Morning Has Broken

 It was a perfect spring day. The grass was glittering from last night’s dewy drizzle, sunlight gleaming off every delicate blade like streams of gold. The bushes quivered gently in the comfortable breeze. A perched sparrow sang a sweet melody in the distance, soon joined by another. There wasn’t a cloud in sight.

 A scream ripped from my throat. Oh my God. Oh my God. I was going to die. I was about to die. My legs propelled me forward, faster than my body could keep up with. That… thing trailed after me, and I could hear its feet squelching against the damp ground nearly two feet away. I panted and let out a dry sob, dashing across the field. Long grass whipped against my legs. I knew I should've worn pants when I left that godforsaken house.
 I was running so fast, too fast, I was going to fall. Luckily, instead of tumbling to the ground like a newborn deer, I caught myself and stumbled instead. Still.
  It laughed. I risked a glance over my shoulder.
  Good Lord.
  I screeched as a knife clipped my upper arm, blood beading at the incision. No time to think about that, no time, I had to run.
  An unfortunately placed branch caught around my shoe and I crashed to the ground. Jerking my leg up upwards, I tried to get loose, but that tangled me even further.
  “Oh God, oh God, save me, oh my God,” I prayed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I-I-I’ll floss next time, ok, I’ll leave cookies, please, please, just let me go.” It hovered above me, oversized blue eyes staring into my soul.
  “No… forgiveness…” The thing kindly informed me, reaching behind its back. It had a gun? Wasn’t a knife enough!
  Instead, it pulled out a blue-pink-yellow oversized painted egg.
  What. I laughed out of shock. It raised the egg over me with massive paws before it crashed onto my head, yolk spilling all over. It hurt a little bit, but confusion outweighed any bruises I might’ve gotten. Um.
  “Wait, really? Are you kidding me? Is this a prank? Do you actually think an egg is going to kill me?” I passed out.

  …
  …
  ...um
  …
  ...ummmm…
  Um.

  Dude, that was the weirdest dream I’ve ever had. I’m never eating Trix cereal again, they were right, Trix are for kids.
  That weirdass rabbit was even in my dream. Was this some sort of sick product advertising? I grunted and pushed myself up in the dark, bringing out an arm to steady myself.
  But I didn’t. Couldn’t, actually. A strip of leather was wrapped around my arm, legs, and torso. Ok. Yup. Not a dream. The Trix bunny had come to life and was evil.
  Wait, no, today was Easter. It was the Easter Bunny, not the Trix rabbit. Oh my God, I’m such an idiot. How could I mix the two up? The Trix rabbit was extremely underweight. The average Easter Bunny had a BMI of over double his. If I could shake my head, I would.
  Click. A bright lamp flicked on above me, my vision solely white until it cleared. There was… a lamp on me. My eyes felt grainy and started to hurt from the sudden change in light. Multiple bodies were crowded around me. I looked around, trying to identify the figures.
  Santa Claus, Cupid… my sleep paralysis demon, Sam. Wonder what he was doing here, we always get along. We even binged Keeping Up with the Kardashians last week. The Easter Bunny was there, of course. The Tooth Fairy stood to the right of me, wearing a necklace with somebody’s teeth on it. I recognized the Haribo bear standing next to Sam, drenched in honey.
  “Where am I?” I asked, panicked. I tossed my head left to right, trying to meet eyes with the strange mammals surrounding me. They weren’t looking at me, and instead were gazing lifelessly at nothing.
  A grumble erupted from Cupid’s throat. It sounded like… Italian?
  Oh wait. No. No. That was Latin.
  “Sum. Es. Est. Sumus. Estis. Sunt.”
  I was part of an Illuminati meeting. This was my worst nightmare. Sam had totally told them, he was always such a prankster.
  The rest of the figures joined Cupid, repeating the same foreign words.
  “Help me! Let me out!” I shouted, squirming in my restraints. “Help me! Fire! Fire!” My calls for help were muffled by a fluffy white paw being placed on my face. It was very soft. Like velvet.
  I made the executive decision to lick it. It tasted like cotton candy. I licked it again, feeling the rabbit shiver. It was trying to resist the urge to flinch.
  I gave it a nice, long, slurp. It jerked back suddenly.
  “Hey dude, can you stop? We’re literally in the middle of something,” it reprimanded me. He sounded like a mixture between a surfer dude and a middle aged man going through a crisis. Totally my type.
  Scoffing, I rolled my eyes. I was literally the worst sacrifice ever, I had no substantial meat on my body, no connection to the gods, and, uh… Oh. It was because I wouldn’t be missed, of course.
  Thanks for that.
  They stopped the chanting and the Easter Bunny grunted, squatting down and disappearing from my sight. It grunted again and… something thudded onto the ground. It was… um… in front of everyone?
  It popped back up with some jelly beans. I then realized that the Haribo Bear was holding some gummy bears (not even going to think about the cannabalistic implications of that), the Tooth Fairy had some teeth, Cupid with some beating hearts. And Santa was holding… a Bang Energy drink?
  Realization shook me like a moderately chubby baby elephant being bodyslammed by a bodybuilder.
  “No. No, no, no, no, no, please. Please, I’m begging you, anything but the Bang Energy, please, I’ll do anything, oh my God.” Tears started streaming down my face. They were… they were… turning me into the next biggest YouTuber! My life was over. Whatever took over my body wouldn’t be the real me.
  Santa pulled a long sharpened candy cane from his beard, inching it closer to my torso. Sobs racked through my body, I knew what was happening. A pain shot from my stomach to my toes and then up to my forehead, then I fell back asleep.
 
  Worst. Day. Ever.

  …
  Um…
  …
  …
  Ummmm…
  …
  Actually, this is quite nice. No complaints here.
  …
  …

  I looked at the camera, smiling like a madman.
  “MAKE SURE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SMASH YOUR **** ONTO THAT LIKE BUTTON!”

Death By Avalanche

 I wasn’t a great skier as a kid, but at least I was better than my mom. Out on the Colorado slopes with the gentle, powdery snow tossing her around, my dad and I would sit at the bottom, waiting and watching her fumble her way down. I was six—a snotty, bratty little girl, and I’d whine at my dad whenever she was more than thirty seconds behind us.
 “Well, she’s not making it down anytime soon. It’s looking like we might be here for another day,” he’d chuckle as I groaned. “Don’t hold your breath waiting for her, sweetie. You might just pass out.”
 Why would I hold my breath? Childish frustration made me huff out even more air as I laid in the snow and constructed snowballs to pelt at my brother. When I aimed one at him, my dad would scold me, confiscating and squishing it down. I’d roll my eyes and cross my arms, glaring in his general direction with a pout.
 Don’t hold your breath, he’d say when Mom took too long skiing. Don’t hold your breath, he’d say when I told him about my dreams to become a pop idol in Teen Vogue. Don’t hold your breath, they told me at scuba camp when my lungs swelled up.
 Here’s a fact: to breathe is to live. That’s an obvious truth. Breathing is not a conscious thing, your body simply does it. Here’s another fact: sometimes, your body works against you. It gets overwhelmed and confused under stress, and starts trying to kill itself instead.
  My first time diving was my last. Equipped with thirty pounds of scuba gear and a mortal fear of the ocean, I plunged into the deep waters of California with my instructor floating beside me. It wasn’t so bad. The water was colder than a freezer, but seeing the glimmering orange fish dance around me made it worthwhile. Ten feet deep, I was fine. Fifteen feet, still all good. Twenty feet, and I was suddenly blind and panic-stricken. Water flooded my goggles, leaving me sightless and in a frenzy. I took a gasping breath, briny saltwater filling my mouth from behind my regulator. When your face is covered in water, your body’s natural reaction is to, of course, hold your breath. Which I did. I coughed and sputtered, minute flecks of tiny bubbles fragmenting around me as the air trapped in my chest began to expand.
 After my instructor dragged me back up to shore, I sat shivering under a thin, coarse towel. My lungs felt like they were too big and too small at the same time. Dazed, I stared up at my instructor as she lectured us on and on about dive safety.
 “-why you should start paying attention in class, you guys. Don’t hold your breath. Don't hold your breath or the air in your chest will expand and you’ll pop. Got it?” She stared straight at me. I smiled sheepishly, lips still a little blue but cheeks red from the embarrassment. I don’t think I could forget, after all that. It’d been drilled into me from the moment I learned to ski ‘til the day we packed our bags and moved to California.
 I wasn’t expecting to be reminded of my childhood memories of Colorado so quickly after the whole drowning fiasco. It’s funny how the brain can draw these kinds of connections from the most unrelated things. Those words struck me suddenly and violently, like a bullet to the gut, wrenching me back into the Rocky Mountains, six years old and not yet aware of my breathing, forcing me to remember all the things I left behind.
 The swirling, snowy skies of Colorado had always wrapped me in a soft comfort throughout my life. Frozen nights where the empty air would be shot with quiet stars, the sharp scent of spruce leaking into the air and into my lungs. Countless memories traced with the snow’s blue shadows. I’ve been back to Colorado a couple times since the move, but only for a few days at a time. When I get there, I can’t help but try to hold all that nostalgia in my chest, like water in a drowned corpse. Despite all the warnings I’ve been given.
  Coming to California had been so jarring. In Los Angeles, it doesn’t snow. I don’t wear a coat. The streets are scattered with forest fire dust, light pollution killing any stars in the sky. Cars beep endlessly below my apartment, always followed by loud shouting. When I hold my breath under the smoggy sun, it’s not because I’m holding onto any emotion. It’s because I’m trying not to get gasoline exhaust in my system.
 I know I’ve always been a nostalgic person. There’s nothing in the world that could stop me from constantly reminiscing on the past. When I try to stop the thoughts, they clump together like thick mountains of snow in my brain. But I’ve come to enjoy being in Los Angeles. The people are nicer. Food is better. And, of course, a population of 2,000 in my old town got a bit boring. It’s not that I’ve forgotten about my childhood, but I’ve realized that if you hold your breath for too long, you just end up spending all your time chasing it.
 Plus, it’s not like the whole of California doesn’t snow. Maybe I’ll head up north in Tahoe and learn how to ski there instead. Maybe those gentle slopes will start tossing me around, and my parents will have to wait down at the bottom as I get used to it. At least then, I can start to breathe.

All Quiet on the Eastern Coast

 Though I moved on to high school years ago, I still maintain a sort of child-like loyalty to my lower school. It’s not that I particularly enjoyed it, but there was something comforting about the slow, stagnant days. Freezing mornings when the heaters were off and cold air would creep through the windows, trapping both students and teachers in a winter fog. At boarding school, I can’t help but feel nostalgic whenever snow turns dirty gray on the sidewalks, or whenever I have to wear a coat in a classroom because it’s too cold.
 In the winter, when freezing weather torments New York subway lines and the local rat population, we would fold and cut paper snowflakes to leave taped onto the windows. Both art and math classes made us do it, something about symmetry and shapes. Science lessons would be about how it works—the snow and rain—and how clouds are formed. Cumulonimbus, cirus, nimbostratus. When they rolled in overhead and the lamps were off, you’d only be able to see blue light trickle into the classrooms. It snuck between the holes in our snowflakes, cutting triangular spots into the carpet.
 The snow brought special class activities. Secret Santa and the like. The day before winter break, my classmates and I would huddle up on the floor in front of the projector, watching Singin’ in the Rain or some other old-time movie. We wouldn’t pay much attention to the screen, mostly just sitting criss-cross applesauce and snickering to each other. Outside, we waged snowball wars and decorated snowmen. When it got too cold, we clustered for warmth in big piles. There was a lot of that. Crowding around radiators, fireplaces, each other. I can’t remember ever feeling cold.
 But that’s just memory, not fact. The coldness of winter overridden by the fun of building an igloo. Painful boots forgotten in the exhilaration of sledding. It’s like a haze that falls over your mind when you reminisce, hiding any prior pain or discomfort. Too cloudy to see clearly. That’s probably why I spent so much time dwelling on memories. You can spend all your time living in the past, but there’s no one there anymore.
 No one’s there anymore. When I moved to California and went off to boarding school, I left everything back at home. All those sleepovers I knew would happen, rumors and gossip I’d never hear. My friends, too. The people I’d grown up with for a decade, fading into the past. I had gone from seeing them daily to talking to them maybe twice a year. It didn’t hit me how far away I was until they started to leave as well. My childhood had been so full of the same faces and names. I’d ignorantly gotten used to New York being the most populated city in the world, full of friends who’d be there forever. A few left for different states. Others moved from the city to some other random country, like Hong Kong or Abu Dhabi. I’m almost glad I was the first to leave, because I didn’t have to watch them go.
 Still, if I never left at all, I wouldn’t have to feel nostalgic for everything. The only things I don’t miss are the things I’ve forgotten. But I remember it all. The excitement before lunch break, rushing down the stairs so fast we fell and got sent to the nurse’s office. I got injured so often they had to call my parents, worried about my recklessness. The last class of the day would always be bubbled up with anticipation for after school activities and whatever else we had planned. Soccer practice. Getting ice cream. Playdates. Trying to run up that massive dome in Union Square during torrential rain, never really able to get to the top, the squeak of our sneakers against the wet metal. School Christmas parties, science experiments, recess snowball fights, climbing over the fence to get to the garden, crowding around radiators, or fireplaces, the winter cold, the snow, the snowfla-
 But these memories don’t weigh down on me all that heavily anymore. The years have passed, and my childhood has gotten foggier than those frosted windows we had in the classrooms. Back when I first moved, I’d spend half the day in bed, staring up at the popcorn ceiling and seeing my friends’ faces drawn in snow. It doesn’t make sense how the most mundane human experiences— going to school, growing up— can stick to you the strongest. I don’t think I could ever pull together the right words to explain why I would spend so much time flipping through my memories like pages in a picture book, hours wasted on chapters I’ve already read, mulling over the past when there’s nothing more to see, nothing left that I have to care about, melted snow endlessly dripping down storm drains.
 Last winter, when the weather was cold and the trees were dead, I came back to New York. My old apartment had been sold, but I found myself in the neighborhood, walking down a path that had become ingrained into my body. Moving half on autopilot, half driven by an uncomfortable sense of loyalty to my past self. Gray slush splashed under my sneakers as I stopped in front of the old school yard, freezing water creeping through my socks. The sky was dark. I looked up through the windows of the building, up at the paper snowflakes, but they weren’t the ones I left there.

Landshark Lager

 I don’t remember meeting him, simply that at some point, I did. In the months following October, his parents brought him over to my house and introduced us to each other. I was probably about seven months old at that point, still babbling my first “mama”s and “papa”s. He was a red and splotchy newborn.
 He’s the kind of person who flitters in and out of your life like the warm glint of sun against a bottle of beer or the shine of clear water against fish scales. Never completely present, but fleeting and temporary. The only way we’d separate is if one of us got knocked into a grave, and even then, the other would probably follow straight after.
 We weren’t always so close, not until we got older. Some time after I got over my fear of cooties, he barreled back into my life like the punch of a gun. There was never a warning, only a crack in the air, and there he appeared. Before then, he had never been a real, complete person to me, more of a concept than anything. Still, even now, not much changed.

--

 It’s when I’m sitting on the torn-up red couch in his living room. Our parents are off talking about annoying grown-up things, with my faux-mature older brother who seems to always be away ignoring me. That leaves us alone and unsupervised in his living room. I don't like his claustrophobic brick walls, the way those wiry stairs twine up the apartment like ivy. The shouting and beeping of Central Park crawls through his house, each squeal of a tire unnerving me a little bit more. Dirty speckles of chapped paint fleck off the wall like silver fins. I peel a piece of it out of my hair when I get home.
 I don’t like his brick walls and I’m sitting on the couch with my legs folded up onto his glass table, watching in abject horror and amusement as he Jackie Chans onto a punching dummy. His feathery punches scritch the plastic base against the wood, kicking dust up out of the floor.
 I could hit harder than him. If I really tried, I could hang that dummy onto the crest of a moon, of course.
 I think it’s some kind of childish urge to impress me that keeps him going. Which confuses me, because at this point, I haven’t expressed any interest in his weird activities whatsoever. My eyebrows turn down when he collapses beside me, panting. Ew, don’t touch me. You’re sweaty and gross. I don’t care if I’m dirty.

--

 Some time in the years after that, he moves to Westchester (technically, he lives in Katonah, but I feel like everything upstate kind of classifies as Westchester). His mom serves me yogurt and smelly cheese for lunch when I get there for the first time.
 The house is terrifyingly boring. For the sort of rambunctious and street savvy kid he is, this apple-pie prison seems like his personal hell. I despise the dirtiness of each corner, I hate the uncleaned glassy chandelier in the disjointed part of the house and how it’s just so open. He says he’d rather be in his beat-up house in the city.
 His mom serves me smelly cheese for lunch and it tastes like dry wool. I force it down my throat with a grimace and stare at the dried orange fish flakes encrusted into his table. My own mother sits next to me and gossips with his.
 We sneak away from them when the sun melts into the edge of the horizon. He has this half-broken trampoline with cracked fabric that we always play in, behind the house and tucked in the corner of his yard. When our lips touch, there’s no emotion behind it. He’s not the kind of person that elicits any sort of romantic attraction from me, and vise-versa. I feel like washing my mouth out with hand sanitizer while he rolls around in the chalky crumpled leaves that have piled up on the edges of the black canvas.
 Still, we stay outside talking until after dark. When he tells me about how his boyfriend drunkenly kissed him behind a tree in Central Park, I think back to my stuffed animals stored in the cluttered corner of my fifth grade advisory room. I’m in sixth grade now, so I should be older than him, but he just feels so much more mature than me. I’ve always been the sensible one, of course, but when he’s doing such grown-up things on the streets of New York? It’s almost too far. Does he not have a smidge of self-preservation? He’s stupid, so stupid and careless because wow, why would you get drunk and kiss someone in fifth grade? It’s so unsanitary. You’re going to ruin your life. Idiot. I know. I’m sorry.
 Our parents call us back in to sleep. When he trips over me trying to get out, I kick him hard in the balls.

--

 Hurricanes come and go from the city. When my friends from boarding school leave my house in the thundering rain, he saunters through my off-green front door and strikes up a conversation with my mom. If I get close enough, the smell of weed and vodka chokes my lungs. The stench is so bad I have to stop myself from gasping for air. I feel like a fish.
 My house is monochrome-- black, white, and sterilized. I take an odd comfort in it, how everything is so lived-through, yet spotless. When he sits down on a chair, I feel like mold is seeping through his clothes and into the leather. He sticks out like a fireplace at the bottom of the ocean. No one else seems to notice.
 When I step back into my room, I see him sitting on my clean bed with his dirty clothes, looking through some stuff I left there, making fun of me for still having a stuffed toy fox. He’s sitting on my clean bed and when he speaks to me, the words splash through my ears like murky lake water. I’m caught in a wave of soggy algae and warbled sentences, and when he tells me about his nightly adventures with abandoned streets and hard drugs, all I see are trampolines and punching dummies and I can’t tell if he’s real or fake. I know I’m not.

The Psychrolutes Marcidus and the Carcharodon Carcharias

 I’d like to be reincarnated as a fish. To have seaweed and seashells and sand tangled in my fins like bubblegum in hair. My uncle’s hometown in Hungary is littered with fishing boats. I’d caught some sort of baby shark back there with my feet half-submerged in murky water. He made me release it back into the tall reeds, I remember the distinct sound of it plopping into the lake from twenty feet up.
 Someday, I’d like to go diving, see billions of sapphires fluttering about. Atlantic, Pacific, I don’t care. Yesterday, my mom told me that I should focus on school, not fish. My friend said she wishes she had a passion like me, outside school. Schools of fish. Ichthyology, I think. They don’t teach that in Harvard. Boston’s waters leak sewagey sludge from every crack and crevice. I like the way the barnacles shine like tiny stars glued to sodden, wooden poles. Look, it’s a shooting star.
 Tomorrow, the moon will be “super pink.” Maybe I’ll be able to reach into the sky and get a taste of a crater-filled gumball. Dubble Bubble, Hubba Bubba, Bubble Yum, Tootsie. My grandma used to call me her tootsie, but I haven’t seen her in a few years. She’s 80 years old and creeping along the line between the living and dead. Circle of life, like a certain lion once sung.
 Old people kind of have gills when they smile, aged cheeks wrinkled with time. You can differentiate male pea puffers from females by three distinct traits: a darker body color, a black stripe along its belly, and prominent gills. When I stick a needle in a pufferfish and it bursts, I’ll take a bite of bubble gum and blow a pink circle ‘til it pops.
 Oceans go down how far? Blobfish live between 2000 and 3900 feet below sea level. Nothing would bother me down there if I restarted life as one. When a blobfish is brought above a certain depth, the pressure makes their insides explode like fireworks and their body ceases to support its organs. Talk about going out with a bang, literally. Ready, aim, fire!
 Gold over clown, guppy over tang, minnow over parrot, cichlid over chromis. Saltwater seas daze you with gems of color poking about, corals filled to the brim with tiny specks of pink and blue. But those shimmery fish scare the life out of me. My roommate came face-to-face with a barracuda while scuba diving. I’m not interested in those overly sharp incisors and marble eyes, but I appreciate the offer.
 Dolphins aren’t all that innocent, either. A group of them will kidnap a poisonous puffer and pass it around, getting high off its toxins like the poor fish is a glorified bong. Humans seem to adamantly believe they’re so different from other animals, and they’re right. What kind of dog would subject itself to sixteen-plus years of getting yelled at for running through halls? The rabbit lost the race in the end, anyways.
  When I’m a fish, I’ll kickstart the intellectual evolution of fishkind. My offspring will have the intelligence of every human here and before me. We will rise above man and create a new Atlantis, where you are enslaved to us, indebted by years of excess fishing!
 There are too many fish in the sea to worry about how people will see my aquatic addiction. Even if it turns me into a fish, who’s here to judge? Sure, I talk about it too much. Maybe it’s an obsession. Maybe I’ll forget this stored-up ichthyological information kept in my head in a year or two. Maybe I’m the blobfish and you’re my great white. I’d stare you straight between those jagged jaws and swim right in.

Unfragment

 Ms. Collet’s cramped principal’s office is this homely kind of place, dark and lived through. I’ve spent so many hours here that I can trace every knick-knack that lines her bookshelves with my eyes squeezed shut. It’s sweltering-- she’s one of those eternally cold old ladies with horrible circulation. Her radiator is turned up so high I can smell the burning dust. Pigeons huddle for warmth outside the foggy window, iridescent feathers shiny and slicked back by gasoline.
 “--Think it’s a joke, but Ms. Capelle-Burny and Mr. Robinson were heartbroken when they read it. They care about you all so much-- imagine how horrible it must have been for them to see that. Do you think they deserve that?” She lectures. I can see spinach trapped in her teeth from lunch. When she speaks, her dewlaps crinkle like the folds of tree bark.
 Catherine had already gotten a talking to, so naturally, I was next. Last year’s creatively titled “Sixth Grade Memories” was a hit, with a list of innocent quotes I probably would have forgotten in a year or two. This year’s seventh grade variation had been organized by Catherine and me during recess. Sounds like our grade has rapidly acquired the immaturity that comes with puberty; I haven’t seen the document or how far from God’s grace it has fallen in the past two or so hours, but I can assume it’s been a steep drop.
 “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never wrote anything about the teachers, I was literally the one who got rid of the bad stuff,” I let out a hysterical huff and tug on my tangled hair. A few kids wrote some insults about teachers and suddenly it’s my fault? “Seriously, I haven’t checked my computer since recess--”
 “You sent the document to every single one of your classmates, and you and Catherine expect me to trust that you didn’t write anything? And taking into account your history of issues with technology?” Ms. Collet sighs, shaking her head. Two years ago I told my friend she was a jerk over text and I guess that stuck to Ms. Collet’s impression of me. “I’m sorry, Calista, but that’s hard to believe. I’ll be calling your mom and your GraceNet privileges are going to be taken away for some time. If you need to see your assignments, ask a classmate.”
 I’m actually in trouble? For this> of all things? Fear simmers up my body in a cold sweat, tiny explosions bursting out of my skin almost painfully. My eyes prickle, threatening to admit my emotions. I blink rapidly and assume she’ll think it’s normal. I turn to stare at the glittering charms on her shelf, colorful porcelain animals and construction paper sculptures. It’s too bright. I can’t look at her.
 “Catherine was the one who made the document in the first place, not me, I only shared it. I hardly wrote anything!” She’s going to call my mom, and in that moment I really do think that my mom would care.
 She licks her lips. “Your actions have consequences. If I see that document on anyone’s screen ever again, I’m putting you on a behavioral contract.” Is she really going far enough as to put this onto my permanent record?
 This is so stupid, so unfair, so ridiculous that I have to sink my teeth into my tongue to stop the words from exploding out of my mouth, pinch my fingers to snuff out the fuse. My foot taps onto the carpet with half-restrained rage. I can already see the horror painted onto her face when I call her a bitch and I can already feel the searing heat bubbling my blood, an atomic bomb under my skin.
 I don’t respond, staring blankly at her like a dead fish. Swallowing, I bite back everything that I could have said. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll have Catherine delete it.”
 “You’re dismissed.”
 When I get up, I glance sideways at her. She’s wearing that trademark ugly dress, muted red matching her short dyed hair. When we lock eyes, mine waver. There’s a picture on her corkboard with a neon-markered depiction of her cat in an underwater house, torpedoes of jellyfish and sharks looming outside the windows. She asked me to draw it for her a year or two ago. Teachers are hot and cold. Does she think I’ll have any recollection of this when I’m older? Does she think this memory will curl away from me like burnt paper? It probably will. I grab my jacket from the chair and kick the door open, rushing back to the safety of English class.

✧

 “Why did she freak out so hard?” William asks when I tell him my story. His desk faces mine in the cluster of four. William’s one of my bestest friends, and I’m not unfamiliar with Brewer or Ross either. Even though William might have a little too much of a liking to guns, he’s a good guy. I think. “I mean, we’ve done the Seventh Grade Memories thing since fifth grade, and the teachers were on that one too. It’s just some funny quotes from kids in our grade, not like--.”
 “This year is different. I think Jools and Ian wrote some bad stuff on it. You know, swears and shit about teachers. Can’t blame them for getting angry at that,” Brewer pipes in.
 “Still, my GraceNet account? How am I gonna do homework?” I whine, dramatically throwing my head down into the desk. Splinters of pink eraser shavings are caught in the ends of my hair when I look back up at William.“I’m going to fail! And I’m an innocent!”
 “That sucks.”
 “I know,” I say.
 “Can you guys shut up?” Ross hisses, glaring up from his English workbook. Muted blue light flitters into the classroom, reflecting off of my unopened one. The sun looks like a bursting star, fractures of light stuck to every surface.
 “Just hack the system and get your account reopened. I know this Russian guy, I’ll call him up and be like "you owe me a favor,” William jokes in a low voice, trying his best to not let a smile crack. Brewer laughs and gets up to annoy Ross.
 When I get home, I’m pretty sure my mom will call me. I’ll be grounded, or worse, my phone privileges will be taken away. The absurdity of oblivion and the absurdity of these infractions. This stupid obsession with memorization will blow up in my face, a howitzer pointed straight through my skull.

✧

 I walk out of the carrot-colored doors and I’m washed in a nuclear winter. It’s freezing, still October but almost November. I pull my gray jacket on tighter. The sky is woven thick with snow-filled clouds, the city drenched in some shade of cold silver.
 My mom is in Vietnam for a vacation and my dad is out playing poker, so I don’t particularly dread going home. This is absolutely, entirely, and unironically the stupidest incident I’ve ever been in. My dad will agree with me, surely. But I can’t stop the headache pounding against my head. I can’t stop fear swirling in my stomach like a glass of wine.
 When I get off my bus and find my way into my brother’s empty room, I sink into his blank canvas chair and lean onto his desk. My house is always just a few degrees too cold, and the icy feeling of dread starts to crawl into my gut. I know that in a few years, this will all fade into the distant past. Someday, the muted blue light of my classroom will slip through my fingers like water. Someday, these lost memories will burst from a grenade, splinter the stars and shatter the sky. Shards of fallout and shells will sprinkle the air like wasted time, fragments of every forgotten word caught in the wind like dust.