when you are fat in middle school, your doctors tell you to join a sport. when you get cut from softball for never having played softball—every soft lob whipping past your swinging bat and racing heart, every careless toss slipping through your borrowed glove—your teachers tell you to run cross country. when you get bullied out of cross country, your parents tell you to walk. so you walk. you tell yourself you’re cute, that deep down, the cuteness of you that no one sees is worth everything, and you tape a black satin bow to a black plastic headband and wear it to remind yourself. 

you don’t have a phone, but you’re just in your neighborhood, the same old neighborhood where the same old people live. the adults tell you to be positive, so you walk, crunching sun-baked leaves, slipping fingers through the scaly fronds of cypresses lining the yard of a girl who used to be your friend. cold shadows spear onto the crumbling asphalt like teeth, and the din of your thoughts obscures the crackling of tires. 

a boxy brown car rolls to a stop beside you. you pause, curious. you are a girl scout, trained to listen and help. the window sinks down into the door. cigarette smoke wafts out.

he’s college age, brown hair, varsity jacket, tired eyes. he doesn’t say hi or i’m looking for… or can you give me directions to... he asks, do you want a ride? 

the upholstery is red leather, cracked but clean, no crushed soda cans or crumpled fast food wrappers. just a blanket folded in the backseat. you take far too long to think, to wonder how you look to him, to scramble for a reason not to get in the car—the car of the only person who has ever, maybe, probably-not-even hit on you. yes, you want to get traumatized on red leather; yes, you want the touch of the hand that adjusts his side mirror too nonchalantly and the vein standing out on the back of that hand and the blood inside that vein; yes, you regret it immediately when you shake your head.

where do you live? he asks. you point beyond the cypresses at your once-friend’s house. she is thin and cute and never home. she has a boyfriend.

leaning an elbow out the car’s window, he frowns, disappointed, even pitiful. or perhaps that’s your reflection in the flake of the car’s paint, and he’s just reading your lie back to you, waiting for you to realize: this will be your only chance. a stranger in an old car at dusk. a scratchy blanket and nicotine-stained fingers and whatever violence he wants to enact on you, whatever cruelty, whatever pretend love. this is your chance, while you still hold the barest possibility that you are or ever were cute. no one actually thinks you’ll get any prettier; they make you try because they can’t stand to look at you. 

so you don’t want a ride? he confirms, and you try to convince yourself his impatience is tenderness. 

no, you say, and rush up your once-friend’s driveway, your black satin bow slipping. you stumble into a crouch in the drainage rocks behind her house, and it falls. you grab it and hold it to your heaving chest. it was supposed to make you cute; it worked in the worst way possible. 

he sits there for a moment, tapping his steering wheel. he knows you’re lying. you know you’re missing your chance. if he gets out of the car and grabs you, drags you by your frizzy hair, you both know you’ll surrender.

the car squeaks as he pulls away. tears press against your eyelids. perhaps they’ll say you’re making progress, that your miniscule reluctance to be kidnapped is indicative of self-esteem, or bravery, or whatever other basic virtue they like to pretend pumps through the chambers of your preposterous heart. in reality, the only argument you can find against running back into the road, bow in hand, is this: whatever he wanted to do to you, you didn’t even deserve that.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson