Sarah is splashing me in the hotel pool. We can't swim, so we stay here in the shallow end, in the blue, blue water. We don't go in the ocean. She has a pink bathing suit with ruffles, and we are best friends. One morning at the pool her parents are there without her, stretched out on pool chairs. Food poisoning, they say, and I don't see her again. Weeks after I get home, there's a postcard from Canada signed with her name. I keep it in a box on the high shelf in my closet, and sometimes I take it down and look at the stamp and read her [...]
We were naked. He was hard. I'd always considered this moment the best time to disclose, because rejection seemed less likely when the possibility of a good lay was hot-breath close. Though maybe once we're naked, it's too late.
I shut my legs and stacked my knees to one side. “I have to tell you something,” I said.
Prefaces, everyone knows, are never good.
“What?” he asked.
I took a breath, let it out. I hate this part, I said to myself, possibly aloud. And then, definitely aloud: “I have herpes.”
Silence. The word had to be chased with something.
“But before you freak out,” I said as casually [...]
1. Move. In January. Move into a new apartment high in the sky that you have to walk up six flights to get to. Have it be small, have it be full of your sibling’s furniture, your sibling who moved away from this small place to the big wide yawn of California. Have it be haunted by their ghost, by strange noises, by loud neighbors who shout like murderers at football games, who scream with strange pain when they climax with hookers. (Yes, they have to be hookers. They can’t be girlfriends. These women, these girls, have to sound young in the hallway through your door, they have to [...]
