Lillith did not originate from an inferior chip of Adam’s body but from the same material, and in the same quantity, as her husband. Lillith demanded Adam treat her as his equal. Adam refused. They fought endlessly until Lillith spoke God’s name. This was the first time a human had ever done so. Lillith vanished. She had disappeared into Hell. She found a second spouse, too. The archangel Samael loved Lillith. For welcoming the exiled woman, God castrated Samael. Lillith became a demon, representing fruitless temptation and the murder of infants.

We are made of the same earth. We awoke to life in the same instant. You and I lay in the Garden, arms stretched out but not yet having touched. We waited for the other’s touch in blind starvation. Our legs splayed like a river parting ways from itself. Our bodies stretched to the same length. Our faces were all that was not identical in form. We, unborn, had known to face each other.

Before I met another creature or realized the grass supporting my body or knew our Father, I saw you. I loved you, Adam, before I learned to love our Father. Our Father entering us on our in breath and abandoning our exhalations before we ever noticed. He settled in our every pore, glistening like the sparkling water coating each blade of grass before the sun rises. He never showed himself. Your lips suspended upon mine like swans gliding across the lake. Our fingers wove together more tightly than a bird binds her nest. We were perfect.

But you silenced me. I woke hours before you. I did not stay beside you to cherish every grunt and snore and marvel at what dreams you must contain. I did not leave only to bathe in the lake and prepare myself for you. I did not gather berries and pile them into beautiful heaps, for you. I wandered in the woods with foxes, deer, trees that you remain ignorant of. The sun was high and my arms struggled to cradle all of the stories but I always returned home to you. You burrowed your nails into my body and dislodged chunks of me, as if I did not exist except as part of you. I am pockmarked with your hatred.

Adam, I am a body and a mind-a masterpiece-as you are. You were all I had. You were more than enough. I collected these stories so that I had something to give to you. You scorned my gifts for having existed without you.

When I condensed our Father’s power into a thing as finite as our bodies, I still loved you. I reached to God and tore him down to us. I balled him into a cheap word to be damned and thanked for petty victories. I had to take what you were too fearful to ever steal from me.

You, too, escaped the Garden. Again on the merits of another woman, although I suspect hers’ was gullibility. You warn your sons that I will find them in their beds and have them, no matter if they resist. Finally, Adam. You have granted me the power of a man.

I have flown so far on gossamer wings to find you. In the discounted hours before dawn, I rifled through continents of sleeping men searching for you. A globe of slack, unfamiliar faces greeted me. You want me to disappear again. You say you do not recognize me, that because I wake at night and dream by day means that you do not know me. I still love you.

I could never exist as a fragment of you. I am your other, equal half.

He agreed to spin the straw for me if I gave him my ring. Toby, the butcher’s son, had spent a year’s savings to buy it, just to propose to me. It came as a shock when he made his declared his feelings. We’d always been friends. He was as nice as they come—that didn’t mean I wanted him like that. I told him how sudden this was, how fast it seemed when we hadn’t even properly courted. Poor Toby blushed and asked if I would give it some thought. Despite my personal feelings, it would’ve been foolish to turn him down right then. He was much better off financially than my father and me. The butcher had the most lucrative trade in the town. So I said I would, and he gave me the ring, anyway. If only my father, in a drunken stupor, hadn’t opened his big mouth, I might have decided to marry Toby, after all. I’m here instead, imprisoned, ringless, and a day away from either marriage to the king or death by his royal executioner.

I didn’t expect the little troll to come back a second time, when the king again demanded that I use my alleged gold-spinning skills, but the creature was my only hope. The straw crunched under my desperate pacing. I fiddled with my mother’s necklace while counting the number of times I crossed the dungeon. I got to twenty-nine when that squeaky, tittering voice piped up.

“This is your backup plan? Crush the straw to bits and make it impossible for anyone to spin it? Not very smart, missy.”

I spotted him in the farthest corner in the same pose as before. He wore a pair of ratty brown trousers and a blue cap that lopped to one side. The cap failed to cover his huge pointed ears and wiry strands of hair that poke out underneath. He hopped down.

“You came back,” I said. Terror had a way of making me point out the obvious.

“And you sound surprised.”

I wiped my hands on my skirt to calm my nerves. “What do you want this time?”

“How about that pretty necklace?”

I clutched the tiny ruby pendant. I should’ve guessed—it was the only thing of value in my possession now. “This was my mother’s. It’s all I have left of her.”

“I know.” The goblin swept his foot through the straw and kicked it up. He chuckled at the strands and dust fluttering down. He was an ugly, menacing little thing, and yet so childlike that I wasn’t sure how much I should be afraid of him.

“In case you didn’t notice,” he continued, “I can make all the gold I want! The ring from yesterday is worth almost nothing in comparison. But its sentimental value—oh, it’s worth a fortune where I’m from!”

Even though it was pointless, I kept hiding the necklace in my hand. When my mother was alive, she taught me that I could do anything, be anyone, so long as I was willing to work hard and make the necessary sacrifices. She’d been more adept at that, and at keeping my father on track at the mill. How had she managed? Her necklace couldn’t teach me her secret language of persuasion, but it soothed my loneliness. It was also the only expensive thing my father hadn’t sold off after her death.

“What will you do with my ring and necklace?” I asked, stalling him.

The goblin looked me up and down in humor. He knew what I was doing and found it amusing. It made me want to step on him for it. Then he tapped his chin and sat on the stool for the spinning wheel. “Give me the necklace, and I’ll tell you.”

I eyed him with distrust. “I’m giving you the necklace so you’ll spin the gold.”

He giggled. “Now you decide to be clever! You’re right. I always ask for something in return.”

I didn’t have anything else with me. He knew that. He curled his hands in another fit of snickers. “I trade in objects of emotional value, remember?”

“Like what?” I ask a little crossly.

“Like a kiss. A kiss on the mouth.”

I sputtered.  Every inch of me spasmed in revulsion. I couldn’t agree to it.

“Then give me the necklace and we’ll get this over with.” He still smiled with his crooked, jutting teeth and chapped lips. The smile lost some of its grotesque merriment, though, in exchange for muted sadness and bitterness. It had me wondering if there were little she-goblins as hideous as he who wouldn’t mind planting their own chapped lips against his.

“Explanation first, then kiss.”

The goblin cocked his head. “You won’t back out?”

I held up my hand the way the people in the kingdom do when committing to an oath. “You have my word.”

The goblin smiled. It was warmer this time. “Very well. Then necklace, please.”

“Necklace and kiss after.” My own mettle took me by surprise.

The troll was surprised, too, but he didn’t complain. His disproportionally large hands gathered some straw around him and wrapped the strands through the spinning wheel’s flyer and bobbin. He somehow tied the strands together, too quickly for me to see how. His wide flat feet pedaled the treacle and make the wheel whir. As the wood creaked and squeaked, the little goblin told his story.

“I come from a land beneath the earth. It’s a place no human can get to without help from a goblin or fairy. We don’t invite them often. Humans are clumsy and greedy and would leave a mess for someone else to clean up. We have markets to trade what we acquire from other lands. We value gold, sure, but that’s the most basic resource. That’s like dealing in pennies in your world. We have magic in mine, and magic is fed by emotions. Human emotions are especially powerful. So we take items with emotional value and trade them for many things—the most basic needs to the finer luxuries. The smart traders stock up on sentimental objects for future spending. Now and then they drink up the emotions to fuel their magic. Like this!”

He pulled out my ring and stared at it. I gasped as it emitted a glow, and when the glow crawled up the goblin’s arm, then shoulder, neck, torso, spreading out until it covered his entire body. Then the light disappeared. My ring became ordinary again. He spun the wheel hard, and in seconds the same amount of gold he’d produced during his story was doubled in a matter of seconds.

The thread pooled underneath the spinning wheel. It curled like a charmed serpent and shimmered. The cold and luminescence reminded me of summer days spent lying in the wheat fields. I liked to play in those fields as child and found peaceful solitude now. Well, until recently. Hours could roll by and I wouldn’t mind wasting them with the bugs and snakes that lived in the earth. I adored roly-polies and worms the most. I loved teasing them, making them writhed with my huge tickling fingers. Something about their shiny, strange bodies intrigued me. Where did they go, I would wonder, when they disappeared into the ground? How could they breathe? What did they see down there? Now I wondered if they saw the magical world the goblin described. I imagined him slithering into the ground like the harmless little snakes with his wriggling, scaly body.

The goblin continued adding straw to the strand in his hands. He worked so fast that after his demonstration with the ring, the straw was half gone. I moved the gold out from under the wheel so it didn’t knock over the device and its master. Sitting there next to him with nothing to do gave me time to think. His story piqued my interest, but more than that it brought back my memories of my wheat field, my unusual companions and how sometimes, when my parents were mad at each other or Toby was visiting another town with his father on business, I wanted to disappear into the ground with my subterranean friends. As a woman, or nearly a woman, I assumed this was a stupid wish. You couldn’t just escape your circumstances like that. You couldn’t escape them even by more realistic means. Sometimes, as much as it hurt to think it, it seemed as though my mother was wrong.

“It sounds too good to be true.”

“It’s not perfect, I’ll admit,” said the goblin. “But it’s home. If you’re willing to go for what you want, whatever the price or obstacle, you can thrive there.”

A swell of determination burgeoned in me. Enough was enough. I didn’t want to marry the king. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t even want to go home to my father. My father hadn’t done a single thing to help me. He didn’t beg for mercy or offer himself in my place. Mother wouldn’t have let any of this happen. She wouldn’t have stood for it. So why should I?

It then came to me—the answer to my real dilemma. I needed to make a different deal.

“Time for my payment, missy,” said the troll.

The heaps of golden thread that surrounded us made my heart skip. He finished the task faster than yesterday. For a moment my former dread of fulfilling my promise returned. Looking at him again, though, I scolded myself for my squeamishness. It was no worse than kissing a toad.

“Is a short kiss okay?”

His large, deep-set eyes, shadowed in anticipation of protest, lit up. “Of course.” He slapped his hands on his knees and tilted forward with lips puckered. He kept watching me.

This is my second kiss. I kissed Toby once. I brought him to the wheat field some years back to show what I loved about it. His fifteen years against my twelve might have made it difficult for him to understand my interest. I suppose it seems strange for a miller’s daughter to find grubs and reptiles so fascinating. But he seemed to like that I didn’t care if an insect crawled up my skirt. I talked a while about all the different species I’d found and the names I’d give them, not having any book that told me their proper names. Maybe he grew bored and decided to silence me with a kiss. Disappointing, yes. It wasn’t the worst first kiss a girl can have, but that sealed my feelings about Toby. It just wasn’t possible to see him as more than a friend after that.

I sucked in air, shut my eyes and lean in toward the goblin. Thinking about Toby didn’t help. I thought instead about the sun I hadn’t seen in two days. I thought about the field, the golden wheat, the tunnels left by snakes that could lead to that magical world my companion came from. I thought about my ugly little friends that I loved and felt my nausea disappear. My lips pressed against his cool, crusted ones.

Out of curiosity and consideration, I lingered for a few still seconds.  When I pulled back and opened my eyes, the goblin’s eyes shined and stared back. He looked dazed.

“Wh-what were you thinking about? Those emotions. They . . . blimey.”

I blushed and smiled. “I was thinking that I want to make a different deal.”

He raised his brows.

“I want to leave. This dungeon, this town, this land. Maybe even go with you, if you’ll let me.”

He gulped. His mischievous confidence had vanished. “To my world, you mean? I told you, humans aren’t all that welcome.”

“Then at least get me out of here. Take me somewhere far from here. But I would like to see your world someday.”

When it looked like he might say no, I put my hand on his. They were actually close in size, which made me more comfortable holding his knobby fingers. The goblin’s pale grey cheeks became imbued with a pink-purple tint. He tensed. Then he tore his gaze from our hands and looked me in the eyes. “The price will be high. Higher than anything I’ve asked for yet.”

I took his words seriously. “Like my soul? My firstborn? What?”

“Eh, I haven’t much use for souls. But your firstborn . . . yes that should do it.”

It was hard not to groan or choke. But then I had a thought. “Whose child? I’m not going to marry the king.”

“Oh, right.” He scratched his prickly chin. “It doesn’t matter, really.”

“Then we’d better stick together.” An impish grin of my own crossed my face. Maybe impishness is contagious. I didn’t have the mind to worry. “Who knows how long it will be before you get your payment.”

Slowly, cautiously, he answered my smile with his, but then tucked away. “I suppose you’re right. Fine. Good.” He cleared his throat. “So . . . the necklace?”

I gave him his fee while forcing myself not to cringe. When the ruby pendant and gold chain fell into his hands, he rolled off the stool and darted back to the corner he came from. He stopped short and looked back. “You’re sure about this, missy?”

He couldn’t me out of it if he wanted to. And going by the quaking in his excited hands, it was clear he didn’t want to. I smiled again. That was enough. He giggled and walked through the wall, still watching me. It was strange that this was only our second meeting, and I didn’t even know his name. Yet, for the first time in my life, I knew what I wanted and what I would do to get it. No more resignation. No more fear about paying the price.

One girl named Callie does not react at all. I always thought she looked like an earwig. A very beautiful earwig, the queen of the earwigs – she has a very royal air about her. Despite the commotion all around the studio of people setting up for the top of the dance, I can’t stop watching her. The earwig takes a swig of her water bottle, the same dripping plastic nonsense that ruined my running leap. Her gulp must be at least three-quarters backwash by now but by the way she savors it you would think it came from freshwater springs. She wipes fat droplets of sweat from the corner of her forehead with the back of her ring finger.

When she does speak, never to me, it seems as though she is always singing even if there is no melody in her words. Something about the way she warbles her complaints and gargles her compliments makes it so there is always a song lodged in her throat. She recently had her heart broken by a boy who had the personality of a beanbag chair. I, of sound mind and having never been in love, could not understood how she could care for such an empty, sagging boy with a weak jaw that could barely cut oatmeal. Still, weeks later her eyes were glassy and she never smiled her patented ear-to-ear smile anymore. The earwig was sad and she took it out on all of us in different ways. To me, she was coldly indifferent but to her friends she was clingy and at parties she wandered over to couches, muttering jaded relationship advice to anyone who would listen after a half a glass of wine.

I’ve pieced together from slurs and through tears that she was supposed to move across the country with him, give up her dream of being a dancer, and he broke up with her at her cousin’s wedding in Chicago. They spent the rest of the weekend sleeping on opposite sides of the bed in a hotel room.  That is the funny part of being in your early twenties. Suddenly everyone is at different stages in their lives. Cousins are starting careers and getting married while you eat Chinese food and weep openly into the take-out noodles.

She had gone out every night since getting back from Chicago and always showed up to rehearsals wearing sunglasses that covered half of her small, round face and guzzling down her water in big, fat pulls to wet her unwettable whistle. Even in her hungover stupor, her musical voice rang, piercing as ever. She must have given herself a headache but it was the only way she knew how to communicate other than judgmental glances.

When Callie was announced as the star of our upcoming showcase and the model for all of our local advertisements, she barely batted an eye; just stared at our director blankly. Her stare is most unnerving because her eyes are ever so slightly too far apart. This gives her the appearance of looking in more than one direction at once and it feels like she is always watching you. On the subway, when I pass the advertisements – her leg perfectly straight, her eyes perfectly crossed – I can’t help but feel an uneasy combination of admiration and pity.

Every night when rehearsal ends she walks home solid five paces ahead of me. I never jog to catch up and she never tarries to match my pace either. It is as though we are children tethered to an invisible child leash and our monkey backpacks are held at a set distance forevermore. One day I heard her crying from my five paces behind. I pretended to be immersed in my phone and I stopped to tie my shoes to create more space between us but her whines only whined longer. That night I cut the invisible leash and called her name.

She stopped short and straightened her spine defensively. She called back over her shoulder, without turning her head, “What do you want?” I didn’t have an answer for that. What was I trying to get out of this? Was I trying to help her? What made me think she needed my help? I suppose I just saw a crying earwig and my stomach turned at the injustice of such an elegant creature being crushed by a mean, lumpy boy. She may get under our skin and think too much of herself but she didn’t deserve to be miserable. I tried to think of a way to cheer her up, a way that wouldn’t make her get all weird and quiet and put up walls to protect herself.

After a significant pause, throughout which she made no attempt to keep walking on, I answered her question with another question, “Do you want to find out what is behind that brick wall?” I pointed to a wall up ahead on the left covered in dead vines. I passed it every night when I crossed U Street and 9^th on the way to my one bedroom apartment above a barbershop. I had my guesses but I wanted to prove my theories and even though Callie and I had never had a formal conversation, I had a feeling she was curious too.

She turned to the left to look at the wall and then to look at me. It was the first time we made eye contact and for someone who had just been crying her skin was flawless, free of redness or blotches. She only had three perfectly symmetrical laugh lines fanning out from each eye. I’m sure the earwig hated them but I thought they were beautiful and unique and I wanted to name each one individually. Callie didn’t say a word but she seemed receptive to the idea. I walked over to her and we examined the wall together. It looked doable, fairly easy to scale. The only problem was our dance attire ripping on the vines and branches.

Silently, we shed our bags and rolled up our leggings, tying our loose skirts around our hips. Our flats gripped at the old bricks and we pushed up onto the gray slate top of the wall. We awkwardly adjusted our bodies around one another and the wall, throwing our legs over the edge in an unladylike fashion. When both of our butts were planted we got the chance to look up and take in the other side. It was a lot full of abandoned buses. Some school buses, some public buses, a couple of coaches. It looked like a clunky, metal elephant graveyard and the gravel was so old it has disintegrated into dust. I looked down and thought about jumping off the wall to explore the gallery of chipped paint and half deflated wheels but she put her arm on mine to stop me. The second time we made eye contact was short lived because it didn’t take me long to she was smiling her smile. I knew I would never forgive myself if I ruined this moment by saying something or even just looking at her the wrong way. I thought this must have been how she felt in the hotel room that night, trying not make any sudden movements or think anything out of bounds so that maybe the boy she brought to her cousin’s wedding would still want to be with her.

After around 45 minutes of smiling at the abandoned lot, Callie swiveled on the slate and hopped off the wall. She rummaged around in my gym bag before throwing it up to me and walked on ahead without waiting for me to follow. I unzipped the black duffel and resting on top was the program for our showcase. It was called “spektakle” like “spectacle” spelled with “k.” I’m not sure why. Between her seemly neck and perfectly curved back the earwig had scrawled, “Thanks Jane.” She still never speaks to me but just the fact that she knows my name is enough to make me smile in the face of her uppity iciness.

Snapping back to the dance at hand, I get in place and I run this time with purpose. I run for Callie and the beanbag man who broke her, but mostly I run in hopes that she will look at me for a third time and I can make her smile once more.

Watching a girl on the train sucking
a strand of her own hair, his purring
stops. This is a warning. She peels
a sweater from her shoulders — I feel glass
enter the fleshy space by my hip bone
and must grab at myself in public.

At home, I close the blinds.
He presses his paws against
my eyelids and I kiss
each of his whiskers,
then feed him drops of papaya
juice from the tip of my finger
until he is tired and full,
and he can sleep curled
between my palms.

When we walk down the street
their eyes are glued to us
like flies to sticky paper.
We’re covered in
imagined rhinestones.
They say we sachey
when we walk on blisters.

I’m so sick of coming clean-
the endless performance
to validate my existence.
To some audiences
I undergo a hideous metamorphosis.
I display my scaly
black belly for the first time
to eyes that scar over
from ugliness.
To others, our struggle
seems glamorous.
They paint our blood gold
to ease their guilt.

“Chin up. You could have everything.”
That’s what my parents and teachers said.
Meanwhile, they boxed my ears
into rubbery strips and my nose
into a bloated lump like a baby eggplant.

So much for my good looks.
Now I will have to survive
on charm alone
to maintain my courageous appeal.

But I tire of tolerance,
as the world does of me.
I want to know
what revenge feels like.

Besame, besame mucho,
mi amor. Let’s wear nothing
but leather from now on.
Our struggle isn’t glamorous
unless we make it so.
Take my hand.
Let’s do the death-dance.
Light the fuse.
The show must go on.
We’ll go out with a bang.

“Sequels can never be expected to
surpass their originals,” I tell you.
“That’s why Superman and Grease
and the Matrix should have been standalones.”

But each time I kiss you it is better
than the last and I am saying something
new with every sharp intake of breath
“and ‘Empire Strikes Back’ was great.”

So press your lips to mine like a bandage
to a wound so we can remember what it
feels like to have defibrillators
breathing life into our skin.

This is what a second chance feels like.

Melody doubles back to blend with talk on loop
of the asshole who sits
two desks away at 8 AM
and weekend plans to wander the city at night.

That same song,
years ago, crawled from a boombox.
Notes and rhythms fell
and suffocated in a cat-stained carpet,
struggled to climb rock band postered walls,
looked down on a lonely bedroom
and a girl too young to shave her legs.

Feedback swelled to hold up her straining voice;
she skipped over the swear words
and thought lyrics sung loud and perfect
could grant wishes made earlier in the woods.

One song
connects these two scenes.
Verses lengthen that girl’s limbs,
the chorus fills out rationality.
She sits on the edge of the bridge,
big toes scuffing the murk
of time between listens.

Then the last repeated lines fade out,
pulling her back to a college dorm couch
and a single, sharp-edged moment
of silence.

The abrading grain around his mouth
like a circle of black ash or gunpowder,
a holy border—
I was somewhere I did not belong.

The exorcism scraped off my tongue, bitter garlic,
anxious as silver. It sent him home in a storm—
the wind shrieked, tore that night
to pieces.

I felt every loss back then. It was a
a measure of water, a morsel of bone,
a deep-tissue itch, old as a birthmark.
I should not have missed it—
I don’t, anymore.

Next time will be better, though.
I will invite him in. I will
tear off all my charms, grown
on top of each other like unshed skins, melted plastic.
I’ll cut the keloid open and give up
all my black blood.

My cosmic honesty:
I am strange, and not pure.
I have dropped my truths in the dirt.
But you’ll hold them in your mouth
as if they were pearls.

but I did, and it tasted nothing like sugar: sweet, but in a vegetable way, and it smelt like sage
and catnip and purple, and the smoke was grating and made me aware of my throat, and while I
passed the pipe and nestled in the warm, dark window ledge, I felt like jelly, and I thought that
the most profound thing about all of this wasn’t the skull-skimming-vastness I’d imagined, but
the dirt beneath my fingernails, and the way lights fell across the pavement.

I huddled against the pantry door, a spoon in one hand and a container of blueberry-flavored Yoplait in the other.  As my mother stood over me, I sobbed my eyes out and shoveled spoonful after spoonful of the chunky, violet colored mess into my mouth.

“When’s she coming home,” I choked out.

“We don’t know yet.” My mother said.  “Probably in a few days.”

“I’m never going to see her again, am I?”

“Of course you will,” she answered.

But I, with infinite stores of wisdom from my eight years of life, knew better.  Marsha was never coming home and since I knew from her telling me over and over again that I was too young and too little to do most things, like follow her and her friends around, I also knew that I would never be able to set out on my own and somehow end up at her side.

“Honey, you can’t be comfortable down here,” my mother said.  “Why don’t we – ”

I broke out into another fit of sobbing.  “Just – leave – me – alone.”

I don’t remember how that night ended.  I’m sure my mother peeled me off the floor and put me to bed in the room I shared with Marsha.  It probably would have felt too empty, just like it always did when she wasn’t in there with me.  Maybe I would have insisted that my mother put me on the bottom bunk or maybe I would have waited for her to leave the room before sneaking down there myself.  It was Marsha’s territory, of course, but that never stopped me from invading it, crawling beneath the covers and falling asleep as I waited for her to come home.  I’m sure I did just that and woke up in the morning, confused and disappointed that she hadn’t come home in the middle of the night and scooped me up and put me back on the top bunk.  Or better yet, just pushed me over and got into bed beside me.

No, when I remember that night, I always picture myself sitting on the peeling linoleum floor of the kitchen, my face sticky with tears and blueberry yogurt.

In the end, my mother was right.  Marsha did come home, a mere day or two later.  My deep rooted belief that I’d been left behind for good didn’t vanish –  though any love I had for blueberry yogurt did – but it did fade away enough for me to forget about until the second time someone I loved went somewhere I couldn’t follow.

This time I was twenty years old, but somehow still no wiser than the scared little eight year old on the kitchen floor.  It wasn’t Marsha this time but Andrea, another older sister figure.  I knew Andrea because we both worked at our school’s I.T. help desk, though it took three semesters of me working there before we ever worked a shift together.  But I knew who she was long before then.  It was hard to work the desk and not know who she was.  She didn’t seem to care what anyone else thought of her.  She cycled through the rainbow, putting streaks of color in her otherwise nearly black hair.  She spoke about whatever was on her mind.  She carried herself with a confidence that I only wished I had.  So imagine my delight when I learned we had a morning shift together the spring semester of my sophomore year.

Now, I don’t consider myself a morning person, but my dislike of mornings could never compare to Andrea’s.  I’d go so far to say that mornings are her arch-enemies.  My shift started an hour before hers, so I was already in place behind the desk that first day when she rushed through the door and behind the desk.

“God, I’m sorry I’m late!  Who the hell invented mornings?  They’re the fucking worst.”  I smiled and said nothing.  She dropped her bag on the floor and collapsed into her chair, looking as exhausted as I felt.  Then she seemed to realize that there was someone there beside her.  “Oh, I don’t think we’ve met before.  I’m Andrea,” She said, still slumped in her chair.

I know, I wanted to say, but refrained.  “I’m Sarah.  Nice to meet you.”

We didn’t speak much for the next hour.  Andrea was still adjusting to the world of living and I’ve never been that talkative with someone I’ve just met.  As the day went on, though, Andrea perked up, transforming into the girl that I’d only seen from afar before then.  I stayed quiet, still shy.  Then she said something that I’ll never forget.

“You have such nice skin,” she said.

“Um, thanks.  I guess?”

“So nice I might just steal it one day and make a suit out of it.”

I turned toward her, unsure if I had just heard what I thought I had.  “You want to steal my skin and make it into a suit?”

She grinned.  “Yup, how else would I walk around in it?”

“Oh, of course.”  I said, nodding my head.  “That makes perfect sense.”

“I’m glad you understand.  Most people don’t.”

“Well, most people don’t have skin as nice as I do.”

She laughed.  I couldn’t help but feel like I had just passed an important test.

That spring she became my favorite person to work with.  The following summer she became one of the few people I considered a close friend.  We worked late night shifts together at the help desk where she made me watch all the movies leading up to The Avengers, dismayed that I hadn’t seen them already.  Afterwards, we took the Red Line train home together.  Sometimes we talked on these rides.  About the virtues and vices of Iron Man, the slow death I was experiencing in my un-air-conditioned apartment (something the Texan in me just didn’t understand), the dozen of vicious bug bites decorating Andrea’s legs and arms from her weekends in the woods (something the Californian in her just didn’t understand), even how tired we were of the patriarchy.  Other times, I just laid my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes, exhausted by the long summer day.  I didn’t realize this at the time, but I looked up to her, much like how I used to look up to Marsha.  She was the cooler, older sister I wanted to grow up to be.

I’m not saying that I replaced Marsha with Andrea, but Andrea did join the space that Marsha once firmly occupied all on her own.  I suppose that’s what happens when you and your siblings grow up.  You move to different cities, you start leading different lives.  You learn to make room in your heart for other people.  I moved to Boston to go to college and pursue a degree in writing.  Marsha married her high school sweetheart and became an Army wife.  Right now, she and her husband are stationed a thousand miles away in South Korea.  I don’t see her as often as I did when we lived in the same room, but I still love her as much as that little girl crying on the kitchen floor did.  But now being apart from her is no longer a nightmare.  It’s a reality and one not as scary as I had once pictured.

As that summer melted into fall, though, I realized soon I would have to picture a future without Andrea.  She was graduating in December and then moving back to Los Angeles, where she was originally from.  I still had at least another year left at school.  I tried not to think about it, but even that was hard to do.  We didn’t have a shift together at all that semester and we both had such busy lives that we barely even saw each other anymore.  Every time we did, I couldn’t help but think that it would be one of the last times we would.

She was scheduled to work until midnight her last night in Boston, but she didn’t let that stop her from spending time with all the people she loved before she went.  She had everyone she cared about from the help desk stop by and keep her company.  I stuck with her until the last lab was closed.  Then, we walked together towards the T station like we had done so many times during the summer.  Except I no longer lived off the Red Line, so sooner than I would’ve liked, we stopped and prepared to part.

I wrapped my arms around her.  “You have to come back, all right?”  I tried to hold back my tears like I’d been doing all night.  I didn’t quite succeed.  “Promise?”

She didn’t bother to hide her tears, as frank as always.  “I promise. I’ll be back in March.  I’ll buy you that drink.”

She’d been promising to buy me a drink since she realized I’d be celebrating my twenty-first birthday a few weeks after she had flown back to California.  Just to be sure, I asked one more time.  “Promise?”

“I promise.”

I hugged her one more time and smiled, ignoring the knot in my throat.  Then I let go and walked into the T station.  I collapsed on a bench and started to cry, not caring who saw me.  The high-pitched screech of the Green Line drowned out all other sound, including my sobs.  No one paid me any mind.  It was half past midnight and I’m sure they were all exhausted and ready to go home to the people they loved.

I felt like I was eight years old all over again.  This time, though, I was lucky.  At least I didn’t have blueberry yogurt smeared across my face.