I.
introduction: you and the boarding school in Owings Mills' woods.
development: you are thirteen and this is the place where you will become yourself.
twist: the ghost in Senior House kisses the napes of girls' necks while they cook.
conclusion: you will see her shoes once in the kitchen as you take out a lasagna. in the corner of your eye, there they are, so white, so blameless.

II.
i am coming back to Meadowood Dorm after Latin class. i have just knocked on your door.

you are telling me to come in, but you are naked save for the white bra with black lace and matching panties you bought at a boutique in New York.

the worst things in my life are the nights you chew Oreos into paste and spit them into wire trash cans without swallowing, the photos of Adriana Lima you put on your snacks to keep from eating them, the fact that i know—even then at fourteen—you won't be here much longer.

we are here because we are becoming ourselves in Baltimore County woods at a school that smells of wet sod and horse hay.

III.
introduction: you in the abandoned barn behind campus.
development: you are fifteen and your roommate is teaching you how to smoke.
twist: eleven years later, in your apartment in Seoul, you will jolt awake from this dream: dusty barn floors pocked with blood, her neck bent broken, her red, red mouth.
conclusion: cotton-thick smoke sets your chest afire. the countdown to her last day begins with the cough you try to stifle.

IV.
i am finding you hungover in your bed with a burp-worth of vomit on your pillow, the smell of stomach bile and booze heavy in the air, a dried shimmer spilt out of a toppled bottle of vodka on your desk.

you are fighting me as i pull you out of bed. your eyes are eyes of want and no fear. you are weeks away from walking into a bar with a stolen ID, from following older men into a Dodge Durango, from turning onto the dark road that will swallow you whole.

the worst thing in my life is that i shield you from the baptism of consequence: i scrub the desk, strip the bed, sow lies to tend to like flowers.

we all walk towards our deaths with the past at our backs, but every few steps, i look over my shoulder and see us seventeen and stupid, see you carrying yourself like a wounded fist, see me fumbling all the ways i could have kept you off this course, out of that car filled with drunken men and hunger, out of the windshield that you'll shoot through like a bat or a bullet.


.