Prologue

(A Memory)

Newly Eighteen — Spring Break

I was newly eighteen, only a couple of months prior, which is a sentence that sounds like a beginning and felt, at the time, like someone had closed a door on my chest and left me standing in the hallway with my keys still in my hand. It was my Senior year, the Friday of Spring break. I had a boyfriend until that Friday afternoon, and then I did not, and the difference between those two facts was a parking lot, a sentence I keep hearing even now, and the particular kind of crying that makes your face look like you lost a fight.

My name is Bethany. Beth to anyone who has ever had to say it more than twice. I am five-foot-three, small everywhere that people like to inventory first. Long black hair that I had only recently stopped treating like a curtain I could hide behind. Small breasts I still hunched to protect. An ass I had not learned how to own yet, even after the weight came off and my clothes started telling a different story than the one I had been reciting to myself since middle school. I was the quiet one, the pencil case, the girl who did the reading. I had spent most of high school being grateful when people forgot to look at me, and then the last year had happened, and looking became a thing I was supposed to want, and I still did not know what to do with my hands.

Amber and Carrie had taken that project on like it was a group assignment with a deadline. Contacts instead of glasses whenever I could stand the idea of putting something on my eyeballs on purpose. Hair that got product now instead of a ponytail of surrender. Makeup that I still wiped off in bathrooms when I decided I had overdone it. Clothes that showed more skin than the conservative stack I used to live in. They said I looked good and I said thank you and then spent the rest of the day waiting for someone to tell me they were being kind.