One weird Halloween everybody dressed up as Elliott Smith.

like HFCA is kind of artless manipulation 
it’s not subtle
 

People keep saying that they can’t say anything but everyone is saying everything all the time. 

Finally, Mr. Mackey, the chair of the school’s English Department, delivered a rambling panegyric about the school’s depth of talented writers. I left my seat in the bleachers to fetch a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine.

Like many who quit drinking, my mother became a proselytizer for sobriety.

The other half was the memories of the end. The time Teddy had threatened to burn the only copy of my novel.

He struggles to come up with actions that give him a sense of joy or purpose when she is not around.

He says he feels like all his problems would be solved if he stopped going to that bar.

Things that make sense: plants, deer, video games, sushi, beer.

When she looks back at me, there’s a saturnine hopelessness in her eyes I understand too well.

He stole my Tupperware, the largest one in a glass Pyrex set.

His white face is red. Mom taught me that people turn red like tomatoes when they’re drunk. I look around and see pink and red faces all around me.

I was telling stories. I was enjoying music. I was proselytizing. I was observing.

I am torn with longing for many unnameable things.

At night, we lay on unmoored mattresses, pressing hands over our eyes to block out spears of light from the street. We cursed our naked windows.

What the Mother wanted to show us might be different from what we wanted to see.

“My grandma drinks that,” the kid ahead of me at Duane Reade snarks at my six-pack of Ensure bottles.

It’s me and Helena. Helena and me.

She feels bad for being taken aback before; she really is a very nice doctor.