Kate Russell

I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet

stare at the spot where they disappeared, the setting sun glinting off a stream of water leaking from a dumpster, the windshield of an idling delivery van. I wonder what those girls

In the truck bed, the tarp covering all my stuff flaps in the wind. My parents stare straight ahead, their anger and grief palpable enough to taste. I open my mouth to let it all in and swallow it whole, where deep in my belly it turns into blame.

When I was younger, my parents used to say I sounded like a mourning dove, always sulking, always so damn sad

Fall comes on suddenly. The hotels close up and the visa workers go home. The trees turn the second week of September, clusters of yellow leaves stark against an overcast sky. Mornings are cold, wet with fog, and I wake with damp bedsheets twisted around my ankles.

I said, “You know how sometimes there’s a book that’s yours?” And he nodded, like he understood exactly.

I exhale, hang my head. “I can’t.”

“That’s fine,” she says. “Take it slow.”

“I just feel . . .” I press the heels of my hands into my thighs. “I can’t lose the thing I’ve held on to for so long. You know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.”

“I know,” she says.

“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?”

I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide-open empathy.

I just hate it when he gets angry at me, because that’s when I feel things that probably shouldn’t be there in the first place, shame and fear, a voice urging me to run

bypass boys altogether, go straight to men.

“I want you to say ‘I love you, Daddy.’”