Her parents' argument had driven her out of the house and now she was lost. There was the cornfield, there was the moon. The lights of her neighborhood had vanished. It was past midnight, early August. She would begin eleventh grade next month; summer swimming lessons were over. No more walking with her sister the five blocks to the country club they were too poor to actually belong to. She was barefoot—big mistake—wearing denim shorts under her nightgown. Her feet hurt, her legs were itchy, and all she could see was cornfield, cornfield, cornfield.

Beyond the cornfields was I-95, heading south to Baltimore, north to Philadelphia, places she would one day live—two years with a rich boyfriend near Harbor Place, six months alone in a studio apartment in Philly, smoking clove cigarettes and drinking Coronas instead of going to her secretarial job, which she would quit when she went back to college, met a man who looked homeless but wasn't, married him and spent fourteen decent years with him before moving back to her childhood home, where her mother smoked on the sofa until she nearly burned the house down.
   
Her older self found her younger self in the cornfield and said: Oh, poor you, a boy you like doesn't like you, and a boy you don't like does like you, and algebra is so hard. Your mother is fat and cries about it; your father is broke and yells about it. Your sister floats sweetly in her own jet stream, with her guinea pigs and her bangles, and she will always be a little happier than you are, and a little more foolish.
   
And her younger self didn't pay any attention, because she was thinking that here it was, her last chance to be interesting: vanished, murdered, a mystery, a cult, a tragedy, a warning, forever 16 years old, a smiling angel in the back of the yearbook. She struggled through the weeds and lifted her young face to the moon—felt the moon staring down and saying, Oh, you're a remarkable young lady, in the voice of her father for some reason. Keep on keeping on, her social studies teacher liked to say, what a nerd, but she kept on keeping on and suddenly there were the lights of her own neighborhood, her own house, her own life welcoming her back.

The house lights were out now; the argument was over. She found the front door unlocked as she'd left it, stepped inside, shut the door behind her. She climbed the carpeted steps to the bathroom she shared with her sister and washed her filthy feet in the bathtub, tenderly, as if they were blind, gentle creatures who loved her.

Becky Hagenston's most recent book is SCAVENGERS: STORIES, which won the Permafrost Prize.

Read her postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of igbsneak.

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