After Hatch’s class, Nicole and I would eat a late lunch at the café on campus, where she worked a part-time job behind the counter. She ate weird combinations of food—clam chowder and peach ice cream, sausages with salad dressing. I got the same thing every time—popcorn chicken with sweet-and-sour sauce and a big, fat slab of chocolate cake.

She slipped on a black apron and a black baseball cap after we ate, squeezed me goodbye and went to work. I walked back to our dorm hall and slept in my room for a bored bit. One day, I decided to take a bus that ran loops around campus instead of walking back. I had been in America a full nine months by then and was beginning to feel confident about attempting public transport by myself.

The bus was delightfully warm, and my routine changed slightly to incorporate it after every popcorn-chicken lunch. A couple of weeks on, I didn’t get off at my stop—I stayed on and replaced the bored nap with a two-hour ride.

I didn’t know it then, but by staying on the bus that day I would one day find the route to some small salvation.

‘Nicky, you can’t leave me here by myself.’

There. I said it. The day before it had to happen, in desperation, I made that inexcusable, futile, selfish request.

She tried to spread the balm of a lie. ‘You’re not alone, Tara. You have Hannah and Thomas and Darya. And hey, you and Asher seem really into each other.’

‘Don’t. You know what this place is like without you.’

And when she hugged me a commiseration, it hurt the most.

The last time I saw Nicole was on the day we moved out of our dorm and went our separate ways as summer strolled in. Intentionally the last two to leave, we hugged a final-feeling goodbye and I watched honey-blonde hair and an orange sundress climb into the back of her grandmother’s van.

Breathe. Breathe in fours. One, two, three, four. Loop. One, two, three, four. Talk. One, two, three, four.

Four. Always, always fucking four.

White Noise

June 2009

Sit, soar, cruise.

The plane smashed through the clouds. They broke. They ripped down their cottony lengths, shredded and scattered, and let us through.

I felt it a folly. I always do. A squirming inside that rings like a warning—my entrails shaking their tails no. It feels wrong to tear our way through the skies. Blankets the air with a sense of the ominous, of portending something terrible— maybe a lesson, maybe an ending—this flouting of gravity, these careless strolls through God’s corridors.

We are not as great as we want to be, are we? Are we?

We cannot break our way through the skies. We do, but cannot—not for long. What happens when the skies have had enough? What will hold us steady in the clouds then?