Two years later, I fell in love with a boy whose devotion to The Smiths matched my own.

He paints using the ashes of the towers in his watercolors.

I love you...
I love you, too...

Everyday we took Jelly for a walk on the track.
If Julia was busy teaching, Scott and I took Jelly.
If Scott was busy teaching, Julia and I took Jelly.

My friend Jamie holds out a thistle bloom, her fingers curved gingerly around the prickles. “Eat this,” she says. 

Anthony was my reason for everything ... for South Park, for Tupac, for horror movies, for music that sounded like screaming, for my parents' vodka, my sister’s mascara, for all the girls I put down.

What we really wanted was to be older.  What we really wanted was for something to happen, take us away from Florida and into the rest of our lives, but that doesn't happen for teenagers, not so much, and so we stood and waited.

i mean, i was black before too.

Civil War Day was a staple at Reginald Middle School, implemented somewhere in the shady patriotism of the Reagan era before carrying through as tradition.

The air before me
is the flavor of
an oat cake popsicle.
Or a shoe box. 
Or the water sports
I’m not doing. 
So I sign for
a prescription
while all the world
is water sporting
in

On my last night in Zhenjiang, the three other laowai and I—each of us western foreigners: three upstaters and a guy from Toronto—walk the condominium-lined miles out to the banks of the Yangtze river.