She bends at the waist and touches the dirt with both wrists, the cool, dark earth that she believes will eventually be used to bury the next Samhattanite to die. She closes her eyes and hopes it’s not another baller.

I’m gonna miss you, Samhattan, she thinks, with intention. I’m gonna miss your gray skies, your macabre city planning. But most of all, I’ll miss your corners, your pockets, your fringes. I know them well. And to me, they are home. So, thank you for your borderlands, your edges, your outer rim…for hosting me for eighteen years.

She’s up again. She looks to the dirt at her handless wrists.

But there are hands there now.

“Hey,” she says. Her friends are here. The smell of smoke and alcohol tell her they got a head start on the party.

Happy birthday, Kennedy Lichtenstein.

One of them is pressed up behind her. Their arms against hers. Their hands her own for a moment. A memory. A present.

“Shell,” Kennedy says. And for a moment she loves her friend Shell in the same way she thinks Zach Gold loves her. In a crazy, young way, she wants to bring Shell with her out west. Wants to bring everyone.

New land out there. New mind. New life.

Daphne Lives

“Aw, Shell…”

She leans back into her friend, looks to the hands, and almost laughs at how big they are. Do hands always look so big, so clumsy, to those who have them?

She inhales the aromas of smoke and booze. The smell of youth in a cemetery at night. The smell of an eighteenth birthday begun.

Kennedy thinks of Zach Gold. She doesn’t mean to, and she wants him off her land. But he’s pointing, in her mind’s eye, he says:

That’s also the smell of someone listening to music in their car long after the sun’s gone down.

“Shell?”

The hands extending from her rolled-up jean jacket sleeves are big. Yes. Too big. Large enough to palm a basketball in each. Large enough to crush those basketballs too.

Kennedy makes to turn, to face her friend, to hear the word “surprise” in the way only Shell can say it.

But the hands come up. Too fast. And even as they clamp to her face, even as they grip the sides of her skull, Kennedy thinks it’s fascinating, the sensation of hands, these hands, any, being her own.

She does not say help or please. Instead:

“Daphne.”

Even as the hands begin to pull her head apart.

As they do, she imagines that land stretching, imagines a break in the sky over her mind, her land, and she knows now this is how to get rid of an unwanted thought, this is how to get that name out of her head.

She hears the rattling of the fence, her friends no doubt hopping where she did the same. But she has time for only one more thought:

The story of Daphne is wrong.

No outsider would do this to a friend on the fringe.