Friday, August 31 The worst part of working fast food is the name tag because there''s always somebody''s mom with coupons who thinks they are somehow being cheated by the teenager at the register, and their eyes always dart down to your chest to look for a way to be in charge. "Listen," she says, and I see her eyes laser in, search out my name. "Alicia. You overcharged me for my mozzarella sticks. Now, do I need to ask for the manager or are you going to make it right?" Make it right. Ever since last year, everything sounds like justice or its burning absence. She thinks she''s been done grievous wrong by the two dollars extra on her waxy receipt and my mouth is supposed to be apologizing but my mind is on everything else: * the whole school/world calling me a whore * Sarah cutting me out of her life like a tumor * my parents, the wood chipper of their life between them In the end I just say, "Ma''am, I''ll do my best. I''ll do my very best.

" We both know she''ll still call the manager over, will still make the world a witness to all the things she thinks she deserves even with my smile so bright it shatters. It''s my last weekday shift before school and it''s just girls on the clock, no creepy manager, no too-old guys pretending they''re still in high school and eyeing you over curly fries. Slow day. No construction workers, no cops expecting free food, no guys in suits who refuse coupons because they want you to know they''re rich: just teenage girls who don''t go to the same school, carrying different gossip not about each other and thus unimportant. Stephanie is the shift manager and she''s only twenty-one so when there''s no customers she lets us turn up the lobby music and all of us sing along. The final day of August is like a guillotine separating September from the rest of the summer in one clean slice, the red sun bleeding out over my feet as I circle the school in my Meat Palace uniform one more time before I start junior year. It''s empty. No one but me would ever come to school while the freedom summer drops like gold confetti still sparkles on our shoulders.

But I like it like this, the quiet, the way the beige bricks drink up the sunset, taking on a color that reminds me of a desert. Dry, baked, vicious. I''ve never been anywhere but here. My feet take me to the track, like they miss it. Maybe they do. Maybe they remember how it felt to transform from girl to mustang with grateful lungs heaving. Freshman year I could fly. Then sophomore year happened.

I look back at the pink bricks, settling into a deeper shade now that the sun is sinking. I''m sinking too, down onto the bleachers, the metal warm against my thighs. This school is empty of people and full of memories and I don''t want any of them. My mother offers to iron my school uniform and even though I want her to, I say no, because sometimes in this place where I am it feels good to refuse help, because saying yes to even something like an iron feels like saying yes to everything else when my whole life has become a pipe bomb full of pieces that explode in a furious no. Tuesday, September 4 The school bus stops on my block but I don''t get on. I''ve been taking the city bus all summer and I like the way it makes me feel like I''m living in a different world than the people who are supposed to be my peers. What''s the difference? At least on the city bus I can pull the string, and it makes me feel like I''m in control. I can get off whenever I want wherever I want even if my destination is predetermined.

On the city bus I can still wonder what the people there think about me, whereas at school once I walk through the door I already know what they''re all thinking, what they''re all going to say about all the versions of me they think they know, laid alongside all the girls I was before in stark contrast. Flashbacks They are like ripples on a pond and they begin in my earliest memories of myself: Playing in the fountains at Elwain Park with no shirt on, five-year-old bird chest Eight and pointing at bras in Target, my brother wearing them like hats while my mother shopped and I laughed Sarah getting her first bikini, me ten and silent and feeling a brand-new envy grow in like ivy Me eleven Me twelve Me thirteen Me fourteen Curious and curious Me warming up Me sneaking to buy my first thong Me excited for someone anyone to notice Me kissing Michael Strong the day I got my braces off just to feel what someone''s tongue felt like sliding across new teeth Me hearing about what good girls do and think and say and always feeling like a neon opposite even if only in shadow. Me thinking I had secrets until last year when I learned what it meant-- what it really meant-- to hide. There''s always a white kid who says "Why do the Black kids sit together in the cafeteria? They segregate themselves." And I''m a white girl too so what do I know but I think the answer is so obvious in a school as white as this one where Halloween parties still feature blackface and redface where the student council only barely voted (5-6) to maintain a special events calendar for Black History Month and the cheerleading squad is all white but shouts yas queen, werk! between routines. Dawn of Day 1 and we''re all in the cafeteria waiting to be dismissed, the swell of the student body heaving as if on a ship at rough sea, all of us deciding where we fit, where to squeeze in, if anyone we hate or love has rendered certain sections unsittable. The girl who says it this year is skinny and blond, a sophomore, and her whole table murmurs and laughs, casts glances at the three tables where the couple dozen Black students, the half-dozen kids from Mexico and El Salvador, all take refuge in each other''s presence. Why wouldn''t they when to sit anywhere else in this sea of narrowed eyes and fake laughs would be like throwing yourself overboard? I''d never say that I consider my pain equal but I can say I know how it feels to step onto a ship and be confident that everyone on board is watching you, thinking that you''re not a sailor but a creature from the deep.

The only text messages I get are from coworkers. Mariah: can you take my shift tomorrow Alicia: what time Mariah: 3:30 Mariah: . ? Alicia: I''m in school, sorry. Yes I''ll take it. Mariah: I thought you were dropping out Alicia: I wish And from random dudes. Him: Thinking about you Alicia: I know what that means Him: yeah;) Him: free tonight? Alicia: tomorrow Day 1 was a success in the way that surviving a haunted house is a success: I walked through the halls and saw lots of ghosts but never the Devil himself. The garage is full of smoke and someone who doesn''t live in this gray house might think something is on fire. If they looked closer they would know nothing is, the smoke they see only the last remains of what h.