Category Archives: fiction

The town where I grew up is shaped like a woman. I rolled back and forth across the valley that lies between her bust and her hips, from crest to trough, as my family could not stop moving and fidgeting between neighborhoods after my parent’s divorce. In the winter, she is wrapped up by the tight wool of home knitted scarves and finds comfort in the hearths that pump smoke out from her belly, making her look swollen and pregnant despite how hollow and lifeless she feels. In the summer she is beautiful. Her hair is long and sways at her waist as she shimmies into the gently lapping waves of the reservoir and her forehead is sun kissed. Her meadows and small mountain peaks flourish in soft green and fifteen-year-olds stumble up them in search of a prettier view. But she is never so beautiful that she is free. Only lovely, only for three months. Even in this bliss, she remembers the things and people that make her up and she bites her lips and remains unheard, as to not upset the pleasantries that parade along her surfaces. 

She is a good woman. Her streets are controlled by stiff men in blue uniforms who tell drunk high schoolers to scatter and pull over anyone exceeding six miles per hour over the speed limit of twenty-five. The men in the middle-class homes along her spine demand her complacency too. They mow their lawns religiously on Sunday mornings, drink too many beers before dinner, and yell when their wives nag them. These habits seem built into them, inherent like the familiarity of the letters of their surname. Their lazy aggression comes out easy and settles into the fine cracks of concrete that line the floor of the half-finished basements where they watch football and feel comfortably alone. She is a good woman. She stays quiet. The husbands and business men that live inside of her still don’t think it’s enough. They wish for younger days when they were not burdened by marriage or mortgage, when their stomachs were less portly, when they felt free beneath the sky above them, not smothered beneath the delicate weight of the mundane locale where they settled down. 

She does not flinch when the cold men who dictate her breath teach their sons to do the same. She knows that she will teach all the young girls how to manage their volume and desire beneath the tension of pressing thumbs. She teaches girls to submit to giggling fits under the sour teasing of young boy’s crushes, and like it, no matter how mean they could be. She teaches girls in middle school to pinch the skin of their midsection and stop eating lunch- it’s pretty to keep yourself small, unnoticeable, almost invisible. She teaches high school girls to relish in the catharsis of full-volume music, blasting through the speakers of their cars— to enjoy it contained and alone. She teaches high school girls to glitter— high GPA’s, honors societies, great sister, beloved daughter— like the cast-in-stone shine of a freshly carved epitaph. These girls are palatable and easy to swallow- she tells them it feels beautiful to dissolve in the stomach acid of boys. She teaches them to float there, bask in the attention of young men who will soon become cruel, while they are still young and curious— too curious to punish the pretty objects that garner their attention. Curious enough to collect these shiny things like crows and treasure them for a while. 

Maybe she did not know what to do with me when I first came along, teetering on fresh, skinny legs, afraid to move. I was a lot like her already; used to the friction of anger in men’s voices and the feeling of curse words crashing and shattering along my cheekbones. Already used to the feeling of lack. Small Town taught me the most once I began to want to feel free— the sandpaper burn of my angry man moved away and only echoed in my ears every other weekend. I had a hard time learning. Little boys’ mean remarks prompted meaner ones from my mouth. I hated the way I could not finish meals, wishing to eat full plates until my bones gained more cushion and I took up more space. 

It was easier to learn in high school. I played my music from large speakers in strangers’ basements and boys disconnected the Bluetooth to bump the dull, heavy bass of their preferred monotone rap songs instead. The volume of my car speakers would get so loud as I drove around at night that I could not hear myself sing along. I began to shine too; all the tumble of emotions and moodiness and unsavory woman was buried beneath my new, pearlescent skin. I tried hard to submit myself to the digestion of boys, but no one told me how much it would scald or how bad singed hair smelled. I did not want to become a misplaced earring in the beak of a big, black bird, a collectable outlet for inquisition. But over and over again, she told me her lessons and soon it was hard to notice the discomfort of craving something that always felt wrong. I wrote poetry about boys. I kissed them. I talked to my friends about what sex must be like and taught myself to want it. The glitter was becoming itchy and I wished I could cut it off. On those late night drives punctuated by blaring music and tear-stained discontentment, I parked at the reservoir and imagined myself sunk to the very bottom, held there by cinder blocks on each ankle, disintegrating into the small town that bred me. Falling asleep at the bottom of the reservoir didn’t seem so bad. People fell asleep everywhere just to escape the feeling of drowning that choked us all the time— in study hall, after two bars of Xanax at a party, as they lost their virginity, during the Homecoming dance, as they filled out college applications to schools in driving distance. Small Town worked better than melatonin, better than tryptophan, better than any lullaby or bedtime story in getting teenagers to fall asleep. I think that most of them never woke up. 

Looking back, I wonder if my angry man felt discontent too, unwilling to become another calloused palm holding too tight to Small Town’s wrists. Maybe that’s why he left. Maybe I have him to thank for making me free to leave too. I ran away to a city plump with humidity and bashful joy that did not feel anything like from where I had come. For a year I let myself incubate and let the impressions of the grasp of Small Town fade from my muscles. Some habits were hard to extract; they were sunk into my veins like thick sap and it was hard to distinguish where they ended, and my own blood began. I remembered that it only takes twenty seven days for your skin to shed itself. I realized I was no longer what anyone expected me to be. I let myself bend and break over the rims of wine bottles, dance for the first time in my life, use my teeth to crack open nights full of learning myself better. I stopped apologizing. I fell in love with a woman. For the first time in the entirety of my life, despite the humid heaviness of New Orleans’ atmosphere, there is no more weight pressing into the pores of my sapling skin. The dank moisture in the Southern air pushed open the cracks in my body and showed me the fossils of who I was. This time it was not a learning, it was a remembering; it was a reminder that I was not drowning, I was not misplaced jewelry, I was not alone. The pearlescent skin I once gleamed in now fits me like a poorly tailored prom dress. I am glad to leave it on the side of the road in a Good Will collection container, for another girl to shimmy into and then outgrow. I hope she rips the taffeta, spills liquor on its skirt, and leaves burn marks along its edges. I hope one day it is so out-worn and tired that no one ever tries it on again. 

Published in Edition 4 of The Dilettante.

“So, Vron asks me if she can borrow my grinder the other day.” Bevin pronounced it like vee-ron, a nickname for her friend Veronica.“And I’m like yeah, sure, why not? Right?”

“It must be nice that you guys live so close together, so you can share stuff like that.”

“Yeah, it’s dope. She lives right down the street. But, she can’t keep any weed or anything at her house because her mom is batshit. Anyways, I give her my grinder and she comes back over after smoking. And she’s high as balls, right? And she’s smiling and she goes, ‘I have a theory… that the dust… gets you higher…’ And I open my grinder. This bitch smoked all my fucking kief.” She opened the top portion of her iridescent purple grinder, as me and the guy sitting next to me leaned in to find the top compartment that usually holds resin completely empty; we were both already laughing.

“Fucking kief thief,” the boy chuckled, head back, face flushed with a heavy red. The three of us were all sitting on the side of the curb sharing a bowl.

Bevin introduced me to Lot 7 that day. It was a student parking lot at a community college. It didn’t look any different from the college’s  other 8 lots, but once we pulled into a spot, we could see closely the wealthy Menlo Park and Palo Alto suburbs, and just past there, the salt flats and the San Francisco Bay. Up there, we could see everyone and no one could see us. 

There were several spots we went to smoke and drink at, and we could see most of them from the parking lot. Handley Rock was to the east, up on a different hill. It was cavernous and each crater was filled with layered graffiti and empty, plastic liquor bottles. On hot summer days, it was nice to hide in the caves’ pockets of shade. The view from there was less far-reaching and mostly of a valley of trees and hiking trails. We could only see in one direction, so, whenever we heard a car park behind the rock, we had to pray that the footsteps crunching across the dead leaves were just those of an amateur rock climber or someone with a bag of weed and a handle like us, instead of a furrowed-brow police officer.

To the west of the lot was The Cross, which boasts a similar view to the parking lot, but still was not as high up as Lot 7. No one knew why there was a giant white cross and a water tank up there for all of Redwood City to sin under, but it was always empty and we could spot cops rolling up the hill a bit ahead-of-time, giving us a few minutes pack up the goods, scramble into the car, roll down the window, and say we were just on a scenic drive.

To the south, there was an abandoned tunnel under a freeway with writing on the walls that read “Please let tomorrow be better than today.” Even farther south than that, there was an empty pool misplaced in the midst of a large field, also clothed in spray paint. Once, we found a couch off the road in San Carlos and smoked there too.

I lived in a very northern suburb compared to everyone else, and, whenever people came over, they slept in my away-at-Johns-Hopkins-University sister’s bed. Those nights, we’d walk down the street to the Crystal Springs Cross Country Trail, past the tennis courts, and slip through a gap in the fence. The trail was beaten down by the sneakers of college-bound athletes building their applications and running harder past the chunks of sideline filled with recruiters. We called it The Shack because we walked the beaten path to an old concessions stand, which we assumed sold candy and soda during cross country meets in the daylight. We sat along the wall with our legs stretched across the wooden deck. It wasn’t a good place to get too fucked up at because the unbeaten parts were a lavish nature preserve: big and empty and tucked in the suburbs. When the tired moms turned their lights out, it was pitch black and populated with coyotes and bobcats, and I could feel their there-ness, although we never saw any. Once, I took an edible and thought I saw a coyote walk right past the The Shack in a quick, white flash, but I was probably just too high. The cops never rolled by there, probably because we were the only group of teens who sat in the miles of nature preserve to smoke weed and drink wine. There were no abandoned bottles or lost lighters to be found.

The areas heavily populated by high schoolers were labeled “hot.” These included many state beaches and a creek bed that cut through Palo Alto which sits dry in the summer. It was littered with mattresses and shopping bags, but none of the people who lived down there ever bothered us. Once, some of us were sitting down there – it was one of the first times I ever got high – and we heard a voice call out, “Hey, guys!” We looked up to see two police officers staring down at us with their hands resting on their belts.

 “Why don’t you come on up?” We started to stand up when they asked, “What’s that next to you? A can of beer? None of you look twenty-one.” We were fifteen. We looked back down by our feet and laying between smooth, dry creek stones was a smashed beer can, full of spiderwebs.

“It’s not ours. It was here when we got here,” I said. I was surprised at how calm I sounded. I was surprised at how calm I felt.

“Alright, just come up here,” the officer conceded.

“Do you want us to bring the can?”

“No, it’s fine.”

There was a rope someone had tied to a tree up at the top and we grabbed onto it to pull our sideways selves up towards the cops.

I had gotten high and paranoid minutes before the police arrived and told everyone to put the bong, weed, and grinder back into the backpack that one boy had picked up from a pile of leaves behind a fence. He and his friend shared the paraphernalia and left it in a backpack around town for each other, since it was hard to come by a smoke shop that sold to minors, and they could only steal so many twenties from their moms’ wallets before they noticed. At the time,  my anxiety had annoyed the circle of smiling, red-eyed friends.

“You’re way too sus,” one said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Suspect, suspicious,” he replied.

When the cops showed up, they burst our bubble of euphoric high, found no evidence of drugs (California law stated they couldn’t search us without probable cause), and asked us what towns we were from. Most of us replied “here,” meaning Palo Alto, but I had to be honest: “not here.” The badged men smiled, “Where then?” 

“Oh, sorry. Belmont.”

“Right.”

The cops acted like they just wanted us to be safe and warned us about the “transients” that live down there, even though they never so much as glanced up from their camping areas when teenagers came stumbling down that ridge. Everyone said my paranoia had saved us. 

“We can’t go back there. That spot is too hot nowadays,” one boy said, as we walked past long, suburban driveways.

“The cops always treat white girls like they’re our, like, awkward Uncle, or something. You know? ‘Be safe, girls!’ C’mon. We are the ones breaking the law,” my best friend, Gianna, reasoned.

Lot 7 was densely populated at all times of day, but especially after 3pm, when school got out. I’d commonly run into people I knew from school there, and so did my other friends. I only had a few friends that attended the same “alternative learning” high school as me, but I liked the anonymity in the refurbished warehouse’s hallways. Jessie was the only one from school I ever really spent time with and, before I had my license, she would drive me up to the lot after school. Sometimes, she’d even take me to Taco Bell afterwards, when our eyes were red and her car’s A/C swirled a tornado of her Pink Sands scented air freshener and the warm smell of weed. She loved to paint wings across her eyelids and hated that girls felt ashamed for burping. Once, under the beating sun, in the passenger seat of Jessie’s car, I asked if she could pull the car up to one of the college’s buildings so that I could look for a restroom.

“Just piss in the bushes over there,” she told me.

“What if someone sees me?”

“They won’t.”

When we found other cars full of familiar teenagers, we’d pass bongs through rolled-down car windows. The only reason Lot 7 wasn’t hot was that it was a community college. Bevin told us that the campus security guards couldn’t arrest us. They could just ask us to leave, and maybe call the cops if we were disrespectful. They’d come up to windows during the day and ask us to open them, feel hot smoke rush across their face, ask what we were doing, to which we would reply, “Just chilling.” They never called the cops, even on Friday evenings at sunset, when the 50-something parking spots were full of people drinking whiskey out of the bottle in truck beds and hotboxed compacts.

Bevin knew all this about campus security because she went to the college part-time, and Lot 7 was technically a student parking lot. She took half her classes at the college and half at a public high school in a special program for “independent, self-motivated learners.” She didn’t go to class much but claimed she could transfer her college credits to a UC and be ahead when she was accepted as a freshman. She was the first person I knew with a nicotine addiction and taught me how to replace the coils and cottons in a box mod, carefully, wrapping metal around a pencil and pulling apart her bathroom’s cotton balls. She drove a twenty-two-year-old Volvo – half a decade older than me, four years older than she – and named it Thelma. “There is only one rule in Thelma,” she told me the first time I pulled hard to open the stiff door, “and it’s that you can’t say anything bad about her if you want a ride.” She strung fairy lights along the inside and always had a speaker sliding across her dashboard because there was no place to plug in an aux cord. I later learned that Thelma was named after Bevin’s babysitter who abruptly died from cancer; she left the car Bevin’s family had lent her full of hidden McDonald’s french fries and for a 16-year-old Bevin to inherit.

The first time I smoked a cigarette was at one of the picnic tables before the parking lot’s dirt drop-off. Gianna was there with pink wine, plastic cups, and her turtle-shaped pipe (I had a matching dolphin). She didn’t smoke cigarettes because her mom always did and she hated the smell, but she stood next to me while the older boy we were with helped me light the right end of the Marlboro Red. We played “Cigarette Daydreams” by Cage the Elephant and looked at the sea of lit-up towns as the lyrics played from an iPhone speaker stuck in a disposable cup: a scratchy “cigarette daydreams… you were only seventeen.”

After that, I made a pact with her that I would only smoke one cigarette per year for the rest of my life. Word of the pact spread amongst our friends and every time I’d smoke one more they’d ask: “What about the pact?” to which I’d reply, “I’ve got sixteen years of not smoking to make up for.” I never thought of death more than when I smoked cigarettes and that was only about seventeen times before I left the Bay Area. Mostly, I wished for time to move faster.

Jessie stuck around in the Bay Area for a while after everyone went to college and told me she found my pink, lacey underwear abandoned among the shrubs and crushed beer cans in the drop-off. I had gone down the hill like she had advised, pulled up my skirt and started to pee without remembering my underwear’s grip. I had to discard them, back in 2015, before going back to Jessie’s new civic.

Thelma doesn’t run anymore and Bevin and I both went to school out of state. When I was 18 in New Orleans, I met some girls and we made a routine of sitting at wood tables in a parking lot behind a college bar. We called it The Nook, which reminded me of The Cross and The Shack. I didn’t know what the word “nook” meant until today: a corner or recess, especially one offering seclusion or security.

By the time I turned 19, The Nook was blocked by gates at night and cars parked where tables used to be during the day. I asked the bar’s manager why they’d closed it and he told me they couldn’t watch people out in the back – that it just wasn’t safe.

I never asked anyone why they closed Lot 7; no one was around when I found it covered in caution tape.

Published in Edition 4 of The Dilettante.