2000
I’M SIXTEEN AND Sasha’s seventeen and we go out to the beach at night and no one’s there. We’ve thrown a party at her house and I have fallen, scraped my knee, getting a piggyback ride from a boy I know only offered it to me to impress her.
You tired, runner girl? he said.
They all call me runner girl.
We’ve freed ourselves of all the other people. We’ve gotten drunk and already sobered up and after emptying the keg, after cleaning up her parents’ house, after putting people in their cars, we’ve brought the trash out to this dumpster by the beach and run out to put our bare feet in the sand. The water’s quiet, moon reflected off the top and sharp and tinny, as the waves roll up; dark blues and blacks, as they dip down.
We each carried a large bag filled with empty cans and bottles, plastic cups, leftovers from the store-bought box cake we cooked too long and the big bowl of pasta that we mixed with garlic, oil, cheese, and diced tomatoes. We both smell of sweat and beer.
We’ve thrown a sort of week-late birthday party for her, while her mom and sister are traveling with her dad for work. No one except us knew it was a birthday party, and before the older kids arrived, from the larger public school ten miles from ours, we set out plates and napkins, knives and forks, and pretended we were grown. We poured glasses of wine and we dressed up and people looked confused when they came in and we told them to sit down, when later we brought the cake out and no one really knew what it was for.
We each did keg stands and our shirts rolled down our fronts, showing our bellies and our bras. I grabbed at my shirt, pushed back as it rolled down; she let hers sit around her neck. For a while, she went into her sister’s room with some guy I run track with, about whom other girls at practice talk, to whom I’ve never said a word.
* * *
That wasn’t fun, I say to Sasha now.
Which is maybe wrong, but also, she’s the only person in the world to whom I say these things out loud.
They’re all so dumb, she says.
She takes off her shirt and pants and I try not to stare.
Happy birthday, I say, thinking, Why did we invite those people we don’t like when we could have spent the whole night just like this.
She laughs and nods down at my clothes.
You going in? she says.
It’s January, but it’s Florida, so it’s warm, and I take off my shirt and pants.
We’re both strong and swim out far and though the water shocks at first, it feels better, safer; I feel surer than I ever feel on land.
* * *
Back at her house, an hour later, we take hot showers and then wrap our hair up in towels and we sit on her big floral duvet and she talks and I half listen to the words she says, but also, I lie back and let her talk pour out overtop me until my eyes are closed. I don’t sleep well most nights—I wander the high-ceilinged, too-still, too-big upstairs of my parents’ house, talk online to older men, pretending that I’m someone else—but I sleep hours, ten or twelve, halfway through the next day, these nights that I’m with her.
2017
1
MY ALARM GOES off at 4:30 every weekday morning, and I keep my phone lodged between the slatted stairs that lead up to the lofted bed my husband built us in the closet we use as a bedroom, so that I’m not able to press Snooze. I climb down in the dark and find the phone, which has often fallen. I turn off the alarm and put on my bra and tights and shirt and shoes and gloves and headband, grab my keys and phone, and lock the door behind me; I run miles and miles before anyone wakes up.
By 6:15, I’ve showered and dressed and started to make breakfast. Sometimes my husband slips into the shower while the children are still asleep and we have sex. It’s cold in the bathroom. He bends me over the railing of the back ledge. He pushes me up against the grimy tiles, holds my leg up. My body is outside the halo of hot water and my skin mottles and I shiver and am cold as I wait for him to come.
* * *
I take two trains to get to work and neither of them runs well. I wait sometimes three minutes for the first, sometimes fifteen. Sometimes, the train’s right there, doors already open, as I pass through the turnstile, and I run, my bags flapping against my hip and back, up the stairs and through the crowd of people, slipping through the closing doors. I often get no seat and stand, trying not to grab hold of close-by arms or shoulders as the train turns hard, stops short. I try to read a book but fall asleep if I’m sitting and almost fall over if I stand. I hold it open, not turning any pages, both my bags clutched between by my calves and ankles, planting my feet firmly on the ground.
* * *
Good morning, team! says the Google chat they made me install on my phone when I started at this job six months ago. Looking forward to a joyfully driven professional day!
On Twitter, the world is ending. A nuclear war is threatening, ice caps are melting, kids at school are shooting other kids at school. At work, I wear collared shirts and cardigans and black wool dress pants and clip a set of keys around my neck and no one makes much mention of the world outside.
* * *
Once a week, more sometimes, when I get a seat on the train and am tired enough not to acknowledge what I’m doing, I check Sasha’s mostly dormant Facebook—she has college photos and a handful from right after. A girl with whom she roomed her sophomore year, whom I knew vaguely, reposts the same handful of old photos every couple years; We were so young! this girl says, every time that it comes up, look at us. Twenty-year-old Sasha stares at me, over and over, too much how I remember: defiant, careless posture, perfect face, her too-big eyes.
I check her hardly active Twitter. Three years ago, she retweeted a New Yorker article on Miami Beach and climate change.
I check her sister’s and her mother’s Facebooks—sometimes she’s in their pictures—to be sure that she’s still there.
* * *
At work, two blocks north of the subway, in a big brick building, through two large, heavy doors, I walk past the scanners where the kids stand in line to have their bodies and their books checked. I tip my coffee to the security guards and the kids I know.
A handful of them call out my last name.
I take attendance on the live attendance tracker and talk to my two co–homeroom teachers, who are my only friends at work. They are black women, and I’m white; for a long time they didn’t trust me, until one day they decided they could trust me, and still sometimes it seems like they might not. We are all older than our other colleagues; one of my two co–homeroom teachers is the only other person in this building with a kid. They didn’t trust me because they shouldn’t trust me, because there’s so much I don’t know or understand about them, because sometimes I lie to them about my upbringing to make my life seem more like theirs.
I think they trust me mostly because we love the kids we teach.
We check the various apps and Google calendars where the deliverables for the day are laid out and we post the morning PowerPoint about the new lateness policy, about the new rules concerning the dress code: only black socks are permitted, shirts must be tucked in at all times and belts worn, shoes must be black and sneakers aren’t allowed.