Fiction

In retrospect, I think I loved her bed more than I loved her.

She was sweet, don’t get me wrong. With that long auburn hair and those freckled constellations on her arms and tiny little upturned nose…I spent an inordinate amount of time that semester, maybe forty minutes into history or halfway through study hall when I should have been finishing math homework, thinking about those freckles, thinking about pressing our bodies together so hard that maybe I could transfer those constellations onto myself.

If I’m being honest, I’m having trouble remembering her name now. Something classy, no doubt. An Anabelle or a Francesca, maybe. Some name I had no business with.

I know the way it ended was awful. But in my defense, I was young, and teenage morals often stretch at the whim of emotion, especially love.

She loved me, I don’t doubt that. I could see it in the way she walked toward me, the way her mouth looked like she couldn’t quite hold in the words or the kisses. I could see it when she walked away from me, the way her stride bounced a little more after exchanging a few words.

I may have loved her. I had no frame of reference, see. But I know without a doubt that I loved her bed.

The first time Francesca (Annabelle?) took me home, I felt like a stray puppy she’d pulled in off the streets. She had a maid, for God’s sake. She had a cut glass bowl of those nice candy almonds on the kitchen table, and she didn’t even eat one as she walked by. Her younger siblings were tiny and perfect, like dolls, but she waved off their piping questions and dragged me up a white carpeted staircase to her cavernous bedroom. And there it was: silken, pink-sheeted love at first sight. When we started making out on that gorgeous, pillow-covered vision, all I wanted to do was sit up, put my shirt back on and look around. Because man, she was pretty cool, but that room was like another dimension. If you land on a planet you’ve never been to, you’re gonna want to leave the spaceship at some point. Even if the spaceship wants you to touch her boobs.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. My blankets were scratchy and my pillow was lumpy and my bedframe squeaked when I moved. My little sister was snoring in the corner of the room. You’d think I’d have been used to that, seeing as she’d been sleeping there for eight years, but that night I couldn’t stop thinking about Annabelle’s (Francesca’s?) sister, who had a loft bed draped in lilac and glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling.

At three in the morning, my older brother came in, drunk off his ass, slurring angrily when he tripped over the coffee table. My sister sat up and watched with sleepy amusement. I told my brother to puke in the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to clean it up this time. Mom yelled at us to go to sleep.

Francescabelle wanted to come eat at my house. I told her no, partly because my brother was always more attractive than me and partly because the image of her scrubbed, vanilla-scented self sitting at my kitchen table made me vaguely nauseous. Plus, I hadn’t even told Mom I was seeing her. Plus, my little sister was sick a lot and I wouldn’t want Francesca to catch anything. I had a lot of good excuses.

So we went back to her house, up her staircase, to her bedroom, over and over and over. Once, after school, I fell asleep in her bed. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was, but the fluffy pillows smelled like her and in my half-dreaming state, staring up at the folds of the canopy bed, I suddenly wondered if I was going to cry.

That pissed me off, so I rolled out of bed even though my body was screaming for another few minutes of bliss. I walked down the stairs looking for Annabellesca, and the maid told me she’d had to go to her piano lessons but said I could sleep for as long as I wanted.

The maid was this pretty Latina girl who looked familiar for some reason, and halfway through our conversation I realized she was one of the twelve hundred chicks my brother dated in high school. I asked if she remembered him, and she started laughing.

“The one who punched the principal at graduation?”
I said yes, that was my brother, and I laughed too even though he’d spent two weeks in juvie for that and came back bruised and smelling like piss. The maid was very nice and gave me a handful of the candied almonds that I’d been too scared to eat because they looked so pretty in the cut glass bowl.

Later, I told my brother that my girlfriend’s maid was one of the girls he’d dated in high school. He looked shocked.

“No way.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Isn’t that funny?”
“No way.”

            “What?”

“You have a girlfriend?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Franabelle still wanted to come over for dinner, and now my brother started pestering me about it. “Why the hell would she date you, dude? What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing,” I’d say. “She’s hot.”

“Yeah, imaginary chicks usually are.”

Eventually my irritation overcame my weird dread, and I told her she could come over for a meal. I spent the days leading up to it with my stomach knotted. Because of my brother, I told myself. Because Mom cooks simple food that might not suit her refined palate. Because my sister has a cold again and Franabellesca’s perfect upturned nose should never be cursed with the sniffles.

We had spaghetti, I remember. Tangled up with red sauce and meatballs. Our table was square, made for four people. We gave Ancesca her own side. She sat up straight and thanked my mother profusely. She was the shiniest thing in the room. She glowed like her insides were full of molten metal. She reached for the loaf of bread at the same time as my brother, and though her hand was half the size of his it still got there first.

My sister’s mouth hung open. Snot was running out of her nose, but Mom was too fluttery to notice. When I told Mom I had a girlfriend, I knew who she was expecting to be over for dinner. The girl with the purple hair who sat in the back of my history class drawing dragons all over her textbooks. Maybe one of the girls who would dodge behind the school to smoke a joint between classes. Someone who my brother went out with, someone like the maid. Someone who wouldn’t make my mother feel like she needed to scrub the house from ceiling to floor.

My sister said, through a mouthful of meatball, “Your hair is so pretty.”

Franabelcesca looked startled, like she wasn’t used to hearing this every day of the week. “Thank you.”

“Your hair is beautiful too, honey,” said Mom, and my sister sneezed her acknowledgment.

We ate dessert in silence. Mom fidgeted with the napkins, folding and unfolding them. I could feel the spaghetti tangled up in my stomach.
I asked if she wanted to play cards or something. No prospect of hooking up, what with my sister sleeping in the same room (God, I missed her bed). She said her dad was already coming to pick her up. She hugged my mother, and I watched Mom breathe in her vanilla scent, and I watched Francescanabelle breathe in Mom’s smell of cooking oil and detergent. When Francesca put on her coat and opened the door, I saw Mom’s shoulders relax even as her mouth formed a good-bye.

As we waited there by the curb, my mind was lagging. I was still caught up in the smoothness of her fingers between mine, or the dying embers of her hair in the porch light, or some other physical perfection that made my hormone-riddled body feel airless.

“I had fun,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Your mom is so nice.”

“I’ll tell her you said that,” I said. “It’ll make her day.”

“Aw,” she said, and I looked at her sideways, but her face was blank and her thoughts had clearly moved on. I thought, she doesn’t get just how rare it is for my mother’s day to get made. She should have noticed my sister’s awe-filled snot-sticky stare, how my brother who broke his hand on his principal’s cheekbone drew back his fingers from hers like she was electrically charged. I thought, why do I expect her to understand?

It was about then that her dad pulled up in a Porsche, and it was about four seconds after this that I said, “I think we should break up.”

Her head jerked towards me. “What?”
“Bye,” I said, and I ran into my house. And then I started laughing hysterically because I knew that I was the worst person on the planet and I already missed her and especially her bed and I somehow didn’t regret any of it.

I bought a pack of the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars at the dollar store a few days after. Turns out, anyone can afford those things. I put them on the ceiling over my sister’s bed. Her nose bubbled excitedly, and at night sometimes I could hear her singing to her constellations, but pretending they were the ones singing, in a constant loop of comforting and comforted that was only meant for her but sometimes made the knots in my stomach loosen a little.

I’ve heard that it’s common for people to fantasize about their ex-lovers. I don’t remember ever doing that with her. Hell, I don’t remember much about her; her name was probably Jacquelyn or something. But I have to admit that many nights, when the glow-in-the-dark stars were the only source of light in the room, I could not keep myself from dreaming about her bed.

 

Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a eighteen-year-old writer from Petaluma, California. She is the founder of her school’s creative writing club and editor of the school literary magazine. She is a two-time finalist at the Youth Speaks Grand Slam Final for Slam Poetry in San Francisco, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Teen Ink and Amaryllis. When not writing, Esmé enjoys acting and making music.

Frances is afraid of the rain. She is afraid that the water will soak through the bricks of the buildings, which will soften like pound cake in milk and collapse. And so when it begins to drizzle Frances takes the bus (the bus is safe, because it is waterproof) into Central Park (the park is also safe, because there are no buildings) and she waits by the reservoir with a red umbrella until the storm passes. Sometimes it is a long storm, or there are multiple thunderstorms, and on those days she brings a beach chair and a blue blanket so she will not get arthritis by standing in the cold and the wet for too long. Sometimes when it rains for days she has no choice but to go home, and lie in bed, and feel afraid.

When home Frances takes the little white bus tickets (the ones that look like receipts, for the cross-town buses), folds them in half the long way, and slips them into a jar she has on the ground by the mirror across from the door. She says she will send them all to the mayor to show how environmentally harmful he is being. After this Frances reopens her red umbrella which she closed in the lobby, and sets it out to dry on the terrace, where there is a black cat figurine. Frances knows it is bad luck and has been the source of many troubles in late years, but is afraid to throw it away in case it was a gift from her daughter. She does not remember. The beach chair is left propped against the cat, as kind of a curtain to obscure Frances’s fear. But in reality she is not afraid of very many things; only the rain, black cats, and the feeling that one day she will forget her daughter. She knows she is very forgetful already; this is because every month she finds a new dried plant on her windowsill that she has forgotten to water. Sometimes she lets things stay on the stove too long and they burn, but she is not as afraid of fire as she is of rain because the bricks in the building are not flammable. Besides, her kitchen walls and floors are of granite, which ought not to burn either.

But fire is not what Frances thinks of most of the time after she steps back into the apartment from the terrace. Most of the time, she thinks about if her daughter is going to visit, and then she thinks about her grandson. Then sometimes Frances goes to take the garbage to the compactor room and sees the man who lives across the hall, except she has forgotten about him. He has lived there two years now, and she has welcomed him with brownies almost thirty-four times. He has helped her pull the Monet print off the wall and then put it up again almost ten times, because she keeps forgetting and wondering why the Monet is not on the wall, or why it is still on the wall.

She is not so terribly lost, though. She still reads the newspaper and does the crosswords in the bathtub and hangs her rose-printed sheets out on the balcony so that at night they smell like Park Avenue sunshine. Sometimes when she is bored she sits on the couch and pulls the comforter up to her chin and thinks about nothing, but thinks that she is thinking about everything. Sometimes she thinks about the man who owns the pickle shop two blocks away who talks to her when she pays for her sweet marinated red peppers, and then she thinks about the doorman who has the night shift downstairs, and sometimes she only sits and stares at the little mark on the wall from twenty-some years ago where there used to be a nail. Frances is sad when she does this, but barely realizes it, and instead considers it a routine time to ponder the world.

Maybe Frances is also sad when she goes to sleep, because she pulls her blanket up to her chin and stares up at the ceiling. Occasionally she stares long enough to remember what it was like staring up at other ceilings. She remembers pink walls (hers at six years of age), gray walls (his at twenty-seven), yellow walls (theirs at thirty-one). She wonders what color he painted his walls after he moved out and moved in with someone else. Usually while staring at those walls she remembers the feeling of smiling. She does not really smile because the lift of her lips takes too much energy, and besides, there is no one to smile to except for the ceiling light. If Frances looks at it for a long enough time it begins to look like a face.

She is not afraid of death, really, only afraid that when she goes to heaven she will not know anyone there. She is not sure of what she will do if no one speaks to her. What if it is crowded, and there is no place to sleep, no beds for her to lie in and no walls for her to stare up at? She has said this to the drunken man on the street corner whom she lets sleep in the living room (this is safe because she knows him and does not forget him like she does the man who lives across the hall. The drunk man, his name is Joseph and he is an actor). He repays her for her kindness by knitting her scarves and sweaters.

There are few events in Frances’s life, unless one counts the flowering of one of her succulents every few years. Otherwise there are events such as when she takes the piggy banks, stuffed with change, to the bank down the street, or when the young woman above drops cigarette butts onto Frances’s terrace (they often land in the aloe plant). Every couple of years her daughter and grandson visit from California, and Frances invites them to dinner and they eat roast pork and beans and tomato gazpacho in silence, because there is nothing to say. Frances’s daughter asks how she is doing, and Frances says she is doing well, how about you? And then the daughter says she is doing well, too, and William has just started his first year of elementary school, and William looks outside at the black cat figurine that is sitting on the terrace because he has nothing to say either. There are minutes of silence, and then Frances asks how Emily’s husband is, and Emily says he is busy and could not come, but did say hello. Frances says hello back, and then they sit and wait for William to finish so they can sit some more.

William is bored and he looks at the cat and then he looks at the Monet and he looks at the old television in the living room and then he looks at the plaid jacket that is hanging on the tall, ornate coat rack. If there is nothing else to look at William will look at the shoes under the bench and the jar under the mirror and maybe into the mirror, but never at his grandmother because he has nothing to say to her. Sometimes Emily hugs her mother and pretends to ask her to come to California, but both she and Frances know no husband wants his mother-in-law in the house, and so Frances says that she is too old to leave New York, and Emily insists that she is young, so, so young. William looks at the carpet and holds his mother’s hand.

Sometimes when it rains and one of Frances’s succulents is flowering she brings it into the park with her. The people on the bus wonder why she is holding a small painted blue pot with a miniature cactus and a long trail of white flowers coming out the middle, but Frances says nothing. If it is night and she falls asleep on her beach chair the small blue pot tumbles out of her hands and into the mud, where she finds it when a nice man wakes her up. Then she gathers all the dirt that was spilled from the pot and slips it back in on the sides, and then looks sadly at each little white blossom, as if to apologize. And when she goes back she is shivering and the doorman with the night shift tells her, again, that the rain will not soak into the bricks of the building and make them soften, and she smiles and says she knows. Then he asks her why she goes out if she knows, and she replies that she knows but does not really know—that she knows in her mind but her heart, where the fear lives, has not quite gotten the message yet. It may have been lost on the way.

Maybe in a few months or a few years Frances will forget her daughter. So that when there is knocking at the door Frances will open it to an unfamiliar face; she does not know anyone this young, she is sure, apart from the mailman and the new man across the hall. Maybe her grandson will be there, too, and she will wonder if they have gotten lost, or perhaps come to the wrong floor. She will ask who they are looking for, and then her daughter will know. But maybe that will come slowly; she will forget many things before she forgets them. She will forget to take the garbage to the compactor room, to bake brownies for the neighbor who just moved in, to pay for her peppers at the pickle shop, to think about life and heaven and smiling when she sits on the couch or the bed and stares at the white around her. Maybe Frances will forget to be afraid of the rain.

 

Rachel Zhu lives in New York and is a current junior at Horace Mann School. She is the cofounder and Editor in Chief of Horace Mann’s creative prose magazine, LitMag. Outside of school, Zhu writes creative short prose and poetry, and is also an artist and ceramicist. She draws influence from her Chinese background and culture as well as classical European and American works of literature. Through her work, she hopes to inspire other Asian Americans to express their stories and experiences through the world of humanities and art.

We realize later that the day everyone in the township lost both hands — no clean cut, just a rude awakening to two drying, painless stumps at the end of our arms — should have been declared a state, if not national, emergency. This shit doesn’t happen often! The least we could get is some recognition. Instead we got Dr. Selwyn accepting bids for an experimental treatment that’s supposed to regrow limbs like lizard tails, and those Veterans Association guys, Ray and Eddie, volunteering to lead workshops and support groups for our new lives without hands. Also a lot of screaming and anarchy and this-is-an-outrage stuff on TV in the first few days, but none of us had time for that. Panic is for morons who can afford to miss work, as Samira likes to say.

So here’s how the day goes: us girls get up individually, clear our cauterized stumps of the nastiest clots, and drag our sorry asses in with five minutes to spare. We’re forgiven, obviously, for skipping makeup and leaving our bedhead in place, though Manager David draws the line at ditching those neon-pink fifties uniforms. That alone sets us back about an hour. By the time we do manage to get the doors open, we have a line of pissed-off, balding weirdos who must be from out of town, since they’ve still got fists to shake at us. David greets them all with a yellowing say-cheese smile and leaves us four, all handless, to fend for ourselves.

It takes a few minutes in the kitchen for Haruhi, our high schooler, to ask how the hell we’re supposed to get these orders out. It’s lucky our pancakes only take one trip to the microwave and the cooler’s right there. But these plates have a long way to go. We’d leave them on the counter, but expecting customers to come up to the counter for their food? Unthinkable.

“Well, let’s test it out, Haru,” Samira says. She wiggles her stump at the steaming heap of brown on the table. “Group effort, ladies. Wrists out.” Except Haru’s tiny, and our first attempt to balance a plate on her twiggy wrists ends with the pancakes sliding off onto the floor.

So we improvise. Have her hold the plate in her teeth? No, too heavy. Hold it between her elbows? Haru’s too weak. Piper suggests having her juggle it with her knees like a soccer ball, and really, Samira’s blank stare is what she deserves.

Finally, Samira throws her stumps up and stomps off to get the whipped cream. Piper and I look at each other, then at Haru, who’s holding herself ramrod straight like she’s afraid to let herself move.

“Put it on her head!” Piper’s a genius.

It takes both of us crammed onto one step stool to get the platter to balance, but we manage it. We’re just lucky we picked Haru, whose head is surprisingly flat.

We hop off the stool as Samira returns with the whipped cream tucked into the pockets of her apron. She glares for a moment, holding the canister by her wrists, and then she yanks the cap off the cream with her teeth and pushes down the nozzle with her tongue. She didn’t shake it enough, though, so it comes out gloppy, an oozy lump that splats in a pool of liquid.

“That’s, like, three health code violations right there,” Piper says.

“What, the tongue thing?”

“No, dumbass, that whipped cream job,” I say. “Atrocious.”

Haruhi’s eyes fly to her hairline, and before we can stop her, she whips her head back to look, sending the platter facedown to the floor. I’d wipe it up, but I can’t hold a mop at the moment and one look at that rancid fluff has me convinced that it’ll give me blood poisoning. Instead I strike a movie pose — wrist flared against swooning forehead, backside against the counter. Woe is us.

The three of us start giggling, Piper and me doubled over and Haru like she can’t believe she’s allowed to breathe, but then Samira laughs. She’s laughing so hard that she can’t keep hold of the canister, and it lands with a splat in the middle of the mess. Which makes us go even more nuts.

Anyway, that’s what we’re doing when David comes back in with a tray of muffins in his translucent, veiny hands—because (and I forgot to mention) he’s also an out-of-towner and none of this is his problem. We only pause to laugh harder and cover our mouths with stumpy wrists when he shakes his crooked finger at us, saying, cut the shit.

 

Katherine Xiong is a freshman in college who’s doing her best. Her most recent work has appeared in One Teen Story and Body Without Organs.

It was that five o’clock quiet. That near dinner, husband-isn’t-home-hush that Mary drew close to. She was working flour through her fingers, kneading gluten into a biscuit dough and hoping for an even rise that Ed might even compliment if she kept the oven steady and hot. There was a familiar taste of Mississippi pollen on her breath and a yellow day of work under her fingernails.

She held the storm door open with a dusted Mary Jane, its match cleaned by a fresh breeze. Without the lulled hum carrying from the kitchen, it would seem no one was in the steaming home. Wind brought Spring in from the porch, with the dewy smell of honeysuckle and St. Valentines Day. There were framed portraits on a table by the wall. Three of her children when they were young: Charles at twelve with a cheeky grin; Jane Ellen almost grown, with her dark curls and doe eyes; and Missy, seven, lips already sweet as sugar. Mary kept in the drawer beneath them the photo of her angel, in a coffin at three. Over doilies stained yellow, pictures of her grandchildren. In the center was a photo of a little boy with a cap-gun Ed had passed down against Mary’s wishes. A boy so young could hardly hold the truth of a bullet in his thoughts. He sat in a child’s rocking chair on top of the couch cushion, grinning at Jane Ellen through the lens. Each frame carted memories in the afternoon light.

The dough was stiff and clung to her warm hands in the humidity. Mary rolled it thick and cut circles with the lip of an empty peach jar. She washed her hands and covered the tray with a damp cloth to rise until supper. Her mind wandered down Depression tracks as they always did before evening. She counted her blessings again. The one nice brown dress with pink ribbon on the hem, the record Jane Ellen and her husband had brought on their last visit, the beef she and Ed could afford again. She hummed the melody of In the Ghetto and thought of the still fresh babies her Jane Ellen had at home. Her youngest grandson and his sweet kisses captivated her mind a moment. His hair was blonde as sand and fine as talc powder, but his mother’s had been too. By sixteen he’d have a full head of dark horse hair.

A truck crushed down the gravel drive. Three footsteps echoed up the porch stairs, disjointed. Mary busied herself with collard greens, halving and dousing them in fat on the stove in a choking simmer. The figure in the doorway turned her in panic, and hand to her chest, she exhaled relief and hugged her son. He held himself against the doorway, like his shoulders held the weight Almighty.

“Now Charles, you know better than to scare an old woman!” She rubbed his cheek with her thumb. She could smell the habitual alcohol on his breath. She spared him the loss of her temper. “You go and wash up if you’re staying for supper. It’ll be ready before your father gets home.”

Charles left the kitchen in mud-caked boots. Leaving a trail on the mopped linoleum, he ran his fingers along the wall and balanced his weight against the wallpaper. He paused at the photos and turned them down on their faces. He felt too old to cry, too broken to be home. Tile kept the bathroom cold and the water colder against his cheeks. Flushing himself with the chill, he began to sob. He closed the door.

Mary continued to cook, adding a third helping of collards to the simmering pan. She worried not, but rejoiced at Charles’s return. Her heart was near to bursting with tremors of a filled nest.

The biscuits continued to rise. Her husband would walk in any moment, hungry and distracted. There was leftover chess pie from the church group in the fridge that she’d been saving for Valentines’ Day, but she could serve it as a treat for her two men. She smiled to herself and washed a floured bowl.

“Charles, bring another set of napkins for yourself when you come.” She spoke to the sink and herself, “I would have folded them real nice if I’d known you’d be home. Such a shame I’m already behind.” She looked over at the counter. “Why, the biscuits won’t even be ready in time.”

She waited for her son to respond and took the tray of dense dough to the oven. The creaking door flooded the warm house with the evening chill. She called again – “Charles? What’re you doin’ back there? Your father will be home soon and he’ll wanna know what you’re doin’ back- Charles?”

She sighed and worked her way down the hall, kicking over the shoe and letting the door swing to a close. Two fingers all veins and knuckle closed the latch. She looked over the fallen frames. A cough cut the hall in two. Mary turned. Her son was leaning against the bedroom door frame, his eyes red and hands shaking. His eyes still held tears, years of them. They twinkled like a movie star’s – that’s what Jane Ellen had always said, that Charles was handsome as a show horse – and something was missing. Mary held composure and spoke again,

“Charles, what’s going on?” She held herself but her tone slid cussedly. “Why did you come home tonight?”

Her son’s demeanor shifted again, becoming anxious. Charles’s voice crumpled beneath his throat and a sob rippled back. “Mama I never, Mama I- Mama I didn’t want to hurt anyone.” He had lost his grip, as he’d done when he was younger. She had been sure he’d outgrown it, having watched him hold Jane Ellen’s little baby the previous Christmas Eve.

She prayed to Almighty that Ed might walk in the back door and took her son by the shoulder. It was stiff and knotted. “Charles, what have you done? Answer me- why did you come here-”

Charles swung back and forth along the door, exposing his arm and the sawed-off shotgun from the linen closet. “Mama-” He lifted the arm and lowered it, staggering in breath and stance. The house settled into its covers, and Mary began to ache, aware of every closed curtain and private space in their little home. “Mama-” he crooned, a small boy again.

Mary held her necklace and released a prayer with her tears. The house was quiet. A stormy wind cracked against the latched door and pleaded for entrance. Mary hushed it with will, praying that silence would hold until Ed’s truck pulled in. She damned herself for the smell of collards boiling over. Her movie star little boy cried to himself, ‘Mama, Mama, Mama.’ She remembered the days when he sang to her and brought her bracelets of wildflowers, the days when she couldn’t feed them more than the previous evening’s leftovers- if there was a serving left. Days when he still loved to run amuck with Missy and get into more trouble than Mary had the energy to manage. She kept in her mind the little grandson she wanted to hold. She held only herself.

The fat from the collards rushed in rivers over the edge of the pot, the greens simmering down to a green syrup. A smoke flooded out from the oven, stones of flour calling out for safety. The house was hot and loud, festering wounds of the evening. “Mama, Mama, Mama-”

It was just one shot. Then the world kept its quiet.

 

 

 

Zoe-Aline Howard is a Kernersville, NC local and Early College graduate entering her college years with an Associate of Arts and high, high hopes. Beyond studying forms of poetry and reading fiction, she enjoys creating digital zines. In the fall, she will declare herself a Pre-Creative Writing major at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and begin her literary journey in full force.