to find our outfits if we focus.
This businesslike briskness
is not the way
I’d imagined coordinating
my first dance at Lansing High
but it is what it is.
And while I can tell
Lyric is still holding me
at arm’s length
maybe just maybe
we can get back to
where we almost were
after the teahouse
with a little more time.
Yeah, I’m in,
I say.
Noon. Saturday.
The mall. Stella’s.
I’ll be there.
Great. See you then.
I’ll text if anything else
comes up on BeautyStarz
in the meantime.
And with that, Lyric
turns on her heel
and disappears
into a sea of students.
Goodbye to you too,
I mutter, heading to class.
You ever just sit and listen to an iced-over lake? I did that a lot last year, when things were really bad at home. When the bitter cold outside was no match for the icy glances and terse exchanges between Mom and Mama Alice. When it seemed they only talked to each other to check in about bills, or my schedule, or what to pick up later from the grocery store. It got so bad one November afternoon that I’d bundled up after school and braved the windchill to walk the lakeshore and sit for as long as I could manage, just watching the ice move on top of the water, listening for the shuffle and soft lapping of movement below. This was right before the confession. Before Mama Alice and I knew anything about HER, before the big fight and the slamming of doors and the suitcases packed. But already, we could all feel it: the shift. Mom’s attention elsewhere, Mama Alice’s mood swings and depression, all of us wrapped in our own thought bubbles, moving through life on autopilot. I needed the sweet violence of cold lake air in my lungs to wake up, to remind myself of my heart, that somewhere, past all that ice, a smallmouth bass was slinking its way through a forest of dense algae, waiting for summer too. That love stories ebb and flow, just like the tide. That sometimes you have to weather the cold, the impossible freeze, before life, as you knew it, can begin again.
