We meet at thirteen, your bedroom a mere corner, carved from your parents’ kitchen by a janky plastic accordion door. The place we pine after boys and our imagined futures, Cat Stevens on the stereo.
When you break your arm, your family doctor sets the bone askew. Your pain—and the despair you dose with LSD—seem glamourous to me, upstairs in my parents’ house, behind a solid oak door. Hung from its handle, my denim shirt, embroidered with your rendition of the cover art from Tea for the Tillerman.
Though you opt for the long commute to a math and science high school, I cling to your circle, meeting you in the city, doing drugs with your friends. But I’m always the light-weight and a hanger-on, seeking only those next-day moments, talking the way we used to, on the subway ride home.
At colleges even further apart, letters and calls grow rare. Then your voice on my dorm payphone. You’re pregnant, and could I come with you.
“Is there anyone closer?” I say. “Because I can—if you need me to.”
“No, no.” you say. “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t really. I just had other plans. We didn’t speak again.
Decades later, in California, we reconnect thru a mutual friend. Over lemon ricotta pancakes I confess my regrets, but you only laugh.
“I had a miscarriage in college. But I don’t remember calling you.”
You signal the waiter for more coffee, and I try not to look at your arm, its familiar thickening at the elbow exposed by short sleeves.
We try once more, but our reunion doesn’t stick, that tenuous thread broken when I return east to take care of my mom. A million times, I’ve gone down to the basement, put a load of laundry in. Only today do the stacks of unlabeled cartons cry out to me. At the bottom of one, my denim shirt. I lift it up, a whiff of mildew as the fabric unfurls, the colors still bold across the back. But the embroidered image is only half-finished. I’d forgotten that.
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Sue Mell is a writer from Queens, NY, with an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Cleaver Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and Newtown Literary. Find her on Twitter @suemell2017.