Gabrielle Hamilton is looking at me like she’s deciding if I’m worthy of her hawk-like gaze. Her restaurant is called “Prune” and is lauded by restaurant critics but also by my mother, who sent me pictures of her meal there last year when I had typhoid and was on a steady diet of white rice and bananas. I cried with envy.
I logged on to Facebook to check it out. Her sister was fourteen, a freshman in high school. She had about a thousand friends and did not have 113 likes—it was up to 115 now, in the thirty minutes that elapsed since Allie’s text.
I am to have this gold when you die. To buy ink for poems crumpled on the carpet purchased with your cancer. You’ll make nothing as a writer. But my materials are cheap. Each verse I write about you merely … Read More
Every Thanksgiving, the rest of America puts a turkey in the oven and sprinkles marshmallows over sweet potatoes. They sleep in late, watch football. Or so I would imagine.
It was my first night drinking since February. I’d decided to take a break from alcohol for all of March—now that I have the freedom to buy my own alcohol legally, I don’t feel as compelled to jump at it when offered. But mostly, I just wanted to see if I could make it for a whole month.
People start asking some time around kindergarten. It’s the fault of those LL Bean monogrammed backpacks, so ubiquitous to the elementary school experience. “What does the E stand for?” I asked a friend as she set down her Nacho Cheese … Read More
