Sarah Miller
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Bad (Teenage) Things
I remember you. The start of your bad teenage things.
I carried a tiny purple purse. Hard sided with satellites and little planets and Venus and all that. It sat next to me in the back of that boy’s car the night he offered up tiny squares of white paper
on the tip of silvery scissors.
I remember choosing to fake eat that hit of acid.
I remember you taking two, fully.
Claiming later that when you cracked your back, you still saw tracers.
She wore her badness as badge.
I remember her yelling about getting banged for the first time.
I remember all the boys’ faces when she said it. Stunned, sickened.
We were too young for that.
I remember your accent.
Your voice like we grew up in Bronzeville. We did not.
Some days I wonder if the invisible purple swirls on that little white paper ate up your childhood. It was the proper medicine for a monster. You’ve always been one. Your salon mother, forced to quit, go inside. Your father still turns soil
with machine, with malice,
with alcohol fumes on his tongue, with bad things in his head. Your brother works the rails, like our fathers when they were young, and unbroken. Wild white paper squares. You grew up under the buck moon, just like the rest of us. Except the evil holds you sway. Holds you still. Holds you bad.
I remember the reason you turned bad.
Your father let you out too much. Opened the gates to what’s beyond the corn field.
Maybe it happened when he passed down his vapor to you, mouth to mouth, beast to dragon.
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Sarah Miller Freehauf is the Managing Editor for Lunch Ticket, Founding Editor of Teenage Wasteland Review, Editorial Assistant for Divedapper, a reader for [PANK], Interviewer for The Review Review, and a recent graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She also teaches high school English and Creative Writing in the Midwest. Her most recent creative work can be found in Stone Highway Review.