[fiction]

I am a little man. That’s what Papi always says. Mijo, you are un hombrecito. That means that I must be strong, never ask for help and—very important—never cry. But my teacher doesn’t understand this and wants to know why I punched Manuel during recess. She says that I need to use my words and not my fists and that talking about the problem might help. I don’t want to tell her anything. My dad says that it’s embarrassing to talk about our problems.

Nothing’s wrong, I say, I’m fine, I won’t do it again.

It doesn’t work. They ask my parents to come to school and they both look upset. Mami brings me to the principal’s office and Papi arrives ten minutes later. He sits across from us. What happened, mijo? I stare at my shoes and tell him that the other kid started it. I close my fists—so tight that my thumbs hurt. But that pain is nothing compared to how I feel about my parents being at school—like being squeezed and pushed out. They don’t need any more problems, they have plenty. I keep looking at my shoes wishing that I could be anywhere but here.

Inside the principal’s office, I sit on the small couch with my mom. My teacher, Mrs. Miller, takes the armchair. The principal tells my dad that there are chairs outside, that if he wouldn’t mind bringing one inside so that he can sit. No, no, I’m okay like this. But before the principal can insist, the school counselor, Mr. Gomez appears at the door, Oh, we need two chairs, I will take care of that. My dad wants to say no again but it’s too late. Mr. Gomez offers him a chair with a big smile on his face. Papi just slurs a quick thank you. The principal starts talking but after a few words, she makes a strange face like the one I make when I have forgotten to do my homework. She looks at my dad. Mr. Suarez, I was told that you speak English, is that correct? My dad nods without looking at her. Then she turns to my mom. Mrs. Suarez, what about you? Mami does not respond, her big eyes distant stars sending distressed signals. Okay, I will speak slowly then. Mr. Suarez and Mr. Gomez, could you please fill her in later? Mr. Gomez is happy to oblige, all teeth and cheerfulness. Papi barely shrugs.

I close my fists—so tight that my thumbs hurt. But that pain is nothing compared to how I feel about my parents being at school—like being squeezed and pushed out. They don’t need any more problems, they have plenty.

I get tired of looking at my shoes so I grab a pen I find on the desk next to me. I play with it and concentrate on the click-click it makes when I push the tiny button. I know they are talking about me but I don’t look up. Everyone’s upset at me right now but in a couple of weeks, some other kid will screw up even worse than I did and then everyone will forget about me. I can’t wait for that to happen—I don’t like people looking at me and bombarding me with questions. Speaking of which, I think Mr. Gomez is asking me something. I just shrug.

That’s not going to work, we need an answer. Why did you punch Manuel?

I keep staring at the pen and just say I don’t know, that I was upset, that it isn’t that big of a deal. They go back to talking to each other and I just stay in silence for the rest of the meeting.

*     *     *

Two weeks later, I am at a counselor’s office all the way across town. While we wait, Papi keeps looking at his watch. He’s missing work because of me. Mami moves around in her chair and gives me a tired smile. We go inside and they ask her to sign a bunch of papers. Some lady is translating the information for her. Mami just nods and signs wherever they point. We then talk to another lady who has huge, thick glasses. She is sitting at her computer and talks to the translator lady who then asks my parents tons of questions. Words and tears spill out of Mami, little diamonds falling down her face. I look at Papi. Arms crossed, he moves his head side to side and stares at the floor. What is Mami doing? We don’t tell our problems to other people. She keeps crying. I don’t want to look anymore. I look out the window—at the trees—the leaves rustling in the wind. But Mami’s crying is still there. It always is.

*     *     *

I start meeting with a counselor once a week. Mami has Wednesdays off so that is when we go. Papi cannot ask for more time off work. I meet Rick by myself and sometimes, he speaks to my mom afterwards with the help of the translator lady who always looks like she has a stomachache. I thought the counselor was going to be mean and tell me what a bad kid I am but it turns out that counselors are very much like art teachers. One day he asks me to draw my house, another day, my family, and another one, my classroom. After I’m done with the drawings, Rick asks me to explain them to him and he also asks about the people in them. I like talking about my drawings. I like that this guy does not ask what is wrong with me. He asks easy questions. I now look forward to talking to him so that I can tell him all about my drawings.

One day, Rick asks what made me draw my father far away from Mami, my brother, and me. I tell him that I don’t know. He asks if I am upset with Papi, if I don’t want him at home anymore. I answer no. I tell him he got it backwards. Papi is the one who’s upset. He is the one who doesn’t want to live with us anymore. Rick asks why. I answer that I’m not sure, that maybe he is tired of my mom always yelling at him. Rick asks if I know why she yells at Papi. I tell him no, that I don’t ask because my dad says is rude to ask people about their problems. When they fight, I just go to my room, put my headphones on and play video games. I tell Rick that I can still hear the yelling through the earphones. He asks me how does that make me feel and I say that I don’t know—I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Rick says okay and asks about my upcoming soccer game.

Rick shows me a video. A boy that looks like he could be my age is playing outside his house, shooting some hoops, smiling. Suddenly, yelling comes from inside the house and the boy starts singing to himself. The ball dribbles faster and faster but the yelling keeps getting louder and louder. Then his dad comes out, slams the door, gets into his car and does not even look at him. At the end of the video, the boy throws the ball over the fence and just sits on the porch with his head down, looking at his shoes.

How do you think the boy feels? Rick asks, like he knew a secret I had yet to discover.

I think he is sad, I say, but then change my mind. No, I think he is angry. I can’t make up my mind and I tell him that I think he is both sad and angry.

What makes him sad and angry?

That his parents are fighting, I guess.

The boy’s sad because his parents are fighting?

No, that makes him angry!

Why is he sad then?

I say that the boy is sad because he thinks that it is his fault that his parents fight all the time. He thinks he’s a bad boy and that’s why his parents yell at each other.

What do you think the boy should do?

I say that I don’t know.

Maybe he could talk to someone? Rick insists.

No, I say, that would be embarrassing for the boy.

But if he’s sad, don’t you think it would be a good idea to ask for help?

No! Men don’t ask for help.

Rick says the boy is not a man. I say that he’s a little man and little men don’t cry and they don’t ask for help. I tell Rick that I have a ton of homework and that I need to leave early. He nods and says that’s fine, that he will see me next week.

*     *     *

For a week I can’t stop thinking about the boy, sitting at that porch while the world around him keeps getting smaller—the sky above him slashed with gray clouds. I want to hug him and tell him that everything’s going to be okay. Rick says that it’s very nice of me to want to comfort the boy. He asks me what else I would say to him.

I’m not sure, I answer.

What if the boy told you he thinks it’s his fault that his mom and dad are fighting?

I say that I would tell him I don’t think that’s true. Adults fight all the time about old people problems and it has nothing to do with the kids. Rick asks if I’m sure about that. I say that yes, I think so.

You are right! It is not the boy’s fault. As a matter of fact, children are never to blame when parents fight.

I nod, suspicious. I’m usually never right.

What about you?

What about me?

Do you think your parents fight because of you?

I look down, shrug and say that sometimes I do.

But you just said that it wasn’t the boy’s fault that their parents were fighting. Why should it be your fault, then?

I don’t know. I start lowering my head so that I can look at the floor but Rick stops me.

Look at me! You need to look at people when they are talking to you. Now listen. Your parents are going through a hard time, and they may fight sometimes because that’s how adults think they can solve their problems. But I want you to understand, it is never your fault. You cannot control what adults do or say. That’s not your job. Do you understand?

I nod slowly. I feel strange, like my chest is about to burst. I’m not sure what’s happening.

You can ask for help. It doesn’t make you any less of a man. It makes you human.

And something else, Rick continues, I want you to pay close attention to what I am about to say because it is very important. Always remember, no matter how much they fight, your parents love you very much. That will never change. Your brother and you are the most important people in the world to them. They may not always act like it, because parents are human and they can make mistakes. But they love you with all their hearts and they want what’s best for you.

Something breaks inside me. I try to stop the tears with my hands. Rick says that it is okay, that I can cry. I say no, that’s not true and I tell him what Papi says.

I’m sure your dad means well, but like I said before, parents don’t know everything and they can make mistakes just like everyone else. Crying does not make you less of a man. For example, what does your mom do when you fall from your bicycle and scrape your knee?

She cleans the wound with warm water.

Does it feel better?

Yes, it calms the pain.

Exactly! It works just the same with the wounds we have inside. Our warm tears help wash the sadness and anger away. If we hold our tears and words for too long, the wound gets infected and it will only hurt more and more. I bet your parents have told you that if your brother or you hurt yourselves when playing, you should ask an adult for help. It isn’t any different when we hurt inside. You can ask for help. It doesn’t make you any less of a man. It makes you human.

I nod. I take a deep breath. And then I cry.

I cry for Mami and Papi. I cry for my little brother and for me. I cry for my family. I cry because it hurts that my parents can’t be friends and I don’t want Papi to leave and I’m afraid I’ll never see him again. I tell all of this to Rick and he says that it’ll be okay. That now that I can talk about what hurts, the pain will get better. He says that I cannot control what my parents decide to do but that I can talk to them about my fears and tell them how I feel when they fight. He says to keep in mind that even though my mom and my dad are older than me, they are still learning how to deal with their problems. But that no matter what happens, I have to remember that they love me, that they will always be there for me, and that I should hold on to that.

*     *     *

A few weeks have passed and things have started to get better. My parents talked to Rick a few times and now they don’t fight as much. When they do, they make sure to come look for me, give me a hug and ask me if I’m okay. This isn’t something easy for Papi. At the beginning he didn’t want to meet with Rick but little by little, he’s becoming less uncomfortable when talking about things. He’s learning just like me and he now understands that it’s okay for a man to be sad sometimes and to want to talk about his problems with other people. I am stronger now because I can help my mom and my dad and give them hugs when I see that they’re sad. I don’t look at my shoes or the floor anymore when people ask me questions. I try to look straight into their eyes, answer their questions, and apologize if I have done something wrong.

That makes me brave, not weak.

That makes me un hombrecito.

Melanie Márquez Adams is an MFA candidate in Spanish creative writing and a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship at the University of Iowa. Her short story collection, Mariposas Negras, won Third Place in the 2018 North Texas Book Festival Spanish Fiction Awards. Melanie’s work has appeared in storySouth, Dash, Whale Road Review, Asterix Journal, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.

[creative nonfiction]

Before I talk about Halloween and Corey Fisher and the two of us in the coat closet dressed as toilet paper mummies, let me start with Mom. Mom grew up in Chicago. As a teenager, she worked summers at Brookfield zoo. Head zookeeper of the petting zoo.

All her stories from that time start with “Once we had.”

“Once we had a baby elephant that stole a woman’s purse.”

“Once we had a baby kangaroo that jumped into a woman’s arms”

Once Mom bought me a pop-up book named Mammals of the World. I was five, earning a reputation as the “kissy girl” because I kissed Alfonso five times on the cheek. I asked another friend if I could see his underwear. Big deal. If my curiosity about Alfonso or the underwear had been a zoo, it would be that dinky fifteen acre “zoological park” in Amarillo with the boring Longhorns and Monkey Island.

When I was five, I opened Mammals of the World and saw a red panda. This curiosity was different than the underwear and kisses. It grew and grew until it became the size of the National Zoo. One hundred and sixty-three acres. An enclosure of pandas and Lemur Island. My life’s mission revealed itself. Become a zoo keeper. Live among the red pandas.

Now, I’m ten. Behind my belly button the call of the red pandas still purrs. And I hear it loudest when I steal glances at my friends’ bras and touch the logos on their chests.

The sounds are familiar. Thirty minutes ago familiar, when Corey Fisher walked in on me changing. Corey’s eyes widened as I stood before him, nipples bare as the swinging tits of the Monkey Island spider monkeys.

So what has me pulling at my fingernails tonight is whether or not I feel the purring with Corey Fisher. Corey Fisher who apparently forgets how to knock on a bedroom door before entering. Corey Fisher who said we should TP ourselves, hide in the coat closet, jump out, and scare the trick-or-treaters. He said that could be our act in the haunted house his mom and my mom have put together. Which is why his mom is standing at the front door, ready to greet the trick-or-treaters, while my mom waits down the hallway. And Corey and I are in the coat closet, ribs cage to cage, among my parents’ forgotten winter coats, rain slickers, and church jackets. One of Mom’s shoulder-padded jacket butts against my face. I punch it away. The jacket rebounds from the closet wall, hits my neck.

“Back! Stay back,” Corey says, elbowing a ski jacket. He’s eleven. He’s tall enough to reach the closet’s top shelf, where Mom keeps her animal hats. Flamingos, ducks, and crabs.

Once my family had a dog who liked to raid the guinea pig burial site. When we returned home, she gave herself away by hiding in the bedroom.

Not Corey.

Since the incident, he hasn’t blushed, avoided, or apologized. I huff. Cross my arms and think about the autobiography Mom and I wrote for English homework last night. The paper started with Mammals of the World and ended with me becoming head keeper for the red pandas at the National Zoo.

Once, Corey told me that when he’s an adult, he’s going to own five chinchillas. I raise both my eyebrows at him. A house of chinchillas compared to a life spent among the red pandas—

“Do you hear that?” He says, interrupting my thoughts.

I shake the dust out of my head. “No, I don’t hear anything.”

“I think I hear someone coming up the breezeway!”

The doorbell rings.

“They’re here!” Corey sings, squeezing further back behind the ski jacket. I sigh and let the shoulder pad win the fight for my face. Mrs. Fisher opens the front door. There’s a chorus of kid-voices shouting, “Trick-or-Treat!”

She chimes, “Welcome to our haunted house.” She’s dressed as a pumpkin. She’s wearing a blimp, orange pillowcase with black triangle eyes and a mouth that would not get A+ stickers at the dentist.

Last year, Mrs. Fisher was my fourth-grade teacher. I met Corey when his family popped into our house for dinner. Surprise! My mom isn’t any regular PTA mom. Not only did she start up an animal program at my elementary school and organize ferrets, bearded dragons, even a chinchilla into the classrooms, but, then at the end of the school year, she invited my teacher over for dinner.

Mom and Mrs. Fisher became BFFs. Corey’s younger sister and my younger sister Kristin became BFFs. Corey and I are as close to BFFs as I can be with a boy that has cooties.

In the closet, we hear the shuffle of the trick-or-treaters coming inside. “I will be your tour guide for your stay here,” Mrs. Fisher says and lets out a throaty high-pitched cackle. One of the trick-or-treaters proclaims they’re not scared. I think just wait. Last year, Mrs. Fisher caught me pinching my friend Crystal’s butt, and I saw exactly how scary she could be.

“What do we have here?” Mrs. Fisher says. “A T-Rex and… a jackrabbit?”

“I’m a Jackalope,” the kid squeaks.

“Only in Texas.”

Corey starts jiggling his leg. “It’s almost time,” he whispers, even though it’s not. Mom still has her bit of the routine to do. I slump into the jacket’s shoulder pad. Rotate my head and gaze through my left eye at Corey. My belly starts to chatter and trill.

Once we had matching BFF rope bracelets, but now I don’t know what’s going on. I furrow my eyebrows and glare. You listen here, Corey Fisher, I think, I don’t know what zoo this curiosity with you is building, but this kissy girl only wants the National Zoo. I want to feed red pandas their daily 200,000 bamboo leaves. Pet their red fur. Feel my curiosity pop out from the imaginary of books and into the real.

In the entryway, Mrs. Fisher says, “And now, I want you to meet my sister.”

On cue, Mom goes “whoooo” from the hallway. She’s abandoned her baggy khakis and animal shirts and gone rogue, borrowing a red belly dance costume, which she threw over a white turtle neck and leggings. I picture all five feet ten inches of her dancing down the hallway, her long legs like stilts. Permed duck fluff crowns her head.

“Hellooooo,” Mom moans to the trick-or-treaters. “I’m the older sister, Genie.” No one lectured Mom to be scary. We figured the turtleneck was frightening enough. “I want to introduce you to another member of our family.”

Well-rehearsed, Corey and I know now is when Mom pulls a picture frame from behind her back. She slowly rotates the frame to show the trick-or-treaters my dead grandfather.

The audience gasps.

“This is our Dad!” Mom howls.

“Oh, how we miss him!” shrieks Mrs. Fisher.

“He died seven years ago!” Mom wails.

Corey pokes my ribs. “It’s almost time,” he whispers. Excitement runs like static electricity from his squirming arms to the ski jacket to the shoulder pad to my face. My belly starts to chatter and bellow. The sounds are familiar. Thirty minutes ago familiar, when Corey Fisher walked in on me changing. Corey’s eyes widened as I stood before him, nipples bare as the swinging tits of the Monkey Island spider monkeys.

When I was five, I opened Mammals of the World and saw a red panda. This curiosity was different than the underwear and kisses.

For a second, I was lock-limbed. When I snapped awake, I laughed and told Corey to get out. I dove headfirst into a long-sleeved shirt. The door shut. Against the itchy fabric, I heard the bellowing of whatever was caught in my stomach.

And now, with those same sounds whirring in my belly, clarity comes to me as a zoo park map spread behind my eyes.

The chattering—Monkey Island. The bellowing—the long horn cows. My eyes fly open. I see Corey with his hand on the door handle. I step away from him, back into the shoulder pad. No, I think. This kissy girl isn’t going anywhere.

“Now,” Mrs. Fisher says. “There’s one more member of our family we want you to meet. You’ve met my sister Genie…”

“Ooooooooo,” sings Mom.

“Our father…”

Mrs. Fisher inhales. In that pause I imagine all the mummy toilet paper falling away. I imagine stepping instead into a zoo keeper costume. Khaki pants. Green shirt with white National Zoo lettering.

Laura, Keeper of Red Pandas. Kissy girl no longer.

“Now, we want you to meet the last member of our family. Meet our mummy!”

The red panda keeper leaps ahead of Corey. She jumps out of the closet, raises her arms, and screams, “BOO.”

All the zoo sounds from my belly stampeded into the entryway. The shrieks from the children. The high-pitched peals of Mrs. Fisher’s laughter. Corey wheezing as he doubles over on the floor. My mother’s throaty wailing.

In my autobiography, I became a zoo keeper like my mom. I got married. My husband and I moved together to Nepal so I could study red pandas in the wild.

What if your husband just died, Mom had asked while we were writing. Wouldn’t that be so weird and funny? Yes, yes, yes, I’d said, howling. That would be hilarious.

We wrote the scene like this: one day, my husband and I were in the forest, scouting for red pandas. Then soldiers appeared. They shot him.

I spent my life living among the red pandas.

Mrs. Fisher hands the trick-or-treaters their Kit-Kats and Reese’s. Corey snatches a handful of candy for himself and dashes into the coat closet. “C’mon Laura,” he calls. “I think I hear the next batch.”

Instead, I step toward Mom. I take her hand. Mom twirls me under her puffy, red belly-dancer sleeve. I spin in the orange light and know that at the next sleepover, I’ll ask my friends to show me their bras. I’ll ask them to show me their arm pit hair.

The next wave of trick-or-treaters comes up the breezeway. Mrs. Fisher says, “Quick, quick, get in your places,” so I skip over to the coat closet as Mom dances back up the hallway. Corey perches next to the shoulder pad. I stand by the door. I put my hand on the handle. Hear the wild red panda purr of my stomach. “Welcome to our haunted house,” cackles Mrs. Fisher. Laura, Keeper of the Red Pandas, grins.

Laura is a queer writer from the Texas Panhandle. She is currently residing in the Idaho Panhandle, and in addition to cooking with pans with handles, enjoys teaching theater to elementary students and co-hosting Moscow’s first queer reading series: POP-UP PROSE. To read more of her work, check out the NonBinary Review or The Manifest-Station and her Patreon page: patreon.com/lauragould and sign up if you’d like to receive her monthly stories in the mail.

[fiction]

Since coming here, the bright red-orange of my skin has begun to fade into a washed out but stubborn stain. The gold of my eyes, too, has dulled to a yellowish brown.

This place—they call it a school. We’ve been here almost a year now, and on my first day of class, as we sat in the rows of desks facing a woman with colorless skin and yellow hair, I raised my hand and asked, “Why is it spelled with an h?”

She blinked at me. Those strangely colored eyes—blue, they call it. “What, honey?”

I wanted to ask what honey was too, but I knew it was better to go one question at a time. “Why does school have an h in it if we don’t pronounce it?”

She smiled at me as though I’d finally discovered some far-flung moon that she’d known about for ages now. “That’s because it’s a silent letter, honey.”

A silent letter. Who had ever heard of such a ridiculous thing? That’s what I thought then, except now I am beginning to think differently. I like silent letters, how they hide within words and within sounds, the way you cannot see them in speech but you know they’re there. If you don’t know the silent letters in a word, then you don’t really know the word at all.

I have silent letters in me, too, I think. Things I have tucked away in my mind that the teachers and doctors can’t see. I can do nothing about the loss of my red-orange coloring or the golden glow of my eyes, but my memories—I can hold on to them, as best I can, for as long as I can. I clutch at them in desperation, as though my sheer force of will can keep them alive in my mind.

*     *     *

In the dark of our dormitory, everyone is stirring restlessly. The low rumble of thunder drives the fearful youngest girls to me, and I am sitting up in my bed with children in my lap. They are too young to remember that this thunder heralds the coming of the red rains. Too young to recall the time before they came—the colonists from Earth. 

I whisper about the night sky after the red rains—a sky so black and clear and glittering that it kissed the breath right out of my mouth.

“Mar…Mar…” someone whimpers as thunder rattles the building. I hear pattering feet running down the aisle, and a little girl crawls up into my bed beside me. Emily.

Mar. They mean Margaret, which is and is not my name. The school assigned us names when we arrived, sullen-faced, teary-eyed. Fearful, wary. I am Margaret, my brother Harry, and some days I almost forget I was ever called anything else, in a language utterly different from English. But living at school, constantly hearing and reading and speaking and writing in English, I have begun to lose my mother tongue. But I suppose Margaret is not too terrible of a name—mostly because it contains within it Mar. Almost like Mars, which is the name the colonists call this planet. My home. I would like to think that even in unnaming and renaming me, the colonists have failed to erase who I am, where I come from.

A loud crack of thunder startles someone into crying. Lightning illuminates the dormitory in stark, harsh whiteness. In the flash, I see that all the older girls, like me, are sitting up in bed. Their faces are turned towards the window, their faces hungry. Waiting. We remember what the red rains are like.

“Shh,” I whisper to the crying girl, smoothing her hair. The littlest ones don’t speak anything but English now, but when they first came they hardly spoke it at all. I, having the best grasp on English out of all of us, helped them along, and since then they have always clung to me. “Shh. It’s the red rains coming.”

“Red rains?”

I lean forwards and begin to tell the little girls congregated around me about what it was like before the Earth colonists came. In all honesty, even my own memories of that long-gone era are limited and fading into fantastical glimmers, but I do my best. I whisper into the dark about the canals, how they filled to the brim once a year when the red rains came in wonderful torrents, how we all went swimming. This, I do remember. How could I not? The cool water, the splashing and laughing, all of us washing reddish dust from our skin and faces. My mother’s hair fanning out around her head as she floated. My brother spewing a stream of water from his mouth at me, his eyes bright and glimmering with excitement.

I whisper about the night sky after the red rains—a sky so black and clear and glittering that it kissed the breath right out of my mouth. My father and I would stand on the red rocks or climb the crimson dunes to marvel at the stars. They all had names and stories, but I’ve forgotten.

“Mar?” A thin, high voice.

“Yes?” I say.

“Will we get to go and play in the canals too?”

I close my eyes. Thunder calls out again in its booming, commanding voice, summoning me to come outside and dance in the red rains, to soak the color back into my fading skin, and I ache with the longing.

The answer is, of course, no. The time of playing in canals and standing on the dunes is over now. I take the little girl’s hand and stay silent. I don’t have the heart to tell the truth. I don’t have the heart to tell a lie that will only disappoint.

*     *     *

The colonists came without warning, one day, simply dropping out of the sky. I was inside, chattering to my mother about what my friend and I were planning to do for her birthday, when a deafening roaring exploded into the air and there was a crash so loud and strong it swallowed up every other sound. A wave of force, a ripple coursing through the ground beneath our feet, threw us down roughly. Dazed, I watched a great cloud of red-orange dust engulf the world. I remember coughing so hard that tears came to my eyes, the feel of the gentle weight of my mother’s trembling hand resting on my back. I remember the moment I finally drew in a breath and could breathe, remember thinking I’m alive, not knowing…not knowing, not knowing what was coming.

We ventured outside, hand-in-hand, my mother gripping me so hard I thought all the bones in my fingers would splinter and shatter. She had lovely skin, my mother—a deep scarlet, with an undercurrent of bright copper.

The cloud of dust thinned. All our neighbors were there too, gathered around nervous and dusty before a strange thing of metal and wire and who knew what else. A spaceship, later, is what I learned it was called. But I didn’t know that then, and English was strange and foreign, that day when the spaceship came and the hatch opened slowly with a hiss. I wanted to laugh when I saw them, climbing out in bulky white suits, their heads encased in what looked like bubbles.

After a moment, one of the beings lifted a hand in greeting and spoke, a crackly transmitted voice breaking the silence.

*     *     *

From Earth, with peace. That was the first line the Earth colonists spoke, though of course we didn’t understand it then. That is the line now written on our dormitory doors, painted on our classroom walls, and blinking on the screens in the doctors’ offices. But those words were not supposed to be the first ones spoken on Mars, I learned. The first words were supposed to be the same words uttered by some other space traveler from Earth, Neil something-or-other, who had either strong arms or legs. I can never remember which. I asked a doctor about it once when I went for my check-up, and he only laughed at me. The doctors like me, because they like the fading color of my skin and eyes. They like that they have successfully corrected my gait.

Corrected. They don’t know that I only walk the way they want me to so I can avoid having to go back to the physical therapist. But in the dormitory, at night, when the matron has turned the light out and left the room, I loop around the beds to comfort the littlest girls and walk in our usual loping, sloping gait. I refuse to lose that, too.

From Earth, with peace—an improvised line, because the colonists had no idea we already lived on Mars. I, too, improvise, as I tell the girls stories about the stars and give them silly names. I say when the stars cry from laughing so hard, their tears fall down to Mars as the red rains.

“Only once a year,” I whisper. “Stars are so serious that it’s hard to get them to laugh that hard.”

The first rain drops, fat and ruby colored, splatter against the window. My mother’s face swims before my eyes. My brother, howling into the sky with glee, pointing at the churning clouds as the rain pours down.

Someone gets up. I hear her feet hit the floor, and as she passes by my bed, I recognize her. Veronica. We were best friends once, before we were turned into Veronica and Margaret, before she stopped speaking altogether when we came to the school. She won’t walk the way they want her to. They send her back, over and over again, to the therapist.

Much of her extended family has managed to avoid the fate which has befallen the rest of us. In the days after the colonists first arrived, the leaders and councils met to discuss and debate, so heatedly it’s a surprise they didn’t spark a wildfire. Some, wary and mistrustful of the newcomers from Earth, wanted us to all disappear, migrating to the mountains or going underground into the ancient tunnels. Some, including my parents, argued that it would be best to coexist with the colonists, who seemed peaceful and harmless enough. My mother pitied them, those poor weak-lunged souls who struggled to breathe our air properly. We ought to help them, and maybe they can help us too.

With horror, the colonists pointed to our red-orange skin, our elongated limbs and faces, our four-fingered hands, the loping gait with which we walked. Discolored. Disfigured. Disabled. Or so they said.

My family stayed. So did Veronica’s, but most of her relatives left to go underground, where cities now unfold beneath the unsuspecting colonists’ feet. We should have gone too, but it was too late by the time we realized that the kind of help the colonists wanted to offer us was not the kind we wanted or needed. They had censuses, registration, numbers to keep track, charts about population growth. We could no longer merely disappear without attracting attention and search parties and investigations.

I watch Veronica make her way to the far end of the room. She stands on tiptoes and unlatches the window as the pane rattles from the rumbling thunder. Her hands are shaking as she opens the window and reaches out to let droplets fall on her palm. A gust of wind blasts in and I draw in a deep breath, desperately trying to fill my lungs with cold, rain-scented air, so different from the sterilized thin oxygen we breathe in here. The wind smells of the dunes, and I think I can even feel some of the dust on my skin.

When the rains come, the underground rivers will swell and overflow, and perhaps there will be dancing and swimming and singing in the tunnels.

Not so for us.

*     *     *

They came to take us away a year ago. Before that, for a while already, we had been going to English classes the colonists facilitated, and although I knew vaguely that ours was an uneasy peace, I was blissfully unconcerned. The teachers were kind and friendly, the new language enthralling, and as one of the fastest learners, I took home spelling and grammar tests decorated with gold stars.

But then something happened, something which knocked every gold star out of the sky of my imagination and slapped the smiles off my teachers’ faces. A doctor happened to test a child for a disease and found, instead, high levels of a chemical in his skin and hair. From lab results, the colonists argued that the chemical was in our water, in our red rain—a chemical that discolored, disfigured, and disabled.

With horror, the colonists pointed to our red-orange skin, our elongated limbs and faces, our four-fingered hands, the loping gait with which we walked. Discolored. Disfigured. Disabled. Or so they said.

There were rumors of children being seized and taken away in the name of sanitation and schooling, a secular sort of salvation intended to ensure that following generations might be whole and healthy. I watched my parents worry and whisper night after night. They kept my brother and me from going to our English classes, and as fear wrapped its noose around my neck, my brother and I took to sleeping huddled up so that if we were taken in the night, we would at least be taken together.

But it was morning when they came, announcing themselves by way of a raucous knocking on the door. My father froze and shouted, “Coming! Coming!” in accented English while my mother herded my brother and me into a cupboard. My hands were sweating and trembling, and I held my breath. I remember my brother pressing a crumbling rock into my palm as though somehow he had known we would be torn from the land we knew and loved, and I brought it to my nose, breathing in the familiar smell of Mars while unfamiliar, unfriendly footsteps stomped around outside. Loud voices. Slamming. Where are the children? The question punched me right in the gut; it slammed its fist into the table, and then the cupboard doors were wrenched open and light poured in. I was screaming, thrashing, as rough hands descended on me in an iron grip. The world blurred through my tears. My mother’s hands, reaching for mine, knocked away. My brother shrieking my name. My father, asking, “Where? Where?” Where are you taking them? I bit my tongue on accident, pain exploding in my mouth, the taste of salt and blood as I choked on a scream.

*     *     *

The rock my brother gave me—I dropped it, somehow, in the scuffle, but it would have been confiscated anyway. At the school, I stood in a line with other girls in the cold inspection hall, shivering. My hands were coated in red dust from the rock.

It took three teachers and a doctor to make me wash my hands.

*     *     *

The rain falls harder, singing a humming song that intensifies. Veronica puts her wet hands to her cheeks.

The dormitory stirs as thunder bellows triumphantly and lightning cracks the world in two. Wind blows rain into the room, and dozens of feet hit the floor all at once as we all run towards the open window. The older girls hold the younger ones, helping them reach the window and cup their hands to catch the rainwater, before they themselves lean dangerously far out to let the rain run down their faces like tears after a long and weary day. Someone is singing, though the rain carries the words away, and from where I stand, I can only hear the ghost of a melody.

I tremble with anticipation as the crowd shifts and I move forward. The silent letters in me stir like desert flowers waking up from the dry season, unfurling shriveled leaves towards a sky heavy with rain. I am so parched. I didn’t know it till now, how much of a desert this place is—I’ve kept my focus on surviving, on holding on to what I can, for so long that I didn’t realize I was clutching dry bones. Everything in me is crying out now, begging for the red rains to pour over them and make them like new, pleading that I sing them out into the storm.

At the window at last, the wind blasts my hair back and kisses my face with rain, welcoming me into its embrace. I cling to the windowsill. I want the storm to tuck me into the crook of its elbow and cradle me, rock me. Is it tears or rain that runs down my face?

I uncurl my fingers from the sill. A door opens, slams. I reach out a shaking hand towards the rain. Footsteps. Cold, lovely drops fall hard and fast into my open palm like gems and I open my mouth to laugh or to weep, I don’t know which, and then someone yanks me back by the shoulders, shouting, “Margaret!” and I am knocked aside onto the floor.

The matron screams, “Don’t you know how dangerous this rain is?” She slams the window shut. The force of it is enough to jolt silent letters out of their places. To rattle them. To cast them on frigid tile and dash them into pieces.

Outside, the rain knocks on the window pane, asking to come in.

Chihye Naomi Kim is currently a sophomore at Brown University studying English. Her writing appears in Post- and Cornerstone, both publications at Brown University. Two of her short stories have been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards with a National Silver medal and a National Gold medal.

[fiction]

January 1

Liz: Happy new year!!!
Alyssa: Not yet here ☹ What’s the future like?
Liz: Wild. People are leaving this party in hovercars. Pretty sure we just achieved world peace. We all have teleportation bracelets now.
Alyssa: Great! So you can come celebrate with me?
Liz: I wish!

“Lyyyssaaa.”

Isaac drops onto the couch beside me. We’re in Nicole’s family’s den along with most of the sophomore class. Isaac swings his legs up onto my lap, and I almost shove him off, but his eyes are drooping closed and he looks almost sweet. As sweet as Isaac can look.

“Who’re you texting? Everyone you know is here.”

“Maybe that’s why I need to be on my phone,” I say, poking his knee. “To get away from all of y’all.”

“More like to get away from me.” He turns his head to the side so his voice comes out pillow-muffled. “Hurts, Lyssa.”

Now I do want to shove his legs off. But I’m pretty sure he’s asleep, all of a sudden. And maybe drunk. He didn’t mean it. He might not even remember saying it tomorrow, and knowing Isaac, even if he does he’ll pretend he doesn’t.

I’m not trying to get away from Isaac all the time. Or any of my friends here—“real-life friends,” my mom calls them. I’d rather Liz be a real-life friend, too. But she happens to live in Connecticut, not north Texas. And I would definitely rather talk to her than maybe-drunk Isaac. So.

I open her video message before the new texts. It’s some girl—I think her friend Taylor—literally dancing on a table. Liz turns the camera on herself making a Can you believe? face. It’s hard to tell if she’s making fun of Taylor or laughing along. It’s hard not to feel jealous.

Liz: So how’s your party?
Liz: Aly?
Liz: Alyssa Rae, are you alive?
Liz: Oh, God. Did Isaac finally try to kiss you?
Alyssa: Hey, sorry
Alyssa: What??? No!!!
Liz: Okay, okay! I’m just saying, that’s happening.
Alyssa: It is not!!
Liz: Suuure. I’m from the future, remember? I can see things.
Alyssa: I like teleporting Liz way better than fake fortuneteller Liz

January 6

I swear I was getting ready for school, but it started to feel like too much. Struggling through math 2, Isaac’s neediness, no-phones-in-class—the only class I want to go to at all is choir, and that was barely enough to propel me out of bed. Now I’m lying on my stomach on the floor, half-dressed.

Alyssa: Uuuuuuugh I don’t want to go to schoooool
Liz: Hmm, how sad for you.
Liz: If only you lived somewhere with snow days.
Liz: Like Connecticut! Random example.
Alyssa: Hey, speaking of that. Your spring break is the same week as mine
Liz: Yeah…
Alyssa: So I was talking to my mom about spring break
Liz: YEAH…
Alyssa: So what if I came to visit?
Liz: !!!!!!! SHUT UP!!!!!!
Liz: Are you serious!??? Your mom said you can come??? I’ll ask my parents today!!!
Alyssa: ?
Liz: ???

I push myself up from the floor, pull a sweater over my head, and run down the hall to the kitchen, where Mom is examining a box of Pop Tarts.

“Breakfast to go?” she asks, shaking the box at me. “There’s bananas, too. Your lunch is in the fridge.”

“Thanks.” I grab a banana and turn to the fridge. The blast of cold air steels my resolve. “Hey, Mom. You know my friend Liz?”

“The girl from your choir class?”

“No, the one, uh—the one who watched Grey’s Anatomy with me?”

“Oh, your internet friend.”

I close the fridge behind me. “Yeah, my friend from Connecticut. So, her parents—did you know her dad is a pastor?”

Mom raises her eyebrows at me. “You may have mentioned that.”

“Right, they’re like…good people. Anyway, me and Liz have the same spring break, and her parents invited me to visit them that week, and I was wondering if I can go. Please say yes?”

She takes a long sip of coffee. She’s going to say no. Of course she’s going to say no. I clear my throat and try to turn it into a convincing cough so I can stay home sick to recover.

“I’d like to talk to her parents,” Mom says.

“You—what?”

“Liz’s parents. I’d like to have a conversation with them. Make sure they’re real?” She keeps her voice light, like she’s joking, and I know she’s not really, but it’s okay. She’s just being a mom. A good, great, amazing mom. I feel a smile creeping across my face.

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s not a no. For now.”

I throw my arms around her and don’t even care if she splashes coffee on my sweater and I have to walk around school like that all day. I can do that. I can do anything to make it to spring break.

January 10

Alyssa: So, I think our moms are about to be bffs
Liz: Oh my God, my parents are SO EXCITED. You’d think they were the ones about to meet their soultwin.
Alyssa: But they’re noooot, weeee aaaaare!!!!
Liz: WOOOOO
Liz: Gotta run, but I’ll video call when I’m home tonight and the adults can make their love connection. Cool?
Alyssa: Yep! After they approve the best spring break ever, are you free to watch something? I got a new bootleg…
Liz: omg shut up. What is it.
Alyssa: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Liz: Off-Broadway? Actual Broadway?
Alyssa: You’ll just have to see. Get excited…
Liz: OMG. DO YOU HAVE EVAN HANSON.
Alyssa: Oh, God, no. Not that excited.

*     *     *

“Are you sure she was going to call? Maybe they’re waiting for us to call them.”

I shake my head without looking up, eyes glued to the still screen of my phone. “No, she definitely said she’d call. She must just be running late. They probably thought we meant seven our time, not theirs.”

I want her to understand that Liz isn’t like that, she wouldn’t stand me up or forget about me.

Mom doesn’t point out that I’ve already said that three times or that it’s now 7:26 here. Which makes it 8:26 in Connecticut. It’s cool, I’m sure she just—something. There’s something dumb and we’ll all be laughing about it soon. Any minute.

A little before 7:45, Mom stands and picks her book up from the coffee table. “I’m going to go read in bed,” she says. “Come get me if she calls, okay?”

“I’m sure she’ll call,” I reply, fast. And then, finally, the thought occurs to me, and I look up from the phone screen with wide eyes. “Oh, my God, Mom—do you think something happened? Like, to one of her parents? Medical emergency?”

“I certainly hope not. I’ll pray for them, all right?” She leans down to give me a hug, made awkward by me hunching over the phone. “Love you, Lyss. I hope she calls soon.”

By the time I realize that Mom feels sorry for me, she’s in her bedroom with the door closed. I want her to understand that Liz isn’t like that, she wouldn’t stand me up or forget about me. I mean, one day last year we were supposed to talk after my choir concert and she got invited out at the last minute and did that instead. But she at least texted me about it. And we barely knew each other then, not like now.

I’ll tell her in the morning. Liz wouldn’t do this to me.

January 11

“Mr. Matthews told me you failed the EOC last semester.”

Startled, I look up to stare at Isaac. “What? Did not. Why would he tell you that, even if I had?”

“Because he knew you wouldn’t listen if he tried to tell you. Because you haven’t heard anything anyone’s said to you all day. Because you’re off in Lyssa Land?”

I roll my eyes and shove my phone in my pocket. “You’re such a baby.”

“You’re such a baby,” he mimics in a baby voice.

“Wow, Isaac, I forgot how much fun you are to talk to,” I snap. “You’re totally right, I should pay attention to you all the time.”

Isaac opens his mouth, closes it again. He takes a fry off my paper plate. He wants to call me a bitch, because I’m being one. He won’t, though.

“You’re being kind of bitchy,” he says. Quietly, mumbling, around a mouthful of soggy potato, but still. It surprises me.

And it gives me an excuse to get out of here. I shove my chair back from our cafeteria table.

“Hey, hang on, sorry.” Isaac pats my empty seat. “No more fry stealing. No more name calling. Stick around.”

“No, thanks.”

“You’ve just been weird all day. I get it, I know you’re worried about Lacy.” He winces right away because he knows I know he knows her name is Liz; who’s the bitch?

I leave the fries. He doesn’t try to call me back again as I exit.

*     *     *

Alyssa: Starting to get worried. Please call me or something?

*     *     *

Ten minutes left of lunch. I sit against the wall next to the water fountain between the gym and the science wing, where I can stay hidden if I skip my next class, and consider the possibilities.

One: Liz’s phone died/broke/got stolen. Only she would have gotten in touch with me some other way.

Two: Liz is mad at me. That would be new, her being so mad at me that she would ghost me like this. But it can’t be anything we wouldn’t be able to fix.

Three:

The sixty-second warning bell rings. I jump to my feet and run for my next class. No reason to skip unless something was happening, some major, life-changing thing. And it’s not.

*     *     *

Alyssa: If I did something to make you mad, I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean to.

*     *     *

Nicole comes up to me before the bell rings for choir to start. I’m slumped in my rehearsal chair, arms crossed over my stomach, giving off the strongest leave me alone vibe I can manage. I don’t look up as she approaches, or when she stops a foot or so away, or when she clears her throat like maybe I’m ignoring her by accident.

“Hey,” she says. “You okay?”

“Did Isaac get you to ask me that?”

She doesn’t answer, which means yes.

“Tell him I don’t want to talk to him, either,” I say. To her credit, she not only takes the hint, she spreads the word. No one comes near me for the rest of class.

*     *     *

Alyssa: Was it weird, inviting myself there for spring break? That was too much, right? Did your parents think it was weird? I’m sorry. We don’t have to…whatever. Anything.

*     *     *

I stare at my face in the grimy bathroom mirror. Nothing’s wrong, I keep reminding myself. I don’t know what happened, but that doesn’t mean something Happened.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

Mirror Alyssa nods.

“She’s going to call you soon.”

Mirror Alyssa nods again, but she looks a little skeptical.

*     *     *

Alyssa: Please text me back.

*     *     *

The third time my mom suggests it after dinner, I give in. I’ll video call her. She has an Android, or maybe even like a Windows phone or something, and I know it gives her problems sometimes. Maybe she’s receiving stuff but can’t send anything, so an incoming video call would go through, in theory.

There’s half a ring and then it disconnects. Her phone isn’t even turned on.

January 12

Alyssa: Is this like the time I trash talked Captain America on my blog and you stopped talking to me?
Alyssa: I went back through my blog and I haven’t really ranted about anything lately, so I can’t figure out what it could be. Maybe I said something harsh on a video call?
Alyssa: If it’s something like that, you can tell me, okay?

*     *     *

Isaac asks if I’m free after school and there’s no reason to say I’m not. Plus, he says we can do whatever I want to do. He feels bad about yesterday, even though he was right, mostly.

We watch my bootleg of Anastasia. It’s not awesome, but I pretend to be super into it every time Isaac gives me a sideways look to see if I think it’s awesome. It’s like I’m punishing him, even though I invited him over to try to make up for being the way I was being at school. I can’t decide what to feel about him.

He falls asleep on my shoulder. I wake him up for the final number. I don’t tag along when my mom drives him home.

I feel so guilty about watching the bootleg without Liz, I throw up in the toilet.

She still hasn’t texted by the time I fall asleep, sometime after one in the morning. Sometime after two, in Connecticut.

January 13

Friends of Liz,

I don’t know how to write this post. I almost didn’t. But that seemed too shitty, so. Here’s something shitty that I hope will at least be better than radio silence.

Liz passed away the night of the 10^th. I don’t think she suffered, it was fast, from what I heard.

Her blog is going to stay up because I think she’d want that. She loved a lot of weird shit, so this is kind of like…a memorial to all her weird obsessions. It won’t be updated after this, obviously, but it will be here. If that helps.

If you were friends with Liz irl, there will be funeral details and everything posted to her facebook as soon as that’s all sorted out.

I’m sorry there’s not more to say. I love her. I miss her.

-Taylor (Liz’s friend)

I keep refreshing the page and it keeps staying the same. The pastel orange background, the icon of her standing by the ocean in a hoodie. The post. Every time I refresh.

January 14

I can’t go to school. I can’t even get out of bed.

Mom bugs me about it—“What’s wrong? If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I can’t do anything about it.”—until I show her the post on my phone. She gets really quiet. She runs her hand over my hair and I don’t shake her off. I think she cries; I hear her sniffle. I haven’t cried, still.

After a while, she puts the phone down on my nightstand and leaves, because it turns out she can’t do anything about it no matter what.

January 15

Alyssa: I swear to God Liz if this is a prank or some kind of “joke”
Alyssa: I know some of your friends there have awful senses of humor but this is too mean
Alyssa: Was it Taylor’s idea?
Alyssa: Do you know that what I keep thinking about is her being the one who knows your blog password?

The tears that haven’t come for days are waterfalling now, and it feels unfair because they’re not even the sad tears she deserves, they’re hot huge angry tears because I am so angry at Isaac, and that Liz’s tears showed up for him instead just makes me cry harder.

January 16

Mom says two sick days at the beginning of the semester is enough. She’s right, and she sounds sorry, but I still slam the door when I leave to catch the bus. It makes me feel better for two seconds.

Isaac is all over me as soon as I walk through the front door. He’s all, “Oh my God, where have you been, were you sick, you look fine, well actually you look really tired, sorry I’m not trying to be an ass, but you didn’t answer my texts, what happened to you that you wouldn’t tell your best friend,” and I just open my locker and pull out my books because I don’t have the energy for him right now, and when I close the locker he’s looking at me like I am so stupid, and it makes me take a step backward.

“It’s your imaginary friend,” he says. “Right? What, did you like, have a fight about which guy on whatever TV show is the hottest and she set her status to offline?”

The last couple of words die out and the look on his face says that the look on mine is bad. The tears that haven’t come for days are waterfalling now, and it feels unfair because they’re not even the sad tears she deserves, they’re hot huge angry tears because I am so angry at Isaac, and that Liz’s tears showed up for him instead just makes me cry harder.

“Hey,” he says. “Lyssa, no, I’m s—”

“Don’t.” I smack away his hand when he reaches for me. “You’re not sorry. And I hate ‘Lyssa.’”

“What? No you don’t. I’ve always called you Lyssa.”

“I’ve always hated it!” I’m screaming, having a full-on meltdown in the sophomore locker hallway, and I can’t stop. “Alyssa is my name, and I like Aly, which you should know if you love me so much. But you don’t, Isaac. You’re just here.” The word breaks my voice, breaks something in my heart that was holding on by a thread. “You’re not my best friend. You’re just here. You’re still here.”

*     *     *

Isaac: Alyssa, please pick up. Your mom told me about Liz. I’m so sorry.
Isaac: Come on. Please. You know me. I have a big, stupid mouth. You know I didn’t mean it.

January 18

Alyssa: I tried to video call you again. Dunno why. Your phone is off.
Alyssa: Tried to find your parents, like on Facebook, but you know what? I don’t know your last name. Mine is Robinson. I’ve been trying to think of who I should tell that, in case…whatever. I can’t think of anyone.
Alyssa: I checked your blog but the same post is still the most recent thing. I don’t even know how to get in touch with Taylor.

*     *     *

There’s a text from Mom on my phone when I check after first block. She loves me so much and she’s praying for me. She sent it right after I left the house, but my phone’s been on silent. She’s worried about me. I’m worried about me, too.

I don’t want to feel this bad anymore. But I’m also afraid of who I’ll be when I start to not feel this bad.

January 21

Alyssa: Was your funeral nice? Is that a good thing to wish for a funeral? Is your mom doing okay? I don’t know if my mom would be. She’s barely okay now. I wish you were here to talk about it. If you could just skip the dead thing for a while? I’d be okay with haunting.

January 25

Alyssa: I really miss you, Liz.

January 26

The look on Isaac’s face when I sit down at our table almost makes me laugh. If I wasn’t still mad at him and also so sad forever.

“Mind if I sit here?”

“Of course.” He grimaces. “I mean, of course not. I don’t mind. Of course you can sit here.”

“Chill, God.”

We spend most of lunch in silence, him watching me, me watching my sandwich. He asks how the semester’s going; I shrug because I haven’t really been paying attention. He tells a story about something Nicole did in P.E. I laugh in the pauses. I try to figure out if I missed him or just couldn’t spend another day sitting in the corner of the library. He doesn’t mention Liz.

Until the bell rings and we file out toward the lockers.

“Ly—” He cuts himself off. “Alyssa. I really am sorry about your friend. I want to… Just, I don’t know. If you need anything, I’m, uh. Here.”

I nod, perform something like a smile. “Thanks. I know.”

He lifts his arms in my direction, and I’m surprised by how relieved I feel when I step into the hug. I rest my cheek on his shoulder and just breathe, and I feel better. Not good. Definitely better.

As I pull away, Isaac starts to turn his face. Toward my face. With his eyes closed and his mouth doing something that looks like—

“Oh, my God! You are not trying to kiss me!”

He jumps back like I’m electric, and I might be. “No! I mean, maybe, but only because—I thought, I don’t know, you seemed…”

“Sad,” I provide after he trails off. “Really fucking sad because my friend is dead and my other friend is acting like a jealous asshole about it.”

He’s the one who walks away from me. Good.

*     *    *

Alyssa: Dear Liz. You were right, you bitch. Isaac tried to kiss me today. Basically because I’m sad about you. Did you know that would be part of it, in your super special fortune telling?
Alyssa: I have to stop being sad about you. I mean, I’ll never stop being sad about you. But I can’t keep doing this thing where I visit your blog all the time and keep checking for texts from you in the middle of classes and, like, don’t pay attention to my life. My Texas life. You know? So. I’m writing to say goodbye.
Alyssa: It sucks so much that I didn’t get to say goodbye to you.
Alyssa: Or tell you about stupid Isaac and his stupid kiss face. How did you know? And what am I supposed to do now?
Alyssa: I love you. Bye, Liz. <3 Alyssa

January 28

One (1) New Message: Liz

I can’t stop staring at my phone. It’s out on my desk, which is not really allowed in this class, but I can’t put it away. If I don’t check every couple of seconds, the message will disappear. Or I’ll wake up? Neither of which I want. Both of which I want. I feel sick.

It’s Liz’s number. I checked. Double-checked.

Two (2) New Messages: Liz

I get yelled at three times to put my phone away. I spend lunch in the bathroom, staring between myself in the mirror and the name of the ghost on my phone. Can’t open it. Can’t leave it sitting there. Finally, I lock myself in a stall.

Liz: Alyssa?
Liz: Sorry to text you from this number, I know that’s shitty. I’m finally going through some of her stuff, and I saw your messages. This is Taylor.
Alyssa: Liz’s Taylor?
Liz: Ha, yeah. That’s funny. She called you her Alyssa.
Liz: Not funny, I guess. Sorry. Sorry, this is so weird, probably.
Liz: I just wanted to…I don’t know. Can I text you?
Alyssa: ???
Liz: I mean from my phone. Instead of this.
Alyssa: Oh. Yeah. Yeah, please.
Liz: k. I’m in class now, but I’ll text you later.

January 29

Isaac is getting annoyed with me ignoring him through lunch to text. Pre-failed-kiss Isaac would ask if I’d moved on to a new imaginary friend already. New Year’s Isaac would whine that I would rather talk to literally anyone than him. This Isaac just eats his chicken nuggets.

It’s weird. Texting Taylor. Like we don’t really have anything to say to each other that’s not about our mutual dead friend, and neither of us wants to bring it up. But there’s only so much hey, how’s it going I can take.

Alyssa: Hey, so, I don’t mean to be a bitch, but I just need to ask. What happened? To Liz?
Taylor: Car crash. She was in the backseat. Her parents are okay. Well, they’re not, but you know what I mean.
Alyssa: That’s it? A car crash? Some drunk asshole running a red light?
Taylor: Sober asshole. But yeah.
Alyssa: That’s…so stupid.
Taylor: Weak, right? Don’t you feel like she deserved something cooler than that?
Alyssa: Or, like, to not die.
Taylor: Or that.
Alyssa: That is seriously unfair, though. She would’ve been so pissed.
Taylor: I know, right?

January 30

Taylor: You know Liz was a writer?
Alyssa: Um. I was her first reader for every fanfic she wrote.
Taylor: Right.
Taylor: I mean, I read her stuff, too.
Alyssa: k.
Taylor: Anyway. She was working on something. A fic for one of the superhero shows, I think.
Alyssa: I know.
Taylor: I figured you knew. I’m trying to, like.
Taylor: I can’t find it.
Alyssa: What?
Taylor: She never posted it, and I looked for it on her computer but her file names are so random, and I can’t find it. And I need to read it. You know?
Alyssa: I have it. I’ll send it to you.
Taylor: Really?
Alyssa: Yeah, of course. Give me a sec
Taylor: Thank you.
Alyssa: It’s really, really good
Taylor: Of course it is.

*     *     *

“Is the chicken that bad?”

I’ve barely touched dinner, but Mom’s smiling when I look up. I still say sorry and set the phone down.

“You and Isaac are getting along again?”

“Huh?”

“Isaac,” she says, pointing her fork at the phone. “Your thumbs are flying. Friends again?”

“Because I only have one friend who could possibly text me?”

She gives me a look that’s somewhere between rolling her eyes at me and afraid she’s actually upset me. “I just noticed he hasn’t been around lately.”

I chew until she breaks eye contact. After I swallow, I say, “Texting a girl in my bio class about homework.”

Mom makes a joke about hoping she’s helping me and not the other way around. I don’t know why I lied. It’s a little embarrassing, maybe, hanging onto my dead friend’s friend like a lifeline. Maybe a little scary. And maybe I want to keep this for myself, for a while. Just to be safe.

*     *     *

Taylor: Still awake over there?
Alyssa: It’s earlier here, ha
Taylor: No, I know. 1:30 is still on the late side. Unless you’re more of a party animal than Liz said.
Alyssa: Not a party animal. But yeah, awake. Hard to sleep lately.
Taylor: I get that.
Taylor: I don’t want to make it weird…er, but I just feel like I should tell you, in case you need to hear it, that Liz really loved you.
Taylor: She talked about you all the time. You meant a lot to her.
Taylor: Alyssa? Sorry, if that was too much.
Alyssa: No, that’s. Thanks. I did need that.
Taylor: Okay. Cool.
Alyssa: Same for you. I could tell how important you were to her even without, like, being around. If that makes sense. I mean, I’m sure you know.
Taylor: I do know. But it still helps.
Taylor: This helps too.
Alyssa: Yeah.

January 31

“Anastasia sucked.”

Isaac ignores me. Or he didn’t hear me, since I’m whispering from the row behind him. No talking in choir rehearsal, even if Ms. Brush is working with the sopranos across the room. I kick the underside of his chair.

“What?” he mutters.

“I said Anastasia sucked. The bootleg sucked, you couldn’t hear half the dialogue, and the show itself was like—weird and bad.”

“I thought you loved it.”

“So what?” I poke him between the shoulder blades. “You obviously didn’t love it. Why would you act like you did?”

“I don’t know.” A small shrug. “I was trying to be nice to you.”

“I don’t want you to be nice to me. I just want you to be a person. A real person. And treat me like a real person. A person who has other friends and feels sad when they die and watches bad musicals for fun. Stop making this an imaginary friendship.”

“I’m—not trying to.”

“I know. Prove it.”

It comes out a little too loud and Ms. Brush finally looks our way. “Ms. Robinson,” she snaps, “you and Mr. Siegel can talk later, when I’m not directing my choir. Yes?”

“Yes,” I call back, with my best apology face. “We can talk later.” I tug the hem of the sleeve of his T-shirt, and he exhales in a way that probably means we’ll be fine.

*     *     *

Alyssa: Can I ask you another question? Sorry, lots of questions.
Taylor: No worries.
Alyssa: What was Liz’s last name?
Taylor: Walsh.
Taylor: Did you want the link to her obit?
Alyssa: I’ll look it up. Maybe not today.

*     *     *

I last 35 minutes before I Google for Liz’s obituary. It sucks.

Elizabeth Caitlyn Walsh passed away on January 10. She was a junior at Lakefront High School. She is survived by her parents, Mr. Stephen Walsh and Mrs. Joanna Walsh. Elizabeth was a joy to all who knew her and will be missed by many friends and loved ones as she joins the angels.

Then, for the first time, I type Liz Walsh into Facebook’s search. Her profile picture is a side-profile selfie, black-and-white, intensely dramatic in a way that may or may not be ironic. It’s so Liz. It hurts.

The posts on her wall hurt in a really different way.

Lizzie girl can’t believe you’re gone!!!! You were my best friend, don’t know what I’ll do without you!!!

the world and fourth block aren’t the same without you…rip

BFFs 4 life (and after) R.I.P.

thanks for the sunset yesterday!! Don’t know how you know I needed that xo

There’s one post from a Taylor, but it’s a grainy picture of a rainbow with some fake-cursive text about smiling from heaven. Definitely not Liz’s Taylor. Of course, there isn’t a post from Liz’s Alyssa, either.

*    *     *

Alyssa: The facebook…
Taylor: Oh, God, no. You saw the facebook.
Alyssa: Who even are those people? I mean, I obviously don’t know them, but…who are
they?
Taylor: “the world needs to know I was the dead girl’s bestest friend”
Alyssa: As if that wasn’t you.
Taylor: It was YOU.
Alyssa: We can totally go BFF halfsies. It’s what angel Liz would want.
Taylor: Maybe she’ll send us a thunderstorm to confirm.
Taylor: My last name’s Burke, by the way. Just so you know.
Alyssa: Alyssa Robinson. I like Aly.
Taylor: Nice to “meet” you, Aly.
Alyssa: Nice to meet you, Taylor Burke.

Catey Miller lives with her wonderful husband and hound dog in Wilmington, North Carolina. She received her BFA and MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Aside from writing, she enjoys making cards, experimenting with eyeshadow, playing bass in her church band, and watching and tweeting about lots of TV. You can read more melancholy YA short stories from her in Youth Imagination, Young Adult Review Network (YARN), and Hunger Mountain.

[fiction]

It’s getting dark and my arms are crawling with goosebumps. My butt is pretty much asleep at this point too, which makes it nearly impossible to get comfortable in this here stupid tree. The branch I’m on is like Mom’s eggshell mattress topper only the eggshells are more like little rocks. Like sitting on the moon, I bet. But there ain’t no moon tonight and ain’t no way I’m climbing down, so I’ll just sit here on this tree-moon-planet until some spaceship takes me away or until Mom can pick me and Erin up tomorrow morning.

The yard at Dad’s house is cluttered with car parts, so it’s kind of like I’m stuck on a prop in a sci-fi junk yard. The wind is sharp and eerie, so it’s the perfect set for my movie. Dad is the villain on his imperial base and I’m here on my own base hiding from his screaming and bad breath. My character’s name is Princess John because this is my movie and I can be whatever I want to be.

The dress I have with me is a uniform, a cape, a banner of rebellion. I think of climbing higher and letting it flutter like a victory flag. A flag that says, You won’t climb up here, you fat baboon. But instead, I use it as a makeshift blanket when the sun fully vanishes from the sky and the air gets deep-space cold. It’s not a great blanket, but it’s something. More like one of those cloth napkins you put on your lap at fancy restaurants, only bigger and pinker. A pretty astronaut-suit that fans out like an umbrella and carries me to different space-age places, yet can easily transform into a leg warmer.

Before it was a leg warmer, it was the cosmic pageant gown I borrowed from Erin. But then big bad wolf saw me fluttering away in the dress, in the room Erin and I sleep in when we have to visit him. I thought the wolf was going to laugh like Erin was, but instead, he picked me up like he does when he’s going to throw me in the air like a rocket ship, and instead of tossing me upward, he dropped me on the floor and ripped the mystic garment over my head.

My character’s name is Princess John because this is my movie and I can be whatever I want to be.

“Get dressed,” he said with his breath, throwing at my chest the shorts and shirt that were in a ball on the floor. Then he stormed out of the room with thumps and bumps and hammer sounds. The magic was gone.

“You better put your boy clothes back on before he comes back,” Erin said.

I gave her a look.

“I told you not to wear my dress,” she sighed.

“You did so tell me to put it on,” I said.

“Well, I was just joking,” she said, now flicking at the screen of her iPad.

When I put on my clothes and the baboon-wolf came back, I grabbed the dress from the floor and teleported to the back yard where I climbed the tree and became Princess John the Magnificent Space Detective.

I guess I am lucky stink-mouth made me change into my Earth-boy clothes. They are warmer than the dress alone. But the dress is more a type of armor than another layer of clothing anyway. More like a shield of honor in this wasteland of car parts and Miller High Life. Of bad breath and divorce.

If I lean a certain way, I can see the TV in the bad man’s dungeon. I know it’s late from the show that’s on and I wish I was back in bed even if I have to share it with Erin. There’s not much else I can do, so I curl into the moon-rock bark and drape the dress over my head like a veil. Princess John on his wedding day.

I sit there leaning and wiggling and trying to get comfortable. After a bit, I start to drift off to sleep. In and out like it is sometimes.

And then I’m startled awake by someone lifting the veil over my head. Like it’s time for the prince to kiss Princess John. Only it’s not a prince and I nearly shake myself off the branch when I see the alien space-baboon of fatherhood. He’s standing on the little ladder he used to use at Mom’s house to hang Christmas lights, only there’s no glow on his face and December is still three years away.

“Let’s go, kid. You made your point,” the alien says, removing the dress from my head and wrapping it around his neck like a scarf.

Wolf-creature-space-breath picks me up with his large alien paws. Easy, like gravity is practically zero. I want to fight as he drags me to his lair, but I know there’s not much I can do. It’s late and I’m tired and so is he. The moon is somewhere in the sky but I can’t see it. All I see is ground as Dad steps over space junk and walks inside the house.

While I’m in the bathroom letting go of everything I had to hold in out there, I can hear Erin throwing a fit when the monster with shoulder hair tells her to put the iPad away. She’s whining like only a sister can whine, but quickly calms down after she sees me back inside and back on planet Earth. She scooches over to make room in the bed.

Wolf-creature-space-breath picks me up with his large alien paws. Easy, like gravity is practically zero.

After we’re settled, Dad stands in the doorway like the baboon he is with his hairy finger perched on the light switch. He gives us a little smile with his dragon teeth.

“Night, Dad,” Erin says all cutesy, as if there wasn’t a yeti standing in the doorway.

“Good night, princess,” Dad says all dad-like.

And then he looks at me with those baboon eyes and I look back at him with mine.

“You too, princess,” he says to me, and Erin starts cracking up. And that makes Dad crack up, which makes me laugh a laugh so deep in my body it might as well be from outer space.

“All right,” he says. “That’s enough.”

When he closes the door, Erin and I are trapped in darkness, but the darkness doesn’t seem as heavy as darkness can sometimes get.

Erin wiggles herself into the mattress, her face toward the wall. I pivot myself the other way and stare at the light leaking in from under the door. It reminds me of a UFO. A UFO waiting to take us away once the wildebeest falls asleep.

When I close my eyes, I can still see the strip of light behind my eyelids. I stare at it and watch it grow brighter each time I squint. After some time, the light dims and I’m lifted high above the trees. The light intensifies again and I am weightless.

Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection, Morning Time in the Household, Looking Out (Aldrich Press, 2013), and the children’s picture book, Uma the Umbrella. His work can be found in Maudlin House, The Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, Sundog Lit, and others.

[fiction]

The gravel churns under the wheels of the boxed-up Peugeot, the sound falling behind them into a quiet that exists where cities do not. Abbey checks her hair with her fingers. She’s learned how to turn it in a twist and secure it behind her head, letting chunks fall from the barrette and tickle her neckline. Céleste’s pale face pushes forward over the steering wheel, her bare arms painted with freckles and her invisible lashes blackened with thick layers of mascara.

“Shit,” Céleste says, turning quickly to check between the seats behind her. “I forgot my crown.”

The back seat is piled high with trays of food, tablecloths, blankets, and bundles of candlesticks. The lacey chocolate chip cookies Abbey baked that morning are wrapped in a plate and wedged at a slant in between champagne bottles stacked from the car floor. Céleste’s parents provided the champagne for the party.

“How sad. The birthday girl has no crown,” Céleste says. She is turning twenty-two.

Céleste’s friend from law school, Sébastien, has arranged for her to borrow his parents’ country house for the weekend. The parents, Céleste explains to Abbey, spend every summer weekend and all of August out there.

“His papa is working on an historical novel set in Brittany’s salty meadows, but in November and throughout the winter the house is empty.”

It’s raining when they arrive. The precipitation falls from a sky the color of paper bags, and as they pull up to the house, gray birds shoot from the slick slate roof as if the slate itself takes off in flight.

“We have two hours to get everything set up before the guests arrive,” Céleste says as she backs the car up to the side door.

*     *     *

Last August, Abbey left her suburban New Hampshire town to attend an American high school in France. She would spend nine months living with Céleste’s family—strangers to her, assigned by her study-abroad program—in Rennes, a small city several hours west of Paris.

All fall, she rode the subway to school, first walking past the low-rise apartment buildings where Muslim women pinned wet laundry over their cement balconies, their muted scarves flapping in the fickle breezes. She exited the subway at the botanical gardens and passed by the hundreds of varieties of roses, their dark green petals trembling under the weight of daily falling raindrops, but it was the dirty, perspiring windows of the city greenhouse—the layers and layers of neglected grime—that made Abbey want to run home just before arriving at her school building and rub off the suffocating city filth from her skin.

The high school was housed in an elegant brick building that smelled of mildew and adolescent sweat. Students laughed their way up creaky stairs to alcoved classrooms where they studied Existentialism and Dadaism and pined away for the familiarity of America, waiting for the mail to be delivered and distributed each day by the program secretary, Madame Dalfine. From what Abbey could tell, however, most of the Americans at her new school transitioned easily to the sophistication of French life; and besides, in the US they attended fancy boarding schools and did drugs and had boyfriends and girlfriends. In New Hampshire, Abbey had worked at a small farm stand, had never held a boy’s hand.

At night, Abbey helped her host mother make mayonnaise or salad dressing, or she sliced pieces of baguette over a plastic tablecloth for dinner while, for hours, her host brother chased the chocolate puppy up and down a narrow hallway running from the front door to the small bathroom at the back of the house, saliva flinging sideways from the dog’s droopy lips and splattering on the walls. Abbey’s host father, Roland, spent an hour with her each night looking down past his swollen, pockmarked nose across the pages of her school notebooks, correcting her French spelling with a blueberry-ink plastic fountain pen and taking personal offense over her illegible American handwriting.

Céleste usually came home late from her law school, sharing news with her mother before folding herself deep into the couch cushions in front of the television set to watch classic black-and-white Hollywood movies, from time to time declaring certain actors and actresses “Genius.” Sometimes Abbey would stand under the doorframe in the living room, listening to the dubbed French jumping over the American actors’ lips on the small television, wishing Céleste would talk to her, acknowledge her in some meaningful way.

*     *     *

The main room of the country house is a cave-like space under high ceilings, built with cool, round stones. Abbey and Céleste move a long, thick-legged table—squat and sturdy like a country workhorse, and prairie-bleached—to the side of the room where dinner will be served; twenty guests will fit there, easily. They move the chairs to clear the middle of the room for dancing.

“I’ll set the table,” Abbey says. She unfolds the tablecloths and lays out the mismatched china Céleste has borrowed from multiple friends. The wine glasses ring hollow and squeak between her fingers when she unwraps them from the crate. Céleste sets up the blankets in the bedrooms, and the smell of a moist, impending winter cold creeps up Abbey’s bare legs and under her nose. They are saving the lighting of the fire for when Sébastien gets there; the large stone fireplace stands taller than either of them.

*     *     *

While Abbey’s friends back home rode shotgun in boys’ cars to keg parties after Friday night football games, Abbey hid under the low-hanging eaves of a makeshift guest room listening to the water heater behind the bedroom wall and imagining a world of experiences just beyond her reach…

Abbey’s high school friends were almost hostile toward her decision to spend their junior year abroad. “You’ll miss everything,” they said at the end of the summer. One of her friends had recently started fooling around with a senior soccer player, meeting up with him after summer preseason practices and laying her body across the damp pine needles that carpeted the woods behind the school.

“I lost my underpants out by Edson’s Pond,” the friend confided, and the rest of the girls pulled her into the Friendly’s bathroom, demanding details. “Well,” the friend said, suddenly shy, maybe coy, “I can’t really say more. Not yet.” But Abbey saw the girl’s smile freeze for a second and her eyes darken before her confidence returned. “I’ll tell you soon! I promise! Let me get used to it first.”

This new development seemed to open up an entirely new social landscape for them for the upcoming school year.

“Abbey, you can’t leave us now,” they said. “Ricky Babson’s parents are headed out of town for Labor Day weekend, and Mike Joncey said we were invited over. Ricky’s older brother is setting him up with beer and everything.”

“I can’t believe you’ll be on a plane. To France! You’ll miss the party.”

“And football season.”

“And the Casino Night fundraiser. My mom promised she wouldn’t volunteer this year.”

“And getting your license! When you get back, we’ll have been driving around by ourselves for a year, and you’ll still need to apply for your learner’s permit.”

*     *     *

“Abbey, coucou, you need lipstick. Let me do it.” Céleste has brought her bag to the dining table, and takes out a gold case. She slips the lid off, metallic plastic popping open a faint suction, and she touches Abbey’s bottom lip with a cherry stick smelling of petroleum and elderflowers. Abbey’s chest rises and falls with a shallow breath, the nerves from her lips radiating warmth below her jawline and out to her ears.

She wears a stretchy green top and a pleated wool skirt, no stockings. In the U.S., her friends always said she had the sexiest legs. Her feet slip forward in heels she borrowed from her host mother. The week before, she bought a glass ring from a Tunisian street vendor in the center of town. It is translucent with cuts of red and blue swirling around the interior. At the time, Abbey had felt very French purchasing that ring, but Céleste’s fingers are bare and adorned only with chipping nail polish, and the weight of the glass bauble is distracting.

*     *     *

Céleste ignored Abbey for three months. While Abbey made mayonnaise by beating egg yolks with a fork until they emulsified, Céleste was at the bars with friends. While Abbey swallowed her gag reflex as her host father’s mossy breath spread around her school papers, Céleste watched her favorite movies and then let the front door snap behind her when she headed back out into the late night. While Abbey’s friends back home rode shotgun in boys’ cars to keg parties after Friday night football games, Abbey hid under the low-hanging eaves of a makeshift guest room listening to the water heater behind the bedroom wall and imagining a world of experiences just beyond her reach, in a language she barely spoke.

And then, in November and without warning, Céleste announced to the family her plans for a birthday party in the country. She would invite her friends from law school; Sébastien had just the house for such a celebration. She would cook the food ahead of time and borrow what she needed from friends.

“Abbey, you will need a pair of heels for the party,” she said. And just like that, Abbey saw the door swing open, her life about to start. “Do you know how to make chocolate chip cookies?”

The morning of the party, Abbey baked the cookies without baking soda on papery tinfoil and watched through the oven window as they spread paper-thin to the on-off ticking sound of the gas line. Abbey peeled strips of foil from the backs of molten sugar and chocolate and wondered if Céleste would tell her not to come. But the birthday girl didn’t even look at the cookies when it was time to pack up the car to go.

*     *     *

The party guests arrive all at once: women in short black dresses brimming with silk scarves, men in blue jeans and starched white shirts. They bring into the stone house bottles of wine, chirpy greetings, and a shared sexual bravado. The Christmas lights Céleste and Abbey strung around the room blur under a tobacco haze to dot the air with a magical forest glow. Abbey stands mute amidst the noise, her nose running slightly from the rising body heat filling the room.

A man with deep russet cheekbones and chestnut hair talks with Sébastien by the roaring fire. Sébastien is taller, but the other man swings his hips while he gestures with his cigarette and commands more of the space. Céleste kisses them both on the cheeks and then kisses the man once more on the lips. She takes her time rubbing her lipstick off him. He leans over her, whispering, and Céleste threads her arm through his and leads him to where Abbey is standing alone.

“Abbey, chérie, I would like to introduce you to Paul.” Céleste brushes him gently on the chest. “He would like to try some of your flat cookies.”

Paul takes a long drag from his cigarette and cracks open the corner of his mouth while he looks intently into Abbey’s face. Smoke escapes from his lips in a narrow sheet of white. He is one of those people who make fun through their eyes.

“Enchanté, Abbey.”

“When Abbey first moved in with my family, I told her that she looks like the film actress, Deanna Durbin, but she had no idea who I was talking about.” Céleste taps the tip of her own nose. “Deanna Durbin: the American beauty. My God!”

Paul continues to look at Abbey, and Abbey runs a hangnail across the wool pleats in her skirt.

“But Deanna Durbin moved to Paris when her career was over. So perhaps we should consider her French,” Paul says.

Céleste laughs. “Imbécil.”

*     *     *

Paul sits next to Abbey at the long table for dinner.

When Céleste brings out the food, the guests whoop and holler, and the men bang on the uneven wood with their hands. Céleste pats above her flaming Titian hair, as if to adjust the crown she forgets is not there.

Paul and Abbey find a tiny library at the far end of the house, and in it, an entire shelf of erotica.

They pass around shells filled with Coquilles St. Jacques, the buttery breadcrumbs browned over lumps of sweet scallops. People use slices of baguette to wipe their shells clean, and then clink their forks and knives against plates piled high with bright green lettuce glistening in a mustard vinaigrette. The candlelight reflects on the surface of wine in glasses, tiny tilting windows of moonlight at the table in the country house at night.

Abbey tries hard to understand the rapid back-and-forth exchanges over politics and history. A piece of lettuce falls from her fork just as she opens her mouth, and she snatches it from the tablecloth and eats it quickly with her fingers, glancing at Céleste at the head of the table. A woman is swinging her arms over her head, and Céleste claps slowly, her bright red lips parted against pale skin that glows luminescent like the powdery wings of an evening moth. She doesn’t seem to notice Abbey.

Paul snaps across the table at a laughing friend. “Ai, oh! More wine for the American.” He winks at Abbey. “In France, even the children drink wine with dinner.”

Céleste leaves the table and returns with a tray of cheeses.

“To the birthday girl!” someone shouts, and Céleste addresses the guests, “Dis donc. Ce soir, vous m’appelez la Reine.”

There is dancing after dinner. Paul keeps his hand on the small of Abbey’s back and his nose nuzzled in her hair. When he breathes out, dime-sized circles of moist heat disappear into her scalp. The room pulses with techno music and smells like the subway at the end of the day: a bitter body odor that lingers in Abbey’s throat. Empty champagne bottles roll across the floor.

Paul whispers in her ear, “Let’s explore the farmhouse.”

They pass through the small kitchen where two women scrape plates into a plastic garbage can, their voices sharp with gossip. One of the women looks into a spoon and pinches her cheeks, makes an O with her mouth. Paul kisses her from behind on the back of her neck before he hops through the galley like a faun, holding Abbey’s hand. The spoon hits the linoleum.

“Paul! Shit, you made me drop a spoon.”

Paul shields his eyes and lifts Abbey under his other arm to carry her onward. She scrunches her toes to keep her heels from falling off.

“Paul, be nice to that poor girl!”

Abbey covers her mouth to hide her smile, the attention and wine brewing warmly inside her like the coffee smells that fill the kitchen.

Overnight bags have been thrown into each of the small bedrooms. Paul and Abbey find a tiny library at the far end of the house, and in it, an entire shelf of erotica. The din of the party seeps under the door like an echo while they put their heads together and laugh, Abbey’s head spinning in circles. When Paul sits down on the desk, he pulls her between his legs, his jeans heavy with detergent against her bare thighs. He holds a book of erotica to the side and directs his pointy nose into its pages like a professor.

“Oh là!” he says, quickly shutting the book with a loud smack. “I don’t know if you’re old enough for this pornography.” And shaking his finger, “You Americans lead sheltered lives.”

His eyes flash amusement, and then, very slowly and holding her gaze, he draws a long line from the base of her neck down her spine to the split in her behind. Scaly goose bumps blossom in waves under her dress. She draws a quick breath.

“On second thought,” he says, smiling, “this is part of your French education, no?” Abbey raises her eyebrows and makes a face she’s never felt before. “Maybe I’d better translate it into English so you don’t miss the good bits.”

The author is Anaïs Nin, someone Abbey’s never heard of, and it is the dirtiest book she has ever read. The words slurp up from the page through his accent and cover her with slowly running liquid metal.

Pierre’s mouth gathered the fresh foam between her legs, but he would not let her reach her pleasure. He teased her.

Must from the books tickles the air. Abbey’s underpants are still twisted from when Paul carried her under his arm, and now one half bites painfully between her cheeks.

He held her legs apart. His hair fell on her belly and caressed her. His left hand reached for one of her breasts.

Paul turns the page. He fingers the edge of Abbey’s sleeve, separates her fingers with his, slides off the glass ring. The ring knocks twice against the surface of the desk where he places it.

 She was completely under the spell of Pierre’s fingers, awaiting pleasure from him. When finally his erect penis touched her soft body, it was as if he had burned her.

Building energy vibrates from down the hall, interrupting their reading, and there are cries of “Un… Deux… Trois!” and then the slow, mournful drag of Bon Anniversaire sung tuneless in the anarchy of merrymakers.

The barrette in Abbey’s hair springs open, and she grabs for the twist.

“No,” she says. She stumbles back and trips out of a heel. “No, they are singing.” She points to the door. “I have the cookies in the kitchen.” Her loose hair falls over her shoulders.

Paul clicks his tongue, shaking Anaïs Nin at her. “We are just getting to the interesting part in our book.”

Abbey stands with one bare foot on the cold floor. The room is not heated, and she starts to shiver. Her glass ring looks like a cube of ice on the desk.

“Céleste will be angry if we don’t sing to her.”

Paul watches her with his mouth open, his tongue curled behind his teeth. Abbey turns her ankle while stepping into the loose heel, takes a further step away from Paul, and her cheeks warm with embarrassment. She feels like a child in dress-up shoes, mistaking a real house for a playhouse.

Paul lets out a slow whistle, drawing circles around the deep sound with his chin. He stands up. “Come on, then. The birthday girl is waiting.”

*     *     *

After the cake and cookies, Céleste offers Abbey a cigarette and holds open the front door. They step outside, and the night breeze folds over them, soft as a blanket but cool like running water. For the moment, the rain has stopped. Music from the party flows in tinny muffles into the darkness.

Abbey has never wanted to be a girl in the pine needles behind the high school with a soccer player. She’s been getting letters from home, other friends taking off their clothes at parties, giving blowjobs in parked cars, puking their guts out on peach schnapps and orange juice, and then making the same mistakes again the next weekend when another kid’s parents go out of town. The giddiness of gratitude her friends show to do the same thing week after week after week mystifies Abbey. She sits with herself—in the US, in France—alone, lonely, restless, disgusted, bored, teased into hopefulness by the faint promise of a world that lies all around her, waiting for her to awaken into something more, someone more.

The Paul in the farmhouse library in France scares her a bit, and yet, he could be her more, he is what she is not waiting for back home. Maybe.

Abbey has never wanted to be a girl in the pine needles behind the high school with a soccer player.

“Coucou.” Céleste nudges Abbey’s foot. She points the red tip of her cigarette toward the sky and looks away from Abbey over the dark fields. “You know, when you first arrived, I didn’t like you. You seemed kind of stupid. Besides, it was my parents’ idea to host an American student, not ours.” She swallows a short cough. “They bought that puppy so we wouldn’t resent your coming so much.” Céleste leans her shoulder into Abbey’s. “Now look at us. Drunk on champagne at my birthday party.”

Abbey adjusts her cigarette to hang between her two fingers just like Céleste’s does.

“I’m sorry the cookies were so ugly.”

Céleste laughs through her nose. “Did you see how people ate them? ‘Real American chocolate chip cookies,’ I told everyone.” She drags on her cigarette and exhales. “They tasted like air.” And then she says, “I see that Paul likes you.”

An owl crows like a rooster down the road they drove in on earlier that day. The air stills and the temperature seems to drop, as if, with great speed, someone has built a wall of ice around them.

Céleste grinds her cigarette butt into the gravel and dusts off her hands.

“Watch this. I learned it from a Hollywood magazine.” She leans forward and scoops her breasts out of her bra. In the light of the country house windows, in the crisp fall air, one of Céleste’s nipples flashes tight and pink from her cupped hand. She stands up and shakes back her hair, her breasts spreading at the top of her dress. “Et voilà, maximum cleavage.”

*     *     *

Back inside, Abbey looks for Paul in the party room. The round stone walls draw shadowed hollows in the dying light of used up candles. The long table is littered with dessert plates and rumpled tablecloths. Sweat and coffee and sweet marijuana smoke, and something new to Abbey—the scent of desire and coupling—thicken the air; humidity hangs over the room.

For some time she sits at the table, dizzyingly watching the darkened scenes play out around her like a movie. Two women stagger and trip, arm in arm, their scarves intertwined around their shoulders. A man follows behind them, one fist pumping the air against the techno beat, the other hitched to his belt like a cowboy. Sébastien dances in slow circles with a man in a purple hat whose hands hide in Sébastien’s back pockets.

Someone walks into Abbey’s chair. A pain knocks inside her heavy head.

“Oof!” he grunts. He peers down at Abbey and points. “Who are you? Are you lost?”

“I live with Céleste,” she says.

The man pulls on a thin goatee.

“You are mistaken. It is I who lives with Céleste,” he says. “And you talk funny.”

Abbey crosses her legs and grips the edge of the chair, trying to think of what to say. Maybe he knows where Paul is. She brings her eyes to focus against the nubby texture of her skirt. She speaks into the texture.

“I’m from the United States.”

The man looks over his shoulder, scratches his crotch.

“Where’s the rest of the champagne?”

He walks away without waiting for an answer and disappears down the hallway to the bedrooms.

Paul is not in the big stone room. Couples sit in corners, limbs knotted over limbs. The fire embers glow orange like cats’ eyes at the bottom of the fireplace. Rain begins to tap on the windows.

Abbey puts her fingertips to her throat and feels the buzz of Paul’s accent reading words like pleasure and erect and burn. The buzz moves between her legs. She stands, soberer now, thinking she will find him in the library.

She will kiss him. When the weekend is over, she imagines sitting knee to knee in a café back in the city. He will help her with her French and tell her she’s beautiful, say to everyone she’s got sexy legs. They will discuss politics while walking through the rose garden holding hands. She will write to her friends about her older French boyfriend.

One path to the library is through the kitchen. Abbey stumbles on the step up. She is caught by a sound that reaches her first as isolation, then as a question mark.

A man, his shirt hanging over his bottom, his pants pooled at his feet, stands by the sink with his back to Abbey. His pale legs are washed in the dim green light from the oven clock, legs as stiff as pencils and groomed with soft hair. His breath is barely audible, like a whispered confession that comes rapidly and is without ending. There, on his pinky, is Abbey’s glass ring.

Facing him, a woman leans against the wall. Her hair is the color of carrot juice, and she wears a makeshift crown of pinched and molded tinfoil. Between raspy moans, she laughs in quick licks of air.

Abbey digs her nails into skin just below her pleated skirt, unwilling to make a sound. There is nowhere to go but around the couple or retreat. Céleste opens her eyes. Her cherry lips part, and she winks at Abbey.

She lies down on the hard, cold floor, bunching up her skirt like a pillow, then closes her eyes. She wishes she could sleep for months.

“Paul, coucou,” Céleste whispers, watching Abbey. “You are my birthday present.” Paul moans.

Abbey trains her eyes downward, backs up shakily, returns to the party room. The techno pulses but the only guests around are passed out on the floor. She is all alone, standing in the stone room. The candles have burned out. It’s very late. Céleste’s wink is a slap.

Abbey steps out of her heels. She walks over to the fireplace. The embers still glow, and heat radiates against her bare shins. She crouches down and dangles her host-mother’s shoes over the coals. They tilt precariously on the tips of her fingers.

As she stares into the embers and feels the listing weight of the shoes, Abbey forces away the scene from the kitchen and begins composing a letter to send home to her friends. She’ll address it to all of them, a group letter. Hey guys! I met a man, she’ll write. A law student named Paul. The heat from the embers strips the inside of her nose. During the week, I meet him after school when his classes are done, and we get coffee and talk, and he helps me with my homework. He taught me to like cigarettes.

The letter bores her. She takes one shoe and pushes the toe into the embers, twisting it back and forth. Orange sparks shoot into the air and Abbey leans out of the way. Shifting her weight forward again, she uses the other shoe to scoop hot ash around the sculpted toe, burying the satin vamp. She starts again on the letter.

Guess what?! I met a man. His name is Paul. He has the cutest accent when he speaks English. He’s the best kisser, and he takes me out with his friends and holds my hand.

Abbey lets go of both shoes and twists her hair into a knot. It comes undone right away and falls into her face. The shoe that is already half-buried begins to smoke.

Dear Ladies, I’ve met a man named Paul! He’s very romantic, and things in France are so much more mature than in the U.S. He takes me out to dinner with his friends, and I spend the weekend nights at his house. He lives with his parents because that’s what people do here, even when they are in law school, like Paul. I have to lie to my host family about spending the night out, but Paul’s parents treat me like a grown-up, and it’s just like we have our own apartment when we are alone in his room.

The smoke thickens. Abbey puts a finger in the ash around the edge of the fireplace. The ash there is cool and she touches it to the tip of her tongue.

Bonjour, les amies. I met someone! My host sister, Céleste, introduced us at her really cool birthday party out in the country. He read to me from a book by the famous French author, Anaïs Nin, and he read with the sexiest English accent, and we slow-danced by ourselves while everyone else sang happy birthday and ate cake. He’s such a good kisser. It’s been a few weeks now, and we meet up every afternoon with his friends, and they are so fun, too. Last weekend, he took me away to a hotel. Sex is No Big Deal here, but he still wanted our first time to be special. Céleste helped me make up a lie to her parents about going away on a school trip so that I could be with Paul. Oh, his name is Paul.

Both shoes continue to smolder, and a few transparent flames jump from the ashes and disappear. Abbey takes off her stretchy shirt and drapes it over the shoes and embers. In just seconds, the shirt starts to wiggle and shrink, the green material blackens as it melts into the form of the underlying high heeled shoes. Green flames leap up, grab hold of the two shoes, and they begin to come apart, sending out the smell of burning hair.

Abbey turns away from the fire. She’s in her bra and skirt, which looks stupid. She takes off the skirt and leaves it in a pile on the floor. One of the tablecloths hangs over the end of the long dining table, and Abbey shakes it off—knocking around empty glasses and dirty plates—and wraps it around her body. She lies down on the hard, cold floor, bunching up her skirt like a pillow, then closes her eyes. She wishes she could sleep for months.

Two people walk past her, their sharp heels clicking on the old stones.

“Is that the American?” one asks.

“She’s lost her clothes, poor puppy,” says the other. “Perhaps Céleste should have brought a babysitter.”

Abbey won’t send any letter to her friends. There is nothing to tell them. She wonders why she can’t just start with a kiss. A kiss would be enough for her, she thinks.

Tomorrow, she will help Céleste clean up from the party and they will drive home. Céleste will act like nothing happened, and Abbey will apologize to her host mother for losing her shoes at the party.

Author’s note: The Anaïs Nin Trust has given permission to include quotes from Anaïs Nin’s short story, “Runaway.”

Milena Nigam is a Pittsburgh-based writer and a 2016 fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She was a finalist in Cutthroat Journal’s Rick DeMarinis 2014 short story contest, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in YARN, Pithead Chapel, Slice, Full Grown People, The Fourth River, Lunch Ticket, Hippocampus Magazine, and elsewhere. Milena is currently an editor at Halfway Down the Stairs and is working on a novel set in northwestern France.

[fiction]

All the food is kept in the house kitchen. Yon and I, like all the kids but Symboline, aren’t allowed to go there. Symboline, the oldest of us all, brings out bread for children who’ve been nicest to her and flicks crumbs at the others. After she saw our first kiss the other week, she began tsking at us. We tried to be nice to her by shining her shoes and braiding her hair, but after each task, she tsked. Now, when she brings the bread out, she doesn’t even bother hitting us with the crumbs.

Since we started getting no bread, the longest times of the day start at noon when my stomach lights up with hot gnawing. It slows my thinking and pulls me into naps that I hate. Yon doesn’t let on so much that he misses the bread, but he was born in the house, unlike me. I was left here when I turned five. My non-house life taught me to expect food and complain about midday starvation.

If it weren’t for the breakfast and dinner oatmeal Symboline leaves in our assigned wall alcoves, I’d be dead by now. At breakfast one day, I say I’m going to figure out how to have a talk with the adults on the other side of the house, and Yon says that even if I make it through the kitchen to the other side, which I won’t, they’d just ask me to figure things out with Symboline.

“Don’t they care?” I say.

“I’ve never seen an adult on this side, but that’s what Symboline’s for,” he says.

“Does that mean you’ve seen an adult on the other?” I say in wonder.

“Not that either. You know no one ever goes there,” he says.

I imagine beyond the kitchen door. I conjure up a man in an apron who prepares the food for Symboline to carry out. Beyond him, a hallway that leads to the rest of the house, not only hidden from us inside, but also outside. If you walk around to the back of the house, the towering evergreen trees grow thick, and no one dares to push through them.

“Why is Symboline in charge anyway?” I say.

“She’s been here forever,” he says.

“And later, if we just go to the kitchen for more food?” I say, the daily lack of bread making me daring.

“Don’t you remember the boy who never came back?” he says.

“But at least we wouldn’t have to be here anymore,” I say.

“Speaking of, we have to go to work,” he says.

Breakfast over, we head up and grab our bundle of The News, the newspapers we print in the attic at night. About a month ago, we said it would be nice to make something. It was our first close conversation. On a walk soon after, we headed higher and higher in the house, into dusty parts no one bothered with, and found a trove of computer equipment and stacks of paper. We hadn’t used a computer since the one in the rec room died the summer before, but we got it all working in a few days.

In the garage we set the stack of papers in the box in the middle of the unwieldy tandem bicycle. Anyone could use the bike, but we were the ones who got along enough to make it work. Each day we bike to Marty Square to sell our news for a quarter each. We tell Symboline and the others that we give the newspapers away. They don’t care because everyone has to make up some kind of fun in a house with no books but our lesson texts. Though since Symboline told everyone about the kiss, Jerome does rub his index fingers together at us and pretend to gag.

At the park we smell hot meat and peanuts. We lick our lips when someone holds an ice cream cone while giving us a quarter for a newspaper. The headlines are always like today’s: “Alien Elected US President—Again.” We don’t get many repeat customers, though the woman we call our veiled editor has started to bring back copies with marks on them. “I’m a school teacher,” she says through her flowing cloth. Her eyes live in a rectangular panel bordered in bright oranges. “The article on dogs causing all of our pollution was original, but the word ‘pollution’ was spelled three different ways.”

I take the newspaper, and, as with the other times she’s handed us one back, we try to give her a quarter for it. She laughs in delight once again, though this time for a shorter period, and waves away the small money.

“How old are you?”

We don’t answer, and we shake our heads at the offer of lunch.

She tells us to read her comments, to give them to our editor. She’s our one editor, though, and we know she doesn’t mean that. When she’s gone, I read through what she’s written. Sometimes she’s placed a star in a margin and written “Good word choice.” The rest is full of suggestions like “More research needed to aid believability.”

“Maybe today we don’t return to the house,” Yon says. He places a hand on my rumbling stomach.

“Do we have enough money?” I say.

I remember my mother towering over me, my last memory of her. She seemed the size of the sky and I was a feather from a sparrow’s wing.

He shakes his head, so I say, “The adults would find us. And then one of them would stomp on us.” He frowns and nods. A vision of a giant foot squishing me the way my mother’s car once squished a hare fills my thoughts. When Mom and I got out to see what we’d hit, we found two piles of jackrabbit: the outsides, and, a foot away, pounds of insides. I imagine one of the adults lifting a foot to find my outsides compressed. A second later, he sees that his stomping has forced my insides to squirt out and land nearby.

“Gross,” I say.

“What is?” Yon says.

“My brain.” I shake the images away.

I remember my mother towering over me, my last memory of her. She seemed the size of the sky and I was a feather from a sparrow’s wing.

We continue to sell our newspaper, but I can’t concentrate very well. In the morning, the oatmeal felt like it stuck to my stomach’s walls, but it has slid away. “What if I take a fist of our quarters to buy us those hotdogs they talk about?” I say, even though Yon knows as well as I that the house adults can smell all food.

“It’s not just the adults who could tell,” he says. “They’ve taught Symboline to smell any food on us too.”

“When did they do that?” I say.

He scrunches up his nose. “I don’t know, but everyone knows it,” he says.

“I didn’t know,” I say, and he tells me that now I do.

Stomachs still on fire, we pack up the last of the newspapers and return to the house. When no one’s in our long boys’ room, Yon slips the quarters into one of his bedposts, and I burn the leftover paper in the room’s fireplace. We kiss.

Beyond Symboline and Jerome, the kids in the house don’t care that Yon and I kiss, including all the boys who share our room. They only get gaggy at the thought of kissing when it’s for themselves. Every brave attempt at spin the bottle has ended in terrified screams.

And it’s not that we make out in front of anyone. Symboline saw us because she opened our bedroom door when she wasn’t supposed to. Yon says she can do what she wants, which is common knowledge, but it’s also common knowledge that girls aren’t supposed to open boys’ bedroom doors as much as we aren’t supposed to open theirs. Even Matt, who says he was always really a boy and sleeps in our room now, isn’t allowed to open any girls’ doors anymore.

After the quiet of holding each other, we go down to the dining hall and find our dinner oatmeal in our wall alcoves and shovel it down. Afterward, I hold my aching stomach and cry. The other kids finish their bowls and leave us in the dining hall. “Tomorrow, let’s not come back,” Yon says.

“We’ll have enough to leave?” I say.

He says he guesses maybe not but soon. He rubs circles into my back and says it’s time to head to the attic to print the next day’s news.

“We’ll write a story about her,” he says.

“Symboline?”

“No. The veiled editor,” he says, and I agree.

The next day in the park we set up with our printouts. “Do you think she’ll be here today?” I say.

“I hope so,” Yon says, and sure enough, about an hour into selling, the veiled woman, clothes rippling in the wind, walks up to us. I wonder if her eyes were always green. She buys a copy and reads.

“Clever, this,” she says as she taps the headline, “Veiled Avenger Solves Case.”

Her cool tone surprises me. Yon thanks her, and she pulls a loaf of bread from her bag. “Do you want any?” she says.

The bread is in the same red-and-white packaging as the loaves Symboline has at the house. I step back and hide behind Yon. He tells the woman thanks but no thanks, and she apologizes and slides the bread back into her bag.

“We can’t do wheat,” Yon says.

“Oh, okay,” she says, and she says sorry again and walks away.

“Did you see what bread she had?” I say when she’s gone.

“I’m sure that bread is everywhere,” he says.

We sell the rest of the copies in the next two hours—a record for us—and bike home with quarters filling our pockets. At the house, we sneak through to the empty bedroom and Yon fills the bedpost with the quarters.

For a few moments, we have enough without the money.

“Do we have enough yet?” I say.

He shakes his head and pulls me into a hug. In the past weeks he’s gotten taller, so he rests my cheek on his shoulder and squeezes me. For a few moments I forget I’m hungry. For a few moments, we have enough without the money.

The next day as we put our morning bowls and cups in the stacks next to the water jugs on the long table Symboline says we’re not to go to the park with our papers. One of the adults is coming over, and we have to head to the rec room.

In the rec room, Yon and I sit by the stage on two of the many costume boxes donated to the house after a local professional theater shut down. The younger children sometimes put on skits, though I haven’t seen one in months. After all thirty of us kids have gathered, Symboline nods and leaves the room. As one kid yells out that if we’re not good the adult will squash us for sure, the adult walks in. She’s clutching a loaf of bread. She has flowing black clothes on. We can see nothing but her eyes through the cutout in her headpiece. The adult is our veiled editor. After being so nice, how could she be one of the adults who would squash us?

She tells the room that there are reports of two boys in the house who are not following all the rules. She says the two boys go out every day and work, sell things, and horde the earnings. “And they are extremely good friends,” she says. The woman never focuses on anyone, but she doesn’t have to. By the time she says she’d like the issue resolved soon, everyone is staring at Yon and me.

The veiled woman leaves, and bodies stir in the quiet. Everyone stands, unsure of what to do, since the woman didn’t ask anyone to do anything in particular. People start to whisper and point, so Yon and I move for the door. People part at first, but Jerome makes kissing fingers at us and blocks our way. “Kissers,” he says.

“Not for you,” Yon says, and he tries to push past Jerome.

“Give them ten minutes to leave,” Symboline, suddenly standing with us, says.

“You have ten minutes,” Jerome parrots as he lets us pass. No one protests about any of it. No one in the house has great friends—no one but Yon and I have ever tried to be attached, it seems—but now I feel like we’ve been living with strangers.

We leave everyone behind, the buzz of their voices churning after us. I start up the steps, but Yon yanks me back. “No—we go to the garage,” he says.

“But the money,” I say.

“No time. I don’t know what they’ll do to you. We’ll figure something out later. Sneak in or something.”

We bike to the square, the place we know best outside of the house, though our latest edition sits in the attic. The sun flashes on and off of the pavement, blinding us in some moments, guiding us forward in others. At the park, we roll the bike into some trees and find a stone bench.

Sneaking back in for the money will be the last time at the house, but I don’t feel freedom. We don’t have enough sold yet. I smooth my hand over the stone and worry about sleeping. I like my bed and the pillow that stretches just right around my neck. And though I am always hungry, I eat twice a day at the house. Yon pulls me to him and rubs my hands, even though they are not cold. Yon tells me we’ll be okay. I rest for a moment, and when I open my eyes, I smile because Yon’s already smiling at me. But then I focus beyond him and see the veiled woman heading for us.

Yon pulls me up and we skip past the bike-hiding place for the painted sidewalks. We step on face after face. “We left the house like she said to. Why is she here?” I say.

“I don’t know,” Yon huffs.

We bump into a woman pulling a wagon and call out that we’re sorry. She swears at us, but we’re already too far away to respond. I look back to see how fast the veiled woman can move with so much covering, but I don’t see her.

Yon grips my hand and slows us. I can feel his fear. I twist about and find the veiled woman a body length in front of us. “I haven’t run that fast in years,” she says.

“Why are you after us? We left the house like you wanted,” Yon says between breaths.

“Left the house? What do you mean?” she says.

Before either of us can answer, her eyes grow distracted at something behind us. She pulls herself taut and we swivel around. Standing back at the start of the painted sidewalks is another veiled woman. As she gets closer, we see she could be the same woman—with the same fabric, nearly the same bright embroidery.

The first veiled woman says, “What is this?” and the second one tsks and says, “If you don’t show me where the money is, the adults will start hurting the ones who are left.”

I check on the woman behind us. She takes a look at each of us and shakes her head, backs away. She reaches the opposite end of the painted sidewalks and turns out of sight.

“Let’s go after her,” Yon says.

“Can we?” I say.

“No,” the remaining veiled woman says. “After all I’ve done for you, you must return one more time.”

Yon puts an arm around me and walks us past the woman, past the bike, home. I struggle on the way, but Yon holds me tighter and says things will be fine, and what do I have but him?

At the house, she brings us back in front of the househeld, all the kids. Jerome makes his finger-kisses and soon everyone is. “They have agreed to bring the adults their secret money,” our captor says.

“And then they’re done for good,” Jerome says.

“For good,” a girl cries.

“Bring me to the money,” Symboline says from behind us.

I search for the veiled woman, but she is no longer in the room.

We lead Symboline out of the room. Out of earshot of the other kids, she says, “The adults just need the money and then you can go.”

Yon pulls me up the stairs and along to the bedroom. Inside, Symboline says, “But after you left I searched in here.”

Yon settles me on his bed. He kisses me, and Symboline tsks. He unscrews the wooden ball at the top of a bedpost and tosses it next to me on the bed. I roll it around. It’s not hollow. It’s heavy.

Symboline stares down into the hiding place. “The money’s in there?”

I pick up the bedpost topper and test its weight.

“Yes, it’s down in there,” Yon says. “All quarters.”

“I know that,” she says.

Yon yanks a duffel bag out from under the bed. He pulls up on the post and says, “Hold the bag open.” Symboline anchors its mouth wide as he slides the post away from the bed and tips it to rain coins into the bag.

“All this in just under a month?” Symboline says in the most hopeful voice I’ve heard that year. “And you worked together? Imagine how much bread this could buy.”

“No, not all this,” Yon says, and tells her to bring the bag to the other rear post. He repeats the same moves and another stream of quarters joins the first. “That’s what we made in just under a month,” he says. “With your help too, of course. The quarter you used to buy the newspaper is in there too.”

I realize he’s right but keep my surprise to myself. Symboline tightens her slack stance and tosses her hair back. “How did you know?”

“At the park earlier, you sounded like you. I didn’t catch it when you bought the paper, but with the real woman there, it was obvious. And I don’t know how you found such close-matching clothes, but you couldn’t be her: The real woman was nice, didn’t hate us,” Yon says.

“The costume boxes are helpful, and I don’t hate you,” she says. “I made sure you kept getting oatmeal. It’s just that for the kids to survive, things need order.”

“Did the adults tell you that?” Yon says.

“The adults,” she says. “Yeah, they tell me.”

“Why didn’t you just tell us to leave right away?” Yon says.

“It takes a little while to make outcasts, to feed the disquiet that people don’t even know is growing. If the househeld think they’ve kicked you out, they won’t think of leaving too.”

“But why pretend to be the veiled woman?” he says.

“I followed you to the park after you started going out every day. I followed you to see how close you’d gotten. I was shocked to see you were making money—and talking with an outside adult multiple times. Pretending to be her seemed a perfect way to make you stop trusting an outsider.”

I step up on the bedframe and with a wild swing, I slam the bedpost ball against Symboline’s head. She slumps forward, and Yon catches her. “Took you long enough,” he says.

“I wasn’t sure if that’s what you meant,” I say. I’m grateful she’s breathing, and we move her up on the bed. I can’t imagine moving again if she weren’t breathing.

Yon shoulders the bag and says he hadn’t thought it would be so heavy. “It’s enough though, right?” I say, and he says we’ll have to make it be.

“Let’s get back to the park and the bike,” he says. “I didn’t want to risk having it back here and something happening to it.”

We head for the front door, but we find Jerome and ten other kids. They start finger-kissing at us, so we back away and go for the rec room. It has lots of windows—but kids are standing in our way there too.

“Get them,” echoes between the groups.

We reach the stairs again, but going up means fewer ways to get out. Besides, Symboline is that way. Instead, we opt for the dining room and aim for a door that leads to the front hall. Before we reach it, Jerome slams through it. We veer right and find ourselves in front of the kitchen door.

“Kissers,” they say, and they have us. The swinging door behind us might as well be a drop off a cliff.

“At least we’re together,” Yon says, and he pulls me through the door. No one follows, and no one cries out. No one’s invented a sound for what we’ve just done.

No one follows, and no one cries out. No one’s invented a sound for what we’ve just done.

Or for what we see. Grime covers the kitchen. One set of towering metal shelves holds rows of oatmeal silos, though most are missing their tops. Next to the silos, our house bowls rest in stacks. Other shelves hold a few loaves and countless empty bread bags. We look in cabinets and the refrigerator, but we find no other food. On the stove is a large pot crusted with oatmeal. On the wall opposite our entrance, a white door waits.

We squeeze each other’s hands. Yon grips the handle and pulls it open. The excitement of discovering the hallway to the other side of the house, to the adults, quiets away fear. We run into a dim grass-covered room that has trees for walls. We race around a bench and push into a gap in the farthest trees. The bag of coins gets stuck for a moment, but we ease it free. And come to a stone wall. It’s just low enough for us to press ourselves up to look over it. The park we bike to lies out and below. Between Marty Square and us is the slope of the city—yards and houses and streets and stores. We leave the wall and push through the trees in other directions, but we end up in the neighboring yards.

“This whole time it’s just been a backyard,” Yon says, and I feel guilty that I struck Symboline.

We return to the kitchen and ease the door shut. Yon puts the duffel on the closest counter. We look at the scant supplies of food. “What kind of teacher do you think the real veiled woman is?” he says.

“A nice one?” I say.

“Do you think if we sell newspapers in the park again that she’ll buy one?” he says.

I shrug. “That would be nice,” I say.

We read the prices marked on the bags of bread and boxes of oatmeal. We have money to buy plenty more.

“Do you think they’re waiting out there for us?” I say.

“Maybe, but they’ll see we were able to go in and out of the kitchen. But we can say the adults made us like Symboline.”

“Symboline,” he says.

“Our first change could be to get hotdogs,” I say, and Yon hugs me close.

For now, we leave the bag of quarters on the counter. We push the swinging door out to find the house gathered. I catch Jerome’s face, and he mouths a “Wow.” He calls for people to get back, that we’ve done the impossible. When the room is full and silent, Yon kisses me in the doorway and again in the dining hall.

Todd Wellman is former fiction editor for cream city review. He received his MA from UW-Milwaukee. His writing has appeared in The James Franco Review, the Indie Next Lists, The Missouri Review blog, and more. He implores all to shop at indie bookstores.