In the morning, I put on a red tank top and gathered my hair into a ponytail. Wearing my hair up gave me a headache, but every time I did it Alec complimented me. You’ve got such a pretty face, he’d tell me. The morning felt sad, and I wanted to look pretty for him.

In the kitchen, he looked up from the table and squinted at me. I waited for him to compliment my hair, but instead he said, “I got a dick pic at one in the morning. Guess from who?”

I bit my lip.

He had a piece of paper in front of him, which he slowly pushed toward me.

“What’s this?” I asked, although I could read what it was: a ticket from Sacramento to Wichita.

“We’ll get you some big suitcases so you can check a couple bags. Everything else, I’ll mail you.” He looked down at the ticket, ran a hand over his head.

“Is it the girl?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s everything. It’s every minute since we got here.”

I was trying not to cry. “Do you still love me?” I asked.

He sighed, looked again at the ticket. “It’s like every day, I’m trying to take a goldfish for a walk—nobody’s really enjoying it.”

A moment passed in which my body floated outside of itself, bumped against the ceiling like a helium balloon. Then he said, “I thought putting your hair up gives you a headache.”

The room grew dark, a tint of gray swallowing everything it touched: the table, the walls, Alec. As quickly as it came, it left, restoring the house to a mocking brightness. Closing my eyes, I imagined my first breath of air in Kansas. It would be cold already, a layer of frost twinkling on the sidewalks. My mother would collect me from the airport in her minivan, the same old lightning bolt crack in the windshield. She would not say anything—she wouldn’t have to. We would simply drive off through the saddest, ugliest city in the world, a city of Burger Kings and pawn shops and antiabortion billboards and residential streets bursting with plastic playground equipment and ratty front yards patrolled by toddlers in dirty diapers, snot dripping from their grimy little noses—noses their mothers would die to protect. Inevitably, my mother would turn to me and smile. Put a warm hand on my knee and squeeze three times. I. Love. You.

A Million and One Marthas

Paige invited me over so we could cook our skin cells. Laying out, she called it. It would be me, her, maybe a few of the other Preps. I wasn’t a Prep, but I was on my way, slowly rising through the ranks one tube of kiwi lip gloss at a time. Only a week before, they’d cornered me after gym, eyes bright with endorphins, pastel shorts rolled down to expose a strip of golden waistline, and asked if I wanted to eat lunch with them. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I’d wanted to scream, but instead just shrugged and said, “Whatever.”