That year I was smoking cigarettes, swishing past boys, and worrying about Vladimir, the classroom tortoise. Tim’s desk was inches away from the terrarium and he seemed to be keeping an eye on him. Vladimir appeared too wise to be trapped. The lettuce in his terrarium turned brown, but Tim would replace it with new
I woke up, rolled out of bed, and felt beautiful. I called the man I’d met online and told him that I really lived a lot closer than he thought. “I’m wearing elevator shoes,” he said. “Because I’m tall in my soul.” Fine with me. When I looked in the mirror, I just had to
It was her high school boyfriend who started the trouble. She was just sixteen. He suggested that she didn’t have a normally shaped vagina, his finger skittering around it like a lost tourist. “You need to see a doctor. Find out why it isn’t opening,” he said. “God, that’s embarrassing.” He shrugged and turned on
There’s a spider in the bathroom, I tell him. It’s six feet tall, I say. I wake him up and tell him to save me. I pee a few times a night and can’t imagine slipping into the cold bathroom alone, facing this spider head-on. It’s frigid here in Siberia. Outside, nothing can live for
The kinds of things he says about his wife. The way he describes her smile. “Actually, you know who she reminds me of the most?” ”Nope, who,” I say. “She reminds me of Margaret Thatcher, the Meryl Streep version,” he says. He laughs. I laugh. We laugh and sometimes I cry. He holds me and
1. He reads labels. Even perfume labels. Rides the double-decker buses so he can watch from above. I poke at the halo around his shorts with my wayward finger. “You have strange ideas, Mary-of-the mushroom-teas,” he says, mussing up my hair, not noticing the finger, like, at all. 2. His eyes dilate when he
