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1
Stasi
A cheap plastic suitcase lies open, spilling over with a dozen brightly colored swimsuits. It looks like a painting.
I pause my packing and capture the display with my phone camera: the first official memory of my first-ever real vacation.
A red blur swishes by behind me. “Ooh, you should post that!” That comment comes from my housemate, Suzanna. “Hashtag The Suitcase of Dreams.”
Suz is the poet of the house and has about a hundred thousand active followers on her poetry account.
I’m not going to post it, though. Not yet.
“That one’s just for me,” I say.
Mostly I lurk on social media. I don’t like drama; I just want to keep up with everyone else’s. Plus, I don’t think anyone needs to know where I am and where I’m going 24 hours a day. It’s fine for other people but it’s just not me.
“Can you believe our sweetheart Stasi is actually getting out of the house, Jakob?”
The smell of burning metal wafts in through the side door that leads out to the open-air courtyard-turned-makeshift art studio. I brush past Suz and briefly glimpse Jakob lifting his welding helmet to nod. “Be careful out there. People are overrated.”
The outgoing Suz sighs and rolls her eyes but then flits around to look for her favorite pen.
Jakob makes sculptures from found objects…or something. He doesn’t say much. Jakob mostly stays at home, putting in the house. On the rare occasion he does leave, he just skulks around the city streets on his own, bringing home odd treasures.
“I get out more than Jakob does. I wait tables at the brewery five nights a week,” I remind Suz.
“Work doesn’t count as getting out,” Suz clucks as she rifles through the roll-top desk by the front door. She plucks up a burnished gold ring and shouts, “Jakob, you don’t want to lose this ring. You need a home for it, not right by the front door. It’s dangerous.”
“Said the lady who can’t find the feathered fountain pen that the queen gifted her,” I mutter.
“I heard that,” Suz yells from the other room. Damn, that girl moves like a ninja.
“Just put it on my pillow,” Jakob growls out.
“Touching my housemate’s pillow is far too intimate,” Suz cries. “I’ll set it on your dresser.”
“Fine!” Jakob shouts. “When is your girlfriend coming to get you?”
That’s Jakob’s way of asking how long until Suzanna leaves the house. Jakob… doesn’t like to be fussed at. Or noticed in any way. At all. Poor Jakob. Living with Suzanna is like living with a very nosy monarch butterfly.
Tuning out my housemates, I toss a few other things into the old suitcase and then close it, my twin mattress creaking as I weigh it down to get the zipper to work.
“Do you want to use my suitcase, love?”
“Your matching Louis Vuitton set? Babe, you don’t want that going where I’m going,” I say to Suz.
She swishes by me, looking behind curtains and under cabinets. “Where are you going again? I forgot.” I smile as Suz zips high and low, late for work again, probably misremembering where she put her work shoes.
“In the closet,” I throw out.
She pauses and stands up straight, looking at me like I’ve lost my marbles. “You’re going to the closet?”
I snort. “No. Your shoes are in the closet.”
“Oh, I thought you borrowed them yesterday.”
“I did, and I put them back.” Is that a pointed comment on how Suz borrows things and doesn’t return them? Yes. Yes, it is.
