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For Peter, Isabel, and Luisa
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Kerry Cullen and Sarah Bowlin, who believed so surely in this thing.
To early readers, talkers, thinkers: Miranda Popkey, Marcy Dermansky, Lindsay Hatton, Adrienne Celt, Lucas Knipscher, Bryant Musgrove, Robin Wasserman, Rebecca Taylor, and always and especially, Rumaan Alam.
To writer dinner ladies: Elena Megalos, Eliza Schraeder, Yurina Ko, Sanaë Lemoine.
To Karen and Sam Steger, Cristina de la Vega and Kenny Strong, Kayleen Hartman and Emily Bender, and families born into, married, and chosen.
To Zipporah Wiseman, for that conversation in the car about what to make and why.
To all my students past and present, for your investment, excitement, generosity, and care.
To Peter, Isabel, and Luisa, for everything you are.
2000
I’M SIXTEEN AND Sasha’s seventeen and we go out to the beach at night and no one’s there. We’ve thrown a party at her house and I have fallen, scraped my knee, getting a piggyback ride from a boy I know only offered it to me to impress her.
You tired, runner girl? he said.
They all call me runner girl.
We’ve freed ourselves of all the other people. We’ve gotten drunk and already sobered up and after emptying the keg, after cleaning up her parents’ house, after putting people in their cars, we’ve brought the trash out to this dumpster by the beach and run out to put our bare feet in the sand. The water’s quiet, moon reflected off the top and sharp and tinny, as the waves roll up; dark blues and blacks, as they dip down.
We each carried a large bag filled with empty cans and bottles, plastic cups, leftovers from the store-bought box cake we cooked too long and the big bowl of pasta that we mixed with garlic, oil, cheese, and diced tomatoes. We both smell of sweat and beer.
We’ve thrown a sort of week-late birthday party for her, while her mom and sister are traveling with her dad for work. No one except us knew it was a birthday party, and before the older kids arrived, from the larger public school ten miles from ours, we set out plates and napkins, knives and forks, and pretended we were grown. We poured glasses of wine and we dressed up and people looked confused when they came in and we told them to sit down, when later we brought the cake out and no one really knew what it was for.
We each did keg stands and our shirts rolled down our fronts, showing our bellies and our bras. I grabbed at my shirt, pushed back as it rolled down; she let hers sit around her neck. For a while, she went into her sister’s room with some guy I run track with, about whom other girls at practice talk, to whom I’ve never said a word.
That wasn’t fun, I say to Sasha now.
Which is maybe wrong, but also, she’s the only person in the world to whom I say these things out loud.
They’re all so dumb, she says.
She takes off her shirt and pants and I try not to stare.
Happy birthday, I say, thinking, Why did we invite those people we don’t like when we could have spent the whole night just like this.
She laughs and nods down at my clothes.
You going in? she says.
It’s January, but it’s Florida, so it’s warm, and I take off my shirt and pants.
We’re both strong and swim out far and though the water shocks at first, it feels better, safer; I feel surer than I ever feel on land.
Back at her house, an hour later, we take hot showers and then wrap our hair up in towels and we sit on her big floral duvet and she talks and I half listen to the words she says, but also, I lie back and let her talk pour out overtop me until my eyes are closed. I don’t sleep well most nights—I wander the high-ceilinged, too-still, too-big upstairs of my parents’ house, talk online to older men, pretending that I’m someone else—but I sleep hours, ten or twelve, halfway through the next day, these nights that I’m with her.
2017
1
MY ALARM GOES off at 4:30 every weekday morning, and I keep my phone lodged between the slatted stairs that lead up to the lofted bed my husband built us in the closet we use as a bedroom, so that I’m not able to press Snooze. I climb down in the dark and find the phone, which has often fallen. I turn off the alarm and put on my bra and tights and shirt and shoes and gloves and headband, grab my keys and phone, and lock the door behind me; I run miles and miles before anyone wakes up.
By 6:15, I’ve showered and dressed and started to make breakfast. Sometimes my husband slips into the shower while the children are still asleep and we have sex. It’s cold in the bathroom. He bends me over the railing of the back ledge. He pushes me up against the grimy tiles, holds my leg up. My body is outside the halo of hot water and my skin mottles and I shiver and am cold as I wait for him to come.
I take two trains to get to work and neither of them runs well. I wait sometimes three minutes for the first, sometimes fifteen.
