The fifth time it happens, I am leaving.
It is too hot to be outside, and especially to be gripping each other so tightly. But we squeeze closer together with every flash until we have a camera full of red-eyed pictures. They will end up in three different albums all entitled “Best Friends Forever.”
We are all reluctant to be the one to call an end to the night. But the decision is made for us when my camera beeps three times, blinks, and dies. The noise startles the crickets into a momentary silence, but they speak again before we do.
I am experiencing that moment I knew would come ever since I told these girls, these sudden sisters of mine, that I would leave. That onslaught of objections, that renaissance of regrets. My precious pair voices all the necessary reassurances and the promises I don’t yet know only one will keep. My legs seem to have caught up with my exhausted mind, and I slump against the car that will be my home for the three-day journey eastward.
Soon it is the only car that remains in my driveway, and I wave as their blurry lights disappear around the corner. Then it is just me alone in the heat that radiates up from the dark pavement. I lift my humidity-ravaged hair from the nape of my neck, and that’s when it gets me.
I hear it buzz angrily away from its makeshift nest in my mane, but I am distracted by my hand growing even hotter than the late July air. Even in the dark, I can see my small finger begin to swell. My mirthless laugh echoes in the empty night, and I go inside for the last time.
—-
The fourth time it happens, I am crying.
Just hours earlier I was squeezing into a satin seafoam contraption that clung to nonexistent curves. Now I am in shapeless sweats that stick to the backs of my thighs in this dank basement bathroom. I lock the door between me and my dancemates and immediately strip down in the stuffy solitude. I forage through my locks, now nearly calcified with hairspray, for the dozens of pins hiding in the depths. Piece by piece, glued groups peel free from my DIY do.
When I put them in, I was buzzing from belated excitement, ready for my year-late date. The date was a formality – a forever friend fulfilling the requirement of arriving on an arm. But as we weaved wildly through the crowd of our classmates, a flyaway fell in my face, the pin dangling helplessly. He returned it to its rightful place, lingering on my neck, my shoulders. It was a fleeting moment, but one that flies back now.
We have spent the last three hours languishing at this listless excuse for an after party. I hovered on the edge of sleep before tiptoeing through the dozen dozing bodies, eyes peering at me through drooping lids. Now, as I watch a resilient ant work its way up the watery wall, I hear movement echoing outside in the crowded room. He says his goodbyes quickly. I hear him trip in his haste. I do the same as I start to step back into my sweats, sure he will stand at the stairs until I emerge. But footsteps echo over my head, and as I slam my own foot through the suffocating fabric, I step on it.
The pain radiates through my leg, and I tumble to the floor, looking at the creature I have overlooked and walked all over. Pants half off, tears filling my eyes, car tires squealing away, I can’t help but know how it feels.
—-
The third time it happens, I am lying.
I tell her it’s okay, I understand. My best friend has become such a master at selling her stories that despite my common sense, I try to ignore the sick sensation sweeping over me. She swears she’s sorry, she shouldn’t have even seen him, she certainly shouldn’t have gone along with it. And I continue to play the part I suddenly realize I have been playing with her all along. I am the ear, the enabler, the eraser. We have sat on my front steps time after time, and I have nodded along with her confessions. I am nodding even now.
She called an hour earlier to invite me to her new pool, an offer I quickly declined. Now, as she keeps rearranging the mud-covered rock bed lining my steps, I realize she wanted the home field advantage. I want to call her out on that, to tell her it wouldn’t have mattered, not when telling me something like this. But all I do is tell her to stop fucking with the rocks. It isn’t until later, like usual, that I see my missed opportunity there – something along the lines of telling her what else she could have avoided fucking.
Her tales are always elaborately weaved, and none more so than this. For a second I think I even see tears forming in her eyes, but when I look closer, she breaks eye contact. It all comes together. He isn’t a good guy, but neither is he the lonely mastermind she has painted him to be.
There is already so much prickly pain spreading through me – from shame, anger, humiliation – that the rapidly growing bite on my knee gets dulled. Her words are becoming a fading buzz in the background. I wordlessly stand up and walk in, locking her outside with the dirt on her hands.
—-
The second time it happens, I am drowning.
Not drowning in sorrow or despair or panic – literally drowning. The weighted toy remains unclaimed at the 15-foot depths, but the water filling my lungs longs to settle me at its side.
Minutes earlier, I had been flushed with childish shame as my poolmates dove in the formidable deep end, forever away from where my feet dangled into the shallows. They paid no mind to the chlorine stinging their eyes. I couldn’t do that. Where they smiled around the sting, I would run away in tears. Where they leapt from the pavement into the man-made waves, I inched my nine-year-old body in step by step. Where their stomachs skimmed the floor, like sharks looking for legs to latch onto, my own stomach barely broke the surface.
When they tired of their game – and their taunts to get me to join – I floated over in fearful curiosity. Once in the water, the deceivingly heavy toy lost its weight, and I lost my nerves.
And seconds later, I lose my breath. I am trapped, too close to push myself to safety, too far to escape without a lungful of acidic water. It rushes in without permission, and my eyes fly open as if my body is saying Look for the light – that’s where you want to be. But all I see are my flailing limbs and the frothy fervor they create, pushing more water into my eyes, my mouth, anywhere it should not be. The pool was cold when I stepped in; now it burns.
With a broken, desperate gasp, I emerge into the sunlight. They haul me up as if I am weightless, as if the water now inside me hadn’t been pulling me down all along. I am sure I only took one horrible breath, but what comes out of me now seems to never stop coming. It isn’t until the flies start circling that I realize, in misplaced embarrassment, that entire contents of my stomach now lie on the hot pavement.
There are more people buzzing around me than I thought existed at this party, but the curious creature still targets me. The fire spreads up my trembling left arm, and I dissolve into disbelieving tears. Others echo me, cursing the pool and the playmates and the party itself, and I let them believe that is why.
—-
The first time it happens, I am running.
We had been warned to stay away. With those words, the innocuous fire escape seemed to gain a mythical glow, one that pulled us ever closer. Hardly anyone had a fire escape in our town; it must lead to something magical.
The iron staircase, its black paint peeling away, scalds our hands. No matter how softly we tiptoe upwards, the stairs clatter so loudly we were sure it echoed across the empty field right through our windows. We grow dizzy as our heads swivel back and forth towards the house, sure we will soon see our parents storming across through the parched brown grass.
When we reach the top unimpeded, we fold our bodies into the tiny space between the dirty step and the even dirtier window. Like usual, my little cousin is the first to gather her courage, and peeks over the sill as my sister and I try to control our nervous giggles. She reports back what she sees: a classroom, a blackboard, a room full of – uh-oh!
She trips over our huddled forms and nearly tumbles down the rickety stairs. The window flies open, and a shaking fist emerges in a sea of black and white. Our legs tangle together in our haste to get back on solid ground. Miraculously, our feet hit the packed earth and we run, run, run, faster than ever before, across the never ending field.
I lag two steps behind the younger girl, who is two steps behind the older girl, and I am sure that at any second I will feel a triumphant hand on the back of my shirt. I turn to see my fate as I run, and all I see is the nun, peering out of her sky high window to see where the three mischief makers will run to.
As I turn back, struggling to keep pace, I feel a sharp pain on my sunburned shoulder. For a second, I am mystified, wondering how she crossed the expanse in a silent second. But as we switch from a sprint to a sneak and slide into the house without suspicion, my sister squashes the creature still clinging to the mark it has made. I try to be brave, but my lower lip trembles with the surety that not only will our pursuer soon barge into the house behind us, but that I will never, never, never feel pain like this again.
For my final project, I decided to talk about memorable moments in my life that included me getting stung by a bee. When I first proposed this essay I wanted to write about all seven times, but as I wrote, a theme started to emerge that two of them just didn’t fit into. That theme was surprising to me, since I didn’t recognize it when I first started mulling over the idea. But when I finished writing, I realized there is an undercurrent of emotional distress in all of the stories.
I tried to use vivid writing here. Getting stung is such a sensory moment in someone’s life, and I wanted to include not only that burn but the emotions that go along with it. There is also a bit of a theme of heat here – all of these stories took place during the hot summer which, for those of you who have been stung, does nothing but intensify the sting. I found myself playing around with alliteration a lot too. I think it shows up better in some of the stories more so than the others. Do you all think I should try to incorporate it more or lessen it in the ones where it stands out? I also used the word buzz multiple times because I didn’t want to actually use the word “bee” in the essay. Was that too much?
One sentence I like in my essay is: “But all I see are my flailing limbs and the frothy fervor they create, pushing more water into my eyes, my mouth, anywhere it should not be.” I think it’s a good use of vivid writing, since it captures the complete panic, frenzy, and suffocation that I was experiencing at the time.
My main question is if you all think the way of telling these stories backwards works. I realized as I was writing that it could work chronologically as well – it shows how I have grown throughout and how my reaction to them lessens over time as well. But I also like doing it backwards – I think the last story, with its last line, shows how naive I was as a child and the audience now knows, after reading the whole essay, that this is not the last time.
Thanks everyone!
Mary, I’m gonna start with some local comments and get them out before I forget what I want to say, and then move on to the bigger issues. I love the image in the first part about how the crickets stop chirping for a second. It’s a great example of vivid writing because it evokes the sense of sound and really serves to call up a summer evening.
I notice the alliteration here. I like much of it, but do think it’s overdone–maybe it jumps off the page a bit too much. Precious pair, coming so soon on the heels of sudden sisters, for instance. To be honest, precious pair sounds like you’re talking about breasts. You might want to scale it back. Use alliteration to increase lyricism and flow, to make the piece sound–beautiful. But walk the line of not slipping into overuse that makes the alliteration call attention to itself.
I like the parallel way you begin each section. That’s awesome. The second section reads a little “awkward” to me. I think it has to do with sentence structure. You missed our discussion on Thursday; make sure to ask me for the handouts. I gave out 3 chapters on sentence structure and posed the challenge to mark ideas from those chapters, ideas about types of sentence structures and ways to structure sentences consciously to achieve certain effects, and then use them in your revisions. Here are my thoughts on your second section based on the discussion we had in class on Thursday and the reading I handed out, in which you’ll find these ideas more fully explained: If you look at your second section, you have very “populated” prose, meaning most of your subjects are human (I, he, we, etc) and they have great active verbs. This is good; it adds to the vividness, helping readers to see not only the scene but the people at the center of it. You also have mostly complex sentences (one independent clause plus one or more subordinate clauses). These complex sentences you have written often have more than one subordinate clause, and often they are relative (or adjective) clauses, with an occasional adverbial clause. Okay, so, maybe you can try to break up this pattern a little with a simple or compound sentence thrown in. See what happens. I think the pattern of mostly complex sentence structure is creating a bit of a web and tangle of commas and modifying subordinate clauses that would happily be teased apart a bit with the interruption of some simple sentences, even fragments maybe, or compound sentences (which you do have in there, but not too many).
The drowning section for me reads beautifully. I love the repetition of the “where they” clauses; it performs, structurally, the act of luring and seduction you were undergoing. It’s great. The description of drowning, the use of heat to explain how it feels, is terrific. Good defamiliarization. You have a bit more sentence variety in that section–a few simple and compound sentences, which you might notice if you do a little inventory. You do tend to write mostly in complex sentences, which most writers do, and I think it will be fun for you to play with alternatives. Especially a few more compound sentences, a few more semi-colons and dashes perhaps.
The last section is maybe my favorite. The description is simple and direct. The nun’s shaking fist. The cousin’s description which ends in an uh-oh. The certainty that you’d see parents storming across the field or the nun right on your heels evolving into the certainty that the stink isn’t a bee sting but the nun who somehow flew to catch up with you. It’s all perfect in terms of how it describes how a small child might see things, and/or how it might appear in memory.
The theme that emerged to surprise you–the theme of emotional distress–forms a wonderful through-line for you. But the theme is more than that, more textured that mere emotional distress. It’s a certain kind of emotional distress, marked by separation, alienation, feeling utterly alone (even right up until that last section where you fall to the back of the pack of fleeing girls; that’s one helluva lonely spot to be in when you’re running away bc you’re poised to be the one who gets caught and left behind, while the others get away). This feeling of alienation, even when you’re never actually alone in any of the sections–except, I guess, in the first section, you’re alone when you get stung there)–is a theme. It’s one to keep in mind as you revise. The story’s meaning is there. Ultimately, the message for me is the sting of alienation, the utter truth about life: in our pain, we’re alone. Of course, if you said this, it would sound like bullshit. So you offer these linked stories that say it quietly and mostly implicitly. I think it’s utterly the right choice not to name the bee. We get it, and your choice doesn’t seem slippery or evasive. It just works.
Be careful with showing not telling. You do a lot of showing here and write a vivid essay. But do you need, for instance, to tell us your laughter was mirthless? Not so sure; it feels a bit heavy-handed to me. Are you using modifiers anywhere that do too much telling that could be shown with, for instance, a better verb?
Thank you for your work on this terrific draft. I look forward to seeing the revision,
Cheryl
Hi Mary,
I really like your idea for this piece and the descriptive writing you used to bring it alive. I especially enjoyed reading the last paragraph of each section; they contain the most emotion for me and I think they sum up each experience nicely. My favorite of these last paragraphs is: “The pain radiates through my leg, and I tumble to the floor, looking at the creature I have overlooked and walked all over. Pants half off, tears filling my eyes, car tires squealing away, I can’t help but know how it feels.” I love the comparison you make between the squashed bee and yourself. He’s upstairs, above you, you can hear him leaving, and he goes as if nothing has happened. The words “overlooked” and “squealing” are great in these two sentences. I also want to choose these two sentences (cheating I know) as my favorites structurally. Both sentences rely on the comma to move the action along; both have several short fragments and then conclude with a longer fragment; and both are simple but descriptive.
Like Prof. Smith said, I think that your vivid writing is great, but there’s a little too much alliteration. Although the alliteration all sounds good, I became conscious of it while reading, and kind of started looking for it as I continued, and I don’t think this is the effect you wanted to have. Some of your alliteration sounds more natural, such as “selling her stories”, and these are good. But then others, like “sick sensation sweeping over me”, are more forced. Maybe it’s that “sensation sweeping” has a lot of syllables, or that “sweeping” is an uncommon word in this usage, but for reason that phrase sounds unnatural.
I really enjoyed reading your piece, good luck with your editing!
Michael
Also, I really liked that you arranged this in reverse chronological order. I can’t explain why, but I just feel like this works better than it would if you rearranged it.
Michael
Hey Mary,
First off, I love the creative concepts of this piece, from the reverse chronological ordering to associating pain in your actual circumstance to the bee stings. And I think the content works in them in the way you want them to.
I love the sentences, sentence structure, and the pacing of the piece. Also each of the five sections, I feel, has a defining sentence, which makes your piece very memorable. For example, in the first section, for me, it would be “I am experiencing that moment I knew would come ever since I told these girls, these sudden sisters of mine, that I would leave.”, in the third it would be “I am the ear, the enabler, the eraser.”, and so on. I think these sentences really bolster your effort.
With that said, I really only have a little bit that I would change. I would like to point out that I think that there is a bit too much use of alliteration going on. I think its overuse is really taking away from the sentences that deserve musicality and emphasis. Also I think there is a bit of over-description of events happening–not way too much over-description, a bit too much. I think you should revise and keep only what is essential for the reader’s knowledge. Also, for the reader to realize better that the bee sting is the connecting factor in these anecdotes I think you could benefit from making them shorter.
Other than that, great job, Mary!