I was still wearing sweat pants under a dress coat when I got to The Countess’s house. I hadn’t changed since I got home from school and I’d run out of the door and down the street on converse high-tops, purple, inscribed with Smiths lyrics, boys’ initials, and that Oscar Wilde quote about the gutter and stars. January needled my lungs and numbed my … Read More Queen Bee
In the beginning, the Radio Club had a radio station. It was a closet shaped room at the bottom of the stone stairs that opened like the mouth of hell under the old wrestling room and led to a concrete landing. To the left was a cinderblock storage room, home to long-abandoned student art and occasional band practice from the students most likely to … Read More Sound Salvation
I’m not now nor have I ever been a rich person. But I’ve spent enough of my life rich person adjacent to know that the whole College Admissions scam is only surprising in that someone actually got busted for it. The whole story is hilarious–almost hilarious enough that we forget about the still-acceptable legacies, the “here’s this new wing for the library” beneficiaries, or … Read More Early Decision
The first thing I saw out my bedroom window was the car—black with a long nose and curved where most cars were squared, so shiny it reflected the rosy summer dusk. I was eleven, not the kind of kid interested in cars, but that car was something else. I skittered down the stairs in my nightgown, through the cocktail party melee and haze of … Read More Passers-by
My first little sister got married in September of 2017. It was a a prolonged rosy gold twilight at a Lowcountry beach resort and a masterclass in production. Every piece of the event was at peak photogenic, but even without the scrapbook, the whole wedding weekend lingered in the collective memory like a slightly salty confection in Maxfield Parrish colors, something close enough to … Read More In The Canyons
My last semester in college, I took a creative non-fiction workshop on Wednesday nights in a class of all women, taught by a woman scarcely older than I was at the time. There was some odd symmetry to it. I started college at a Women’s College. I finished in a classroom without men. I had a hard time taking the class seriously. I joked … Read More Fake News
After college, my little sister planned events at a historic mansion in the state capitol. The house sat at the center of a lush city park in the center of a once-shabby, since-gentrified historic neighborhood blocks from the Governor’s Mansion, the capitol building itself, and the shiny, unmemorable skyscrapers familiar to any city with a banking presence and a hankering to call itself New … Read More A Brief Word on Melon Balls
To begin with, I didn’t steal The Shirt. I got it for Christmas from my Nana, which meant my mother bought it and signed Nana’s name to the card, because lord, shopping takes so much out of you and just go ahead and add that to my account, honey. The Shirt itself was nothing to write home about. It was silver and velvet and … Read More A Thief’s Journal
I hadn’t cleared the Governor’s School Audition and my parents couldn’t afford a fancy performing arts program. I didn’t have a car. I couldn’t find a job walking distance from the house. And so, I accepted an exile to Virginia the summer before senior year, where instead of traditional teenage things, I loitered around the antique shop reading Faulkner novels, eating Twizzlers, and smoking … Read More Lake Monsters
At the beginning of my junior year of high school, we started leaving school after play practice—me and the Countess and the Dryad—to drive around town. I had a car, a piece of shit Honda, the color of old mayonnaise, without functional defrosters or radio. The passenger seat held a boombox, and usually the Countess holding the boombox and sometimes a collection of wasted … Read More Martyrs
the boys I mean are not refined. The lowercase still felt a bit revolutionary; the content more so, they go with girls that buck and bite. We thought we were, the girls that would buck and bite. Not prudes or prims or pearlclutchers, but tough girls, brave girls. The kind of girl that could handle herself. The kind of girl who could hang with … Read More Collaborators
In the summer of my thirteenth year, in the waning, anxious, chlorinated days between pirate camp and the eighth grade, I had a sleepover with Sunshine and we went to see “Dead Poets Society” at a pre-multiplex, twin theatre in a shopping center on the far western edged of my hometown. I loved it. I thought it was the greatest movie I’d ever seen, … Read More Fashion Victim
