will feel the weight of my apology when she unpacks stacks of paper and box after box of craft supplies. I wonder what this missive will do, or undo, when it arrives. I’ve packed all my hopes into this Shamrock-and-

Timberwolf-colored box, and I have to trust that they’ll find their way to Ella.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

ME, MYSELF & MATTHEW GRAY GUBLER

“I had my first orgasm at age ten, humping a four-foot George Jetson doll while a homemade tape of vomiting sounds (my own, fake) played on my Walkman. I fantasized that I was

Kimberly, a pretty, popular gymnast-girl. I imagined that I/Kimberly was running down the hallway at my school, not making it to the bathroom, vomiting all over the place in front of everyone. I wanted this pretty girl to know shame, the shame that I felt in my own body. This turned me on. At the same time, I felt that Kimberly—as a pretty and popular girl—was beyond reproach. Even when out of control, even at her most disgusting, she would be embraced. I wanted to experience that as well.”

–Melissa Broder, “My Vomit Fetish, Myself”

***

I accepted my homosexuality at roughly 8 p.m. on October 11, 2013. True to melodramatic form, I weathered this epiphany:

• sobbing

• in the fetal position

• on a criminally understuffed loveseat

• clutching a white dishtowel in my fist, hanky style.

Though, to be fair, I acquired the dishtowel completely by accident, not in anticipation of any stormy self-inquiries—it was the eve of a Penn State whiteout; wild-eyed volunteers had swarmed campus to equip all potential gamegoers with the essentials—but, nevertheless, that

Terrible Towel became my lone companion on the journey out of the closet. I wish I could say

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the significance of the white flag, of surrender to myself, hadn’t dawned on me mid-weep, but then I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t thrive on theatrics.

I accepted my bisexuality at roughly 4 p.m. on February 17, 2017. True to slovenly grad- student form, I enjoyed this insight:

• gobbling Skinny Pop

• cocooned in long-unwashed turquoise sheets

• wearing glasses prescribed to me when I was twelve

• ogling Matthew Gray Gubler, a.ka. Criminal Minds’ Dr. Spencer Reid, as he uttered the

words “stripped naked” and “tied to a goal post.”

Clearly, these revelations are related.

***

Nothing particularly humiliating happened to me as a child. Once, I came home from school to find my zipper undone, which was embarrassing but not devastating. In seventh grade,

I farted during a documentary about Helen Keller, but only my friend Chelsea heard and she found it more hilarious than appalling. In eleventh grade, I learned the hard way that maternity hosiery does not fit the non-preggo crowd (my tights puddled around my ankles seconds before I was set to walk onstage for the winter choir concert). But none of these events are particularly scarring. They’re barely amusing enough to warrant telling at parties.

So my fascination with humiliation has to come from some deeper, more recessed grotto of my soul. It’s past the memory of Oliver What’s-his-name pooping himself in the cafeteria, beyond the recollection of some boy seeing MK’s pubic hair beneath the baggy seat of her bikini, buried behind the image of the snare drummer who cried during sixth-grade band practice. Maybe it comes from a dream I had when I was young, no older than seven or eight:

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my sister brought a boy—I knew, instinctively, that he was a cute boy, an angel of a boy, the most perfect iteration of boy to ever be iterated—home for me. She and he were climbing the stairs (my dream house, unlike my real house, had stairs, carpeted ones) to my bedroom—where

I was naked. Starkly, breezy-beneath-the-seat naked. I sprinted to my bedroom door (ajar, of course), but of course I couldn’t get to it fast enough. I watched in horror as my sister and the perfect boy ascended the last step and found me in all my unclothed glory.

Or maybe it comes from an even older dream, an opposite dream, a dream in which I intrude on my sister and her friend. They’re both naked, but my sister scurries out of sight while the friend doesn’t. The friend stands there and lets me see her, and I stand there and let myself see her. I was five, maybe six, years old.

Or maybe it comes from devouring the Embarrassing Moments column in Seventeen every time I managed to ditch my dad in the grocery store. While he chose between shrink- wrapped chicken cutlets, I pored over stories of first-date blunders and locker-room snafus.

Or maybe it comes from that inconvenient, irreverent tic we (for lack of a better excuse) deem “human nature.”

***

Actual scholarly literature on pornography exists. Ponder that for a minute. A cursory search of academic databases produces 16,144 articles on pornography and public humiliation,

2,692 articles on torture porn, and 502 articles on humiliation and BDSM.

Within those tomes of information, I couldn’t find answers to all my questions. I did learn, comfortingly, that I’m not the only human fascinated with humiliation (Wayne

Koestenbaum, author of the aptly titled book Humiliation, definitely shares my enthusiasm for the subject). I learned the official academic definition of humiliation (“the removal of a person’s

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dignity or self-respect; the shaming of a person and in extreme cases the debasement of a person to a point where they become an object of disgust”5). I learned the semantic and psychological difference between humiliation and shame (“While shame is a feeling that prompts us to want to hide or escape…humiliation, in its narrative of unfairness, unleashes intense levels of passion that, as we know, favours violent actions, revenge, and ‘vendettas’, and which is offered to justify murders, kidnappings, the madness of wars, and many other atrocities”6).

I learned there’s a subgenre of humiliation—one that scholar Daniel Shapiro labels

“degradation”—that’s so sadistic, it makes the back of my neck prickle to think about it.

Degradation has nothing to do with the accidental humiliations of everyday life, the downed zippers or loosed gases; it has everything to do with power, with manipulation, with making another person consent to his/her own humiliation. 7 And nowhere is degradation more prevalent than in pornography. While all pornography operates under the illusion of consent, the thrill of the genre comes from the actors’ implicit (self-)violations of said consent. Yes, the actors have

“agreed” to having their orifices poked and prodded and exposed, but in order to appeal to the average viewer, the actors must engage in poking/prodding/exposing that no self-respecting person would agree to. Rebecca Whisnant dissects this thoroughly in her article “Pornography,

Humiliation, and Consent.” Analyzing the 2005 pornographic film Anal Cumsumption 4,

Whisnant untangles why viewers are so titillated by the sight of the star, Jamie, engaging in degrading activities:

5 Blackburn, Simon. "humiliation." The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy: Oxford University Press, 2016. Oxford Reference. 2016. 6 Bigliani, Carlos Guillermo, Moguillansky, Rodolfo, and Sluzki, Carlos E. The International Psychoanalytical Association Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications Series: Shame and Humiliation: A Dialogue between Psychoanalytic and Systemic Approaches. London, GB: Karnac Books, 2013. 7 Shapiro, D. (2004). The nature of humiliation. Retrieved from http://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/ShapiroNY04meeting.pdf

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No one else is in the frame, handing [Jamie] the glass of ejaculate or encouraging her to

drink it, let alone forcing her to do so. She drinks ejaculate out of her own rectum all on

her own, apparently. We are to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain or behind

the camera: the central narrative of pornography is that it reveals the inner truth about

women, or at least about this particular woman. And indeed, what we see in the picture

or film is not that this low and dirty thing was done to her, but that she did it.8

***

From Criminal Minds 3x16, “Elephant’s Memory”:

SPENCER REID: I was in the library and, uh, Harper Hillman comes up to me. And she

tells me that Alexa Lisben wants to meet me behind the field house. Alexa Lisben’s, like,

easily the prettiest girl in school.

DEREK MORGAN: So what happened? Alexa wasn’t there?

SR: She was there. So was the entire football team. They, uh…stripped me naked and

tied me to a goal post. So many kids were there, you know, just watching.

DM: Nobody tried to stop them?

SR: Mm-mm. I begged—I begged them to. But they just—they just watched. And

finally, they got bored, and they left. It was, like, midnight when I finally got home. And

8 Whisnant, Rebecca. "Pornography, Humiliation, and Consent." Sexualization, Media, & Society, vol. 2, no. 3, 2016.

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my mom didn’t…Mom was having one of her episodes, so she didn’t even realize I was

late.

DM: You never told her what happened?

SR: I never told anybody. I thought—it was one of those things that I thought if I didn’t

talk about it, I’d just forget. But I remember it like it was yesterday.9

***

Daniel Shapiro, author of “The Nature of Humiliation,” would analyze Dr. Reid’s situation as follows: in this multi-layered humiliation situation, Reid is not only made naked

(literally and figuratively), he is degraded (“debased, devalued, and dehumanized”). And, as in pornography in general and Anal Cumsumption 4 in particular, Reid appears complicit with his own degradation. As his body was rendered an object of disgust and shame before his peers, he endures the emotional pain that: “I am apparently choosing to degrade myself. I could resist—or

I could have. Now, all I have is a terrible feeling of degradation and regret.”

Through vigorous soul-scouring, I’ve concluded that I am not fascinated in, attracted to, or supportive of degradation in any form. (And I don’t say this in a holier-than-thou, clearing- my-name vein—I say it with relieved exaltation that at least my mind isn’t that far gone. (I’d like to thank my well-meaning parents, my catty-but-not-cruel childhood bullies, and the

Academy for this honor.)) But there remains the hairy truth that I wasn’t 100% certain of my bisexuality until Matthew Gray Gubler relayed this scene of textbook degradation.

***

9 Davis, Jeff, and Andrew Wilder. “Elephant's Memory.” Criminal Minds, CBS, 16 Apr. 2008.

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Back in my God-fearing days, I heard a sermon about masturbation that was infinitely comforting. Mark Driscoll, pastor of a now-folded Seattle megachurch, preached that masturbation is sinful because of the nasty thoughts that accompany it, not because touching one’s genitals is inherently sacrilegious. In his eBooklet Porn-Again Christian: A Frank

Discussion on Pornography and Masturbation, Driscoll answers the FAQ, “When I masturbate I am not lusting, so is this okay?” He decides: “I would be very cautious in evaluating your heart since only you truly know if you are lusting when you masturbate…it seems possible but unlikely to be sexually aroused without sexual thoughts; I guess you could think of tractors or something to divert yourself, which seems peculiar but not evil.”10

Thanks to Mr. Driscoll, my clitoris had a happy and healthy (and blameless!) high-school career. I felt like the luckiest masturbator alive because I never had impure thoughts. It never occurred to me to picture genitalia, or intimate contact, or anything remotely sexual or lusty, when I was taking care of myself. I was perfectly satisfied with fantasies of wetting my pants climbing the rope in gym class, which was weird but certainly not erotic. To quote the foul- mouthed Catholic woman who worked with my dad, “I was the best fuckin’ Catholic.” (Except I was Evangelical, not Catholic, and I wouldn’t have dared say the f-word—but you know what I mean.)

***

Nobody wants to be bisexual. No, I haven’t done scholarly research on the subject, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want a sexual orientation that our culture labels “confused,”

“greedy,” “unfaithful,” etc. I’ve known many lesbians who wouldn’t (or who would hesitate to) date a bisexual girl because of the fear that she’d “go back” to men, as if men were an island the

10 Driscoll, Mark. “Masturbation.” Porn-Again Christian: A Frank Discussion on Pornography and Masturbation, Crossway/Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL, 2008, pp. 22–23.

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girl sporadically abandoned. I suppose I can understand that fear: after all, it wouldn’t be fun to watch your ex-girlfriend get married in a traditional wedding that her entire family approved of and attended; it wouldn’t be fun knowing she never had to worry about losing her job or being denied service at a business because of her identity; in other words, it wouldn’t be fun to watch her move through the world with full hetero privilege while you watched from the much- maligned sidelines.

For years, I suspected I was bisexual (read: I slept with both men and women, had feelings for both men and women, imagined futures with both men and women) and treated the secret like an atomic bomb that, if detonated, would implode my and everyone else’s lives. If I dated a man, I pictured the following happening: my Bible-thumper sister would, ever so smugly, tell herself she’d been right all along, that obviously I was straight; my mother would try to hide her glee, but her relief would be cloying as a gallon of perfume; my relatives, who’d never asked about my girlfriend, would trip over themselves inviting my boyfriend to

Thanksgivings and Christmases; my former church-circle friends would start liking my

Facebook posts again.

I mean, I’d rather grow out my pixie cut again than deal with that level of weapons-grade homophobia.

But I’d also drop everything to go live with Matthew Gray Gubler in his haunted treehouse11 and spend every day adoring his crooked smile and quirky sketches12, so…?

***

11 “Why Matthew Gray Gubler Lives in a ‘Haunted Tree House.’” Vanity Fair, 17 Aug. 2015, video.vanityfair.com/watch/matthew-gray-gubler-lives-in-a-haunted-tree-house. 12 Gray Gubler, Matthew (GUBLERNATION). “the astounding marta becket, seen here in a sparkly hat.” 27 February 2017. Tweet.

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“Hi! Hello! Hi…lo. I forgot how to say hello! This is off to a terrible start. My name is

Matthew Gray Gubler and I’m very honored and flattered to answer some questions today for

Rookie’s Ask a Grown…Boy. Man? Ask a Grown…Ask a Grown Boy, I’ll call it.”13

***

I don’t want Matthew Gray Gubler, in person or in any of his onscreen iterations, to be stripped naked and tied to a goal post. (To be really clear, I don’t want that for anyone.) I do, however, want Matthew Gray Gubler, in all his lanky glory, to be vulnerable with me. Maybe all I’ve ever wanted is for someone to be vulnerable with me, or me to be vulnerable with them, and for it to be okay. For it not to be a matter of “yikes, look how gross you are,” but of “you think that’s a big deal? Show me that and more. Be grosser. Be weaker. Be sadder. And watch me love you through it.”

Women are good at being vulnerable. Even the steely girls, even the condescending girls, even the narcissistic girls—they’re pros at wiping off their eyeliner, shimmying out of their bras, cannon-balling onto their unmade beds, and divulging their deepest secrets. They can snap out of public mode and into private mode faster than most guys can lace their shoes, and it’s sexy and majestic and intoxicating. To see this transformation is like stealing a glance at the universe’s best-of compilation.

Men, on the other hand, fight vulnerability like it’s Medusa’s stare. And maybe some girls, the heterosexual or closer-to-one-on-the-Kinsey-scale girls, appreciate that hardheartedness. All I know is, I never have. One naked nerd tied to a goal post is, to me, worth one thousand stubbly-chinned, steel-muscled men with tobacco in their teeth and barbed wire on their hearts. One Matthew Gray Gubler, in all his illustrious, boyish, non-stereotypically-

13 “Ask a Grown Man: Matthew Gray Gubler.” Rookie, 9 Sept. 2015, www.rookiemag.com/2015/09/ask-grown-man- matthew-gray-gubler/.

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masculine masculinity, is worth love songs and fireworks and maybe even a festival, one of the good small-town ones replete with funnel cakes and surprisingly talented cover bands. He’s worth the begrudging acceptance of my own bisexuality, and he’s so stunningly good-looking that I don’t even need to weep into a Terrible Towel because of it.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

SHAME, A LEGACY

“Guilt,” my psychology professor said, flipping to the next slide of her PowerPoint, “is the feeling, ‘I did bad.’” Pens danced across September-smooth notebook pages. “And shame,” she smiled grimly, “is the feeling, ‘I am bad.’”

I had always figured that guilt and shame were more or less identical. I felt guilt and shame when I lied to my parents, when I snapped at my friends, when I ate too much chocolate on Halloween night. Maybe shame seemed to rank higher on the emotion spectrum, but not drastically so. Shame and guilt had more of a square-and-rectangle relationship (all shame is guilt, not all guilt is shame). Right?

But I paused my note-taking anyway, looking past my professor to the place in my mind where a woman I used to know stood. Heather was my former nutritionist, someone my Mom had hired against my wishes when my anorexia resulted in a second stress fracture. Heather had bottle-blonde hair, the body fat percentage of a greyhound, and a penchant for talking about

“food guilt.” Food guilt, as if indulging in a brownie or taking a bite of a syrupy pancake only resulted in niggling regret. As if a minor flare of conscience was the only consequence of eating a potato chip or buying 1% instead of skim.

So I understood, viscerally, what my professor meant. Food guilt was a joke, and a criminally bad one at that. Food shame—that needle-through-the-eyeball assault of I am bad I am disgusting I am worthless—was at least approaching accuracy.

***

I never told my dad why I stopped riding the bus during my freshman year of high school, why I called him one morning at 7:46 near tears and begged him to start dropping me off.

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My dad was my best friend, so why wouldn’t I be honest with him? Maybe for the same reason I wouldn’t have glanced at my reflection in the mirror when I stepped out of the shower.

Because there’s not a huge chasm between witnessing someone else’s shame and being ashamed of that person.

***

Case in point: I sat next to a shy, stark-nosed girl in French III. She was bookish and modest and a staunch rule follower—in other words, she was everything high school despised.

But so was I, so I became her sort-of friend.

And then one day, as our class slogged through verb worksheets, the stark-nosed girl let out a grumbling fart. A three-step, air tripping out of the asshole, PFFT-pfft-pfft. Instantly the room became as silent as the inside of an ice cube. No one smirked; no one even breathed. We just sat there, paralyzed with secondhand embarrassment.

My sort-of friendship with the girl was terminated. I use the passive voice here because I didn’t terminate the friendship; reality did. That I would stop speaking to the girl was as inevitable as the fact that the dismissal bell would ring at 3:16. The bell was never late, and no one ever disobeyed the bell, and I could not associate with the stark-nosed farter.

***

So, no, I never told Dad about the morning I boarded the school bus, careful not to step out of my sandals, careful to keep my head bowed, so careful that I almost didn’t hear David de

Armas holler, “Hey, Alaina, when’s the baby due?”

But I did hear him. And, since mine was the second-to-last stop, so did every other kid from my neighborhood and the surrounding ones.

***

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I was unforgivably old before I discovered that the secret to self-acceptance was to never tell my mother anything.

Flashback to a sunny fall Saturday in third grade; I was looking forward to the Disney

Channel movie marathon that was starting at noon. While Mom sat at the kitchen table perusing clothing catalogues, I cobbled together a lunch: Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, an apple, and some cheese. Lots of cheese. Three squares of Kraft Singles. Well, maybe four—most likely four.

“Wow,” Mom croaked. “That’s a lot of cheese.” She said it the way you’d say “do you really need all that dynamite?” or “what a hefty bottle of arsenic.”

I gnawed my lip. “Cheese is low carb.”

“Watch out,” Mom harrumphed. “If you eat all that cheese, then you’ll really be fat like that Elliot boy said.”

I fled to the basement, my squares of cheese still huddled inside their protective plastic coats. I sat on the rough carpet in front of the television and unwrapped the squares slowly, careful not to nick their shiny yellow skins or tear their floppy corners.

But the cheese didn’t taste quite the same.

***

That’s a lie. I don’t actually remember how the cheese tasted.

But I remember sitting on the picnic-style laminate benches in the Park Forest Middle

School cafeteria, desperate to keep my lunch hidden from prying eyes. Ciara—a girl who was so thin, she was practically translucent—always noticed the weird things my dad packed. Always.

Over the previous weeks, she’d launched endless interrogations:

Why do you eat meat and cheese without bread?

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Why do you only drink diet soda?

Why can’t you eat candy with carbs?

I wanted to savor my Russell Stover Low-Carb Caramel Turtles, but I didn’t want to risk raising Ciara’s nasally curiosity. I watched Gabriella, my Brazilian friend, munch on a bag of

Bugles. Gabriella was lithe and gorgeous. I marveled at the fact that she ate carbs.

By the end of seventh grade, I remember being unsure of what was more shameful— being seen eating low-carb frankenfood; being seen eating fatty-fat-straight-to-the-ass carbs; or eating, period.

***

The summer before I left for college, my mom was suddenly full of sage advice. I didn’t want any of it. I was unsure of myself, I was headed into a world I knew nothing about, I was yearning for childhood in a way that felt both poignant and mortifying—basically, I didn’t know what I wanted, but it sure as hell wasn’t my mother. We’d agreed a decade ago that we weren’t on the same team.

Hadn’t we?

“Maybe you should start seeing Heather again,” Mom said casually. We were driving down a street I knew by heart; to our left was the bar that regularly got busted for serving minors.

To the right, a shabby Sherman-Williams. “We don’t want you to start having food problems again.”

***

Don’t we?

***

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The first time I realized I had a problem with food, I was in my best friend’s basement. I watched as Nadia tore open a bag of honey-flavored pretzel twists. “I don’t know why my mom bought these,” Nadia quipped, crinkling her nose in distaste. The plastic was electric in her hands.

“Let me try one.” I plucked the inaugural twist out of the bag without waiting for

Nadia’s okay and snapped it between my teeth, reveling in the brisk break. Hard, crack-your- molars pretzel gave way to a tide of salt and then the most gratifying tingle of sugar. “They’re okay,” I said as I scrabbled after another one.

Nadia took a hesitant nibble. “They’re kind of gross.”

“No,” I spoke through a pretzel-full mouth, “not if you just tell yourself they taste great.”

Nadia looked at me skeptically. “Just try it. Bite into one and pretend that you’re biting into your favorite food.”

Half-grudgingly, Nadia obeyed. She closed her eyes, bit, chewed. “I see your point.”

“See?” I grabbed two more twists. “It’s like magic.”

What was more magical was how half the family-size bag was suddenly gone, and how even though those pretzel twists were nothing spectacular, I’ve never forgotten them.

***

The fact is, I was a cute toddler. I can own this. Strangers told me they knew I’d be tall, and even though my doctor never gave me a height prediction—for some reason, all my friends bragged that their doctors said they’d be five-nine, maybe five-ten—I saw big things in my future. I wanted to marry rich; I wanted to be one of the braided-hair girls on Barney; I wanted a kiss from the handsome boy in my sister’s eighth-grade class. Most surprising to my adult self,

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though, isn’t the gusto of my old wants, but my unshakeable conviction that I’d get exactly what

I craved. That I’d get all that and more.

I laughed a lot as a kid. I brought imaginary friends with me everywhere I went. I tried to ride the teeter-totter solo. And I spoke my mind, including the time I stared my archenemy- slash-preschool teacher dead in the eye and proclaimed, “I ain’t gonna do that!” Who knows which “that” Fat Jen had asked me to do; I’d learned the word “ain’t” from a Backstreet Boys song, and thus I felt entitled to it. I felt entitled to everything.

Once, when I was home from graduate school for Thanksgiving break, my mother lapsed into a rare moment of nostalgia. “You were the most fun baby,” she said, smiling at a memory I couldn’t see. “You used to laugh so hard, your whole face would turn red and you’d stop making noise, and we’d worry you weren’t breathing. You thought everything was funny.”

***

Every eating-disordered person has a “got skinny” moment. It’s as wild and vital as the turn of a sonnet: it’s that moment in your life when you decide enough with this, break from your dowdy Before, and start chasing that beautiful After.

For me, that moment happened over a scraped-clean plate in a gourmet restaurant.

Strawberry cheesecake roiled in my gut while my sister, Erica, fretted over the chocolate cake she’d just demolished.

“We’ve been bad this vacation.” She turned her agonized grimace from her husband,

Jeremy, to me.

Jeremy shrugged, unperturbed. I felt the cheesecake roar in my stomach, splashing and frothing like the Lochness monster.

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Erica massaged her temples. “Each dessert has got to be…what? Six hundred calories?

Six hundred calories at least.” She looked somberly at me. “I think we should give up sweets for a while.”

The deal was that we’d abstain from all junk food until Thanksgiving. We shook on it, and Erica returned to our hotel room looking noticeably more peaceful.

But Erica broke the pact before the week was out. Then, mere days after we returned from vacation, Mom flouted every one of her low-carb precedents and baked a luscious strawberry shortcake. Even more shockingly, she ordered Dad to buy full-fat vanilla ice cream to go with it. When I told Mom that the cake looked good, but that I couldn’t eat it, she frowned.

“Erica already caved on that little deal.” Mom drew her thin lips together. “You don’t have to go on with that.”

“But I want to do it,” I said, wide-eyed and fearful. I wondered if my mother would make me eat the shortcake. It was the first time I could remember worrying that someone would foist sweets on me, and the worry was as black and acrid as car exhaust. I side-eyed the gleaming cake and thought, six hundred calories. Nausea gripped my intestines and twisted them.

“Have a small piece,” Mom insisted. My throat constricted. “It won’t make a difference.”

“But I don’t want one.”

Mom’s glare scalded me. “Fine,” she snapped in a tone that said otherwise.

But I made it to Thanksgiving. I made it to Thanksgiving and beyond. After a small meal of turkey and vegetables on that holiday night, I passed on Aunt Linda’s coconut cream pie and chose a Gala apple instead. Aunt Linda studied me, her two chins wobbling as she chewed a

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generous bite of dessert. I wondered (worried) if she would guilt-trip me into partaking. She swallowed—a muffled, gelatinous sound that made me put down my apple—and delivered her verdict:

“I wish I had your discipline,” she shook her head, her pig-pink cheeks rounding around a smile. “You’re so good.”

***

I’m so good.

***

This girl—yes, this despicable girl—this girl with the thighs that’ve long refused to part, this girl whose seventh-grade crush told her to “go find a bigger guy,” this girl whose birthday wish has always and only been to lose weight—this girl is so good.

***

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

1:26 p.m.

Mom,

Heather asked me to write this letter. I wouldn’t be writing it otherwise. I don’t like to talk about my eating disorder because, like you, I like to pretend like the imperfect things in life don’t exist.

Growing up I knew there was something wrong with me. I could see it in your eyes when you examined my appearance; I could hear it in other kids’ mocking laughter. I was fat, I was

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wrong. People judged me or cast me aside or made me the butt of the joke and I hated it. But so many kids deal with bullying—I wasn’t unique. The devastating part was the fact that I was wrong to you. I’m not what you wanted and I never was.

The bright side is, you’re no longer my greatest enemy; your words no longer hurt above all others. I’m my own worst enemy, my most fastidious critic. I can deride and degrade and deprive myself worse than you can imagine.

***

I joined the Cross Country team to lose weight, though, to my horror, even two-a-day practices and grueling speed workouts almost weren’t enough to conquer my fat stores. I suffered through the ninth-grade season, taking grateful pulls from my inhalers—by the end of

September, I was prescribed to three different inhalers, a minimum of five doses a day—and trying not to feel humiliated about being so damn slow. The whippet-thin Varsity girls ran sub-

20-minute races; my best time was a 25:40.

Sophomore year, I pulled off a 23:16.

And then I started starving.

It began innocently, a tandem challenge to my no-dessert rule. Could I count calories faithfully? Could I resist nibbling Cheez-Its after dinner? Could I stop drinking milk (-80 calories) and choose rice cakes over crackers (-95 calories) and substitute lite bread for wheat bread (-20 calories)? Better yet, could I do all those things daily?

I could, and so I did them and more.

After one year, I was down 15 pounds.

After another handful of months, ten more.

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But my Cross-Country times were climbing higher and higher, from the 25s to 27s to sometimes even the 28s. I was tested for iron deficiency, I was told to get more sleep, I was ordered to do additional speed workouts. And still I got steadily slower.

But at least I’d slimmed down. For many months, that was all the prize I needed—until one of the first runs of the winter track season. The sky was the color of elephant skin, and

Thanksgiving was approaching, and a single shimmering pain, hot and tight as a star, lit up the center of my left shin. One footfall, it hadn’t been there; the next, it was the only sensation I knew. I felt it throb-throb-throb all practice. I felt it all the next week.

That afternoon, my period came: heavy, clotted, and two weeks early.

It was my last period for five years.

***

“Female athlete triad,” my doctor said slowly. Her Chinese accent swallowed some of the syllables, making “athlete” sound like “at least.” As in, at least my years of dieting had accomplished something.

Triad: unhealthy or insufficient nutrition (check!); cessation of the menstrual cycle

(check!); low bone density (check!). My doctor took out a colorful BMI chart not unlike a gas gage. Slowly, she slid the arrow from right to left to show me how my weight had gone from green—i.e., good—in 2007 to yellow-almost-red in the present (2010). I’d officially been without my period for two months, and I had a stress fracture in my left shin, and now I was a sufferer of The Triad. (I made a mental note that cutting out milk hadn’t been worth the -80 calories/day.)

My first question for my doctor was how to exercise with a fractured shin.

***

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I re-fractured the shin once more before the start of senior year. Not as badly as the first time, but still; my doctor wasn’t pleased.

That second fracture was the end of my Cross Country and Track careers, if you could call them careers. I’d never managed to beat my sophomore-year times, anyway, and I figured I could get a higher calorie burn on my own.

I wasn’t wrong.

***

At my lightest, I goaded my weight into the red “danger zone” of the BMI chart. There is no overstating how divine that felt, so I won’t try. I eluded photographs during my red-zone year, terrified that 1) I wouldn’t look as skeletal on film as I did in my bathroom mirror, and 2) if

I someday regained the weight, I’d have an incriminating paper trail of my past prime. Once, hostessing at a restaurant—and gawking at all the reckless diners who finished plates of pasta, who ordered mixed drinks and appetizers—a guest told me how “cute” the other hostess and I looked. She asked to snap our picture and, for some reason, we agreed. When she showed us our images on her cell-phone screen, I didn’t recognize myself. There was a yellowed, sunken- faced girl parked where I should’ve been, and she looked so thin it made me wince.

No way was I good enough to be her.

***

I spent most of my late-teen years judging other girls. Viciously, relentlessly, callously.

On my way to the dining hall, I’d watch the ass of the girl in front of me, registering its every jiggle, eyeing its unseemly sag. I’d feel awful—mean and petty and so achingly alone—but I’d keep judging away.

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I didn’t have many friends between ages 18 and 20. I didn’t have time for friendships, what with my college classes, my hour of weight training every morning, my two hours of power-walking every evening, and my thrice-daily dates with the grocery store (I only ever kept enough food around for the next meal—that way, I stood no risk of overeating).

One girl, Martha, stands out in my memory of those years. Martha had a cute little body, but her ghastly triceps ruined it: they were flappy, pale, bulbous. Just looking at them gutted me with embarrassed pity. Martha made me feel as if I was eight years old, naked in the dressing room with my mother, tugging off yet another pair of jeans that didn’t fit.

Martha is married now. She’s happy (according to Facebook, that is) and has a good job.

At 18, I would’ve found such news unfathomable.

Even now, it’s still barely fathomable.

***

Whenever you urge me to relax about food, I just feel angry. I don’t want to feel this way, and I hope I can forgive you fully, but I’m not ready yet. For example, when you try to persuade me to eat pasta with a big “friendly” smile on your face, I want to scream. There’s still a girl inside of me who remembers how I didn’t deserve carbs in the past, how you forbade dad to put bread on my sandwiches or balked when I ate starches at dinner. Some twisted part of me even wants to mock you. I can see you’ve put on weight within the past year and I constantly want to point it out. I want you to be humiliated and punished and deprived until you whittle back down to an acceptable size—not because that’s right or fair, but because that’s what you did to me. If I had to feel so terrible about myself because of a few extra pounds, you should too. We should treat your body like a public issue, we should write your weight on the

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wall in the garage for everybody to see, we should make mean comments about your growth chart in the doctor’s office, we should make you miserable when you go shopping.

***

We should treat your body like a public issue.

But don’t we already? Doesn’t everybody?

***

My grandmother, Margaret Billett, was born April 5, 1928, in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.

Bellefonte was where she grew up, met my grandfather, Dennis Maney, married Dennis and gave him six children (one of whom, a baby girl, only lived one day).

Margaret was visibly disabled for as long as Dennis knew her; that she would eventually be wheelchair-bound was a given. But what neither Dennis nor Margaret anticipated was that one of their five offspring—my mother—would inherit Margaret’s disability.

Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease is a genetic neuropathy that wreaks havoc on the body’s motor and sensory capabilities. CMT patients often have foot drop: abnormally high-arched feet with hammertoes. These patients can’t build or maintain muscle; most rely on orthopedic braces, walkers, or wheelchairs. They have “slapping” gaits, difficulty balancing, and constant numbness in the feet and lower legs. Eventually their lower-body symptoms spread to the arms and hands.

Before my parents attempted to conceive any children, they met with a geneticist who told them their offspring had a 25% chance of inheriting CMT. My parents accepted these odds and played the genetic lottery. Fortunately, neither my sister nor I have shown any symptoms of the disease. Unfortunately, my mother’s CMT symptoms worsened during pregnancy.

My mother suffered to have me.

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Does she still suffer to have me?

***

I wanted to have a body that would make others stop and stare—not just one that would stop the teasing.

***

Family lore says that, after her CMT worsened beyond a certain point, my grandmother was too ashamed to leave her house. To move from her yellow-tiled kitchen to the skinny blacktop driveway, she’d have to navigate three steep concrete steps. Unless she wanted Dennis to carry her, she’d have to get down on the ground and scoot. And then she’d have to be carried to the passenger seat, anyway. And Dennis would have to stow her wheelchair in the trunk. And

Dennis would have to hoist her out of the seat in the middle of the public parking lot. And when their excursion was over, Dennis would have to re-hoist her back in the car, re-stow the chair, drive home, and then help her up the stairs and carry the wheelchair inside.

***

How would you like to grow up thinking that your body was so awful your mom took you to a doctor to get it “fixed”? And then how would you like to go through the rest of your childhood knowing that it didn’t work, that your mom was still embarrassed by your appearance?

***

In fourth grade, I fell irrevocably in love with Clark Kerner. (Irrevocably meaning my crush lasted three months.) Clark had sandy hair, adorably crooked front teeth, and a broken arm shrouded in a clunky blue cast—evidence that he was both vulnerable and strong. Clark whispered to me so much during SSR that we got scolded daily. The romance was exhilarating.

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Exhilarating, that is, until Family Night, a chaotic evening that brought together the parents, teachers, and siblings of every student at Radio Park Elementary. Family Night was one of those earnest initiatives to build community and foster new friendships. I loved it because it was a reason to see Clark outside the 8:30-to-2:50 range, but I seemed to be the only non-toddler in attendance who was eager to be at school in the evening. I casually bumped into Clark on the baseball field, waved hello to his adorable little sister, Anastasia, and hoped she’d be my adorable little sister-in-law in a decade or so.

By the end of the night, Clark and I were seated at our usual table in the classroom waiting for our teacher to make a speech. (Unfortunately for our teacher, she was being mobbed by a gaggle of helicopter parents who needed to know more about the math curriculum.) Clark smiled at me, and I noticed how he looked different at night. Sharper, somehow—like a 3D movie that blurs the line between illusion and reality. (In hindsight, the difference was probably just the result of the unfamiliar contrast of our bright classroom lights against nighttime darkness, but to a nine-year-old approaching her bedtime, the difference was enchanting.)

And then my parents shuffled into the classroom, Dad’s hand clamped around Mom’s left upper arm. All my life, they’d walked like that: like participants in a three-legged race, like conjoined twins. Except they weren’t tied together—Dad just kept a cautionary grip on Mom so she wouldn’t fall.

I’d forgotten how odd the sight of them was until I saw it through Clark’s eyes. He looked away quickly, but the recognition in those blue eyes made me cold. Clark had seen something weird, something he’d never before considered about me. He didn’t say anything about my mother, but I felt as humiliated as if he had. I suddenly yearned to be invisible; I

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wished I’d never told my parents about stupid Family Night, never donned my sparkliest bracelet and prettiest headband, never left my house at all.

Looking back, I wonder if my mother was wishing exactly the same thing.

***

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that there are worse things in life than not having a flat stomach, or not squeezing into a size two at Abercrombie & Fitch, or not finding your own body utterly irreproachable. It took me until, roughly, one morning in

November 2015 when my mom took a hard fall that fractured both her femurs. I was visiting for the weekend, and I remember breakfasting at the kitchen table, nursing a bowl of plain nonfat

Greek yogurt and mulling over how long to exercise that day, when I heard a thump and a cry.

In the years since November 2015, Mom hasn’t complained about the pain of that tumble, hasn’t bemoaned the consequent slew of doctor’s appointments and physical therapy sessions.

No, what she complains about is that when the ambulance came for her, all the neighbors came out of their houses to watch her be wheeled away. One by one they came: like pigeons spotting bread, like dogs chasing the crinkling of their food bags.

My mother detests being a spectacle, so she aimed to protect me from that fate. So she tried to sculpt my body into something the world would deem inoffensive, unobtrusive.

My mother fields stares everywhere she goes, and she didn’t want me to know that shame. She didn’t want me to feel others’ judgment on me like so many hands.

And, all in all? Her intentions were right. To be a chubby girl, a girl with flap and jiggle, a girl with softness, is to be vulnerable. To risk ridicule. To walk down the hallway and prickle at your peers’ laughter because it’s so often directed at you.

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My mother doesn’t run the world. In fact, she did everything she could to shield me from its cruelty. Giving me tough love was probably hard for her; showing me cruelty probably hurt her more than it hurt me, even though she thought she was acting in my best interest. She assumed I’d rather be battered by her than by the rest of the world. Who am I to say she was wrong?

I am ashamed as my mother is ashamed as my grandmother was ashamed. This is an imperfect bond, a bond wrought from something less eternal than love. But this is how the women in my family are able to relate. This is, for better or for worse, our legacy.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

PARALLEL (INTERSECTING) LIVES

I’m thinking of how people disappear…

I will break up with you first. I will puncture my own skin.

–Lucy Corin, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls

“The way I remember the difference between ‘dessert’ and ‘desert’,” Ana announced, tossing a translucent swath of blonde hair over her shoulder, “is obviously you want to eat more dessert, so it has two s’s, but you’d never want to be deserted, so it only has one ‘s.’”

I tried to angle my face so my nose wasn’t downwind from Ana’s morning breath. Ana was mind-bogglingly aggravating. It wasn’t so much her behavior, her haughty asides and wet sneezes and hideously patterned fleeces, but her attitude: she knew the whispers behind her back would dissipate if she’d straighten her hair and wear Limited Too jeans, and that’s exactly why she kept her locks tousled and her clothes gauche.

“Very good, Ana,” Mrs. Lorantas said. She circled dessert’s second ‘s’ with her green

Expo marker. “And, of course, we don’t want to forget that ‘desert’ is not only a homophone; it’s also a homonym. We have desert, the verb, and desert, the noun.”

I hated Ana. Or maybe I didn’t. Ana had made me trust her, tricked me into believing her when she called us “best friends forever.” But apparently “forever” in her book meant “until my dad gets a new job in the Midwest.” And because I couldn’t control Ana’s father’s employment, and because she had duped me with her “forever” talk, I did what any rational person would do: I blacklisted her. She could go live in the stupid one-s desert for all I cared; my policy—and I thought it a wise one—had always been “leave before you get left.”

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In the end, Ana’s family didn’t move. We finished fifth grade together and were assigned the same homeroom in sixth, though we were never friends again. Ana couldn’t forgive the way I’d severed our friendship with a 10-blade, and I couldn’t forgive the way she’d toyed with my trust. When her family actually did move, sometime between sixth grade and seventh, all I felt was relief: the searing, ripping-the-Band-Aid-off-after-hours-of-hesitation relief that she’d finally done what she’d threatened to do.

***

The first December we were together, my girlfriend and I fought in the multicolored glow of our Christmas tree, sob-shouting ourselves hoarse. As the fight wore on, Chloe wrapped her arms around her torso, simultaneously comforting herself and shutting me out. The ornaments we’d bought at Goodwill swiveled on their gold strings.

“I’m going to go to my parents’,” I sniffed, scraping the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand. I absolutely did not want to go to my parents’ house. “I’ll pack a bag.” I absolutely did not want to pack a bag. I didn’t want to do anything except take Chloe’s hand and guide her back to bed. It was past 2:30 in the morning. It was much too late to face the reality of an empty highway, an empty passenger seat, a vortex of wind and gray trees and my own cloying regret.

“No.” Chloe’s voice was suddenly clear, composed. “I’ll go.”

“Wait—”

“I can’t be here,” she snapped. “I’ll go to my mom’s or something.”

“You can’t just leave,” I argued, ignoring the fact that I’d threatened to do exactly that.

Chloe brushed past me, marched into our bedroom, flicked on the overhead light. Our rumpled teal sheets frowned at me. They didn’t want me crawling into them alone any more than I did.

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“I need to get out of here,” Chloe announced, hauling a duffel bag onto the bed. She tossed random shirts into it. “And, clearly, you need to be free of me for a while.”

A fresh wave of tears clobbered me. “Please don’t leave.” My throat cinched the way it always does when I’m overcome with grief. I wanted to say something more—the one shiny, perfect thing that would earn Chloe’s forgiveness—and, for God’s sake, I was a writer, I was in an MFA program, I should’ve been able to conjure something eloquent—but all I could do was close my eyes to the pain. My esophagus was a balloon animal being bent, twisted, pinched.

I heard Chloe pause. “Why are you crying? You’re the one who was about to leave.”

My throat stung. I opened my mouth to try to explain myself, but the only sound that eked out was a wretched, airless grating.

When Chloe touched me, her hands heavy with concern, I lunged into her like a swimmer shooting through the water’s surface. When she held me, I could breathe again. I rested my head against her shoulder and gulped air and wondered if my soul was healing or leaking.

***

“Why do we study history?” Mrs. Lorantas asked, setting down her Expo marker and clasping her hands together. “Why care about the past?”

As always, Ana’s twig-thin wrist pierced the air. The girl practically rocked with anticipation every time an idea flitted into her head. In a quintessentially Pennsylvanian show of passive aggression, I pinched my lips and hit her with a disapproving glare.

“Because,” Ana shook her lank hair out of her face, “we don’t want to keep making the same mistakes. Something like slavery, or war, is like…it’s like a pit that we fell in before. And if we don’t keep reminding ourselves where the pit is, we’ll fall in it again.”

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I felt my lips relax, unspooling like two shaken-out braids. Something about what Ana said made sense to me. Or, rather, it made sense in the vague, two-closed-doors-down way that most things did in childhood: like it was something important, and it was waiting for me, and maybe I’d find it—or maybe I’d abandon it the way I abandoned most things that were challenging.

***

Lately, the thrum of my blood has been Nevada, Nevada. It’s the beat of my heart and the scuffle of my steps. Until last year, I didn’t understand the lure of the desert, didn’t respect the taunt of an endless sky or the promise of empty space. I thought people who lived in the desert were zany, alien-like, fundamentally different from me. I imagined their lives shrouded in dust, dotted by lonely cacti, replete with rattlesnakes.

I know that Nevada literally means snow-covered, but I like to overlook that fact. I’m from the northeast; snow is neither new or mysterious to me. Snow is, in fact, dead to me. What

I’m concerned with now is dryness, brightness, strangeness. The smell of pavement radiating heat. The buzz of neon. Desert one day, Vegas the next. The only truths I care about are these:

Nevada is far, Nevada is new, Nevada is wild, and if I flop my sopping-wet soul onto its sandy streets, maybe I will be redeemed.

Redeemed from what, I don’t know.

***

On Wednesday, November 3, 2004, our middle-school principal went on the PA system to announce that John Kerry had conceded the presidential election, and that George W. Bush would remain in office for a second term. Of course, we students had already heard the news,

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but there’d been newscasters talking about a possible recount, about voter suppression and long lines at Ohio polls and malfunctioning punch-card machines. That talk was, I supposed, over.

The news hit Ana especially hard. As the principal’s voice reverberated through our homeroom, she sunk down in her chair, rested her pale forehead on the edge of her desk. I thought she was just being dramatic, that she didn’t realize politics wasn’t something sixth- graders needed to worry about. Politics was for adults to bicker about every four years; it was for angry headlines that our parents read at breakfast and then tossed in the recycle bin. Sixth- graders were supposed to think about things like whether Andy and Shelby would break up, or who had the new iPod Photo, or how stupid it was that the boys were judging our butts (and how jealous we were that McKenzie won “best butt”).

I frowned at Ana. “It’ll be fine,” I said. My wealthy white relatives had wanted Bush to win, so he must’ve been the good guy in the race.

“It won’t be fine,” Ana said scathingly. She sneered at me so long, I worried her eyes might start bleeding.

Years later, I’m astounded by how presciently correct Ana was. History is a pit, a pit you’re doomed to fall into if you forget. We forgot the 2000s; we fell into Trump. Who would’ve expected it? Ana, that’s who.

***

I want to go to Nevada alone. I’m in a wonderful relationship with Chloe, and I want to end it. I itch to end it. If it ends now, it ends in a happy place. That may not be true in one year, in ten, in twenty, or maybe it will be true, but who can know? Who can afford that risk?

Of course, I don’t want to end my relationship. What I want is two parallel lives, one in which I’m engaged and one in which I’m single, one in which I stay here and one in which I flee

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to Nevada. I want to have two scenarios: two best-case scenarios. And if I can’t, if all I have is the old childhood bray “leave before you get left,” who am I to reject it?

***

Lately, Siamese with my obsession about Ana is my obsession about September P——

(or at least I believe her name is September P——(it may be Autumn P——, or August P——, or not P—— at all but B—— or E—— or G——)). I recall, with frustrating fuzziness, a former student’s memoir about his elementary-school classmate, a little girl with the wonderfully singsong name September. A little girl who stopped coming to class the day after her sister was kidnapped and killed. I wonder where September lives, how old she is, how old her sister never got to be. I wonder if I’ve imagined this memoir and this girl completely.

I want to know September and yet I’m afraid of her. In my head, September looks just like Ana. She’s treated the same, too: ostracized, mocked. She speaks prophetic truths while boys shoot spitballs at her. She places lilies on her sister’s grave. Where is September now?

I’ll tell you where Ana is. Ana majored in political science. Ana has a good job. Ana’s mother—her very-active-on-Facebook mother—is ecstatically proud of her. Ana has good friends and a handsome boyfriend. Ana has visited China. Ana’s life looks like a best-case scenario one, one I’d zip myself into if I could, if I could do so without taking what is hers.

***

They say, scientists even, that every thought makes a path through your brain, that your

brain is a map of what’s happened to it. You think and think and patterns are worn like

deer trails through the forest. The deepest marks are the thoughts you repeat. It’s that

physical. Enough intersecting ideas can make a pit.

–Lucy Corin, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls

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***

If I ever see Ana again, I hope I meet her at a bar in Vegas. Someplace swanky, someplace with music I love but am never able to find again, someplace lit with every color except white. Chloe will (and won’t) be there. I will try to talk politics with Ana, try to be the adult I couldn’t fathom in sixth grade, try to prove how good of a Democrat I’ve become (and she will shoot a spitball at me; she’ll pull a blade from her purse and carve a pit in my arm).

She’ll give me a hug (she’ll leave bite marks on my shoulder). She’ll whisper, look how you’ve

(not) grown! I’ll excuse myself to use the restroom. (And when I return she will be gone, leaving behind only our unpaid bill and my spilled blood.)

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

HEROIC SELF-PRESERVATION

My first potential sugar daddy was a Penn State professor who wanted me to verbally abuse him while he masturbated. He proposed meeting at his home every Wednesday morning while his wife and kids were at work and school. The selling point of this gig—a point he strongly stressed—was that, unlike “most of the other creeps on the site,” he wouldn’t require me to touch him: dirty talk got him off, and besides, he wasn’t the type to cheat on his wife. He acted as if I should be grateful for this hands-off policy. (I was.) But ultimately I passed on the professor, partly because he didn’t pay well, mostly because I couldn’t stomach working in a neighborhood where I’d attended sleepovers in middle school.

The second prospective daddy, an Asian-American businessman in want of a weekend girlfriend, seemed promising: he offered a generous monthly allowance, getaways at ritzy hotels, frequent gifts of designer clothing and jewelry. In the end, though, I worried I lacked the stamina to see the businessman whenever he wanted. I was working toward a Master’s degree, after all.

The third would-be daddy was by far the wealthiest. He wanted to fly me—first class— to Chicago for threesomes with him and his bisexual girlfriend. Not only would I get free monthly jaunts to the Windy City, I’d earn a few grand each trip. The lavishness of the offer enticed me as much as it flattered my ego, and I hesitated for longer than I should’ve before declining the invitation and logging off the site. Sure, I wanted adventure, but I’d watched far too many crime shows to rationalize flying alone across the country on secret “business.”

As I routinely rejected potential daddies—and blocked the ones who refused to take no for an answer—it dawned on me that maybe I didn’t want to be a sugar baby. I didn’t need the

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money, I didn’t desire rotund old men, and I definitely preferred Netflix to escorting. But I couldn’t delete my account, not just then. Every time I received another lewd message, another typo-filled missive replete with expletives and perverse fantasies, I felt—how to put this?— whole; relieved; it’s not a stretch to say empowered. Those daddies were the most honest humans I’d ever encountered. They knew what they wanted (my body) and they’d compensate me for providing it. When had any man ever been so beautifully straightforward about his intentions? When had any woman ever been so commendably sincere? Every time a daddy gave a numerical value which expressed exactly how much he valued me, I reverberated with pleasure. I loved seeing my worth onscreen, haloed in digital light, awaiting my approval or bartering or dismissal. I loved noting which offers were fair and which weren’t, loved thanking my noble suitors and coolly denying the cheapskates, loved knowing that the next time I got used, it’d be on my terms, for my monetary benefit.

Maybe it’s worth noting that my heart had spent the previous year being other peoples’ punching bags. Maybe it’s worth noting that the boy who introduced me to sex had suddenly stopped speaking to me, or that the girl I loved was spreading monstrous rumors about me, or that none of the self-harm I’d tried had numbed the wounds from that dynamic duo. Maybe, maybe not. What’s most worth noting is that when I created my account on the anonymous, encrypted Sugar Baby website, I didn’t believe in love, didn’t see the point in sex for sex’s sake.

If feigning love would pad my bank account, sure. If tolerating sex would help offset GRE costs, why not? But I didn’t see my heart or body as valuable in themselves, and therefore I didn’t have a problem with auctioning them off to the highest bidder.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

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But my bravado dimmed after a few weeks of declining daddies. I’d exit the site before bed and wonder what was wrong with me. If I didn’t believe in love, why wasn’t I profiting off it? If sex was overhyped and underwhelming, why wasn’t I in Chicago raking in thousands for it? If I cared about myself too much to sell my body, then that made all of the events of the past year real, meaningful. More than meaningful: devastating. If I mattered, if I was someone with feelings and dignity, then I was someone who Renee and Perry could have broken. (Did break.)

If I couldn’t betray myself, if I couldn’t remake myself into someone always already betrayed, then Renee and Perry’s betrayal would be real.

It couldn’t be real.

I couldn’t let it be real.

In a gesture of heroic self-preservation, I agreed to meet my newest potential daddy,

Tom, at a hotel bar.

***

I spent the bulk of 2015, my post-sugar-daddy year, losing myself in Taylor Swift. To contextualize this, let’s remember that during her 1989 World Tour, the myth of Ms. Swift swelled like a dying star; no sentient being could avoid falling under her specter. If she wasn’t on your radio, she was gracing the front page of your newspaper. If she wasn’t in the mouths of talk-show hosts, she was in the mouths of your friends and coworkers and fellow commuters.

Every crop top she wore sparked a headline; every glance she cast fueled a rumor. To be Taylor

Swift was to be blindingly, inhumanly alive.

Who knows what emotional toll those years took on Swift? (A prodigious one, I’m guessing). All I know is, I never pitied the woman. Like the rest of the world, I simply used her.

Taylor offered drama when my own life ran dry (who was “Bad Blood” really about? Did you

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see the GIF Katy Perry tweeted?!). Via Instagram, Taylor let me third-wheel her fairytale romance (#swangoals). She gave me carefully curated shots of her cats, her supermodel BFFs, and her impeccably decorated residences. She was my trendsetter, my sweetheart, my inner dialogue, my dearest distraction. She was everything. And because she was everything, she freed me to be nothing.

***

Tom was the first and only daddy I ever met. I managed to avoid sex with him, but nonetheless I didn’t leave our “date” feeling pleased with myself. I wasn’t even comforted by the wadded-up bills he slipped into my palm. What I felt, long after seeing him, long after I’d spent his money, was the probing and prickly disapproval of the woman who’d waited on us.

She’d had dyed-ginger hair and pruney skin and she’d scrutinized me as I drank every drop of liquor Tom bought. I spent the whole hour wanting to explain myself to her. I spent the whole hour wanting to insult her. We’re both serving him, I wanted to hiss every time she replaced my glass, I’m just getting a better tip for it.

At one point, Tom unpocketed his cell phone and showed me a barrage of pictures: his home in New York, his wife, his son. Then he walked me through the back alleys of his life: the secret dispassion of his marriage, his fear that he was an inadequate husband, his nagging conviction of unhappiness. He’d worked his way to riches, hadn’t he? He’d built a fine life, right? So why wasn’t he basking in it? Why didn’t he like himself?

I sweet-talked his fears away because that’s what he was paying me for.

Because, apparently, I give great advice when I’m on the clock and three vodkas deep.

Because the better I made Tom feel about himself, the less real I felt.

***

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Swiftie is less a noun than it is a lifestyle. Swifties are the girls daydreaming about love but never dating, dancing behind locked bedroom doors but never at prom, listening to

“Teardrops on My Guitar” on repeat because it’s a reminder of a time when the world felt manageable. Swifties are ageless and immortal, blessed (or doomed) to a life of blonde optimism. Swifties, as fellow Tumblr user @swiftnwonderland so perfectly summarizes, are

(living in the) shadows of Taylor Swift herself. Taylor Swift’s is the life we’ve chosen:

Taylor Swift is my childhood, she is my teenage years, she’s my young adult years, she’s

those days when I had no friends, she’s those moments when I was experiencing

heartbreak, she’s those times of complete freedom, she’s those moments of fleeting

happiness, she’s the times where I’m laughing so hard I am crying, she’s those nights

when I’m crying myself to sleep.14

I was a sugar baby before I became a full-fledged Swiftie. In both disguises, I found the total- soul release I needed. In both disguises, I believed I was practicing self-care.

***

“How would you feel about doing this again?” Tom asked at the end of the night. His lips, swollen and red, reminded me of sausage links. Sausage links at the grocery store that always feel wet, maybe from the refrigeration, maybe from raw meat-water seeping through the encasement.

“I’m fine with that,” I chirped, hugging my shrunken, goosebumpy arms. This was when

I was still underweight, when I policed myself to a size Renee and Perry would like. This was before I accepted that Renee and Perry weren’t coming back for me. (Thus, this was years

14 https://swiftnwonderland.tumblr.com/post/153498459065/taylor-swift-is-my-childhood-she-is-my-teenage?is_related_post=1

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before I realized that I shouldn’t want Renee and Perry to come back for me, should shout to the heavens how thankful I was to be free of them.)

“Good,” Tom said, licking his sausage lips. “I’d like that.”

He really would have liked it. And, unthinkably, I would’ve liked it, too. I marveled at how patiently I’d listened to Tom’s life story, how heartily I’d laughed at his jokes, how thoroughly I’d lost myself in pleasing him. I felt powerful around Tom, desirable and rare. I didn’t think of Renee and Perry in his presence; I didn’t think of anything in Tom’s presence besides Tom. I simply stripped off my personality like an ugly sweater and stepped into somebody new: Tom’s somebody, Tom’s object, Tom’s rental. It was elating, freeing, healthier than drugs and cleaner than suicide. It was the most cleansing thing I’d done in months.

For some reason, probably self-preservation (though at the time I called it punishment), I promptly blocked Tom’s number and deleted my sugar-baby account. Maybe I didn’t think I deserved cleansing. Maybe I did.

***

Taylor Swift: All-American girl, awkward as hell, brilliant prodigy, cash cow, catty, critically celebrated, certifiably the worst, disingenuous and cheap, easy to hate, effortlessly adorable, feminist nightmare, feminist role model, full of herself, full of shady secrets, keenly observant songwriter, immaculate role model, immature, as immensely evil as she is powerful, innocent sweetheart, literal angel, manipulative piece of shit, media darling, mediocre singer, one of the most talented women in the world, overly sensitive, the professional pissed-off ex- girlfriend, snake, style influencer, superstar, super annoying white feminist, talentless

“musician,” Taylor “People Will Side With Me If I Sue Kanye, Won’t They?” Alison Swift, two-

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faced, Queen of Wholesome, unapologetic basher of Katy Perry, unhinged sociopath, vapid and dull, a victim we are supposed to feel sorry for, a visionary, Wonderbread, world famous.15

I stuffed my identity somewhere at the bottom of that heap and forgot about it. Like the mismatched neon-green sock at the back of my bureau, my identity was unremarkable and ultimately forgettable.

That sounds (twistedly) logical, no? It’s conceivable that Taylor’s titanic identity swallowed me whole, that it was simply too gigantic to overcome. But that’s denying my agency in choosing to forfeit myself. See, I needed Taylor, in all her flawless, taut blondness, to be the anti-me. I needed to gorge myself on chocolate while she strutted onstage in a leather jumpsuit, needed to add layers of insulation to my stomach while she bared hers on red carpets. So long as she frequented the gym and slouched waiflike on the cover of Vogue and wilted unmanned- marionette-style into Calvin Harris’ arms, I could expand in peace. So long as she performed femininity—and not just any femininity: flawless, irreproachable femininity—I could let myself go.

What was it that Perry had whispered to me in bed? “You’ve got such a cute little butt”?

Not anymore; that butt had billowed, had dimpled, had unfurled like a thunderstorm about to swallow the world. What had Renee said—“you’ve got a body”? I.e. a good body, a small body, a manageable body? My body was now bad, large, rule-defying; something to criticize, something to hate. I should know: I hated it meticulously. I found bizarre, masochistic solace in my own self-disgust. I no longer looked like a girl with whom Renee and Perry would associate.

I no longer was that girl. (Maybe, just maybe, I’d never been her at all.) If spiting Renee and

Perry’s memory meant spiting myself, then I’d spite myself into unrecognition.

15 All words and phrases are culled from Internet articles about Swift.

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So I’d binge-eat until my insides ached as if I’d swallowed drying cement. So I’d vomit until my throat bled, my face lit up with burst capillaries, and my skin felt like a strained rubber band. So I’d ice my face for hours until the swelling went down, and ride out days of lightheadedness, and spend torturous hours on the treadmill repenting for my weakness and thanking the cosmos that Taylor Swift was alive and being strong for me.

***

When I finally got serious about seeing a therapist, finally capitulated to my doctor’s suggestion of antidepressants, finally stopped buying binge foods and started buying groceries, I was disconcerted by the colossal toll that “being healthy” took. Recovery wasn’t a glamorous quest; it was a long, slow walk under a gray sky. It was being alone with myself, really being alone without rushing to binge or purge or snag a sugar daddy. It was rediscovering how to face myself without needing a distraction. At first, I couldn’t go more than a few hours without feeling like my curdled soul needed something—shame, vodka, chocolate, something—to soothe it. Gradually, with biweekly therapy sessions and faithful pill-popping, those distraction-less hours became days, then weeks, then months. My weight crept down toward normal, my skin cleared, and I formed a few tentative friendships.

With my therapist, Ann, I relived the Renee-and-Perry debacle until remembering it felt more like reading a movie script than recalling my past. I confessed everything, from the daunting insecurities they’d left behind to the dreams of them that wouldn’t abate. Some mornings I’d wake from a dream about Renee, a dream where she finally admitted she’d abused me, a dream where she promised to treat me better…if I begged for her grace. And of course I begged. I begged all dream long, I begged valiantly, I begged until my words knit a new language. I’d wake with pleas ghosting my lips, ashamed to remember how fiercely Renee hated

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me and how sorely I needed to hate her. Other nights, lying mercilessly wake, I’d remember a scrap of a song, and it’d fling me back to Perry’s apartment. The stink of incense, the tang of blackberry whiskey. His drawling voice. His drawling voice assuring me that he’d stay friends with me no matter what Renee thought about it. His drawling voice so white with lies.

“One of my friends,” I told Ann tentatively, “one of my friends from Penn State, she warned me not to ‘get addicted’ to my sadness.” I cast an accusing glance at Ann as if she were the one who’d given me the unsolicited advice. “But I don’t think I am ‘addicted’ to sadness. I mean, I don’t like being sad. I don’t like being bulimic and I don’t like feeling haunted, and if I knew how to just up and quit, I would.”

Ann, placid as ever, leaned back in her leather chair. “Of course you’re sad,” she said easily. “You experienced a trauma, and a loss—several losses, really. And you have to deal with them. Dealing with something doesn’t make you addicted to it.”

My chest ached the way it always did when we talked about Renee and Perry too much. I hated the stark, official way Ann called my experience “a trauma.” I hated the truth of it. I hated that my sadness wasn’t all in my head, wasn’t some frivolous melodrama I created to pass the time. It was real, and it’d continue to be real whether I ran from it or not.

***

When my girlfriend and I first started dating, I had no qualms telling her about Tom. In my mind, my sugar-daddy experiment was only a few shades shy of innocent. After all, Tom and I hadn’t had sex; I’d catered to his fantasies, but only emotionally. I’d done a sort of good deed by indulging him. Talking to him had been like community service: I’d helped a sad man weather his midlife crisis.

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Of course, what I’d done was far more dangerous than community service, far more indicative of a total collapse of self-confidence than a gesture of compassion, and my girlfriend rejected my candy-coating of the situation.

“I can’t believe you did that,” she said, more stupefied than judgmental. “It makes me so sad that you’d want to do that.”

“Well, it’s not like I want to do it anymore,” I said, my defenses itching to life. “I was just really depressed.” Technically, I was still depressed. I hadn’t yet started seeing Ann or taking medication; I’d simply switched to using food as a coping mechanism. I hoped my girlfriend would overlook that minor detail.

“I just hate the thought of some old man…” she wrinkled her nose, looked away from me. “Some old man paying for you.”

I sighed. “I know.” I let silence blanket the distance between us, hoping it’d muffle some of my regret. Sometimes I thought of my girlfriend as immature and idealistic—in other words, as less knowledgeable about the world than I was. But, really, she was just unjaded.

Really, she just felt protective of the people she loved. And, heartbreakingly, she couldn’t fathom how I could love myself so little as to abandon all sense of self-preservation.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

But she just shrugged as if she wasn’t the one who needed an apology.

***

Months of Ann’s gentle guidance gave me the courage to stop my bulimic behaviors, but

I still ran from myself in other, subtler ways. I buried myself under unnecessary work, opting to write a novel in three weeks and redesign the course I taught and volunteer for editing jobs. To the rest of the world, I maybe looked like a girl with her priorities straight, a girl with a killer

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work ethic and endless stamina. Ann didn’t see me that way. One afternoon, she asked me to make a pie chart of my time, color-coding the fractions of my waking hours spent exercising, eating, socializing, working, etc. When I colored 75% of my hours in blue, the hue meaning

“working,” Ann frowned.

“I know you’re a graduate student, and it’s not unusual to put in long hours,” she said tactfully, “but I still think your pie is a bit unbalanced.” She knit her hands together. “This may be what your girlfriend means when she says it seems like you never have time for her.”

I flinched. This was a constant conversation in my relationship, the fact that I was often physically present but mentally absent. Instead of binge-eating while my girlfriend and I watched a movie, I’d draft an essay next to her while she watched a movie. She, understandably, didn’t feel that was “quality time.”

“But I don’t feel good about myself if I’m not working.” I shook my head. “I feel…”

How did I feel when it was just me, no work to consume my thoughts? Lazy and unproductive?

Or was it more than that? More like depressed and haunted? Lonely and insecure?

I couldn’t stop running from myself. I could stop bingeing and purging, but I couldn’t stop running.

***

In 2016, Taylor Swift announced she was taking “a break” from music and pointedly refrained from defining the length of said break. Fans wondered: would her next album be delayed a month or two? A year or two? Would there be a next album? Swifties on Tumblr moved from congratulating Taylor on her wise self-care to fretting over her absence to hysterically wondering if she’d ever again grace the limelight. With no new music to tout or paparazzi photos to post or interviews to GIF, they resorted to recycling old material.

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A brief reprieve of the media drought came in October 2016 when Swift performed at the

Formula 1 Grand Prix in Austin, Texas. Attending F1 was Swifties’ holy grail of the year, and the lucky pilgrims who saw the concert gifted at-home Swifties with documentation galore.

Ecstatic, I roused my girlfriend to watch clips of Taylor performing throwbacks like “Fifteen” and “Holy Ground.” My girlfriend rolled her eyes and promptly fell back asleep.

For the first time, though, I watched Swift without fanaticism clogging my arteries or fervor clouding my thinking. I still loved her, but in a softer, more nostalgic way; I loved her the way I loved my childhood bedroom or reruns of The Magic School Bus. She symbolized a place

I’d lived, a place I’d left but would never forget, a place I’d—unthinkably—miraculously— outgrown. I closed my laptop for the night, the melody of “Love Story” tumbling around my brain, and let myself bask in something like peace.

I woke to the gossipy writings of fickler Swifties. Taylor’s F1 performance may have appeased them sonically, but Taylor’s body garnered their criticism. Some Swifties mused that

Taylor looked “different”; others, “more muscular.” And still others went right for the jugular, writing: “Do you think Taylor got fat or something?…I think she did.”

In truth, Taylor had undergone a transformation from her waifish 1989-era days. Her stomach remained tight and her arms remained strong, but her legs looked noticeably healthier, as did her no-longer-sunken cheeks, as did her visible-but-no-longer-cutting collarbone. She looked, in a word, spectacular. She looked like she’d evolved in the months since she started dodging the paparazzi, like she’d found a path to a more authentic version of herself, like she’d learned to deliver a punishing roundhouse and bake a mean soufflé.

Looking at Swift through this new lens, I found I could no longer admire footage of her from 2014 and 2015. Instead of watching agog as she performed for a crowd of 70,000, I’d

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watch concerned as her every moving muscle and twitching tendon showed in painful relief. I’d notice how fragile she looked on the red carpet, her head a bobble, her bones knives. I’d wonder if she wanted to be so birdlike, or if her figure was the accident of a busy schedule and a cardio- intensive tour. I’d worry she was whittling herself away for people like me, the vampiric mass that studied her from afar.

Mostly, though, when I looked at older pictures of Swift, I saw myself. I recalled sorting through old photos of myself with Ann, photos from the Renee-and-Perry days, photos from college, photos from high school. In my mind, I’d looked stunning at a freshman-year dance (so what if my dad had said my dress was “hanging off” me? He wasn’t exactly a stylist), and I’d looked petitely cute on my 21st birthday, and I’d never looked hotter than the summer I achieved the hallowed size zero. But, combing through pictures of those years with Ann, I didn’t see a girl who appeared stunning or cute or hot. I saw a girl with yellowed skin, grossly bony hands, and brittle hair. I saw a girl whose body was anachronous with her age, a girl whose smile didn’t even attempt sincerity, a girl who permanently looked like she needed to borrow someone’s jacket. How could I have been that girl, have examined myself in the mirror every day and never really seen her? How could I have inhabited a body I didn’t know at all?

I realized that I wanted to inhabit my body. I wanted to be like Swift (not be her). I wanted to reclaim myself the way she had.

***

In Spring 2017, midway through a predawn jog, I realized how to stop running from myself. Humidity was sending rivers of sweat down my neck, shellacking every inch of my skin in stickiness, and Taylor Swift’s “Out of the Woods” was thwacking against my eardrums. My breaths turned to wheezes as I began the last hill of my route—the snaking, endless hill that

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always threatened to defeat me. (Are we out of the woods yet?) Taylor’s voice, the Florida darkness, and my plodding footsteps married into a beautiful and exhausting swell of sound. The sound swaddled me, and then, without warning, the sound pummeled me.

The sound said that Renee and Perry had used me.

(Are we out of the woods yet?)

They had used me (are out of the woods yet?) until they’d no longer needed me (are we out of the woods?) and then they’d walked away unscathed, drunk on smug laughter (I remember), and they’d been okay but I still wasn’t (are we in the clear yet?). That was the truth, damning and humiliating; that was the pride-scorching truth that no sugar daddy or binge or avalanche of work could erase.

(Are we in the clear yet?)

The two of them might spend the rest of their lives chortling at my naiveté (are we in the clear yet?), cackling at the fact I’d genuinely believed they cared for me (are we in the clear yet?), at the memories of me happily handing Perry my body and Renee my heart (oh, I remember) thinking they’d cherish them.

(Are we out of the woods yet?)

I’d be the forever-punchline of the people I’d adored, admired, trusted above all others

(are we out of the woods yet?). I’d forever be the stupid girl who’d eschewed reason (are we out of the woods yet?), the girl who’d thought she could tame wolves (are we out of the woods?) and then had the nerve to cry about being eaten alive.

But I wasn’t that girl anymore. I was no longer that weak girl who lost herself in Renee and Perry. I wasn’t the girl who believed that, somehow, by living every day recklessly enough, she could retroactively wound herself before Renee and Perry got the chance. (Are we in the

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clear yet, are we in the clear yet, are we in the clear yet?) Renee and Perry had taken the best of that girl then (do you remember?), but I could claim the best of her for every moment ahead.

(In the clear yet?)

(Good.)

***

Not long after that jog, I had a new kind of dream about Renee, a kind I hope is the last reincarnation of her haunting.

In the dream, I looked into Renee’s phantasmagorical eyes and said, “You should’ve treated me better.”

Renee’s mouth crimped, and she shrugged, and she said, “Maybe you’re right.”

I laughed. “I am right.” I narrowed my eyes at the girl I’d once yearned for, the girl whose beauty I’d seen molt into cruelty, the girl I’d hoped could love me, the girl who I now knew only loves herself. “I loved you,” I said, and the words reverberated through the dream- world.

Renee looked at me with that sad, moony expression that used to make me feel like someone new and now didn’t make me feel anything at all. “I know,” she said.

I woke and laced my arm around my girlfriend.

***

At the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, Taylor stood before a very packed Staples Center wearing a side-braid and a dress that can only be described as hoedown chic. With nothing but a banjo and bruised ego to hold, she opened her perfectly painted mouth and gave a stunning performance of her song “Mean.” This song is not just an anthem for underdogs everywhere— it’s a response to the blistering criticism Swift received after a less-than-stellar performance at

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the 52nd Grammys. On that rough night in 2010, Swift took home Album of the Year for

Fearless, then—thanks to a disastrous duet with Stevie Nicks—woke to headlines such as “Poor

Taylor Swift Shows Everyone She Can’t Sing,” and “Breaking News: Taylor Swift Sucks.”

Swift being Swift, she wrote “Mean” as a supreme f-you to those haters.

Which was triumphant and all until she had to stand before those critics and deliver her message live.

I’m sure Swift could visualize the headlines waiting for her (“Taylor Swift Shows Us She

Can’t Sing AGAIN!”), could feel her enemies’ pens trembling with excitement as the spotlight bloomed over her. After all, it’d only been two years since she’d handed music critics the material for the most gleeful dressing-down of their careers.

But on February 12, 2012, Swift didn’t stumble. She twanged her way flawlessly through the first three minutes and thirty seconds of the performance, goading the crowd to its feet, persuading every hand to clap to her beat. Then, with a glint in her eye and a naughty smile on her lips, she raised her hands over head and sang:

But all you are is mean

All you are is mean, and a liar, and pathetic

And alone in life, and mean, and mean, and mean, and mean

But someday I’ll be SINGING THIS AT THE GRAMMYS

and all you’re ever gonna be is mean!

She continued with the chorus, but she was no longer the focus: the roaring audience was. With a victorious smile on her face, she finished her song—to a standing ovation. As the crowd leapt to its feet, the camera zoomed in on Swift turning to her backup singers. Looking equal parts flabbergasted and thrilled, she shook her head and said, “What?!” as if even she couldn’t believe

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the love she was receiving. The frame was too narrow to show her bandmates’ reactions, but you just knew what they were thinking, what they were feeling. They, along with the rest of the world, were congratulating her. They were saying: you did this, Taylor. You put your old shame to rest, you reinvented yourself, you reclaimed your story. You did this.

(Finally, I’ve done it, too.)

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

EDUCATION

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY 2015-2018

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction track

Cumulative GPA: 3.979

PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY 2014-2015

Master of Arts in English, emphasis in Creative Nonfiction

Cumulative GPA: 3.92

PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE 2011-2015

Bachelor of Arts in English

Cumulative GPA: 3.92

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY 2015-PRESENT

Instructor of English 2135, Research, Genre and Context. Responsible for two course

sections (50 students) during each Fall and Spring semester, and one course section (25

students) during each Summer semester.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, PENN STATE UNIVERSITY 2014-2015

Instructor of English 15, Rhetoric and Composition. Responsible for one course section

(24 students) in each of the Fall and Spring semesters.

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ADDITIONAL WORK & LITERARY EXPERIENCE

NONFICTION READER, CARVE MAGAZINE 2016-2017

Worked directly with the Nonfiction Editor to choose essays for publication and contest

prizes.

NONFICTION READER, THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW 2015-PRESENT

Read and rated ~40 essays each semester for publication in Florida State University’s

literary journal.

MULTIMEDIA INTERN, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY FALL 2013

Conducted interviews with authors participating in the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series.

Responsibilities included preparing and delivering interview questions on film, and

editing the footage for uploading to YouTube and the department website. Notable

interviewees included David Shields, Sarah Arvio, and Cary Holladay.

PUBLISHING INTERN, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SPRING 2012

Proofread scholarly articles and textbook indexes for Dr. Cheryl Glenn.

SCHOLARSHIPS & GRANTS

FULLY-FUNDED MFA 2015-2018

Awarded by the English department at Florida State University.

MARGARET DUDA TRAVEL GRANT SUMMER 2015

Nominated by Charlotte Holmes, Director of the Creative Writing Program at Penn State.

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FULLY-FUNDED MA 2014-2015

Awarded by the Creative Writing program at Penn State.

REVEREND THOMAS BERMINGHAM, S.J. SCHOLARSHIP IN THE CLASSICS

SPRING 2012

Recommended by Pamela Cole, Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean

Studies at Penn State.

LIBERAL ARTS ENRICHMENT GRANT SPRING 2012

AWARDS

Finalist, 3rd Annual Oro Fino Chapbook Competition, Educe Press

Winner, Winter 2017 Nonfiction Contest, Santa Ana River Review

Winner, 2017 Essay Contest, El Chapo Review

Best of the Net Nonfiction, 2016, for “The M Word” (from Fourth River)

Graduate Teaching Excellence Award nominee, 2015, Penn State University

1st place, 2015 Toby Thompson Prize for Creative Nonfiction

Nonfiction Nominee for Penn State, 2014 AWP Intro Journals Project

1st place, 2014 Toby Thompson Prize for Creative Nonfiction

1st place, 2014 AAP/Leonard Steinberg Poetry Prize

Honorable Mention, 2013 Edward J. Nichols Memorial Award in Prose Writing

Dean’s List for Academic Achievement, Penn State University, Fall 2011-Spring 2015

PUBLICATIONS

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“Note,” Lavender Review, forthcoming

“Review: Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” Southeast Review 34

“Authors Talk” podcast, Superstition Review blog, October 2017

“Ethereal Girls,” Enter: Rural Scene, Wash and Fold Press, 2018

“Shame, A History.” Rubbertop Review, Issue 9

“Wrestling with God.” The Tusk, June 2017

“Dirty Love.” The Write Launch, May 2017

“Blood, Water, Sin.” Santa Ana River Review, Winter 2017

“Zero Is a Number Both Real and Imaginary.” Cease, Cows, June 2017

“Only the Young.” Tales of Seduction Anthology, Zimbell House Publishing

“Tortoise and the Whore.” El Chapo Review, forthcoming

“I Think You’re Crazy.” Route 7 Review, Issue 5

“The Signs in 100 Words.” Breathe Free Press, Issue 1

“Face Paint.” The Olive Press, Issue 1

“Me, Myself & Matthew Gray Gubler.” Queen Mob’s Teahouse, March 2017

“Faulty Hearts.” Hawai’i Review, Issue 83

“Sunday.” FishFood Magazine, forthcoming

“Holy Ground.” storySouth, Issue 43

“Out of the Box.” Superstition Review, Issue 19

“Ethereal Girls.” Santa Ana River Review, Vol 2, Issue 1

“Un/Done” and “At Dawn, Your Room Looks Aquamarine.” Hardly Doughnuts, Issue 3

“Choice.” Sediments Literary-Arts Journal, Issue 8

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“23 Reasons.” The Tusk, November 2016

“In Transit.” Quarter After Eight, Issue 23

“Ready, Set, Go.” Entropy, September 2016

“girl v. God.” Moonsick, Issue 18

“psalm 107:5-7,” “cosmetology,” and “Fall of ’92.” Tiny Poetry, Issue 3

“All That Glitters.” Sonora Review, Issue 70. Print.

“Macy of the Melanoma.” The Sonder Review, Issue 5

“Review: The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander.” Southeast Review, Volume 31.2

“Flames.” Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, December 2015

“Venus Retrograde.” Little Patuxent Review, Issue 19. Print.

“The Girls We Love (Extended).” Ginosko Literary Review, Issue 17

“Upside Down.” RE(SISTERS), For Books’ Sake Press, 2016. Print.

“Blood.” Chicago Literati. The PRIDE Issue (2015) Web.

Fortune. Columbus, GA: Damaged Goods, 2015. Print.

“The M Word.” Fourth River, Issue 0.2

“Showmanship.” Profane, Issue 2

“Civil War.” Experimementos. 2 (2015): 39. Web.

“Fortune.” Crab Fat Literary Magazine. 4 (2015): 87-93. Web.

“Sonder.” The Offbeat. 15 (2015) Print.

“Sugar.” Apeiron Review, Issue 9

“Raw.” Fiction Southeast, December 2015

“Ghosts” and “Gains.” Gravel. 18 (2015) Web.

“Potato Salad Portraits.” under the gum tree. July (2015): 54. Print.

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“Arizona.” The Wild Ones. 1.1 (2015) Web.

“Trigger.” The Voices Project. June (2015): Web.

“1x1.” Glassworks Magazine. 10 (2015): 22. Print.

“Nothing Gold.” Switchback. 10.20 (2014) Web. (Winner of the Editors’ Prize)

“Because You Said You Loathe Yourself.” If and Only If. 1 (2015) Web.

“The Girls We Love.” Fogged Clarity. 47 (2015) Web.

“Interior Design.” Word Riot. June (2014) Web.

“Frost.” Stone Highway Review. 3.3 (2014) Web.

“Out of Time.” Skin to Skin. 5 (2014): 30-33. Print.

“Hands.” Pavilion Magazine. 2 (2014) Web.

“The Hawk.” Prime Number. 47.2 (2013) Web.

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