I am a nice girl. I don’t even say anything about the pee my grandma leaves on the toilet seat after she uses it. I drive to the store to pick up seasoned soy sauce for the steamed fish my dad is making. The label is green, and the bottle has fallen off the passenger’s seat and is now clinking around the floorboards. There’s a part of me that is scared it’ll roll under the brake, and I won’t be able to stop the car from barreling into the pedestrians at the crosswalk in front of the school.
I drive to the beach to sit in the parking lot. In high school, the people with cars and fifteen years of dance lessons and long beautiful hair and tan freckled boyfriends would sit here and vape. That’s what I recall, at least. I wasn’t there. I sit on one of the fences separating the pavement from the sand to think. I gaze upon the surfers, their wetsuits slick and grey like the leathery bodies of the seals that sometimes wash ashore.
I get a text from a boy I knew once who I’ve met again. He used to smoke cigarettes he’d find on the floor when we were teenagers. His wrist bone juts out from when he broke it skating. He’s asking me if we can do what we did last week again. I am a nice girl.