She teaches me things mothers are supposed to teach: how to use a tampon, apply mascara, find a bra that fits. Do a little something, not too much, but something to accentuate your eyes. I feel my spine rounding, my shoulders closing in. My hair is nearly black and thick, and though I always wear it up, when loose, it reaches to the middle of my back. But if we let your hair down-she takes out the rubber band. It’s a word she’s always had a right to, a world she will always, easily, possess. It’s important she gives me that, no matter what. You might be prettier-she wouldn’t say just “pretty”. She reaches down and touches my ponytail. Her family is a touching, hugging unit when people reach for me, I never know what to do with all my limbs. We’re always close but don’t often embrace. She goes to touch me, then thinks better of it. Sometimes one of us got so loud that other kids, or whatever sub we had that week, would turn from their desks and look. I don’t remember the words we said but that sometimes they felt so alive they had to be whispered we had to lean close to each other, bottoms of our desk-chairs screeching.
She wore her hair down, curly, with product in it that made her smell grown-up. We sat in the school issue chairs attached to desks, my knees up to my chest. “Talked” does not begin to hold inside it what we did together. We had a class together and our teacher was sick for half the year and the sub sat at the desk reading a book and we sat in the back of the room and talked. Whether I wanted to love or have or just to be her never felt as easily discernible as this or that, one or the other-more like all of it, and then more, at once. I knew everything about her that any breathing person would love, the way she felt and talked as if she were a grown up the way she was smart but also pretty but also didn’t care enough about being cool to use the power that she should have had to have more friends. Instead, they broke up, and he stopped calling. I think I thought that if I listened hard or well or long enough that he’d love me instead.
A boy I thought I loved loved her, and I stayed on the phone with him sometimes late at night with him discussing her. I was 13 and she was 14 and we were high school freshmen. She teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Columbia University, Fairfield University, and the Pratt Institute.
Her nonfiction has been published by Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books,, Catapult, Lit Hub, and others. Strong's first novel, Hold Still, was released in 2016. The following is excerpted from Lynn Steger Strong's new novel, Want.
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