April Fools

A Short Story About Adolescence and Suicide

Greetings from Florida - "The Land of Sunshine", 1942, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory

Today, we’re thrilled to publish “April Fools,” a darkly comic exploration of teenage grief, friendship, and alienation in a small Florida town disrupted by a boy’s death, by the frighteningly talented Savannah Horton. With unflinching precision and an acerbic teenage narrator, Horton shows how tragedy introduces fractures between those we think we know best.

We are now open for fiction submissions. See here for details.

—The Editors

---

The boy died on the first of April, so the police were slow to respond. The first of April was a big day for false alarms.

My mother worked dispatch for Alachua and fielded all the calls. Every year, she listened to teenagers report cases of mammoth erections and spontaneous combustion. Maybe twice a decade, a kid would do something inventive with bath salts and launch himself into juvie. But most of the calls were total jokes. Still, my mother’s job was to send the police like a good little Samaritan. Her officers quickly stretched thin.

That year, a representative from the department stopped by our school to speak over the intercom about making smart choices on April Fools’ Day.

“It’s a crime to fake a crime,” he said, but he didn’t tell us what the punishment would be if we got caught.

Or maybe he did. I was too busy looking out the window to listen. A pair of enormous crows was picking apart the unlucky carcass of an armadillo, which felt like big news at the time — I didn’t yet know about the boy.

I was in Discrete Math, a low-level half-course for borderline morons who didn’t need to take Pre-Calculus. No one in Discrete Math was graduating on time. Sixteen of us had to repeat the year. The school had concocted a whole schedule of specialized courses to convince us it was still worth our while to wake up at six AM five days a week.

My desk mate, Nick, threw a penny at the intercom, but it fell very short and struck Ms. Galanis in the chest. She was flat enough that the coin dropped immediately to the floor. It might as well have hit the wall.

Ms. Galanis sighed like a debutante and pressed a palm to her neck. I’d been waiting all year for her to discipline the boys in our class. She had an inconvenient soft spot for them. Rumors claimed she was intermittently dating a nineteen-year-old who sold subpar marijuana to the sorority girls at the nearby state school.

Nick slipped out his phone. He’d already made two fake calls that period.

I turned to him. “People might be dying. And they’ll get the busy signal. So, you could be killing someone, basically.”

He smiled serenely. “If I looked up asswipe on Urban Dictionary, I’d find your picture.”

“Urban Dictionary has no pictures. It’s a dictionary.”

“If I looked up your mom on Urban Dictionary, I’d find a picture of a whale eating another whale.”

“Again, you wouldn’t.”

“If I looked up Gillian, I’d find a corpse. You can tell her I said that. Does she get visitors, or do they keep her in a pen?”

“It’s just not funny.”

Gillian was my closest friend. We’d been inseparable since catching lice at a Field Day six years earlier. The hours we’d spent picking eggs out of each other’s mayo-coated hair had confirmed our pronounced compatibility. That fall, she’d scored an early decision spot at some tiny school in Maine that was obsessed with Arctic studies. My father had, for years, been foaming at the mouth to trade me for her — at least, until that February.

Nick pressed a finger to his lips. My mother had picked up his call.

“I’d like to report a shooting,” he said. “The location? Yeah, it’s in your ass!”

Nick knew maybe seven jokes, all of which centered around body parts. As children, we’d lived two houses apart and had played naked together in the sprinklers even when we were old enough to know better. His was the only uncircumcised penis I’d ever seen, in real life or online. It wasn’t to my liking. All that extra skin. Like those liquid tube toys you shoved your fingers into.

Nick shouted “ass” again into the phone and then laughed like a chimney sweep. He was too gangly, too pimply to have cultivated such a husky voice.

Ms. Galanis muttered that he should probably go to the principal’s office — an impressively mature realization for her — but Nick tucked the phone into his pocket and smiled. He had charming teeth. I could admit that.

“The life of a criminal is short and painful,” the representative said over the intercom.

“I need everyone’s eyes on number five,” Ms. Galanis said, voice wobbling. “I need someone to walk me through number five.”

We were supposed to be talking about combinatorics, which existed, apparently.

A girl named Maeve raised her hand. Maeve raised her hand more than any person in the history of education, and she never had the right answer. Allegedly, she’d once made her dog eat her out. Otherwise, she smoked e-cigarettes in the wheelchair-accessible bathroom, and when the kids in wheelchairs rolled in, she pushed them back out.

I stared at the crows out the window while Maeve read number five. I didn’t want my mother stuck talking to people like Nick all day. Dispatch was a thankless position. Even the victims of serious crimes were cruel to my mother — they didn’t seem to notice or care that she’d saved them, for free, that she’d allowed their silly lives to continue. I thought she ought to have received hundreds of gift baskets a year, from trafficked ladies and paralyzed motorcyclists and fathers of babies who turned blue. But she got nothing.

“The answer to number five is 37.6,” Nick interrupted. “And if it’s not, then I’m going to fucking off myself, Liz.”

Ms. Galanis waved her pink hands around to celebrate him. She was wearing her shirt backwards for the holiday. The tag hung over her chest like a miniature tie.

When the bell rang, I waited until the crows had erased the armadillo’s face to stand up and leave the room.

Then, around two PM, a jogger called the station. The jogger said he found a body at the Ames Street Cemetery. The Ames family owned almost everything in town because they’d sold so many shovels during the Civil War. Lots of people had probably perished on their land. My mother sent the officers, who took over an hour to arrive on the scene. But she could’ve hung up. No one but me recognized her power.

---

Dispatch had rules about confidentiality, none of which my mother followed. When she picked me up from school that afternoon, she shot out of the car and walked two jittery laps around it while she told me all about the boy. She was either filled to the brim with coffee or hoping my French teacher, Monsieur Callahan, was watching from his second-story window. They’d met up for two overlong dates back in January, but he wasn’t calling her anymore. I hadn’t benefited from the fleeting partnership. My grade in his class was a C-.

In the car, I maneuvered my backpack off my shoulders and picked at the wax of a warm Babybel while my mother sneezed at the steering wheel, three times in rapid succession. She was frequently sick, so she often smelled strange, like a person left to thaw in a microwave. She claimed to be suffering from mold poisoning. She claimed the mold lived in our house and that, soon, I’d suffer, too.

“What I don’t understand is how he ended up in the cemetery.” She sneezed three more times. “It’s miles from the middle school.”

“Is he still there?” I asked.

“Oh, they’ve got him at the coroner's by now.”

“I don’t think coroners exist anymore.”

“I keep thinking about that little body, and I . . . it’s beyond belief.”

My mother thought most crimes were beyond belief. I wondered if this made her bad at her job.

“What about the witness?” I asked.

“I’m sure he’s with the police. He didn’t sound well on the phone. But then again, who would?”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to jog in cemeteries.”

“I’m not sure about that, sweetheart.” She traced the denim collar of her jacket with a finger. “Gosh, I would’ve fainted if I saw him.”

“You probably wouldn’t have. Only because I’ve never seen you faint before.” I slid my nail through a sliver of the peeled red wax. “What’s the best way to kill someone, you think?”

“I don’t like that question. How should I know?”

“I’m not asking from experience, obviously. Just your best guess. I was thinking poison. That’s what Gillian and I decided.”

“I hope you don’t talk like this in front of her.”

“Gillian’s practically a poison expert.”

“She’s very lucky.”

I rolled my eyes. Unfortunately, I had no way of telling Gillian about the boy now that she was detained. In February, she’d swallowed a whole bottle of nail polish remover — momentarily — and was stuck in a center working on feeling like a person again. Now, she couldn’t use the phone. Physically, she could, but the doctors wouldn’t let her. She still had fingers and ears and everything. The school was making her listen to recordings of her classes like a leper.

“I’m sure Gillian has heard a thousand other awful things today,” I told my mother. “She likes awful things.”

“That’s the problem.”

I’d never asked Gillian why she’d drunk the nail polish remover, but I assumed it was likely a mistake. She didn’t talk about it when I visited. I couldn’t tell if she was waiting for me to ask.

---

I thought the recent and nearby murder of a child ought to have been an obvious choice for dinner discussion. What topic was as relatable as death? Did there exist an experience more communal? As far as I knew, all humans tore through vaginas and subsequently stopped breathing. The only difference between us was the time it took for it to happen.

I explained my theories about the boy to my parents through pantomime. I sliced my throat with a limp strand of linguine. I held a fork to my temple and pretended to pull a trigger.

My father turned to my mother. “Are you going to let this continue?”

“Sweetheart, it’ll get cold,” my mother told me.

My parents had separated months earlier, but they couldn’t afford to live in separate houses. The scenario might have been hilarious if I was watching it on screen and not experiencing it as a primary source. If you were going to disrupt your entire life and the life of your dependent to have sex with people other than your spouse, you should at least make enough money to do it correctly.

I resumed slurping noodles. “Dad, how many mousies today?”

“Don’t speak like that,” my father said. “You’re seventeen years old.”

“That’s why it’s funny.”

For twelve years, my father had worked as a lab manager at the community college that was mortifyingly close to the state school he kept applying to positions at. His main job was to euthanize the rejected mice by smothering them with gas and then breaking their necks for good measure. The daily massacres failed to take a toll on his mental health, which greatly concerned my mother. She wanted her family to be terrified of death even though she seemed just as terrified of life. But my father was too exhausted to be afraid of anything.

“Today was paperwork,” he said.

I slurped. “Lucky mousies.”

“If no one finishes their plate, I won’t make anything tomorrow,” my mother said.

“I’m sure these kind of look like the dead boy’s intestines,” I said, twisting linguine. “Objectively. I’m not trying to be funny.”

---

At ten PM, WCJB TV20 News showed the boy’s school pictures and a grainy home movie in which he tried to lift a watermelon out of a swimming pool. In the movie, he kept saying how much fun he was having with the watermelon. His family was offering a reward for information.

I was recording the whole broadcast to show Gillian. She was allowed visitors every other Saturday. My job was to keep her updated on whatever people said and did at school so she wouldn’t require an endless backstory when she returned. She’d be inside all the jokes, understand the shifting alliances. I always left out what people said about her.

The police recommended we go about our business as usual, but the district was giving all students the next day off.

“I hope they’re stationing officers at the schools this week,” my mother said.

“He didn’t die at school,” my father said from his recliner.

“They should still patrol the campuses.” She shifted on the shapeless sofa cushion. “I bet you, they’ll send one officer to stand in the parking lot and hand out visitor badges. Probably Duncan. The one they tried to fire for arresting that nurse. This department doesn’t care. I see it every day.”

My father turned to me. “Your mother has no clue what she’s talking about. It was likely a targeted hit if they’re telling us not to worry.”

“A hit?” I frowned. “You think he was running a seventh-grade mob?”

He sighed. “I’d really suggest you take something seriously every once in a while.”

“What a nice thing to tell your daughter,” my mother said.

I felt my cheeks bloom horribly red. My father scrunched his thin nose. I didn’t like his face at the end of the day. A whole oily city pumped beneath his skin, the pin-prick divots of his sweating pores, the unshaven bristles crowding his lips.

“We should let the police do the job we pay them to do,” he said.

My mother looked down at her knitting needles. Her narrowed eyes said: How fast can I turn these into weapons?

With another sigh, my father picked the clicker up from his lap and turned off the TV. Automatically, I squealed like a pig losing blood. He flinched, and the recliner creaked.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“I have to record the rest for Gillian!” I cried, waving my phone.

My father started to grind his teeth then abruptly stopped himself. His TMJ gave him screaming migraines my mother had no patience for. Often, he spent full weekends in bed, quietly moaning but refusing our help. He once told me sleeping was his favorite thing in the world, and then he apologized. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t remember him ever apologizing for anything else.

A tired engine shrieked in the distance. We lived beside a highway, so even with the windows closed, we could still hear the cars revving past on the other side of the live oaks.

I’d always assumed a killer or kidnapper would eventually select our house to enact their crimes inside. Easy entry, easy exit. If I ever grew selfish enough to procreate, I’d buy a place at the center of a thickly settled cul-de-sac. People would have to drive thirty miles per hour past our house — even murderers, as they headed to decimate some unluckier family on the outskirts.

---

I’d planned to use my day off to visit the crime scene, take some B-roll for Gillian, but my father insisted I accompany him to work so I could understand what it felt like to regret one’s choices. He’d dropped out of college and was using his self-loathing against me in all arguments about my GPA. But he made good money — good enough to join a Wine of the Month club — so I had trouble understanding what he was so ashamed of. Plus, no one was forcing him to slay mice for a living. There were always job openings at the dealerships in town. You didn’t need a degree for that.

I was perhaps too excited to visit the lab. Neither of my parents had ever taken me to work before. Despite my poor grades, I boasted solid attendance. My father didn’t let me take sick days — I could only remember one time I’d missed school, for a fourth-grade stomach flu.

So, I’d never met his mice. I thought the whole day would make a killer story for Gillian — or Nick, even. People would find it impressive that I witnessed cruelty and didn’t squirm.

My father and I didn’t speak in the car. He didn’t introduce me to anyone in the ice-cold lobby of the research building as he scanned his lanyard. Maybe he didn’t know anyone. I doubted he had work friends or work wives.

His lab was dingy, probably in need of a sweep, but all I could look at were the dozens of mouse enclosures stacked along the back wall. Each enclosure housed more mice than I could keep track of, more mice than seemed possible. It was like the wall itself was velvet and fidgeting and angry.

The smell alone was enough to spark nausea, but the second I made eye contact — or whatever the equivalent of eye contact was with a rodent — my whole stomach ran away. Those little twitching noses and toes and tails. I couldn’t bear it. I wondered if this was how some people thought about fetuses.

“Is today another paperwork day?” I asked quietly.

“No,” my father said.

He hung his leather satchel on a hook and went to wash his hands. The water ran for a long time. I felt myself tear up. Around me, the room seemed to be expanding, the walls wiggling at a grotesque frequency.

“I have some homework to do,” I said. “Can I go out there?”

My father didn’t respond. Maybe he was in the zone. I walked straight out of the room and set myself up across the hall in what a sign called a Staff Lounge but what was really just an empty classroom. I tried to finish some combinatorics while my father got to work. The nausea didn’t go away.

I was happy not to hear anything. When my dog, Sully, had died of bloat the year earlier, I knew he’d suffered because he’d screamed. His stomach had filled with gas and twisted, and the twisting had cut off his blood supply, and the roads to the veterinary hospital had been gridlocked, and the tube that had tried to compress the fluid had been shoved down his throat too late.

I hoped the mice didn’t know what was happening. Maybe the walls were soundproof, or maybe this species died quietly.

Later, we went to one of the dining halls on campus for lunch. I looked at my turkey sandwich while my father devoured two hot dogs. I decided not to tell Gillian — or anyone — that I’d been here.

---

The vigil took place in the auditorium the next morning. I recorded what I could for Gillian as a Voice Memo. A guidance counselor I’d never seen before explained that we would all feel scared for a few days and then go numb for a while before getting very sad. She told us not to harm ourselves when we got to the sad part. Mascara dripped beneath her eyes too neatly, like she’d stroked it there to look more upset.

A huge picture of the boy shimmered onto the projector screen — the same picture from the news. I wondered if he was an organ donor, if his heart and lungs had been plucked out by tweezers and squished into a dying kid. I didn’t want to be an organ donor because my mother said paramedics wouldn’t try as hard to save me.

The guidance counselor brought Maeve on stage. It turns out the boy was her brother. Maeve was out of dress code. Plaid pajama pants and a sweatshirt from Niagara Falls. Her face was all puffed up like a reheated sausage. When I looked at her, I couldn’t stop picturing her perverted dog, which bothered me. I wished she were a more ordinary person so I could have had more generous thoughts about her.

Through tears, Maeve asked us to pause for a moment of silence. I tried to imagine myself on stage in her place, mourning a slaughtered relative. The scenario didn’t make me sad. I hoped this was because I couldn’t genuinely imagine my parents not existing anymore, without flesh or voices or anything. Sure, I could picture them blue on metal tables, blue in veneered caskets, blue underground, but I couldn’t imagine the weight of their absence. I wanted to. Because everyone around me was crying, and I wasn’t, and that bothered me, too. I felt like a defective human being. I needed to see Gillian. Certainly, she could relate.

Maeve thanked us for the moment of silence. She stuck her hand into her pajama pants and pulled out a crumpled note.

“My brother was the best person I ever met,” she read. “The smartest, sweetest, kindest, funniest, coolest kid in the entire world. He was going to do amazing things. He was better than all of us. I love him more than anything. I don’t want anyone here to ever, ever forget him.”

Everyone applauded. I joined but felt a sting of irritation. Better than all of us? Every single one? There were probably seven hundred people in this room. I had trouble believing the boy was better than me simply because he was dead.

I knew the only person I could say this to was sixty miles away.

---

In Discrete Math, Ms. Galanis spoke to us very slowly. Her eyebags looked like plum slices slipped under her skin. I wondered if her teenage boyfriend had done much consoling this morning. Maybe he’d offered her a joint.

“If you feel like you need to talk to someone, please come to me,” she said.

“We shouldn’t be in school when there’s a murderer on the loose,” Nick said. “Sorry, Maeve.”

In the front row, Maeve turned around and nodded gratefully. I was surprised to see her here. I would’ve thought grief was a good enough excuse to cut class.

“Actually, the police think it was a hit,” I said. “They said we have nothing to worry about.”

I’d hoped to be consoling, but a few of my classmates snickered. Ms. Galanis glared at me. I hadn’t meant it as a joke. I was just repeating what my father had told me.

Nick’s lips curled up. “God, Maeve. I’m sorry my desk partner is so insensitive.”

“It’s fine,” Maeve said, with a sniffle. “Some people aren’t mature enough to properly deal with loss. They try to make it all about themselves.”

“That wasn’t what I was doing,” I said.

Maeve started to heave and sob. It was the ugliest sound I’d ever heard, like a gorilla was watching its own belly split in half. I wanted to cover my ears. A few of the girls nearest Maeve surrounded her like a flock of hungry crows. I rested my forehead on my desk.

Ms. Galanis abstained from the usual lesson plan and allowed us to console each other. She passed out paper so we could write loving notes to our classmates.

“Show your friends how much you care,” she said.

I wrote a note to Sully.

Dear Sully, I wish you were alive so I could pat your fluffy head. We canceled math because a kid is dead.

Nick folded his paper and then shoved it into my hand. It said I’M A PERVERT FOR YOU in block letters.

“If I was the killer, I would kill you,” he said.

I stuffed his note into my mouth and chewed it until he looked away.

---

The nearest pediatric psychiatry hospital was in Gainesville, but Gillian’s mother had known the resident psychiatrist as a child — had relentlessly bullied the resident psychiatrist as a child — and feared the woman now likely wanted revenge. So, Gillian was staying at a center on Fleming Island.

When I visited, my mother would drive me the sixty miles and then wait in the car where she replayed the same Intro to French lesson she’d been listening to for months. Her accent would have offended any actual French person. I hoped that was the reason Monsieur Callahan had dumped her rather than some sexual deficiency.

That Saturday, my mother stayed quiet for most of the ride. I studied the barrage of billboards that lined I-75. Frightened babies, cartoon fetuses with angel wings urging us to choose life. A man and his sons circled a slaughtered alligator’s jaws — Hunt with Guaranteed Success!

“If wombs had windows, women wouldn’t abort,” I read. “I am an endangered species.”

“I have something difficult to tell you,” my mother said.

I wondered if she was kicking my father out. Of late, I was having dreams of him as a homeless man — pants sagging, beard crusty — begging cars for cash or to run him over.

“They figured out what happened to the boy,” my mother said.

“Oh.” I felt a shiver of excitement that I knew was somewhat cruel. “Who did it?”

“Well. No one.”

I frowned. “So, he walks into a cemetery, and the ghosts suck his soul out?”

“No. He . . . well, it’s awful, sweetheart. They did a toxicology report, and he’d taken something. A lot of things. It’s incredibly sad.”

I looked out the window. We passed a billboard with a smiling family holding machine guns. Fun for the Whole Family!

“It was probably an accident,” I muttered.

Yes, an accident. The boy had to have made, like Gillian, a heedless choice that spiraled out of his control before he knew what it really was. Because Gillian was going to college. Gillian was going to study the Arctic. And the boy was the smartest, sweetest, kindest, funniest, coolest kid in the entire world.

“I just wouldn’t mention this to Gillian,” my mother said.

I shrugged in response. My jaw clenched with quiet anger. Was I the only person in the world who wanted to stay in it?

---

Gillian wasn’t waiting for me in the lobby. Usually, I found her cross-legged in the vestibule between both sets of sliding doors, ready to pounce on my feet. I wondered if they’d let her go home and she’d forgotten to tell me.

I signed the Visitor sheet and pressed on the crinkly Visitor tag and wandered back to her room. My head felt empty and fuzzy, like the inside of a puppet. I suddenly didn’t want to show her what I’d recorded about the boy.

She was asleep in the cot, tucked up to her neck under white sheets. For a second, I thought I was looking at her lifeless body. But then her mouth twitched. I hated her for scaring me like that. Her face was much thinner than I remembered. Now, I had a better idea of what her skeleton looked like.

I didn’t want to wake her up, but I had no interest in going back to that lobby. It smelled like stew, and everyone inside it was a weepy parent. I sat in the plastic chair across the cot and stared at Gillian for almost ten minutes. When she finally opened her eyes, she raised them and smirked.

“You creep,” she said. “I sleep during the day now like an old person. I’m basically a hundred. My meals are all soft.”

I tried to smile, but she saw through me.

“I’m funnier than that,” she said.

“I know. I’m sleepy, too, I guess.”

“Well, wake up. You’ve got about a million things to spill before they make you abandon me.”

I frowned at that without meaning to. But I felt annoyed. I wasn’t the reason she was in here.

“And I definitely need to hear about the boy,” she added.

I paused. “I don’t know much.”

“Well, you have to know more than me. They’re completely starving us of information. As soon as he came on TV, they changed the channel and took the remote. I can’t believe I’m stuck in here the one year a murderer comes to town.”

When I didn’t respond, she kicked her feet under the sheets and moaned.

“You really are tired,” she pouted.

“The murderer was probably always in town.” It felt strange to lie to her, like I was speaking the language of an enemy. “Statistically, I mean.”

“Well, it’s just shitty I can’t experience it with everyone.”

I raised my eyes. I’d never heard Gillian swear before. In middle school, we’d sworn against swearing, on account of profanities making people sound less intelligent. It didn’t seem to have made a difference for me.

“You say shitty now?” I asked.

“We’re practically eighteen, Libby. We’re already late to the game.”

“I guess.”

“Besides, you grow up faster in here. You have to be incredibly mature to take it.”

“Take what?”

“I mean, you have to be lonely a lot of the time. You have to think about things a lot. To the point where you stop feeling like yourself. Like, your fingers feel like someone else’s fingers. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“No.”

“You have to think about small stuff, too. Sometimes, I spend all day thinking about my toothbrush. You can’t brush your teeth without a monitor in case you want to choke yourself with the brush. That’s what they think I’ll do. That’s what I have to think about.”

“Wow.”

“I know.”

“I’ve never thought about any of that.”

“See? Exactly. And you’re the exact type of person who should think about these things. Or think about anything. As your friend, I can say this. But you don’t think about things. You know? I mean, you don’t think the important stuff, is what I’m saying. Obviously, you think.”

“That’s kind of a shitty thing to say.”

The word felt wrong in my mouth. Maybe it was too late to start swearing. Like I’d tried too close to adulthood, and my lips weren’t properly fashioned for it.

“It’s just something to think about,” Gillian said.

“Why would you want to think about any of that?”

“You’re in a mood today.”

“Sorry.”

She swung her hair over her spindly shoulder. The strands were coiled into tight braids that hung down to her chest like glossy tentacles. Ever since I’d known her, I’d wanted to unravel them.

“Maybe the murderer will be in town when you get out of here,” I said. “I bet he’ll stick around like a total sociopath.”

“Do you even know what a sociopath is?”

I could sense that Gillian knew, and that she was going to tell me. One of the worst parts about her going to the center was that she’d become a bit of a know-it-all. I had to remind myself how sad she must feel — every second of every minute of every hour of every day — if she wanted to be like the boy.

“Because I think you meant psychopath,” she continued. “A psychopath has violent tendencies. Sociopaths are just weird.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I meant psychopath.”

“Hey, is Ms. Galanis still with that drug dealer?”

I nodded.

Gillian giggled so hard she choked. With a hand over her mouth, she said, “That woman should actually be arrested. How old is she? Like, twenty-five?”

“Probably. She could’ve been his teacher last year.”

“People are actually insane.” She pressed both palms to her cheeks and shook her head. “I mean, I should know, right?”

I nodded again. Maybe fifteen minutes had passed, but I couldn’t spend any more time in this room. I stood up.

“My mom took an extra shift this afternoon,” I said. “So, I gotta head out early.”

Gillian’s hands dropped to her lap and started to squeeze together. She looked at me for a long moment, then her eyes flitted over to the window. “Gotcha.”

I didn’t move. It was easy to forget these visits were important to her, even if she didn’t always show it. It was easy to forget she loved me, even if she didn’t always show it. I didn’t want her to walk into a cemetery and never walk out. Still, it was difficult to ignore that something had split between us back in February. I wished I was smart enough to understand why.

“I’ll see you in a couple weeks,” I said.

She fluffed up her flimsy pillow. “I’ll be right here.”

---

In the car, my mother was quietly conjugating le participe passé. I could hear her through the cracked windows. Her voice sounded more pathetic in French. As soon as she noticed me hovering outside, she paused the lesson and unlocked the door.

“That was a short one,” she said.

I shrugged. “She’s tired.”

“I hope they’re giving her enough outdoors time. I have to imagine it can get a little depressing in there after a while.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“How was she?”

“Fine.”

“That’s good. How are you, sweetheart?”

I wanted to answer honestly, but my feelings made no sense. I couldn’t translate them into language. More than anything, I was confused, and that confusion was upsetting me. I felt as though a sludge had weaseled into my body and bloated all my limbs. I felt worn out. I wanted to be horizontal. I wondered if this was how my father felt when he wasn’t in his bedroom.

“Fine,” I said. “Hungry.”

“Alright. Can you make it until we’re home, or should we stop for something?”

“I don’t know.”

“Alright.”

She pulled out of the lot, and we drove slowly through the surrounding neighborhood. Spanish moss hung from every tree and pole and wire, warped and brown, like the city had excavated its drains and tried to choke itself. I liked the menace of this vegetation. I felt safe inside the tangle of it.

“Why do you still have to send the police when you know someone is prank-calling you?” I asked.

“It’s my job.”

“But. Like. It’s wasting your time.”

“Well, it’s not up to me to decide who to take seriously. My job is to listen and respond. It isn’t to judge.”

I jutted my feet out to the dashboard. “That sounds like a shitty job.”

“Watch your language. The good news is you don’t have to have my job.”

“I’ll have to have a worse job.”

“You have no clue what job you’ll have. You’ll probably have dozens of jobs. Some of them you’ll hate, some of them you’ll love.”

“I’ll probably hate them all.”

“You won’t. You have no idea what you’ll end up doing. But I’m sure you’ll like whatever it is more than you think.”

“I have a hard time believing that Dad likes what he ended up doing.”

“Well, maybe he’s not doing what he’ll end up doing yet.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Life is so much longer than you ever think it could be at your age.”

I didn’t respond. She braked for a stoplight and pressed her lips together. They were chapped and wrinkled, and I wondered if she hated this about herself. Her whole body was shriveling up under her clothes. And she still had to start over. Gillian probably would’ve looked at her and felt only dread.

A car pulled up beside us. Inside, a Newfoundland gleefully chomped at the open back window. I watched the gush of his black gums, the lacework of spit that dangled down the side of the door. He had no clue what was going on, and he was happy about it.

“When are we gonna get another dog?” I asked.

“Oh, sweetheart,” my mother said. “Do you really want to go through all of that again?”

Savannah Horton is an MFA@FLA grad and former Writer in Residence at St. Albans School, with work in The Cincinnati Review (selected as a Distinguished Story for The Best American Short Stories 2020), Subtropics, The Drift, and other places.