Concrete Literary Magazine 2016

literary

magazine

concrete literary magazine

Copyright © 2016 Concrete All Rights Reserved Concrete Literary Magazine is an annual print and monthly online journal produced in downtown Boston, amid blue-tinted high rises and blackened train tracks, at the tables of crowded cafes and at the mercy of flickering wireless internet. Established in 1982, Concrete, like Boston, or New York, or London, or Shanghai, is continuously evolving to match its urban population. Within the journal’s pages – both virtual and print – can be found a collection of prose and poetry that represents the dynamic nature of city life. All of the work found within the pages of Concrete is original work published by undergraduates of Emerson College under the Student Government Association and the Writing, Literature and Publishing department. All rights revert to the authors and artists upon publication, and permissions to republish must be gained directly through the contributors.

Submissions: Concrete accepts unsolicited submissions from registered students of Emerson College, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry and screenplays. Submissions should be delivered electronically via Submittable at concretelitmag.com/submit. Please also include a cover sheet that includes your name, Emerson ID, email address, phone number, and the title and genre of the work submitted.

Do not include your name within the document of the piece. Please do not submit to both the Print and Online categories simultaneously.

Emerson College 120 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02116 iv

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2016 staff Editor-in-Chief

Assistant Poetry Editor

Managing Editor

Poetry Readers

Rebecca Rozenberg

Erini Katopodis

Cara DuBois

Brad Trumpfheller Richie Wheelock Jessica Austin

Prose Editor Sammi Curran

Assistant Prose Editor Kurt Hummel

Prose Readers Kaylee Anzick Madeline Poage Sara Henke Kelsey Costa William Duncan

Poetry Editor Sahalie Martin

M a r k e t i n g D i r ec t o r Diana DiLoreto

Marketing Assistant Marissa Bracker

Head Copyeditor Sarah Heatwole

Assistant Copyeditor Lucie Pereira

D e s i g n D i r ec t o r Tim Biddick

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Contents 1.

The Google Chrome Dinosaur is Running Emma Rebholz

4.

For Us Christina Bartson

18.

Equilibrium Mandy Seiner

19. Sodom Brad Trumpfheller 21. Lucy 39.

Sarah Cummings

Post-Sandy Freeport Emily Taylor

42. Solstice Cassandra Martinez 43.

The Arm Betty Capot

52.

Nail Biter Erin Sherry

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The Google Chrome Dinosaur is Running E mm a R e b h o l z Google’s desert gifts us a dinosaur and asks us to call it a hero as if we wouldn’t remember there’s an inevitable ending past the high score all those binary bones buried just beneath the surface but Google rewrites the tragedy so instead of a meteor crashing or an earthquake ripping the dinosaur ends with a gray cactus and a Game Over CONCRETE

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and sometimes the page loads while it’s still in the air so the dinosaur is caught floating or maybe flying through the white space to me this seems like exactly how it must have happened: the real end of the dinosaurs didn’t look like an end at all but a split second of frozen anticipation all of them hovering in some space between life and death as small as one pixel of Google’s desert until the world refreshed into something new

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on screen: the Google Chrome dinosaur is running/jumping/pushing forward to somewhere or something that’s just out of reach some promise of safety or hope or the simple satisfaction of getting there dreaming of the world again ending and becoming something new

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For Us Christina Bartson It was around 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday, and I was sitting on a bench in my college’s police department waiting outside a closed door. My eyes were heavy and sore. I stared down at my boots, the leather toes milky and stained from sloshing through snow and salt on the February city streets. I leaned my elbows on my knees and pressed my hands together, folding into myself, making myself small. I counted my breaths—four counts to inhale, hold my breath four, four counts to exhale, hold four. This is called square breathing. I learned it from a silver-haired shrink who I saw for a few months in high school.

Square breathing is supposed to make you feel like you have control. I sat on the bench in the police department outside the closed door fighting to hold together my square.

On the other side of the door was a girl I had met only hours earlier. Her name was Ellen. She was from New Hampshire, and she was nineteen years old—ten months older than me. Ellen was small, shorter than my five-foot-five frame. Her straight, dark brown hair was cut to her shoulders, and she wore it parted on the side. Her brown eyes were framed in black eyeliner, and she’d brushed glitter across her olive cheekbones. I pictured her on the other side of the door with her eyeliner smudged and the glitter sticky and wet on her chin from tears dragging the flecks down her face. I sat on the bench and listened to her cry through the door.

I met Ellen at a fraternity house party in Boston earlier that Saturday night. I was a freshman in college, and on that Saturday night, like most of my Saturday 4

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nights that year, I set out across the city with my two girlfriends, Alex and Emily, to drink cheap beer and sweat through my clothes. The fraternity house was a big brownstone with a white spiral staircase, a balcony, and creaky wood floors. The ceilings were tall and photographs of the fraternity classes, dating back to the fifties, hung on the walls in golden frames. On the second floor, there was a study with a fireplace and shelves from floor to ceiling packed with books, their spines snug and stiff. In the basement there was a bar and a pool table the brothers used for drinking games. Most of the people at the party collected in the basement, pooling like stale beer at the bottom of an empty keg. That’s where I met Ellen, in the basement.

I sat on a barstool leaning my elbows on the counter and drank warm beer out of a red plastic cup while I watched my friends dance. The music was loud, and I could feel the bass in my chest, the beat reverberating against my rib cage.

A girl wearing a black dress with glitter on her cheeks came and sat next to me.

“Hi, I’m Ellen,” she said and plopped down on a stool.

Ellen was visiting one of the fraternity’s brothers. He was her friend from high school, and she drove up for the night to party with him. She was on a gap year. She’d graduated high school the same year as me and had deferred her acceptance to a college on the East Coast. She was living at home, working to make money for school, and taking some time to slow down, she said. She was burned out after high school, she told me. We talked for a while, shouting over the music and laughing, and then Ellen finished her beer and hopped off the stool to go dance.

Girls dance and boys watch. This is what I’ve learned. This is what we’ve learned. Under the low lights, in our short, tight clothes, we pulse and dip. Our eyes look out from under blackened eyelashes, trying to catch a glimpse from across the room, or maybe watching for what’s coming. Our backs arch, each CONCRETE

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vertebra unfurling and spines curling like the stems on flowers. Our knees are strong. We bend like hinges. Our hips press into the beat, and our bodies throb as the bass enters our bones, wraps around our muscles, and moves us to the rhythm of the song. Our chests are open, princess collarbones framing our breasts. We showcase ourselves; we hang ourselves up because we are beautiful and brilliant and crafted like art. We perform like we’ve learned to since we were young girls, and when a stranger walks up from behind us and grabs our hips, we’re not shocked by this entitlement. We continue to dance.

We’ve been conditioned through television, movies, magazines, music, and advertisements to see ourselves through another’s gaze—this male gaze. We construct ourselves through this lens. We live in our skin, but look at it through another’s eyes. We dance with a trained and internalized misogyny, tailoring our looks, bodies, actions, and words to please.

On that Saturday night, like most Saturday nights, there we were dancing, many of us fully aware of this gaze but under its spell still, twisting our bodies in ways we’ve perfected over years of watching, learning, and thinking that this is how we’re meant to behave—ass out, chin down, voices high and soft. Across the room, a boy is watching. He stands with his legs spread apart, hands on his hips, chest puffed out, practicing this tango we’re both trapped in. It doesn’t always look like it, but he’s dancing, too.

Later in the evening, I wandered upstairs to the study with the tall shelves.

The upstairs was mostly empty; a few people paired off and leaned against walls, their drunken eyes talking about desire. Red plastic cups sat emptied and used on the staircase like roadkill skeletons. The music playing in the basement was faint and muffled, a pillow pressed over a talking face. I walked into the study and found Ellen lying on a couch. She was falling asleep.

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“Hey Ellen,” I said and sat down on the couch opposite her.

She waved and yawned. Emily and Alex also came upstairs, and they were talking and drinking some cups of water. We’ll go home soon, we agreed. We would catch the last train back to our campus downtown. We sat in a pile, with our legs crossed, dangling tired feet, and leaning heads on each other’s shoulders.

While we sat in our pile, delaying putting on our coats and stepping into Boston’s winter temperatures, a boy stumbled down the stairs from his room and walked over to Ellen, who was nearly asleep on the couch. He stood over her for a moment, and then he leaned down and grabbed her ankle. He started to pull. He pulled on her leg, dragging her slack body across the couch. Alex stood up.

“Hey, stop it, man,” Alex said.

He didn’t even look over. Ellen’s skirt was riding up, and her hair was plastered across her face, covering her eyes. He held her by the leg and tugged.

He was drunk and shirtless, and he ignored Alex, a young woman who did not like to be ignored. He held Ellen by her ankle.

“Come upstairs,” he demanded. Ellen shook her head and said no. “C’mon, come upstairs.” He pulled harder. Her skirt was scrunched up around her waist, and I could see her underwear.

Emily walked over and sat beside Ellen, putting her arm around her protectively.

“Seriously, stop it,” Alex repeated. “She doesn’t want to go upstairs.”

I walked over to the couch and stood in front of him. “Hey, she doesn’t want to go upstairs, okay? Go back to your room, and go to sleep,” I said.

“You don’t live here,” he said, raising his voice. “This is my house, and I can do whatever I want to do.”

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He was loud and tall, and he flung his arms out to the side, making his body appear larger, like animals do when they feel threatened. I backed up a little, startled. I looked around the room. Where was everyone else who lived here?

Across the room, I saw another brother slumped in a sofa chair, barely visible in the dimly lit corner.

“Do you know him?” I asked, pointing to the drunken aggressor.

“Yeah,” he said, not moving. “Yo man, you have a girlfriend, remember?” he called across the room, a little slurred.

The aggressor gave no reply, and the brother did not move from his chair. He just watched from the corner, motionless and indifferent.

The drunken boy tried to move around me to get to Ellen again, but I put my arm out in his way.

“Get out of my fucking house,” he said. He put his two hands on my shoulders and shoved me backwards. I stumbled and hit the coffee table. Emily gasped and stood, and Alex moved in front of me, throwing her arms up.

“Don’t you fucking touch her!” Alex shouted, her curls shaking.

Emily rose and crossed the room. “We need to go now,” she said. She grabbed Ellen’s hand and helped her to her feet, talking in my ear, “We can’t leave her here, in a house full of drunk boys. I think we should take her back with us.”

“Ellen, do you want to come home with us?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said.

The drunken brother was standing over the couch, swaying and cursing.

“Ellen, we’re taking you with us. Where’s your coat?” I said.

Ellen pointed to the bookshelves. We grabbed our jackets and purses, and we left the house.

We took a cab across Boston and back to our campus. We wanted to take 8

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Ellen to a safe place. We planned to have her sleep in our dormitory so she could sober up and go back to the fraternity house in the morning to gather her things and retrieve her car. For now, though, she’d stay with us. In the cab on the way back, she kept apologizing for being drunk. She worried she was being a burden, and she was sorry, she said. We told her to not worry—there was no way we’d leave her in that house. We’d sign her into our dorm as a guest for the night, and she could sleep on our couch.

However, when we arrived at our building we couldn’t bring Ellen into our dorm, because she had no identification on her. We had left the fraternity in a hurry, and we forgot to check and make sure she had her ID. She had forgotten her wallet. We were stopped at the elevators by two male security officers. I held Ellen’s hand tightly, and she leaned on me. She was only wearing a fleece jacket, and her bare legs were prickled with goose bumps. It was nearing 4:00 a.m., it was snowing outside, and we only wanted to take Ellen to a safe, warm place. We explained what happened and asked once more if we could take her up to our room.

“This young lady looks intoxicated,” the man at the security desk said. “How old is she?” He said he had to call the campus police and the building’s resident director.

We were taken to the campus police department, through a maze of narrow hallways and small rooms and blank walls. We described what happened earlier that evening to the campus officer and our resident director. We explained that we feared what would have happened if we left Ellen alone in the fraternity house. We said our most immediate concern was to get Ellen to a safe place. Their most immediate concern, however, was that Ellen was underage and had been drinking. The college police called the Boston Police, CONCRETE

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which confused us, and we asked why it was necessary. They told us this was protocol.

Three Boston police officers arrived. Two were male, and one was female.

They asked us: Who is this girl? How old is she? Where is she from? What were you doing? Were you drinking? Why did you bring her here? Is she drunk?

Why did you think you could take her? Why didn’t you just leave her there? She said she knew one of the brothers, right? Couldn’t you have left her? Do you know what time it is?

I didn’t speak—I couldn’t at first. I swallowed. I inhaled, counting to four, trying to gain back control. My mind was foggy from exhaustion and confusion.

I felt bombarded and small, and while the officers poked us with their pointed questions and Ellen squeezed my hand and leaned her body against mine, I drifted out of the narrow hallway and into my head, imagining what would have happened if we left Ellen at the house with a drunk boy holding her by her ankle.

My imagination was rooted in very real statistics—a fear that festers in women’s minds and bodies every day of our lives. Just two months earlier, my best friend was in her room with a boy, and when she said no, he locked her door and ignored her words. I had just met Ellen, but when that boy clutched her ankle, and she shook her head no, and he didn’t stop, I knew I couldn’t just leave her.

The two male officers said they needed to take Ellen to question her.

Question her about what? I wondered. We asked if we could stay with her, and we followed Ellen as she was led into a small room with two chairs and a desk.

The male officers ignored our request. I asked again, and they said no. Ellen began sobbing, and her crying ripped through her body, causing her spine to bend, and I watched her shrink in front of me like this wilting stem.

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“Please,” she cried. “Can they stay with me? Please?”

One of the male officers, who wore an orange vest, told me to let go of Ellen’s hand. He stepped in front of me. He put his body between Ellen and me, and because the room was tight, I was pressed against the wall with his back and boxed out of the room. The door closed in my face.

“She has done nothing wrong!” I wanted to shout. “We have done nothing wrong!” I wanted to scream. But I was quiet and just stood breathing heavy with my nose a few inches from the door.

One in every five women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. One fifth of our entire female population will be robbed of authority over her body and made to feel powerless. One in every five. I have memorized this statistic.

I wanted to shout this number back in the faces of the officers telling us we should have left her there in the fraternity house. I wanted to yell in their faces that we did the right thing. We made Ellen one less woman to be sexually assaulted. We stopped a bad thing from happening. I wanted to throw this number in their faces, wave it in front of their eyes and not stop until these officers understood the gravity of these statistics and felt the weight women everywhere shoulder every day.

I sat down on the bench on the other side of the closed door and looked down at my boots. My breathing was heavy. Alex and Emily were crying and sat on either side of me. I held Emily’s head, and Alex clutched my hand. We had removed a young woman from a house full of men only to see her put into a room full of men. I could hear Ellen’s crying through the door, and I could hear the officers tell her that if she hadn’t been drinking this wouldn’t have happened.

Just as women are taught to perform, we are taught to be on the defensive CONCRETE

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and to swallow the blame. We don’t teach men not to sexually assault, we teach women how to not get sexually assaulted. It’s been the same dance for ages, and I couldn’t take it.

The female officer, who had been quiet during this, walked over to the bench where we were sitting and said they were going to take Ellen down to the station and hold her for the night. There was nowhere else for her to go right now. The officer said we should leave and go back to our dormitory. We asked if we could go with Ellen. She said no. We asked if we could say goodbye. We were allowed to say goodbye.

The door opened, and Ellen walked out with the two male officers. Glitter ran down her face. We stood, and all four of us wrapped ourselves around each other. Ellen apologized, saying she was so sorry this happened. This is not your fault, we told her. You’ve done nothing wrong, we told her. She was shaking. I held her and stroked her hair, tucking a few strands behind her ears. It didn’t matter that we had only met her hours earlier. We knew the same dance steps, and we feared the same thing. I held onto her, my forehead pressed against her wet cheek. But a loud voice startled me out of this, and I broke out of their arms.

“Don’t make a reunion out of it,” a voice called. “Stop acting hysterical.”

I turned around to face the male officer in the orange vest. He stood with his hands on his hips, his legs spread wide.

“What?” I asked.

My tone was sharp, cutting his gaze with an edge I was raised to keep soft.

I was tired of feeling small and still. I knew this word, hysterical. I knew why and how it was being used against me. I knew that it was being used to silence me. “Hysteria” comes from the Greek word for the female reproductive organ hystera for uterus. In the nineteenth century, hysteria was a common medical 12

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diagnosis for mental illness in women. And today hysteria is used to call women emotional. It’s sexist, and whether or not this male police officer knew its history and connotation, he recognized that this word was an insult, and so he used it to make me quiet. Something in me disobeyed, something in me stopped my dancing, and I started to unravel this thing that was wrapped around me—restricting me—my body, my voice, my power. All of these subconscious feelings drifted towards the surface, and I decided I was done being on my best behavior.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” I said. “That’s sexist.”

The officer in the orange vest shrugged and walked away.

We held Ellen for a long moment, and then we watched her leave with the officers.

Alex, Emily, and I returned to our dorm rooms in the early morning, and our friends came over to sit with us on our beds, hug our shoulders, and listen to us talk about what happened. We stayed up for hours, our bodies unable to sleep and our minds running, deliberating feverishly what we could have done differently to make Ellen safe. But there wasn’t anything more or different we could have done. We had no options. We couldn’t bend the rules, we were told, even if a young woman’s safety was at risk. We were frustrated and exhausted, and we’d never felt like our voices had mattered so little. We felt as if we had been punished for doing the right thing, and now Ellen was across the city sitting on a hard, cold bench in the Boston Police station only hours after a drunken boy attempted to sexually assault her.

Back in my dorm room, I went into the bathroom and cried. I leaned against the counter, holding my face in my hands. I remember my hands feeling wet and hot, and I looked down and saw blood on my palms. I got a CONCRETE

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bloody nose. I grabbed some paper towels, turned on the faucet, and began cleaning myself up, watching the red run in the sink through my blurry eyes. I stood in the bathroom, pressing paper towels over my face, and stared at myself in the mirror—wet eyes, bleeding nose, and shaking hands. I recognized this feeling. I had felt it before, although it had never been this concentrated or violent.

Before this night, I’d learned my feminist vocabulary and read feminist texts and experienced eighteen years of life as a female, but I had never been pushed, literally boxed out of a room, or told to pull myself together because I was being hysterical.

I hate that I make myself small and talk in a quiet voice. I hate that I can’t dance for me, because I’ve been taught to dance for another. I hate that I’m always on my best behavior, but men aren’t taught not to sexually assault women. This violence is my reality. This event was not an isolated case. This happens all the time. One in every five is burned into our memory and our identity, but it shouldn’t be.

Emily slept in my bed that night, and Alex called her mom. Before going to bed, we opened our computers and found Ellen on Facebook and sent her a message asking if she was safe. We didn’t sleep much that night. The following morning we all got breakfast and talked about what we would do, what actions we would take, and how we would turn our anger into power.

A day later, we got a Facebook message from Ellen.

She was taken to the Boston Police station where she was put on a bench and told to stay until she sobered up. After an hour or so, Ellen said she didn’t feel safe and was cold, and so she snuck out of the station. In the early hours of a Sunday morning in February, Ellen walked in just a fleece and ballet flats 14

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to the nearest subway station, jumped over the turnstiles because she didn’t have her pass or wallet with her, and waited until the trains started running.

She took the train back to the frat house, found her purse and keys, got in her car, and drove home. The one job the officers had was to make sure Ellen felt safe, and they failed.

Ellen thanked us in her message and told us she was home. We messaged back and forth for a while, talking about what happened that night and swapping stories. She told us that while she was in the small room being questioned by the officers, they told her she should “get better friends.”

We continued to talk over Facebook for about a month afterwards, but since then I haven’t spoken with Ellen. When I log on to Facebook, I see her posts.

She shares articles about current events, Hillary Clinton, and feminism. She looks happy from her photos.

A few weeks after that night, Alex, Emily, and I met with the chief of police at our college. We told him about the event and how it was handled with a lack of respect and compassion, no matter how by-the-book it was dealt with.

Nothing came of this. We drafted a letter to send to the Boston Globe about police conduct in the city, but never sent it. We talked about what happened a lot, and then we got burned out, and we haven’t talked about it since. I understand now why sexual assault is often unreported. Any justice or legal action with the college police or city police is arduous, painful, exhausting, and stressful.

Two years have passed, and we haven’t done any of the things we talked about. We carried on with our lives, passing over this disruption, ignoring it like the calls that are shouted as us while we walk to work. But we can’t ignore it.

Remembering this night is like cracking open a book from my childhood CONCRETE

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that scared me. I do it with hesitance, but also with an obsession to understand what made me so afraid. About two years ago, I wanted to write this. The events were recent, and my feelings of frustration and urgency and anger lit my words like fire. And I did write it, but I wrote it only for me. I wrote all the facts down, drawing a timeline, recording things that were said, hands that were laid, and people who were involved because I didn’t want to forget. But I never sent my writing into the world because I knew it needed time.

I’m aware of the many accounts similar to mine, and to Ellen’s—a woman’s retelling of a catcall, a sexual assault, a rape. There are entire college courses devoted to this genre of literature. It is in fact, a genre—a body of nonfiction authored by women sharing their stories, giving voice to this ugly truth, this pervasive, rampant, and horrifying violence. It seems every time I open my web browser to a news site or pick up a paper or magazine, I read another story like ours.

Just in the past year, I read the story of Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia University senior who carried a mattress around campus (and later created a similar performance art video for her senior thesis project titled “Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol”) to protest the administration’s refusal to expel her alleged rapist. I read about Erica Kinsman, a Florida State University student who was allegedly raped by top NFL draft pick Jameis Winston, who so far, has gotten off without charges and become a star player in the league. I read about the thirty-five women who spoke up about being sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby. I read at Yale, 34.6 percent of undergraduate women experienced sexual assault, at the University of Michigan, 34.3 percent, and at Harvard, 29.2 percent. And I fear reading the thousands of more narratives folded into these statistics. I read and I read, story after story.

These have become our story, a collective story. But despite the gravity of this 16

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literature, I find myself skipping over the articles, not reading until the end, closing tabs, and falling quiet during conversations on the subject, because I’m exhausted.

The summer after my freshman year of college, the same year I met Ellen, I also met Gloria Steinem. My mother worked for Planned Parenthood, and I volunteered at a fundraising event at which Ms. Steinem was speaking. After she spoke, I waited with my mother’s coworker Katy to talk with Ms. Steinem.

I was star-struck upon meeting her, and while I clumsily gushed, Katy asked a question that I still think about nearly every day: “Ms. Steinem, how do you keep going? How do you keep fighting for women’s equality after all these years?”

Gloria Steinem replied, “I’m eighty years old. I’ve been fighting this fight since I was twenty. That’s nearly sixty years. We do it because someone has to.”

Someone has to. I keep hearing this and repeating it in my mind. I’m now twenty years old, and I’m going to write this because I have to. And so two years after this event happened, I write this for us. I’m joining the collective narrative—expanding this body of literature because we have to keep telling this story until the world can’t stand to hear it anymore, until the world realizes everyone is hurting from this violence.

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Equilibrium Mandy Seiner An empty room will always be colder than an inhabited one.

In the thermostat there is a coil that expands with heat and contracts without it. The furnace adjusts accordingly.

You sit in the room and offer nothing.

You sit in the room and cling to the words of everyone radiating wisdom around you.

You sit in the room and feel trivial, but so what. You are still breathing.

When you do, the coil expands.

Your exhales warm those around you even if you are still cold yourself.

When you exit the room, the coil contracts.

Everyone is colder in your absence; you are each shiver running down their spines. Â

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Sodom B r a d T r u mp f h e l l e r I can’t tell you that; I want to tell you about the boy, the summer, somewhere in a field of grass halfway between the sun & our bodies.

He wasn’t the first, but he was a he, & isn’t that something? At least a promise of silence, but I always liked how he would use a word: wrapping it in all of himself & freeing it like a firework.

Take cynosure: noun, a thing that strongly attracts attention through its own beauty.

Think the sun. Think his green eyes. Think boys learning to swear in every language.

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Our mouths to water fountains then to each other. Then to water bottles overflowing with stolen vodka.

If you drink enough, you can feel the summer dull your mosquito bites. If you drink enough, nosebleeds just feel like losing a bit of yourself.

This is our summer as a portrait of stillness, as a firework coiling in the night & then forgetting its own explosion.

If you wake up and don’t remember, did it happen? Can you think boys are beautiful & still not want to kiss them again? Shut up. Be still.

This is our summer. My stillness. Shut up. This is loving & touching & hurting – somewhere, a sun. A field of grass. A boy, lying as still as he can.

A nose that won’t stop bleeding.

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Lucy S a r a h C u mm i n g s The last time I shared a bed like this I was seventeen. It was the night that Lucy’s first real boyfriend broke up with her, and I showed up at her house with a box of Double Stuf Oreos and Mulan on VHS. I ran my hand through her hair while she cried. ‘He’s an idiot,’ I told her, like the best friend in a TV show would. ‘If he can’t see how awesome you are, he should be institutionalized.’

She laughed as she twisted off the top of two Oreos and put them together. I smiled before doing the same. We watched Mulan on her beat-up old TV that looked like a Windows 98 computer and was still covered in the galaxy-themed stickers we stuck on it in the fourth grade.

A snore comes from the right side of my bed where my blanket usually ends up, and I can’t pretend it’s Lucy. James throws his arm over me in his sleep, and I inch away until my leg hangs off the left side of the bed, until I can just barely feel his heavy breaths on my neck. I didn’t ask him to stay here, but he stalled outside my apartment and said things like, ‘For all the times I’ve dropped you off I’ve never actually seen the inside of your place.’

‘You’ve only dropped me off fourteen times,’ I said, because it’s only been fourteen times that he’s dropped me off—every day since August 12, two weeks after I started at the lab.

He laughed, said he was glad I was keeping count. I wasn’t sure how to respond. So I didn’t. Katie, he said, and I didn’t like that he called me that. He turned off the car right as I began opening the door so I had to look back at him. ‘I really like you. I just wanna spend time with you. Can I come up?’ and no one had ever said that to me before.

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James clicks his teeth together, and I pull the blankets over my head.

‘I’ve been such a jerk to you, Katie.’ I remember Lucy telling me that night, three years and twenty-three days before the last time she said anything to me.

You’re such an amazing friend, and I’ve been totally ignoring you. ‘I’m so sorry, dude. You know I love you, right? I love you so much, Katie.’

I try to let her words overpower James’ breathing. I repeat them over and over. I imagine them floating above me like sheep.

I love you so much, Katie. I love you so much, Katie.

I count them like I used to count the freckles splattering her neck. I used to run my index finger across them as if her body was a connect-the-dots board on the back of a diner paper place mat. I would try to discover a new shape every time. I stopped in sixth grade when she slapped my hand away at lunch and told me it was weird. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around with my left hand wrapped firmly around my right as if it were a weapon.

James’ hand makes contact with my hair, and I curl deeper into myself.

I love you so much, Katie.

— I wake up early. Earlier than I want to. James’ arm is around me; his chest is against my back. I roll over until I’m off the bed and begin sifting through the clothes hanging in my closet, loud enough for him to hear.

After I open and close the closet door twice, he stirs. I watch him glance around the room before a small smile creeps over his face as his eyes find mine.

“Morning,” he says softly.

“Morning.”

He hops out of my bed, circling it to come wrap an arm around me. He isn’t wearing a shirt. “Thanks for letting me stay over,” he says into my hair.

“Mmmhmm.” I move away and grab pair of leggings before heading to the 22

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bathroom to change.

When I’m done, I find him in the kitchen; he’s setting the milk and eggs on the counter. He still isn’t wearing a shirt, and I don’t know why he thinks he has the right to walk through my apartment like this. Or go through my fridge.

“I thought I’d make you breakfast,” he says with a grin. “I’ve been told I make a mean omelet.”

It’s weird, the way he talks to me. How when we met my first day at the lab he continued past the Standard Small Talk Questions I managed to get the hang of in undergrad. College: MIT. Major: chemistry. Home state: Louisiana. Job: lab technician at Exosome Diagnostics. And you? Lucy told me I should always finish with the and you? even when I don’t actually care. It’s just how these things work, babe. People like talking about themselves.

Even when I started the and you? technique, though, most of my conversations didn’t last much longer.

But James, he kept saying things. He asked questions that I didn’t always know how to answer, like why I did MIT for undergrad and grad school, or what I like to do outside of work. He asked questions Lucy might have said I answered wrong, like when I talked for two minutes about how Boston compares to Louisiana and forgot to ask how it compares to his hometown. But he kept on asking things.

And it’s weird, the way he acts like my friend even though I never gave him any reason to. But it’s been nice. Having a friend has been nice.

It was only last Wednesday when we pulled to a stop in front of my apartment that he said, ‘You know, Kaitlyn, I really want to kiss you.’

I stared at him. Whenever Lucy told me about a boy wanting to kiss her, he just did it. I didn’t know the protocol for being told first.

‘Why?’ I asked.

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‘Why? Because I like you.’

So I said okay, and he leaned forward. I didn’t feel any of the things Lucy told me I would feel. But he kissed me again yesterday, and there was something kind of cool about the way it all worked. Lucy used to describe it to me, but I never could imagine it.

I tell James I don’t like omelets, but he insists on making something. As I watch him crack an egg directly into the pan to make it over-easy. “Once, when Lucy and I were kids, we tried putting chocolate chips in our eggs, like you do with pancakes or waffles.” I say as I move to the counter. “And her mom kept the candy hidden, ‘cause Lucy wasn’t allowed any in the mornings, so Lucy had to climb up on my back and then stand on the counter to reach the cabinet it was in. She told me to keep watch.”

James smiles at me, maybe a different smile than usual. “You know, I’m curious about this famous Lucy. Is she ever gonna visit?”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I don’t understand why he’d say that. As if he would meet her if she did. As if he was part of this. I’ve only known him a month.

I stay frozen at the counter, trying to form a response.

“Katie?”

“She died.” The words are out of my mouth before I mean to say them. Then: “She can’t come visit. She’s dead.”

“Oh, shit. Katie.”

I want him to stop calling me that.

He puts down the spatula and comes to wrap his arms around me. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

I don’t say anything. He doesn’t let go.

“You can always talk to me about it, about anything, if you need to, you know 24

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that, right?”

I nod. He holds on longer, kisses my hair, then goes back to eggs. They’re brown when they make it to my plate, but I don’t say anything. I eat without looking up.

I tell him, “I think I want you to go now,” and then I add, “I need to do some things.”

“Of course,” he says. “Call me later if you want, okay?”

I nod, looking at the floor as he collects his stuff, kisses my cheek, and leaves.

I stay seated at the table, staring at the cracked, off-white tile his bare feet had occupied.

It’s been years since I’ve had to say to say anything out loud about Lucy, present tense. “She’s dead,” I whisper again, testing out the words feel as they fall from my lips. “She’s dead.”

— Lucy’s birthday is December 18, the day before mine. When we were in Ms. Vieta’s kindergarten class together, my birthday fell on a Saturday so both our moms came with cupcakes that Friday. I thought maybe Lucy would be mad that I was stealing half of her birthday, but her face lit up when Ms. Vieta made the announcement.

‘Wow!’ she said as she grabbed my hand, her green eyes bright with excitement. ‘Our mommies were probably in the hospital with us at the same time! Maybe we slept next to each other!’ For the rest of the day she quizzed me on all my favorite things. At first I just sat there staring at her mouth as she talked, nodding sometimes but usually saying nothing at all, so she began answering for me.

We spent recess acting out her favorite scenes from her favorite movies. She told me to be the Huns while she was Mulan. I didn’t argue. I loved watching CONCRETE

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the way her lips moved when she sang, and I loved watching her straight, chestnut brown hair lift off her shoulders as she twirled. By the end I was even talking, poking her with sticks that we pretended were arrows, saying, ‘I’m going to kill you, Mulan!’ in a much smaller voice than the Huns used. It was the first time I talked to another kid during recess at all that year.

‘She’s a great kid,’ I heard my mom tell Lucy’s mom Karen during one of our first playdates. ‘But she has a hard time being herself, especially with new people. Preschool was kind of rough on her. Our doctor said separation anxiety is normal, but hers was bad. And then when she started coming out of her shell, the other kids wouldn’t always let her play with them. I mean, in preschool, can you imagine that?’

Karen shook her head. ‘It’s awful, how young it starts. And Kaitlyn seems like such a sweet girl. Lucy couldn’t stop talking about this playdate, you know.’

When Mom died three years later, Lucy was there. We knew it was coming, but I still didn’t understand when Dad picked me up from school two hours early. Lucy watched me walk out of the classroom with her green eyes open wide. That afternoon, her and her mom appeared on our doorstep even though I never told her what happened. Karen carried a tin of homemade macaroni, and Lucy carried a package of double-stuffed Oreos.

“I’m so sorry,” Karen said to Dad. Lucy wrapped herself around me and didn’t let go. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered. “We’ll be okay.”

And I knew I shouldn’t feel anything but sad for weeks, but in that moment, I couldn’t help the thrill that coursed through my veins when she said we. As if this was happening to both of us. As if we were in this together. As if we were so 26

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close that the things that were happening to me were happening to her.

I sat between Dad and Lucy at the funeral, and Lucy kept her arm linked to mine for days. She stood a few inches taller than me, and when people at school told me they were sorry she thanked them, and whenever people ever tried being mean to me she yelled at them, and I felt so protected.

— “I don’t think I like kissing him,” I say on the phone to my dad, wishing it were Lucy or Mom at the very least.

“Oh jeez, Kaitlyn,” Dad says. I don’t have anyone else to talk to about it.

“Okay. Well. Do you like talking to him?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“So then tell him that. If he’s a good person, he’ll still want to be your friend.”

And that’s what I do. Except he doesn’t still want to be my friend.

— It’s been a few weeks since our last conversation beyond, ‘Can you pass the ammonium chloride?’ I sit back in my bed and twist my dark brown curls into a loose braid. I never thought myself particularly attractive, but Lucy, who was beautiful, used to tell me I was, and I took her word on everything. James was the first person to ever want to kiss me, and if it was my personality that caused that, he would still be talking to me. My mom used to tell me that it was my shyness that made people uncomfortable around me. ‘You’re such a great person, Kaitlyn, it’s just hard to change people’s first impressions, and you take a while to open up. But you’ll meet more people like Lucy who can see past that, I promise.’

Lucy, years later, would say similar things. ‘Just try and be yourself, babe, okay?’ She told me during one of our later phone conversations, in our first year of college when she had a whole new crew at Colby and I still didn’t have CONCRETE

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anyone. ‘Ask someone that seems nice if they wanna hang out sometime. You are an awesome person. They’ll pick up on that. You just get intense sometimes, so make sure you give them some space, okay?’ I could hear voices in the background, and she told me she had to go.

I unbraid my hair and then start again as I try to understand what being myself even means. All my life I was Lucy’s friend. Now Lucy is gone, and I’m just the girl that used to be Lucy’s friend. Except the people I know now don’t know who Lucy is, so I’m even less than the girl that used to be her friend.

— I’m at a bar when I see maybe the second most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. My coworkers invited me because I was there as they confirmed their plans. James looked at the floor but didn’t say anything, so I told them yes.

They’re all off getting second rounds or flirting with the bartender, though, so I’m alone at the table when the girl with curly black hair and dark brown skin catches me staring. She smiles. I smile back. Her long fingers wrap around her glass, and she picks it up, carrying it to where I sit. The way she walks, it looks like she’s gliding.

“Mind if I join you?” she asks.

Her name is Sydney, and when she kisses me I feel those things Lucy told me I should feel. At the end of the night we take a cab back to my apartment, and she kisses my neck the whole time. I take note of everything she does in my room, the way her tongue moves, the way her long fingers knot themselves in my hair, how her legs wrap themselves around my body like snakes, and her teeth sink into my lips. I try to imitate it all. I tell her how beautiful she is again and again. She lets out a low moan every time I say her name.

I lift her shirt and dip my head down to kiss her when I see the array of dark freckles working their way up from her breasts to the base of her throat. I 28

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squeeze my eyes shut and stay like that for a while, my head hovering above her chest.

“Hey,” she says, touching my back. “You okay?”

I shake my head, those freckles still in my head even with my eyes closed.

“My best friend died.”

“Oh.” She sits up slightly, moving her breasts from directly underneath me.

She pulls her shirt back down. “I’m sorry.”

When I don’t say anything more, she asks if I want to talk about it, but her voice sounds different. I tell her it’s okay, and that I just need a second. I go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror. I run the tap water and put my hands underneath it, then dab some on face. When I come out, Sydney is gone.

I sink to the floor and curl my legs up against my chest. I’m always messing up. I’m always messing up.

When I eventually move, I grab my computer, and I stalk Lucy on Facebook.

Pictures with college friends. Pictures with college boyfriends. Pictures with post-college friends. People like Lucy. People don’t abandon Lucy.

And I’m so fucking tired of being abandoned.

— The next time I go to a bar, I go alone. For so long I’ve been taking my mom’s advice, and I’ve been taking Lucy’s advice, but trying to be myself didn’t work with James, and trying to be myself didn’t work with Sydney, and trying to be myself didn’t work with any other friend I’ve ever tried to make, and I’m done trying to be myself.

I force myself to hold eye contact with some of the girls I see. Most people glance away, but then someone smiles. I smile back. She comes over, drink in hand, and takes the stool next to mine.

“This seat taken?” she asks. I try to imagine what Lucy would say. I remember CONCRETE

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how she first acted with Josh or the stories she’d tell me about her college parties.

“No, it’s all yours.”

She smiles. “You live around here?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Just moved here. I was up in Maine beforehand.”

“Oh, no way, I grew up in Maine!” She cuts in before I get to the and you? part.

“What part?”

I tell her about college at Colby, and she tells me about her old school. We talk about her rowing team, and I retell the story of the canoe trip: “Some idiot brought beers, and all of us got super wasted. We ended up tipping the boat over.” I copy the exact inflections Lucy used winter break of freshman year. When the girl shares her stories, I respond the way Lucy used to withher high school boyfriend before they actually started dating.

Later, when she’s moving her mouth across my chest, I moan out her name, Valerie, because Lucy always said that was a turn on. She moans my name back.

Lucy.

— I’m better at being Lucy than I was at being Katie.

Valerie still texts me when she’s in town. I begin frequenting gay bars and start approaching women instead of waiting for them to approach me. There are eleven women in Boston with my number under the name Lucy in their phones.

We get a new girl at work. She fidgets as Dr. Vincent gives her the run down, her eyes flickering from mine to floor, James to floor. Vincent introduces her as Ilana, and when he leaves, I ask her the Standard Small Talk Questions before James gets to it. I practice the lines I heard Lucy run with new people time and time again. When I give her my name, my tongue is already on the roof of my mouth before I catch myself.

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“Kaitlyn,” I say.

James is watching but doesn’t speak.

Ilana and I bond over how we both did cross country in high school. I think back to when I would stand at the finish line with Karen, watching the faces come around the bend until Lucy’s appeared. I’d always guess her time, was never more than fifty-four seconds off. I’d cheer as loud as I could, and she’d hug me as I congratulated her. The team would always go out for food after a race, and she’d always invite me along. Would usually try and bring me into the conversation, even though no one else did, even though they just stared at me as if I didn’t belong. ‘Honestly, they should be impressed that you’ve never missed a race. We have team members that show up less than you do, she said when I told her they made me feel out of place. You’re our number one fan, you’re allowed to come out with us.’ There was a look, though, that she’d exchange with them sometimes, after telling me to join.

Ilana starts coming to the bar with us, and I wingwoman like Lucy sometimes used to try with me. When she offers to wingwoman me back, I tell her how I’ve started seeing girls. How I guess I’ve always found girls attractive, but growing up in my small, southern town, I just never let myself think about it enough to realize what it meant. I almost want to say more. Explain how, until recently, no one of any gender showed any interest, so I never spent much time reasoning what I’d want if they did. How it was hard enough trying and figuring out friendships, and I didn’t have the energy to figure out intimate relationships as well.

But instead I smile, and I shrug, and I take a sip of my drink. I try not to panic. Other than the necessities of my job and name, this is the first thing Ilana knows that’s more Katie than Lucy.

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says. “Tell me about your type.”

And that’s another reason I don’t over-explain. Because this whole thing about not being able to make a friend, it doesn’t even really feel like that was me anymore.

We start getting lunch together, and sometimes she invites me over to her apartment just to talk. I always thought I was studying Lucy so carefully because it would make me better equipped to be her friend, but my fifteen years of research has proved to serve a much larger purpose than that. I cut my hair to my shoulders, straighten it, and dye it chestnut brown. I don’t even think I miss her anymore.

— “Okay, so tonight. What are you feeling for dinner before the club?”

“Honestly Ilana, I’m down with anything.”

“Oh come on, girl. It’s your twenty-fifth birthday. It is all about what you want.”

I smile, roll my eyes. “Chinese?”

“Ugh, thank god, I’ve been craving Chinese so hard. See, this is why you’re my girl.”

I laugh.

“And are you sure you want it to just be us? I really wouldn’t mind if you wanna invite some of your other friends. I still need to meet new people in this city anyway.”

I grip the pole as our train pulls into Park Street. Lucy wanted more than one friend, too. “I know, but most of them don’t live close enough. Just us is perfect.”

“Okay, awesome. We’re gonna kill it.” We step off the train, and I walk towards the exit with her before making my way to transfer to the Green Line. “Be at my place at eight?” she says. “And be ready to wear the Birthday Girl Sash.”

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“You are so crazy,” I say, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got the tone for a joke down.

“You love it. Eight o’clock.”

— I wake up the next morning on Ilana’s couch, dress still on but bra on the floor. I packed an overnight bag, but I guess I didn’t use it. My mouth feels sticky. I lick my teeth.

My phone. It’s ringing. I squint as I look at the screen, a blurred picture of Ilana and me behind the caller ID. “Dad?” I yawn. I look up at her clock. It’s almost noon.

“Happy birthday!” he says.

My stomach drops a little bit. I check the open door to Ilana’s room, as if she might be able to hear him on the other end. “Thanks, Dad.” “How’s it going, Kaitlyn? You doing anything to celebrate today?”

“Not really. I celebrated with my friend Ilana last night.”

“That’s great,” he says. “That’s great.” He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. “Well, listen. I’m glad you’re having fun with a friend. I know these few days aren’t always easy. I’m proud of you, kid.”

“Thanks,” I say again. He’s always a little uncharacteristically sentimental on the big dates. Birthdays. Wedding anniversaries. Death anniversaries. Lucy was the one who first pointed it out.

“You know, I actually ran into Karen the other day. She asked about you. She was telling me how—” “Hey, Dad,” I say, another flip in my stomach making me feel a little nauseated. Ilana roles over in her bed. “I don’t really wanna talk about any of that.”

“Right. Of course. Well, I’ll let you go. Have a good birthday, Kaitlyn.”

I hang up and rub circles on my temples. It’s okay. It’s okay. I did have a good CONCRETE

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birthday. It’s okay.

— By junior year of college, my relationship with Lucy boiled down to texts that mostly went unanswered and an 11:30 p.m. phone call on December eighteenth to cover both our birthdays. We started the tradition as soon as we were old enough to stay up past midnight, but the conversation length decreased over the years from two-plus hours to twenty-five minutes.

Junior year, she didn’t pick up when I called at 11:30, and she didn’t pick up when I called at 11:33, and she didn’t pick up when I called at 11:34 or 11:35 or 11:36. On the second ring at 11:37 she finally answered. She skipped the hello.

Katie. Hey. Happy birthday! I said from my dorm room bed. I watched the flashing green light of the smoke alarm while my randomly-assigned suitemate had sex against our shared wall. She transferred that year, and we were almost friends, until she got a boyfriend and new friends and we became less almost-friends.

‘Thanks, babe.’ Through the receiver I could hear music beating like a heart.

‘You too, almost. Listen, dude, I’m out with some friends right now. I’m sorry, I’m not gonna be able to stay on too long.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘I know, I’m sorry. But come on, Katie. I mean, really, we can’t do this forever.’

Her voice was slurred.

‘Lucy,’ I said. ‘Lucy. This is our tradition. It’s our birthdays. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t understand. It’s just twenty-two minutes.’

‘Katie. Come on. I’m at a bar. I can’t just leave my friends for half an hour to small talk until you turn twenty-one.’

‘I’m your friend, I said. And it’s not half an hour. It’s twenty-two minutes.’

‘Jesus, Kaite, how are you still trying to smother me from a thousand miles 34

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away!’

I felt like I’d been hit then. I felt like that time I touched her freckles. I didn’t say anything, not even that she was only 182 miles away.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit, Katie, I’m sorry. I didn’t…I’m kind of drunk, I didn’t mean to say that. It’s just…You are my friend. You are. I’m out right now, okay?

And it’s freezing outside, and I’m in this tiny, gross bathroom to be able to hear you, and the people I’m here with are waiting for me. I want you to be happy, but we aren’t at home anymore, I can’t always be there when you need me. You get that, right?’

I didn’t answer.

She said, ‘Listen, my friends are texting me. I gotta go, okay? I’ll call you tomorrow.’

She hung up. She didn’t call back the next day.

— We’re just about to start a movie—some documentary Ilana has been telling me I need to see—when my phone rings. It’s Dad. Weird. It’s only been two weeks since he called the day after my birthday. On my birthday. He doesn’t usually reach out this often.

“Dad?” “Hey. Kaitlyn.” His voice is different.

“Dad? What’s up?”

He’s silent for a moment. “Uh…I was calling to see if you heard. I don’t…I don’t like having to tell you this over the phone.”

“Dad.” I say. “Tell me what?”

“It’s Lucy.”

“What?”

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didn’t…she’s…I’m so sorry.”

“What? No. Dad.” My hands begin to shake, and I feel like I might throw up.

I sit on the edge of the toilet bowl. “That’s not possible. Lucy’s been—” She’s been dead. This is old news, Dad. Old news.

“I know. I know this isn’t easy to process, but listen, the funeral’s on Sunday.”

My head starts spinning. Ilana appears in the doorway of the kitchen, mouths, You okay? I don’t answer. This doesn’t make any sense.

“I know you two aren’t friends anymore,” Dad is saying. “But I think it would mean a lot to Karen if you came home for it. You think you could do that? I’ll book your ticket.”

“We didn’t stop being friends Dad. Lucy. She died. She died.”

“I know.” His voice goes soft. “It’ll be okay, Kaitlyn. Come home, okay? I can book a flight for tomorrow?”

Ilana is at my side now, and I feel sick. “Yeah, okay,” I tell him.

He says he’ll text me the details, tells me he loves me, and hangs up. I put my head in my hands.

I try to let his words sink in. I know you two aren’t friends anymore.

I think back. The summer after she didn’t call for my birthday, Lucy got a job and an apartment in Maine. I never saw her, and she stopped replying to my texts, and she stopped answering my calls. I still messaged her close to daily, until finally she sent one about how she loved me but she needed a break. I would have argued, but Dad told me it was a bad idea. He told me that drifting apart is natural and that no one stays close with their childhood friends forever.

But that didn’t make sense. The break, I told Dad, it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t.

Because it didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make sense for Lucy to abandon me.

That was everyone else’s job, but Lucy loved me. She was the only person in the world beyond my parents who ever loved me.

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And James, asking if she would ever visit. I had thought about trying to explain that we weren’t friends anymore, that we were on an extended break, that we drifted apart, that no one stays close with their childhood friends forever. But I couldn’t, because none of it made sense.

It made more sense for her to die.

Everything starts to sway then. Ilana’s hand is on my shoulder, and I become aware that she’s talking.

“Kaitlyn? Hey, what’s going on? You okay?”

“No. My best friend…” I backtrack, the room spinning. “My best friend from home, she died.” I think about that night with Sydney and start to cry. “She’s dead.”

“Oh my god.” Ilana pulls me into a hug. “I’m so sorry. Kaitlyn, I’m so sorry.”

I fall into her, letting her hold me close until I remember Lucy at my house after my mom died, and I really think I might be sick.

“I’m flying down there tomorrow,” I say, wiping my eyes as I pull away. I let out a shaky breath. “I should, I should go home. Pack.”

“Are you sure? I can come with you, I’ll help.”

“It’s okay,” I whisper, standing. I search for my shoes under the couch. “I think I just need to be alone right now.”

“Okay,” she says, looking helpless. “Let me know.” I let her hug me once more before letting myself out.

— I don’t talk to anyone from the time I leave Ilana’s apartment to the time I see Dad at the airport. My phone buzzes with texts from Ilana, but I don’t read them. I can’t. I’m not sure that Katie is really Ilana’s friend anyway.

I start to think that maybe I killed Lucy. Maybe I told so many people she was dead that her living became the lie.

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Maybe I became a better Lucy than even she could be, and she was forced to become a ghost.

At the funeral, I wear my newly-styled hair in a bun so it doesn’t look as much like hers. Karen invites me to sit with the family. I sit in the front row of the church for a funeral for the second time in my life, and it feels like a betrayal. Karen asked me beforehand if I’d want to speak, but I just shook my head. Lucy is good at talking, not Katie.

The day before my flight back, I go to a bar a few blocks away from my old high school, even though I know no girls are going to flirt with me there. I order nineteen-year-old Lucy’s favorite drink. I don’t know what her favorite would have been now.

It’s early on a Tuesday night, so only a few guys are there besides me.

The bartender strikes up a conversation about whatever game is on TV. He mentions the high school football team, and I tell him I went there a few years back. We keep talking, and he doesn’t charge me for my second or third Tennessee Honey.

“I’m Mike, by the way,” he says during a lull in the conversation. When my only response is a nod, he continues with, “I don’t think I ever got your name.”

I stare at a crack in the wooden panels behind him, thinking about when Lucy paid a guy to buy us cigarettes when we were fifteen, and we stood in the alley at the end of this street, letting our fingers touch as we passed one back and forth, coughing and laughing between drags. Thinking about Valerie and how turned on I was to hear her moan my name. Lucy. Thinking about watching Mulan, sprawled out on Lucy’s bed and our fingers touching as we dipped our hands into the Oreos tray. I love you so much, Katie.

I order another whiskey.

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Post-Sandy Freeport E m i ly T ay lo r The survivors began raising as soon as the insurance money rolled in—if it ever even did— I guess your word becomes less sacred in the wake of an apocalypse, but there is no apocalypse as long as you can move to higher ground.

My mother rode her bike to Jones Beach every day when she was young, and Jones Beach rode its waves into every open window, cracked door, rebuilding the furniture it swallowed out of seaweed. now, CONCRETE

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the flat, barren stretches of houses— trees won’t grow anymore, I was told—have risen, resting on pedestals of concrete. And as the water rises further, they will rise against it, skyscrapers of vacant stones, delicately topped with homes.

The end of the world will be a hurricane— something we see on the news and name after our friends’ relatives—once our entire country has shrunk so far it is entirely coastline, as the nature of our destruction has promised us.

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The end of the world will be a hurricane without my mother walking around the seaweed wreckage of a home when my family returned, and saying, “you’ve always wanted this kitchen redone, haven’t you?” and crying, silently, hiding behind the mask and cape that she does not know how to take off.

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Solstice Cassandra Martinez There were peaches in the kitchen Where he pressed me to the counter.

Each moment was a rarity, Each breath drawn sacred To his nectarine lips; Us illuminated, In refracting midsummer light.

With salt and honey we bathed our wounds, Pressed our hands to gentle places, And dreamt of eternity, stretched out.

There were peaches in the kitchen, Where I sunk into his skin In those summer months long gone.

We thirsted, But there were only peaches.

Goddess, He called me As juice dripped down my chin.

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The Arm Bett y Capot Alex wakes up and spits a pile of teeth into her hands, cringing at the sound of them clattering like broken glass into the curve of her palm. She is falling apart again.

Moving to the bathroom, Alex clenches them into her fist, cutting the crease of her thumb against one of her canines. A sliver of blood discolors the whiteness, welling into the minuscule divot, spilling over like wine.

She lines the teeth up into a jagged smile on the counter and begins the slow process of replacement; the last to go in are her front teeth, and they tap unsteadily into place. She licks each tooth back to front, tasting the way they no longer feel like hers, too cold and foreign in her mouth.

Alex is careful not to stretch, worried about the looseness of her joints.

When she checks, her shoulder is held together only by thin, white sinew and twisting muscle. She doesn’t bother checking anything else, afraid of what she’ll find.

Walking feels like puppetry, but she ties herself together and goes outside anyway, refusing to allow her apparent disintegration to stop her from getting breakfast in the park like she always does on Wednesdays. Alex bites her lip and feels it rest askew on top of her chin; an eyelid droops as she blinks against the sun and then remains closed.

By the time she reaches the breakfast stand, she’s only torso and legs, her arms lost somewhere along a side street. If Alex had fingers, she’d try and push the expression on her face into something less like a scream, but her CONCRETE

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mouth remains wide and cavernous. A tooth falls out onto the pavement.

The park is very green and very crowded, but no one meets her eye. She kicks the tooth into a gutter by the curb, waiting for the sound of it landing like a raindrop below. After a few minutes of silence, she leaves.

John sees it before anyone else, or maybe he’s the only one that sees it at all. It leans against the side of an aluminum trash can like a piece of discarded cardboard: an arm, stretching from the end of its curled hand to its bluntly cut forearm. He doesn’t pick it up, walking by instead assuring himself that it must belong to somebody, and surely they’ll come back for it. John sits in his office at work, a small box jutting into the hallway like a dead end in a maze, and doesn’t think about the arm again until lunch time.

He goes, as he always does, to a small café across the street from his building that only serves empanadas and foreign sodas. He chooses a bottle whose label dubiously reads, Drink me, and spots it again on the street opposite, still casually propped up. People walk by hand-in-hand and ignore the sight of it sitting there like a gash against the backdrop of the alley, the stumped forearm glistening wetly from the heat. The small shop is crowded and suddenly feels much too warm; even from here John can see a drop of sweat wander slowly down the tanned skin. He takes a sip of his drink while he’s still in line, and it tastes like seawater.

Still considering what to do about the arm, John orders an empanada.

Spinach and kale, he says to the cashier, I’m trying to watch my weight. He pats the outward roundness of his stomach as it strains against the crisp whiteness of his work shirt and laughs. The cashier ignores him, but this is nothing new. He waits for his food in silence.

On his way back to work, John pretends not to notice it. He walks up the 44

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four flights of stairs to his office and sits back at his cubicle, picks at a fleck of grease staining his collar. Eventually, the light from his computer makes his eyes tired, and he tells his boss he isn’t feeling well. He gathers his things and leaves.

It seems like a waste not to take it, so he does. He grabs it by the hand and shoves it into his messenger bag, extracts his fingers from its grip, and then continues on his way home, pulling the bag tightly against his shoulder. It’s summer, and the leather strap chafes his neck.

The doorknob to John’s apartment is loose, and he has to jiggle it sharply upwards before it opens. The interior hallway has patchy white paint that peels in the upper corners and leads out onto a small, undecorated living room. He sets his things down on the sagging wooden floor and goes to the kitchen to get himself a drink. The water from the tap comes out yellow and tastes vaguely of copper.

He brings the arm to the bathroom and sits it on the edge of his tub while he runs the water, trying to figure out whether a particular temperature matters if the nerve endings are dead. Are they dead? John touches his finger to the palm and feels it twitch in response.

John washes it thoroughly, scrubbing beneath the nails and clipping them short, making sure the end of the forearm is clean so as not to cause infection.

He finds a body wash left behind by a former lover and uses it as well, filling the tub with the scent of gardenias.

Afterwards, he sits on the couch and lays the arm out next to him. He flips through the channels on his small TV, glancing down at the arm occasionally.

They decide on the news, finally, and watch until midnight.

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against her front door until the weak lock breaks, and she lets herself in. She collapses onto the floor and tries to remember what she did before to stop this decay, but she can’t think of anything except calling him to help her. She shimmies her cell phone out of her front pocket and is grateful that he’s on her speed dial still. No longer a symbol of her inability to move on, but now actually useful.

Frank answers on the fourth ring. Alex? he says through what sounds like a yawn.

Yes, she says, hey, it’s me. I sort of have a problem.

He’s quiet, non-curious. Okay, he says, what do you need?

She sighs into the receiver, relieved. There was a chance he wouldn’t answer, a chance that if he did answer, he wouldn’t want to help or wouldn’t understand. Alex feels an ache build up in her chest that feels distinctly like nausea, or maybe nostalgia.

She says, Will you come over?

John leaves the arm at home while he goes to work the next day, but he can’t seem to concentrate on anything else. His assignments, already tedious, become exhausting and painstaking to get through. Numbers crowd his vision until he’s seeing zeros whenever he blinks.

He goes out for lunch as usual and finds himself looking expectantly across the street. Obviously not, he thinks, obviously. No one is looking for it. It was abandoned. You don’t just abandon something and then come back for it later.

He sips at a drink whose label is an upside down question mark and grips the cold bottle until his hand goes numb. Resting it against his cheek, he closes his eyes and tries to imagine that it isn’t his.

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She waits for Frank on the floor of her apartment the next morning, watching for the familiar scuffed, black leather of his boots to come up the stairs. Her kneecaps feel like marbles, and when she twitches, one of them pops out and rolls into the crest of her stomach, settling against her bellybutton.

He arrives loudly, banging his feet against the door and throwing it open, only just missing her leg. Alex, he says, where are you?

Down here, she says.

Shit, he says. Wow. You didn’t tell me it was this bad. And something about the way he says this makes her uncomfortable, finally makes her feel as though she is not whole in some way.

It’s not so bad, she says. If we can find my arms I can probably reattach them.

Frank sits next to her on the floor and strokes her hair while looking down at his phone. Is that what you need me to do, he says, find your arms?

It doesn’t feel right, or rather, it doesn’t feel the way she wants it to, having him touch her again. His smell falls on her like fog, a mixture of pine trees and oil. Yeah, Alex says, that’d be great. I think I left one in the alley across from that insurance building on Green Street and the other beneath one of the benches near the front of the park.

Frank nods, puts his phone in his back pocket, and then makes eye contact for the first time since entering the apartment.

You look good, he says, considering. And she knows this is a lie, this is just a thing you say to exes who are now friends, but she doesn’t feel like his friend, and why would you try to make someone feel better if you didn’t like them even a little bit?

Thanks, she says. I feel good.

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When John gets home, he’s half-convinced that the arm won’t be there anymore, that it was just some morbid fantasy fueled by boredom at work. But there it is, still lying peacefully on his kitchen table, long and relaxed. He runs to it, kissing its palm impulsively, and is surprised to feel it respond, to have it caress his jaw.

He rests his face there for a moment, letting the hand stroke his cheek, feel his warmth. He picks up the arm and brings it over to the couch, where he sets it down next to him. It’s dark in his apartment except for the glow of the sunset from the front window. John puts on the TV and keeps his eyes away from the arm, tries not to wonder what its hand would feel like on the inside of his thigh.

Alex waits for Frank for hours, and when he comes back it is with only one arm.

I’m really sorry, Frank says, but I can’t find your other one anywhere. Why didn’t you ask for help when it happened, anyways? You’re always doing shit like this.

She doesn’t respond to this, instead using her head to gesture him closer.

Get my sewing kit out of the top drawer of my nightstand, she says, do you know how to sew?

He makes a face, and Alex can feel a phantom burn in her missing fist to slap him. I wouldn’t ask, she says, if I had any way at all of doing it myself, but you’re kind of my only option right now. Frank says nothing, starts trying to thread a needle with black thread. His hand is shaky, and she recalls how it used to feel against her cheek, on her hip. He finally gets it and pierces through her shoulder, muttering a quiet apology. She says nothing and 48

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watches herself bleed.

John intertwines his fingers with its and starts to draw circles on the back of its hand with his thumb. He feels it shiver in response, squeezing him closer.

He tries to lick his lips, but finds that his mouth is too dry.

He brings its hand to his face and lets its fingers skate over his features: long lashes, a large, upturned nose, scruffy cheeks, wide forehead. It lingers on his lower lip, digging in until he lets it drop down with a pop. Its index finger traces around the edge of his lips and then slowly starts to feel inside the wetness of John’s mouth.

She flexes her left arm and is displeased to find its reactions aren’t as immediate.

Frank watches her, nervous. I really did try, he says. I’m not very good at sewing, you know.

She doesn’t hear him, doesn’t even look at him. It’s fine, she says out loud to herself, it’s fine.

One by one the fingers curl into themselves and then out again, a delayed show of response. The arm feels heavy and strange on her. This isn’t right, she says. This isn’t how I’m supposed to feel.

Frank looks sad, if insincere. I’m sorry, he says. Maybe it’s just different this time. Alex nods thoughtfully, inspecting the stitches for some error and not finding any. Do you want me to stay?

She feels nauseous again, feels that leaded pull in her chest and doesn’t know if this means yes or no. I think you should go, she says, and it feels true once she says it. I don’t think I need you anymore.

He gathers his things and leaves, kissing her on the cheek on his way out. She tries to wave, but her arm thuds dully into her lap so instead she settles for a nod.

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Her apartment is littered with needles and thread, and her knee aches from Frank popping it back into place. Her arm feels even heavier, even less like her own. It begins to burn, and she doubles over against the numbing pain. Fuck, she says.

The hand delves deeper into John’s mouth, its fingers probing his teeth, stroking his tongue. He tries to gently take it out and redirect it elsewhere, but it resists, gouging at his gums with its nails. He gurgles, panicked now, but can’t stop it.

It burrows down his throat, rips his jaw open with the girth of its forearm, lets its fingers rest against his Adam’s apple. He feels a fingernail puncture his lung, feels himself deflate and crumple and tries to remember a time when he was not so terribly alone. Blood gurgles up his esophagus. He tries to say out loud, I’m sorry. He tries to say, I’m not sure how it turned out like this.

Everything slants, and John’s body slumps forward and stills.

Alex tears out the stitches with her teeth one by one, mangling her shoulder until, bloody and ragged, the arm comes off, and she kicks it across the room, laughing.

Yes, she says, that feels better. She smiles.

The arm lies relaxed on John’s floor, covered in dark fluid that drips and stains the hardwood around it. His body is purpling and bruised on the couch, heavily weighing down the cushions. The arm doesn’t move again.

Alex lies on the floor and traces the cracks along the ceiling with her eyes, extending out from the center light like a web. The air smells sharply of salt and dust.

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Soon it’s too dark, and there’s nothing to see anymore. She closes her eyes anyways, and imagines that when she opens them it will be light out, and she won’t be alone, and there will be nothing wrong with her. And it will be okay, she thinks.

I will be okay.

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Nail Biter Erin Sherry My best friend wears acrylics and knows how to click them together to create warmth, like a fire made out of twigs, and I’ve bitten back my nails so far my teeth can’t get down there, under them anymore.

I always come home green or blue or purple.

I wasn’t even using markers today; I don’t know how it happened.

But there’s this sticky, Crayola warmth on my chin, beneath the friction of the only unchoreographed, wholly comfortable maneuver my pale and pudgy arms and aching discomfort keep repeating.

And I’m not trying to build a fire.

My fingertips are hot and pink, and there’s nothing left to bite.

Somehow, not watching, I stuffed a sliver of indigo where my incisor won’t fit.

And the sting of it, the burn of what’s already been bitten, is not warmth. And it’s not falling asleep on top of her acrylics on long car rides across Ohio in the dark. It’s not the glow of the radio or the whimper of the speakers, but it’s the memory of the passenger seat when I felt taller and brighter 52

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and closer to it. It’s not smiling, quietly, half asleep, remembering a picture from four years ago when I was smiling, loudly, very awake.

But it’s the click of the record player I stole from my father when the A-side ended and I never got up to switch it.

It’s sitting in the new, achingly comfortable silence of the room I covered with myself and that covered me, and all of my skin, my bitten-to- pulp-pores, have embedded themselves in the woodworks.

It is wanting to dust, clean it all up, shed and shed and shed and shed and shed, and come out shining, red and gleaming, like over-bitten fingernails, and squinting in the sun that’s too bright and too hot but warm.

My best friend has longer, prettier fingers than me and knows how to keep herself warm by making fires out of fearlessness and the incombustible ability to disguise her share of terror until we all believe it, and so does she.

Someday, every day, I will be made of the dirt beneath my fingernails.

And it will be like staring into fire, let me be made of twigs and fearlessness, trying to keep myself warm.

And it will be the music they make when they click.

It will be being taller and brighter and closer.

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Contributors E r i n S h e r r y is a freshman Writing, Literature, and Publishing major.

She enjoys mug collecting, reciting whole episodes of Parks and Recreation from memory, and pretending her cactus isn't dead. She is from Pennsylvania.

B e t t y C a p o t is a junior Writing for Film and Television major with a

minor in Fiction. She apologizes for what you're about to read of hers, but she'd like it noted that all of her writing is purely fiction, and she's pretty sure that most of it is physically impossible anyway.

B r a d T r u mp f h e l l e r is a freshman at Emerson College, where he

studies literature and music. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, Assaracus, and The Emerson Review. He works at the Adroit Journal, and will probably talk to you about jazz.

M T a y l o r is a freshman Writing, Literature, and Publishing major. She

is Editor-in-Chief of the newly minted Corridors Magazine and is a member of Emerson's 2016 CUPSI team. If you want to be her friend, walk up to her in any setting and engage her in a heated debate about music. Trust me, it works.

C a s s a n d r a M a r t i n e z is a Writing, Literature and Publishing Major from Richmond, Virginia with wanderlust in her blood. She can usually be found in a museum or wandering city streets, staring at the skyline and conCONCRETE

fusing the lights with the stars. She is also minoring in Art History and is often caught with ink on her hands and wondering if she should be here or somewhere else.

C h r i s t i n a B a r t s o n is from Ann Arbor, Michigan and moved to Bos-

ton to study at Emerson College. She is a Communications major, with minors in Philosophy and Journalism. She likes to bike around the city, hike tall things across New England, and play bananagrams competitively.

M a n d y S e i n e r is a sophomore Writing, Literature, and Publishing major

from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (ketchup capital of the world). She’s been spending a lot of time teaching English to three-year-olds in the Netherlands lately, resulting in her knowing the Dutch phrases for “no throwing mouse figurines,” “please stop jumping off the windowsill,” and “whipped cream is for eating only.” Ask her about Erik Satie.

S a r a h C u mm i n g s is a native New Yorker majoring in Writing, Litera-

ture, and Publishing. Currently residing in East Boston, she’s a part-time barista and a full-time lover of cats. She has previously been published on HelloGiggles and in culture: the word on cheese.

E mm a R e b h o l z is either a very small creature living in your pocket or

a sophomore Writing, Literature, and Publishing major. Her poetry has been previously published by or is forthcoming from Voicemail Poems, The Emerson Review, The Misanthropy, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Souvenir. She probably wants to be your friend.

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