You may be asking yourself why I put quotation marks around “shockingly,” thereby implying that these situations are not shocking at all. Well, let’s face it. We are a largely desensitized society. Nothing shocks us anymore. So writing the “shock” back into fiction helps us ground ourselves in our reality, not the one we create that perpetuates that whole “not in my backyard” attitude (i.e. If it doesn’t directly affect the life I’ve constructed for myself, then it doesn’t really exist.) But the point I’m so ineloquently trying to make here is that I question whether or not we write our version of realism into fiction just to assuage our own feelings of guilt on these issues. If we write about them, then we don’t have to act. As long as we can write this type of so-called realism into our fiction, than we are absolved of ever having to do anything about it. I think we tend to forget that realism is established by us, which brings me to my next question: Does idealism have a place in fiction, or does all fiction have to be grounded in realism?

I am a self-proclaimed idealistic realist, and I think fiction needs more idealism. I think we’ve been desensitized so that we think we no longer want happy endings and positive reinforcement in fiction, just like we’ve been desensitized into thinking we need to write realism(the kind that focuses on the negative) to make us feel justified in what we’re writing. But why can’t something just work out well and be a good story? I think it is better to ask, how can we write idealism into our stories without making our work sound like clichéd fairytales?

That’s a difficult question to tackle, and feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong. Author Alicia Erian came to speak at our class last week, and she said something that made sense to me. She basically said that when she’s considering endings, she tries to think of a small action or detail that can be packed with meaning. Although I’d say from reading her short story collection, The Brutal Language of Love, that her topics tend towards what we think of as realism, she has a point here that applies well to idealistic writing as well. When you want to write a story that uses idealism, you have to be very careful, very aware that your audience is going to be exponentially upset with you if you give them a cookie-cutter or too-perfect ending(unless they are 14, then have it). If you want to express idealism, first of all, I think you need to establish a foundation: Give glimpses of it throughout your story. Hint that this is going to be a positive story. Secondly, avoid clichéd images. And lastly, try out Alicia Erian’s advice: End your story with something small, like an image that reflects back to a distant, fond memory that is simple and unique to the characters, or a small action of some sort, just enough to make the reader want more, yet enough to satisfy their idealistic nature.

While that may seem vague, it’s not if you think about it, and it is practical advice for writing both realism and idealism. But no matter which you prefer writing, you should write when and what you are inspired to write, and remember that the definition of realism I’m referring to is writing about things that we perceive as actual, existing, or real—in other words, trying to represent things as they really are. That doesn’t have to mean rape in the Congo or homelessness in Los Angeles. It can mean cooking dinner with your mother and talking about the good old times with your father before he got Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember any of you. To me, that’s the type of story that can utilize a healthy blend of realism and idealism. The realism is the situation, the lives we are shown, and the idealism is choosing to paint that situation in a hopeful, positive light.

That’s where I think that writers tend to get misguided. You don’t have to choose between realism and idealism. You can be an idealistic realist too. The heart makes us idealists, the brain makes us logical realists. So, doesn’t it make sense to blend the two to create something amazing? Think of your favorite authors. Now go reread your favorite parts of those books. Is it not the idealistic situations and images and language that have the possibility to be real that make you love them so much? Even language itself has its own idealism. I read hundreds of poetry submissions, and I never see an image of a sunset described as a sunset. I see an emblazoned horizon lit by a canopy of variegated torches held by Olympians, or whatever. You get the picture. We are afraid to want idealism because it’s too good, not realistic enough. But if our idealism is centered upon a realistic image or possibility, then we are more likely to accept its positivity and less likely to throw the book at the wall and say “That’s absurd!”

So where does that leave us? Oh yeah, idealistic realism. Give it a try, and send us some submissions. I look forward to reading them.

Best of skill (there’s no luck in writing),

~Emily Bowers, Assistant Editor

You can be a jerk in writing though. Ask Bret Easton Ellis; he’ll tell you, right as he starts bragging about how awesome he is (overrated in my opinion). The key is to write something that isn’t offensive outright, but that is a commentary of some sort; otherwise, it directly reflects you as an author to those you wish to market to—people like us editors!

So what can you write?

You got it: social satire. That’s where it’s at. If you want to write sarcastic commentary that directly judges society’s views and/or other people’s lives, then this is the only way to go. Social satire is an excellent writer’s device, but you have to be careful. Reading American Psycho will surely tell you how consumerism is bad and blah, blah, blah. I don’t care what kind of suit your character’s chosen to wear for the ten-thousandth page, Ellis. But the point is that where American Psycho lacks in readability and general skill, it makes up for in its ability to employ the strategy of using social satire well. In essence, there is a method to the madness. And though you might not enjoy reading it, the book effectively illustrates a society more concerned with having the perfect color and print of a business card than that homeless man across the street.

Now, as you might have guessed, my title is actually a play on another book that uses social satire well, one that I actually enjoyed reading: Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (and So Can You!) This book is hilarious but insightful. It utilizes social satire throughout but does it in a much different way than American Psycho. American Psycho is brutal, unforgiving, and relentless. It hits you over the head time and time again with what it wants to get through to you about society. But I Am America (and So Can You!) employs the wittier side of social satire. While you may not agree with everything he’s saying in the book, you find yourself laughing anyway. Or, as the inside cover puts it, “You may not agree with everything Stephen says, but at the very least, you’ll understand that your differing opinion is wrong.”

Now, I know you’re dying to see an example of this social satire that Colbert uses in his book, and I am dying to give you one. Here’s one section in which Stephen discusses the role of the father in a family:

“One of Pop’s most important jobs is protecting his little family. That’s why he needs to sleep with the 9mm under his pillow. And pack it with hollow point pullets. At the least sign of movement in his castle past 8 PM, he should wake up firing. Let God, Allah, or Hanuman the monkey god sort them out, am I right?” (left hand margin reads “I am.”)
“Publisher’s Disclaimer: Do not sleep with a 9mm under your pillow and shoot at shadows immediately upon waking.” (left hand margin reads “Do it.”) (p

In this excerpt and in the chapter as it goes in, Colbert provides a critical look at the roles family members play and how he thinks they should be. He’s so funny sometimes that you cannot tell when he is being serious, so it’s easy to overlook things you might disagree with about serious issues. Want more proof? When tackling issues of class, Colbert creates a satirical chart to help readers determine which class they belong to if they do not already know.

One of the questions read,
“What keeps you up at night?”
Answers by class:
Lower: “Sound of your own weeping”
Middle: “Growing suspicion you’ve been duped”
Upper: “Should my topiary animals be alphabetized by plant or by animal they represent?” (p 163)

The point here is that you can be a jerk using Ellis’s method—writing through serious extremes (and using characters who are obvious jerks and such to comment on society), or you can write like a jerk through wit like Colbert does—dancing along the line of serious issues through sarcasm, while still voicing societal opinions. You just have to decide which voice your better at writing in, and then you can’t be afraid to try writing something on an issue you feel passionate about. So try out a new poem or story using some social satire, and send it to us!

Bottom line: I am a jerk, and so can you!

~Emily Bowers, Assistant Editor

As we drove toward the Gulf of Mexico in my wheezing hand-me-down car with a backseat full of unfolded state maps, a sun-bleached atlas, and fast food sacks stuffed with gas station receipts and waxy candy-wrapper origami, we listened to every song we could think of that cued us to yell “drive” or “summer” or “go” long and loud during the chorus. On the interstate, we lowered the car windows and let the wind wrack our heads, hot and thundering, whipping the pages of books and churning my ratted ponytail. We had agreed, even before making a packing list or borrowing a tent, on the basics, and that one had been Lee’s idea: car windows down as much as possible.

When Lee drove, I snapped photos out the window of the road signs as they whizzed by. I fed a Neil Young CD into the stereo when we ran out of raucous traveling songs. Lee smoked and softly sang along. We mauled diner cheeseburgers and dropped quarters into small-town jukeboxes all along the way and ripped rodeo fliers from community bulletin boards as keepsakes in Nashville.

At night, to fight off drowsiness, we talked. Listed the middle names of all our family members, played slapdash versions of Truth or Dare, described our favorite Twilight Zone plots and then invented our own scary stories. “Once upon a time, there was an adult,” went mine; I drew my voice out deep and low and winced as oncoming headlights passed over my face, “and she went to work in an office every single day, and she forgot what it was like to drive fast and go on road trips and eat hot dogs for every meal, and she got married to a boring guy and had two boring kids and was boring for the rest of her boring life.”

“Wow,” said Lee. “Truly chilling.”

++

While we were grilling hot dogs on our camp-issued grill in Mississippi, the man camping next to us noticed that we didn’t have a lantern (despite our weeks of planning sessions and one massive trip to Walmart, we’d somehow forgotten this one item, which we hated; it made us look unprepared when we were determined to appear the opposite) and invited him to take a spare one he had rattling around in the back of his pickup truck. I could hear them from our site. Then he offered a beer, no way of knowing Lee was nineteen, of course, “and one for your lady,” offering another.

“She’s my sister, actually,” said Lee. Just a few days after leaving, we had agreed on this version of the truth after realizing that the facts—we were friends, just friends, camping in a tent together for two weeks—confused neighborly strangers. A brother and sister explanation never raised eyebrows—most times it did the opposite, made people fold with tenderness—and felt easier to slip into than the real truth anyway. We both read a lot and did a lot of thinking, and I think we both knew that our friendship would last a long time if we didn’t do anything stupid to break it. Brother and sister felt correct: two people who had a special understanding of each other, chugging along side-by-side through the South. When I was around, I liked to jump in and embellish the lie further.

“Twins!” a motherly park ranger had repeated after me in Mississippi, shaking her head, overcome. “What a blessing.”

Lee thanked the man for the lantern and trudged the few feet of gravel road back to our site, holding the cans in the crook of one elbow. I was lying on my back just outside the tent, holding a thick paperback high over my head like a roof, shading my face while I read. The air was gleaming and hot with sunset. “Will I like this?” I asked, squinting up at him as I reached for the can.

Lee had been drinking bad beer since he was fifteen. He told me the taste wasn’t really the point. I shrugged and pulled on the tab and the can hissed and foamed. “Goodbye, cruel world,” I said as I tipped my head back. The taste of aluminum, the salty sweat of my upper lip.

++

By Birmingham, I’d been driving for most of the day, so Lee offered to fill up the gas tank. I was wearing a sundress and boys’ Goodwill sneakers, chewing on a stick of beef jerky in the parking lot, thinking about how I wanted to get drunk at the Gulf of Mexico. When he walked by to pay inside, I told him so. I’d been thinking about the cheap beer from the day before, but I didn’t know what to buy. 

“Depends how you want to feel while you drink it,” Lee said. I loved him for those words. I’d never been drunk before, really, but I could imagine how I wanted to feel exactly: barefoot and grimy and young, sitting in the salty muck of the Gulf, breathing Lee’s cigarette smoke, like I never had to leave.

“Disgusting,” I lisped through a mouthful of jerky.

We went inside together, through the cool rush of the automatic doors, past shelves of brightly wrapped candy to the alcohol section. We walked through aisles of dusty wine bottles, sleek and dark, and I cooed over the names, the dramatic descriptions on the labels. I held up a bottle of bourbon with two hands, framing it like a spokesmodel, and asked Lee what it tasted like. What kind of cocktails you made with it. He said “cocktails” weren’t exactly his specialty. I trailed my fingers along the bottles as I shopped, like a collector at an antiques mart, and asked what was sweet, what was fizzy, what was complicated and mysterious. Asked what was good mixed with Coke, with lemonade, with Red Bull—strolling slowly down the lit, buzzing beverage fridges.

Finally I stopped again in front of the shelf packed with rows of fat whiskey bottles and turned to Lee, holding my shoulders in a half-shrug. “Eh?”

“The right place to feel disgusting.”

“Gotta start somewhere,” I said, and picked the cheapest one. Lee touched my wrist and guided the bottle back onto the shelf.

“This is a special occasion,” he said. He rooted in his wallet and handed me a ten-dollar bill. “I’ll put in. Let’s get the real stuff.”

At the counter, I chattered through the transaction, suddenly nervous that the clerk would look to Lee for ID, too—I read the names of cigarettes out loud, asking Lee if he’d tried this or that, Gold and Ultra and Lites. Laughed hard at plastic keychains chattering together, blaring bitter jokes about wine and wives. The clerk didn’t ask either of us for ID. Outside on the pavement, I lugged the plastic bag with the whiskey into the back seat with one hand and it slid over the layer of park maps and paperbacks. I pushed the receipt deep into the glove compartment. I loved the idea of finding little bits of our trip in the months to come, when I was off looking at strange apartments or driving to job interviews. Then I unfolded the map on the roof of the car while Lee plunked into the driver’s seat. I bent down, peering at him, clapped my hands for punctuation and said, “Saltwater. Let’s find it.”

++

Once we drove within thirty miles of the Gulf of Mexico, a mist descended on everything, warm and wet. My camera lens clouded. Then came the tourist attractions blinking from the side of the highway, neon and shrill, souvenirs and seafood. And soon I shrieked, reached with one hand to throttle Lee’s shoulder as he drove—there was the shimmering water drowning the landscape, and the sunset streaming pink and red above it.

It was dark by the time we pulled up to our campsite. The car rattled from the effort as it cooled, and the lantern only spat out enough light to make us laugh and to attract wildly buzzing insects. I set up our tent while Lee unpacked our sleeping bag rolls and the grilling supplies, grimy with grease and cheap charcoal. The hot dogs charred in the darkness. I sat down at the picnic table and Lee sat across from me, the lantern between us, the bugs diving and circling.

I couldn’t believe we were really there—the saltwater so close we could sleepwalk into it—and said so, hugging my knees from my side of the knobby table, and Lee agreed with a grin. We sat for a moment in the pocket of silence, the rare absence of conversation, craning our necks to squint at the shadowy tops of palm trees above us. Then we picked up our blackened food and bit in. Ketchup dripped on our paper plates.

“We live here now,” I said.

“I like our house,” he said. I snorted into my food. “And our backyard is pretty good.” The Gulf jangled with noise, frogs chirping and insects creaking and singing. Who knew what else. There was a sign posted at the shadowy edge of our campsite, where the ground melted into black water: BEWARE OF CROCODILES. I pointed at it and we cracked up, imagining waking up to a crocodile sleeping between us, having brought its own sleeping bag; crawling out of the tent in the dewy morning to a crocodile standing on its stumpy back legs, cooking breakfast, trilling I made coff-eeeee!

“Or a crocodile passed out with an empty bottle of whiskey in its paws,” Lee said.

“Paws,” I said. “Right, crocodiles probably have paws. God, I kinda want to open that whiskey now.”

“We have to wait,” he said. “It’s for the Gulf. We’re so close, we can’t blow it now.”

“What if we went to the beach now?” I said. I couldn’t tell if I was joking, but when Lee asked me if I was, I said no.

++

“You do understand it’s pretty likely that we’ll die this way,” Lee said. We were high-stepping our way down the murky shoreline from our campsite in tall rubber boots my dad had made us pack. Lee was ahead of me. I had my index finger hooked in his back jeans pocket and the whiskey bottle jostling heavy in my backpack. The ground sucked at our feet like a giant mouth. I watched the globe of the flashlight float ahead of us. I could close my eyes and see just as much as I could with them open.

“I’m okay with that,” I said.

“Our bodies could just float out to sea,” he said.

“Get eaten by whales.”

“Or rescued by dolphins.”

There was no gate, like we thought there might be. We crouched at the edge of the beach where it opened up, wide and public in the dark, studded with lifeguard stands and beach chair kiosks. “Don’t move,” I said to Lee, and leaned on him while I bent one leg and pulled off my boot. Somewhere far off in my mind, I was aware of making excuses to touch him.

“This is good,” he said. “If someone sees us and we get caught, this is your defense—the flamingo.”

“Except we won’t get caught,” I said. I knew this was true as much as I knew my own name, that if there was a God, he wouldn’t allow us to get caught. We were meant to be here, roaming the cooling sand, as much as the noisy water or the yawn of sky; we were just as much a part of the plan.

I took Lee’s hand.

“We’re on our honeymoon,” I said. “If we get caught. We won’t get caught, but if we do. We just got married and we’re on our honeymoon and we’re two young people in love that no cop would ever send to jail.”

“And we had no idea that walking the beach after dark was illegal,” Lee said. His hand felt big in mine. “Two dumb young people in love.”

“We won’t get caught,” I said again.

We stepped from the shore, out of the tall grass, onto the open stretch of sand. I heard nothing but the rush and swallow of the water, the buzzing of the city down the road. No other people in sight. Lee switched off the flashlight and we walked in the blue moonlight. We kept holding hands and we didn’t say anything. After a few minutes, Lee crouched in the sand. “Let’s sit,” he said. He let go of my hand and tugged at my arm like a diver on a rope, two quick pulls to let me know all was well in the depths. I sat next to him and heaved my backpack into my lap. I unscrewed the whiskey bottle with the damp hem of my dress. We smelled like swamp, like wetness and moss and seaweed. We smelled like mermaids. I took a drink of the whiskey before passing the bottle to Lee; one swallow made me sputter and shiver. Goosebumps prickled all over me. Lee laughed and I bumped him with my shoulder. He took a drink, too.

“I wish we really could live here,” I said. “Or at least never leave.” I’d promised my parents that when we got home I’d actually start the process of finding a post-college job. I could see my whole life unspooling in front of me: college to prepare for a job, then a job, an office that would file me down like a river rock and wring the life out of me, this life, the wet Gulf air and ashy grill grit in my hair and the car-window brightness bringing out freckles on my arms like shadows in a photo developing in a chemical bath. I had spent so many hours trying to find what I wanted, but whenever I thought I’d found it, whenever the bell rang deep inside of me, the context didn’t make any sense: country songs on the interstate, the sunshine smell inside my elbows, sitting in the damp sand of the Gulf with my ass wet, slugging whiskey with Lee. As much as I loved those moments, none of them added up to a plan, and I was pressed against a deadline; life demanded a plan. I wanted to change that about life, not just mine but the whole thing, living, being alive: why couldn’t I stay in the places I loved best?

Lee passed the bottle back to me, and when he did, I turned my face and kissed him. He put his hand on my hair. My lips burned from the whiskey and the pressure of his mouth on mine. Even as it was happening, I was thinking: now Lee and I have kissed. I was thinking: this will never happen again. It was a kiss like a punctuation mark, an ellipsis full of longing; I wish we really could live here… I could hear it repeating; I wish we could stay. A kiss that wanted to say more than I could say myself, full of more words than I knew how to pronounce.

I pulled my mouth away from Lee’s and together we made a small version of the sound of the Gulf, the suction of the water breaking at the shore.

We stared at our feet for a few moments, half-buried in the clumping sand. Lee asked if I was crying, turning his face to see mine in the dim light, and I said I might have been. My armpits stung with new sweat.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said, in a voice that sounded different from Lee, far away and smaller—like Lee, I thought, mind spinning from the whiskey, if Lee was being swallowed by a whale.

I told him what I was thinking. How sad I felt about the way life worked, always pushing us forward, letting everyone die, everything be lost. Stupid things to be sad about, irreversible, unchangeable things. “I’m a little drunk,” I said. I never drank.

Lee was quiet. He lowered himself onto his back in the sand with his arms up above his head, his whole body open. He pointed up above us, into the sky, the mouth of outer space. “Somewhere out there,” he said, “are billions of universes. More than billions. Enough universes to make billions of you.” He’d read a book about it. In some universes, all the rules would be changed enough that I’d never have to give anything up or say goodbye to anyone. In at least one universe, my life really would be to sit in the sand of the Gulf at night, drinking whiskey with him. I got one night that would never end, that would be my whole life, and I’d be alive forever there. That was science, he said. Proven and real. Somewhere, this was the world.

I didn’t know if it was true. But I held the idea inside me. Like an egg safe in a nest. I laid on my back next to Lee, both of us with our arms above our heads like we were jumping, falling, diving through deep water, trying to sink as fast as we could to the bottom. He lit a cigarette and hummed Neil Young: I was thinkin’ of you and me. I was thinkin’ bout you and me. He’d cut his teeth on those songs when he learned to play guitar.

“Cool honeymoon,” I said. I didn’t want him to think I was sad anymore.

“’Til we get eaten by alligators,” he said, and I screamed “CROCODILES!” and then we laughed so loud that he stuck his cigarette in the sand and put both of his big hands over my mouth, telling me the troops were coming, the sharks would hear us, we were about to get eaten, go to prison, get dragged out to sea. His fingers tasted like tobacco and dirt. The sky spun. The stars spat and gleamed and burned out.

++

Rain falling on the tent woke us, the noise spreading, insistent and sharp as applause. We gathered our pillows, Lee crouched to roll our sleeping bags, and then we ran to the picnic table, holding our bundles above our heads. We slumped against each other, side-by-side in the blue light of very early morning, our cold bare feet on the benches, looking down at matted patches of marshmallow and sour spilled beer. We’d forgotten to put out the lantern; it buzzed next to us, still hauling in bugs. I thought about going back to the Gulf in the daytime, in the light of the whole world, the lifeguards and seagulls; I pictured us walking onto the beach full of our secrets, Lee and me cannonballing into the saltwater among all the whales and crocodiles and seaweed and bobbing up again, clean and buoyant.

Her brother-in-law told her it should have changed her. You’d think someone like you would have revaluated her life after something like this, he shouted from the door of her parents’ house after declaring her no longer welcome inside, saying her parents had lost the only child they wanted.

She had been through the steps, done all the meditative yoga, taken all the medication. She had nights of introspection. They saved her from nothing. They redeemed nothing. They changed nothing about the nights still before her, about the men still before her.

There was the man who bet the ponies, who left his losing tickets in her bathroom trash can. There was the man who sold her the car, promising it had thousands of miles to go. There was the man who slipped her pieces of candy. The man who told her to stop crying. There was the man whose hands were heavy. There was the man who gave her his bed. The man who spoke to her only when she slept. There was the man who contained names. The man who erased names. The man who would not use her name.

There was the man who knew anatomy, who recited the parts of her skeleton as his fingers traced each bone, moving from origin to insertion. He settled his hands on her hips, telling her to avoid the word “hips.” Say “iliac crest,” he whispered. She said iliac crest. His hands kept moving. Her mouth moved with them, reciting iliac spine, ischial tuberosity, pubic symphysis.

As she spoke she remembered her sister’s doctor, how he, too, used a string of fancy words—cardiomyopathy, arrhythmia—but how really they all meant hopeless. As she named the parts of her body, she remembered the last time she saw her sister. Her sister would never speak of anything intimate but listened as she described the first time she tried waxing at home, how she didn’t know what to look for at the pharmacy, how she couldn’t find the tubs of wax or the repurposed tongue depressors, how she ended up with pairs of plastic strips, the wax enclosed between them.

For once, her sister hadn’t changed the subject or choked on her tea, just looked around the empty room before asking How do they work? She doesn’t remember everything she said, if she told her sister to hold the skin taut, to move rapidly, to take an aspirin beforehand. She only remembers describing those plastic strips, how she said, Everything you need is already there. Just rub them between your hands. The body contains lots of heat.

“Somewhere like Iowa, or Montana,” Amy said, sucking a pen cap during the six days she tried to quit cigarettes. Madeleine licked the paper of a joint closed, lit it, blew smoke rings into Amy’s redwood curls, and said, “I love you, Amy, but you’re fucking high if you think I’m moving to Montana.”

Madeleine is electric tonight. She’s shocked herself twice on Amy’s bed, now watching her floss in the bureau mirror like her body isn’t the most remarkable personification of the theory that only the fittest organisms will prevail. Madeleine pushes up the bedroom window an inch and lights a cigarette from a silver case, listening for her mother’s sound machine to begin its lullaby of white noise. When it does, Amy tosses her used floss and presses play on the stereo. The Magnetic Fields’ In My Secret Place colors the static between them. For a few moments before Amy speaks, Madeleine wants to be eight years old and dancing alone in her room again so bad that it hurts the back of her throat.

“David said hi,” Amy says, swaying to the song. “You missed him by like twenty minutes.”

“Well now I’m glad I got a flat tire,” Madeleine says, her heart reaching out of place. She holds a hand to her chest until it settles down.

“It wasn’t weird.” Amy picks up and sets down her pink tweezers. Madeleine sits up, allowing Amy to join her on the bed. Amy leans back and hugs her coltish legs. Madeleine counts the four freckles on Amy’s right thigh, remembers kissing them like a hand around her mouth.

“He’s an asshole,” Madeleine says. She sends a silent Fuck You to the tears in her eyes.

“He’s my brother,” Amy says, small now.

“I’m sorry, it’s just… I…” Madeleine hiccups and covers her eyes with a forearm. Amy reaches out to caress her rainbow-rinsed waves, but when Amy speaks again she pulls away. “Why did he have to walk in and look at us like that? What the fuck is so perfect about him? And why did you go so fucking far away?” Madeleine tries to roll herself into the smallest ball possible. She tries to focus on an old daydream of herself as a world-class gymnast, contorting her body into striking suitcase carry-able poses.

Amy shakes Madeleine’s shoulder until Madeleine faces her, eyes silvered and animal. “What are you afraid of? Don’t you want me anymore?” Madeleine asks, every shamed part of her burning leaf-fast.

Amy coaxes Madeleine to her feet and wreathes an arm around her waist, playing the man in a slow dance to In My Car. “It’s not like that,” Amy says to the shore of Madeleine’s neck. “He won’t tell.”

“Taking a ride to somewhere inside, where you never left me, and I never cried, at the speed of light, in my car,” Madeleine sings along, twining her hands through Amy’s hair and down her back, over the secret bruises and the rest of the prodigal body and in seconds their wolves are loose and glaring, pelts basking in the warm artificial air.

The front door slamming wakes Amy at nine-fifteen in the morning. Her parents, off to their psychiatry practice for the day. She slowly transfers Madeleine’s arm from across her breasts to her left side, and tries her best to rise out of bed like Dracula in the classics, like the door of a bomb shelter swooning out of the ground. She finds her panties in a fist on the floor and steps into them, acquires a black leotard, a slim white cardigan, and the previous night’s tube socks. She sniffs her fingers, smells her stepsister. The twist in her stomach is a familiar blend, all moxie and terror. She’s felt it ever since David walked in on them, their graduation dresses purled around their waists, hands between each other’s legs, panting I love yous and I’m gonna comes. The road to her last-minute acceptance to an out of state college was paved with the look in his eyes. Like she wasn’t his at all.

Their final plan was to run away to University of Utah, say they were high school sweethearts, rent a studio apartment and find part-time jobs. Madeleine even knew a girl who went there, named Lady. “Apparently all the gays are doing it,” Madeleine teased, wrapping her arms around Amy from behind. “I’m not gay,” Amy whispered. Madeleine snorted, “Yeah, sure,” and kissed the valley where her neck and shoulder meet, “and I’m Kate Middleton.” Amy said, “It’s Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge now,” but Madeleine was focused on pulling their skirts down and locking the door behind them.

Madeleine is awake now. Amy knows because she can hear In My Secret Place again. The hardwood creaks under Madeleine’s feet. Amy reads the note their parents left,  then crumples it and puts it in her mouth. She chews until it’s an inky pulp on her tongue, listening to Madeleine play the song again, and again. Amy splashes warm water on her face and climbs the stairs, David’s private questions from yesterday forming a river in her head, carrying things away with it, leaving water damaged rooms behind.

“By the way, where did those come from?” Madeleine points at the florid blooms on Amy’s back. Amy leans against her bureau and shrugs her shoulders forward, collar bones like flamingo legs. Madeleine turns down I Can’t Touch You Anymore a little and looks at Amy. “Are you seeing somebody?” she asks, eyes unreachable.

“Did I ever tell you that a deer crashed through a window in our student union like six weeks ago?” Amy asks, pulling off her cardigan and folding it into a meticulous square on her bureau. She turns back around, tries to smile.

“No.” Madeleine crosses her legs at the knee, something Amy remembers her mother calling slutty, one of the few memories she still has.

“It was fucking crazy,” Amy laughs, looking at Madeleine’s shins, tanner than hers, with two more freckles. “Like total pandemonium. It was a twelve-point buck. I had totally forgotten it was their rut, you know.”

“Amy.” Madeleine puts her fingertips over her eyes. “Just tell me.”

“Madeleine, please calm down—”

“Amy.” Madeleine rises, clenching her teeth to keep from crying. “Who are you fucking?”

“Henry,” Amy says, willing her hands steady, failing to turn her gaze above Madeleine’s waist. “He’s a friend of David’s. We go to the same school. I’m sorry. I thought Dad already told you.”

“Fuck you.” Madeleine crosses the room and slaps Amy once, twice, three times across the cheek. Amy covers her face and wails. Madeleine wants to kiss her and say she’s sorry, but feels her body step back, so she watches the blood gallop to her palm, waits for the sting to subside. When she looks up again, Amy is doubled over and howling, her black wolf watching Madeleine, ravenous.