Page 9 of People Like Us

He grimaced. “I don’t mean to.”

I marched over to my bag, shoving the laptop and cough drops back in. “I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

“I don’t know how to make friends very easily,” he called from his spot on the floor. I turned back to find him staring at me. “Especially girls.”

“Shocker,” I said.

He grimaced, and I felt like I’d kicked a puppy. A thought flickered across me instantly. Before I could think it through, I was moving to sit on the couch. His expression was weary as he looked up at me.

“Do you want to have girl friends, August?” He nodded silently. “Alright, well I want to pass biology. So maybe we can help each other.”

He graced me with one of those rare lopsided grins. “You gonna tutor me in girls, Lola?”

I nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, August, I am.”

Chapter Three

Istruggled to reach the shoe box around a winter coat I never wore anymore, and a broken vacuum cleaner I kept forgetting to replace. I’d buried it the last time I put it away on purpose, and was now cursing my past self for how well of a job I had done.

When my fingers finally made purchase on the faded green cardboard, I pulled it out carefully, not because it was fragile, but because I didn’t trust myself with it.

It felt a little like being a teenager again, the way you go searching for something you know you’re not supposed to look at. Something you swear you don’t need anymore, even as your hands already know exactly where to find it. A box of high school memories somehow made me feel like I was sixteen, looking at porn, the volume turned all the way down.

The lid gave slightly under my fingers, and then I was sitting on the floor with it open in front of me like it had been waiting there for me to fall back into the familiar habit.

A stack of photos sat on top. Lindsey and Emily with their arms slung around me, all three of us sunburnt and squinting into a camera like the future wasn’t something we’d have to survive. It was the summer before our senior year and Emily was about to leave us for two months to go to some christian camp her parents had found. I was terrified Lindsey might forget to invite me to parties or the nail salon without having Emily to bridge the gap between us. Emily had always been better at pretending to be wealthy than I had. But summer went on, and Lindsey didn’t forget it.

That was when I began to wonder if I needed Emily as much as I always thought I had. I figured she had the same epiphany at camp because when she came back, she was no longer her overly-affectionate and cheerful self. She was harder in a way I couldn’t quite place the origin of.

The photos from winter formal were next. Andy’s hand on my waist in every frame, like an anchor disguised as affection. His suit was too tight on the shoulders. The layers of my green and gold dress swallowed my petite frame. We looked like we belonged together in the way sponsored couples belong together in commercials—clean, symmetrical, emotionally airbrushed.

My smile in those pictures was too wide, too certain. Like I knew exactly what kind of person I was going to become and approved of her in advance.

I set the photos aside and found the tiny Barbie figurine—a small plastic thing with one shoe missing and scratched paint marking her face—next to a faux ruby ring and faded tickets to high school football games. I turned the toy over in my hand, wondering briefly if I’d ever been gentle with anything just for the sake of it. I couldn’t remember.

At the bottom of the box, beneath loose papers and folded notebooks, I found it…the journal I had kept in Mr. Hayward’s class. I hadn’t kept a diary, having never trusted myself enough for that kind of honesty. But writing poetry let me be vulnerable with the truth in a way that was open to interpretation of anyone who might read it.

I sat against the doorframe and opened it. The first pages were what I expected. Heavy-handed metaphors, overwrought language, and the kind of teenage grief that believes it is the first of its kind.

Then the religious ones started.

God as a judge. God as a mirror. God as a locked door I kept trying to pick with my tongue. I flipped pages slowly, watching the memory of trying to write fast enough to keep up with my thoughts unfurl on the pages.

bruised knees on a Sunday

like a sister set for the ones in the back of my throat

Will I ever heal from this?

My fingers tightened on the edge of the paper.

The words felt too physical. Like they were happening again as I read them. As if memory wasn’t something I owned, but an event I was still actively participating in.

A soft rustling crackled through the baby monitor as my son began to shift in his bed in the other room. A soft whimper. Then another—his nap blooming into another waking hour.

“Okay,” I said out loud, as if submitting to the universe’s will to pull me from this old habit of chasing nostalgia. I carried the notebook with me down the hall, not bothering to mark my place in it..

The house was too quiet in that specific way that only happens right before something small becomes something urgent. When I opened his door, he was sitting up already, hair flattened on one side, face confused by the betrayal of waking too soon. He looked at me like I had scheduled this.