“California Natives” by Kelly Anne Bonner was selected by The Masters Review staff as one of two honorable mentions in the 2023 Novel Excerpt Contest. In this excerpt, Connor finds himself attending the city college instead of Stanford, as he’d been expecting. There, he befriends Adam and Trevor, two boys from his high school he’d never interacted with. Across “California Natives,” Kelly Anne Bonner explores how a person responds and adapts when their path in life diverges from what they’d planned for.
The city college campus wasn’t really a campus at all, more like a series of squat office buildings the 1980’s forgot. Connor had lived in Santa Monica his whole life and had never set foot in this part, where the neighborhoods got a bit more industrial, and, frankly, shittier. He stepped over trash littering the parking lot (lost wrappers of chicken sandwiches, stumped cigarettes, a lone energy drink can) as a car pulled up next him, its frame vibrating with such intensity it seemed like the whole thing might snap cleanly off its hinges, the sides falling away like a present. One of its doors swung open and the rap that had been enclosed was released into the air, broadcasting a host of obscenities that paused to disorienting silence as the driver turned off the vehicle and stepped out.
With heavy footsteps Connor started making his way toward his first class of the day. He steered around the cutout designs in the sidewalks, passing underneath a series of prim palm trees that had been overly manicured, the whole experience feeling not unlike a theme park. Then he approached a little fountain with a waterfall trickling, which had a sort of soothing effect. OK, maybe it wasn’t so bad.
This was an attempt among many—both on this first day and in the ensuing weeks—to temper his own disillusionment with where he was now: physically, but also just in life. He couldn’t overthink his predicament, or put too fine a point on it in his mind, or it’d lead him to spiral out again, which he’d finally acknowledged to himself wasn’t helping anything. To counterbalance the irritated reprimands of his dad to, the exact quote being, “just get over himself,” over the summer his mother had placed him in the pastel offices of a child psychologist, where he sat on a sofa surrounded by floor cushions and gentle paintings of animals in fields. He’d remained mostly mute for these sessions until, finally, he started talking, submitting to the exercise like a dog whose nose was being held to the ground. He wanted to know what to do now that’d he’d fucked his own future so colossally: the cheating scandal, his admission to Stanford (not to mention the eighteen other schools he’d been considering) getting revoked.
The therapist, whose short hair and soothing overtones reminded him of that one NPR reporter his mom was always listening to, told him that when things felt catastrophic like that, he should reduce them down to their components. To remember that life was long. That in the scale of his many years here on earth, this chapter would be brief, and pass quickly.
In preparing himself for the semester ahead of living at home, he’d done some of this mental work they’d talked about, to reach a state of—if not begrudging acceptance, then something like compliance. Acquiescence. Robotically, he’d packed this morning, thinking as little as possible as he threw a binder and a pencil into a backpack, grabbed his car keys. While his parents continued to fight the various administrations of other colleges, he had to move on, which meant leaving the house sometimes.
Finally, he entered an outdoor corridor with columns and a series of blue doors, eventually finding the one posted with the number he was looking for. Before turning the handle, he took a single, quick breath in. He’d tried to figure out a way to do this online, but only these in-person classes would help him eventually transfer to a UC, should his case not work out. Plus, he probably couldn’t avoid people entirely for the next two years. Probably.
The desks inside his first class were sparsely filled out with a few students who had shown up early as well, idly scrolling on their phones. He took a seat on the far side of the second row to avoid being too near anyone, reaching into his backpack to get out a pencil and a notebook, just for something to do. Eventually, more and more people filed in, until suddenly the entire room was packed out, every desk occupied, body heat emanating into the crowded space. These students were outfitted in ways the dress code hadn’t allowed them to get away with in high school: girls in midriff-baring velvety track suits; guys whose mouths glinted when they talked, revealing the inset of shiny gold-capped teeth; mousy kids with striped hair and enormous metal chains hanging off their cargos, which clacked against the seats as they sat down. Over the rustling of desks being moved and backpacks getting unzipped, there were two girls laughing loudly at the back of the room. When Connor stole a glance, he learned the source of entertainment was coming from one of their phones, the back of which was encrusted with tiny rows of crystals that flashed in his direction, blinding him momentarily. He looked back down at his notebook. Other than the detail of what people were wearing, this didn’t feel so different from high school. Immediately, that thought twinged his stomach, knotting into a pit that remained there.
Class started on time, with an instructor who strode in, set his book bag on his chair, then clapped to get the discordance of voices to settle down, which softened to bubbly whispers and subsequent shushing as he addressed the room. On first take, this professor was dressed sort of—whimsically? was the word that came to mind for Connor. But his Dead Poets Society collared shirt and brown argyle-patterned sweater vest, the oil-shiny oxfords were counteracted by a teaching style that was at once brusque and assertive. On top of that, there was a slightly embarrassed manner to it, too, like he was wheeling out a commanding energy to stress he was in charge from the get-go, to take control of the class as if at any moment, it might threaten to get out of it.
He asked everyone to open the textbooks waiting in their desk slots to 234; Connor flipped to the page, looked down and, with a glance, loosened a bit. They were starting with derivatives, which he already knew how to do; he figured, at least, he wouldn’t have to listen too closely. He began to doodle on his notebook. Outside, a maintenance guy with a leaf blower wielded the machine with a loud, mechanical whirring right by the window.
About halfway through class, in the moments while the instructor turned and was writing something on the board, one of the students near the back feigned a cough and said something under his breath. A few kids around him sniggered at whatever had been said.
Then, at another interval where the instructor was once again facing the board, his back to the class, the guy did the exaggerated faked cough thing again, this time louder, the taunting tone clear as hell. And this time, Connor caught it, hearing unmistakably: Stanford. Actually, he wasn’t saying Stanford—it sounded more like Stanfurd!—as he was modulating his voice to a ridicule pitch, the one that distorted anything said in it to sound dumb.
He glanced back at them, and realized what they were getting at: him. Then he looked down and saw he was wearing a red hoodie he’d owned since sophomore year of track. He’d have to burn this sweatshirt.
“Knock it off,” the instructor said, wearily—like, here it was, the exact unruliness he had predicted awaited him—then steered the class back toward the board, with a sharp finality.
Other than that humiliation, the rest of the class went by without fanfare. Connor had to make every effort to anchor himself to the desk and not get up and walk out of there. This was going to be a long two years, as he pictured the months ahead of him endlessly ribboning out into space. A wave of dizziness hit him for a moment as he packed up to head out. He swept his stuff into his bag in one harried motion, so he could dip out as rapidly as he possible while still appearing normal.
“Bro!” he heard someone say from the other end of the hallway behind him, and determinedly kept walking on. The person enunciated again, this time announcing it in what was surely his direction: “BRO!”
Connor finally stopped to turn around, having no other excuse or recourse. It was the two guys who had been catcalling him earlier. He braced for another round of heckling.
“Yoooo,” one of them said with an exaggerated swagger, as the two waddled up to him in low-hanging pants, the waistbands restricting movement like a vise. “We were just messin’.”
This was followed by the other one saying, “Yeah. I ho-nest-ly”—he said it in three syllables—“don’t know shit. You had a good GPA and shit right? I mean I had like, a two point—drizzle!”
He put his hands up, posing like a Greek god casting a lightning bolt, while the other one echoed, Drizzle! and laughed.
He furrowed his brows. They went to his high school? Connor surveyed anew these kids with whom he would have never, ever have interacted in high school.
The one on the left (whose name he would later come to know was Adam) had several dark, mole-like freckles dotting his face and black-and-silver ringed ear gauges the size of quarters. The right one (Trevor, he’d learn) had stringy blonde hair to his shoulders and a neck tattoo of a circular object, like a steering wheel of an old eighteenth century shipping vessel, or a diagram to Satan (it’d turn out to be neither, but rather the insignia of some metal band).
The blonde one coughed.
“We wanted to know if, you know, you were down to hang or whatever.”
Connor calculated this, putting his hands in the pocket of his hoodie. The higher part of him was not, a feeling that deeply conflicted with the baser part of him that was desperately lonely. He did not know how many more weeks he could go home to play another round of Strikeblade online.
“You play Strike?” the one with the mole-freckles asked.
He blinked in amazement. Thank Jesus. They had something in common.
“Actually, yeah,” he said, pleasantly surprised. “I do.”
Connor came over to Adam’s the next day, where he was immediately whisked to the back of the house, entering into the concrete smell of a garage. Once his eyes adjusted to the dim, he saw there was a lumpy beige sofa, the middle cushion held together with a slash of duct tape. It was facing a massive screen which looked dusty at certain angles, but was the perfect size for a crowd to see what they were doing on the multiple game controllers sprawled on the coffee table below. Upon sitting down, Adam pointed out a small dented fridge, the inside of which held a crammed, random assortment of energy and soft drinks. Connor grabbed one, then sat back down. He had to admit: it was a pretty sweet setup.
This was how the three of them started hanging out after class, this offbeat trio who’d meet up either here in Adam’s stepmom’s garage, or Trevor’s backyard, or the benches by the skatepark at the pier, rays of hot light beating down as Adam poorly attempted to execute a kickflip. Despite being grateful for the company, Connor sometimes had to search to find the levels to engage in conversation with them, like hunting up and down a series of cubby holes to land on the right one. The way they talked was almost like a foreign language, and he’d find himself navigating how to decipher it without getting caught out as a non-fluent speaker. Like, for example, this one time—it was a Saturday, and Adam’s stepmom had chased them out of the house so she could host her book club. The sun had bullied them into finding shelter, but otherwise they were doing their usual, which was nothing.
“My dad is such a tard,” Trevor proclaimed, the pine shirt he was wearing today boosting the green of his eyes, unwashed blonde hair strung across his shoulders. He proceeded to regale them with the story of how he and his dad had lost their parked car over at the Santa Ana mall. They’d had to wander the vast, alphabetized maze of lots that were packed by crowds combing Labor Day weekend sales.
“I kept telling him we left it in J, and he thinks it’s in G. So he refuses to go to J, and we’re circling G. I’m like, ‘Dad, it was definitely J.’ And he goes, ‘No, it was G as in Jesus,’ and I’m like, ‘That starts with a fuckin’ J!’”
They were outside a frozen yogurt shop, not that they’d bought anything there but because the outdoor tables were empty, topped with massive pink umbrellas to shade them from the heat. Adam was laughing his monotone laugh, dark hair jostling as he leaned forward. He had on a wristband of some kind, punctured all over with metal divots.
“I just caught a bus home,” Trevor continued. “I was like nah, I can’t deal with this.” “Fuck, dude,” Adam said, by the time he’d recovered enough to get a word out. He was almost out of breath.
“Yeah, my parents are dumb,” Connor found himself saying, though he didn’t feel that way about his parents. Actually, they were pretty smart.
They gazed at him expectantly, and in a few moments he realized they were looking to him to provide more evidence. He crawled his brain and searched to supply a story, landing on something he had seen someone at the grocery store do once.
“This one time my mom was in line at Gelson’s. She’s about to pay and she sees a bunch of stuff getting bagged and is like, ‘Why did you add those? That wasn’t in my cart.’ And they’re like, ‘What? This is what you brought over here, lady.’ She’s arguing with them, getting all pissed, threatening to ask for the manager and shit. Turned out she was checking out someone else’s cart.”
Trevor laughed a short, hysteric bark, like a hyena.
“Bro, that is STU-PID,” Adam said in his classic two-syllable delivery.
Connor immediately felt bad about saying that, something so deeply untrue. He resolved to be nicer to his mom later.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling, trying to find the will to laugh. He ached for better conversation, and whenever he forced a smile, it was like his cheeks ached in sympathy.
In spite of this—these attempts to fit into the specific dimensions of the small overlap on the Venn diagram of their shared interests—the two of them could also be strangely nice. Connor didn’t know why this registered as weird, or unexpected, really, but for example sometimes he’d come over to Adam’s and there’d be a burrito waiting for him at the end of the coffee table, and the two of them wouldn’t even look up at him or acknowledge it as one of them mumbled a monotone, “Hey,” while he settled in. Or—sometimes one of them would offer to pick him up from class while his car was in the shop, even if they hadn’t gone to campus themselves that day, mentioning that they were already driving around, might as well take him where he needed to go.
These sorts of things seemed to contradict his expectations of them in some way, or rather—made him question what sort of relationships he’d had before. Had his previous friends never actually been his friends? He mulled how over the summer his old crew had flooded his phone with messages and showed up to his doorstep, so he guessed they had, to be sure. But then all of their hangouts in high school had been lightly tinged by the veneer of competition that was going down during the college application process. This reality entailed that every interaction was run through that filter, which meant that they seemed to only do nice things when it somehow also served their own self-interests. This never bothered him, or genuinely occurred to him before hanging out with these two, probably because he had been the same exact way. But in hindsight, it was now very obvious to him. And interesting to consider. What he’d lost in better conversation he’d made up for in—steadfastness, maybe.
Soon, they’d passed a semester this way, meeting up for enormous omelets and oil-shiny hash browns before class at a diner near the pier, followed by rounds of Strike and smoking fistfuls of dry weed from Adam’s pipe, so harsh his throat burned and triggered a knife-slice cough, no matter how gently he pulled. While all this wasn’t the most fulfilling, at least it was something. By his metrics, something was absolutely better than nothing, that great abyss he’d stared down at the beginning of the school year.
Today they’d invited him to meet up at the docks, which required a drive all the way down into Torrance, where he pulled into an alley on a side street. The walk to where they’d said to meet was situated between a bunch of industrial warehouses, faintly reminding him of Gotham, rusty iron sidings menacing in the late afternoon sun. There was a row of steel-doored storage units, each bolted by locks with long metal fasteners, like tuning forks. Red and gold spray paint tagged the fronts in loopy, indecipherable handwriting.
He spotted the two of them hanging out among a slew of construction materials in front of a brown-oxidized fence, jogging a memory of the summer he’d spent building model bridges at a youth engineering camp. The smell of petroleum hung in the air, strong, like jet fuel oil, the kind transported by ships nearby. For a while, the three of them were sitting on wooden pallets dampened by the mist off the ocean, joking around, talking about nothing in particular. Connor hadn’t asked why they were here, though he desperately wanted to, wishing to not be out of the loop for once. They were both leaning back against the fence, the hood on Adam’s enormously oversized black jacket threatening to catch the hooks sticking out of the metal lattice. So he, too, pretended to relax. It felt like the two of them kept looking somewhere behind him, so he stood, casually sneaking a quick glance over his shoulder, before kneeling to re-tie his sneakers. What were they waiting for?
A few minutes later, the answer revealed itself in the form of a burly man wandering out from one of the buildings. He was in a sweat stained white-yellow shirt undersized for the belly tugging down the lower half of his frame, offset by dark denim and a pair of steel toed-boots. He lurched up and began arranging some of the pallets to the left of them, acknowledging the three of them with a nod. He went on affecting as if he were working near them, and when (it seemed like) he thought the coast was clear, he approached them. The horizon was settling into hazy streaks of orange to their left, signaling about an hour until the sun dipped out completely.
At this point Trevor started chanting: “We gonna go tresspin’. We gonna go tresspin’.”
“Yeaaaah, tress-PIN,” Adam said with a clap. “Tresp it the fuck up.”
Connor thought maybe this was some kind of euphemism for a drug he didn’t know. But he close-mouth smiled, as if he did.
“He good to go though?” the burly man said, his head knocking sideways in Connor’s direction. Adam put an arm around Connor’s shoulder.
“Oh yeah, this guy’s chill,” he said.
It was made clear that whatever they planned to do was not actually happening here, but somewhere else. They determined they’d take two cars, because Connor had driven there separately. On his way out into the alleyway, he heard Trevor shout behind him.
“Can I ride with you? I got a bum knee.”
In the back, Trevor was sprawled out, as if his knee were so bad that Connor was driving him to the hospital. Connor thought maybe this was the right time to try to clarify the situation.
“So what is, uh, what’s—” He didn’t really know how to finish the question.
Trevor picked it up casually, like they were talking about the weather, strands of blonde hair bobbing out of an army green beanie as he turned to talk.
“Tresspin’? Oh, it’s like. You know, like jump the no trespassing signs and do a raid. Loot shit or whatever.”
Oh, that’s what this was. It sounded dumb and violent. No, he was not interested.
Except—he looked in the rearview mirror at Trevor’s legs crossed in baggy cargos, arm draped along the back seat, looking out the window. These were his only friends right now. He mulled over how it would play out if he bailed, as he clicked the signal and took a left to follow Adam’s car onto the freeway. He prided himself on being immune to peer pressure, but this wasn’t quite that, not exactly. It was more like—they’d know he was different from them. This was something Connor knew deep in his bones, but maybe figured they didn’t. In fact, he sort of realized he was depending on the fact that they didn’t. He couldn’t risk doing anything that might break the illusion.
They pulled up to a different warehouse district further down the coast from where they’d been, but the environment was otherwise similar. He parked on another side street. By then it was dark out, so they cobbled together some visibility by holding the dinky, white flashlights of their phones overhead while the burly guy drew a map for them on a pallet with his finger, drafting out the plan details like a low-rent version of Master and Commander. With one finger he traced Adam and Connor to the back right corner to take whatever they could carry from that side—those specific wares—while Trevor and himself would remain on opposite sides as lookouts. Actually, Connor had read those books in middle school: No man was fit to pass for a lieutenant, let alone bear any command, who could not instantly tell the position of his ship to within a minute. Was that what was happening here? The burly guy continued tracing a thick finger southward. No.
“OK, you guys got it?” he finished.
Adam supplied a ghoulish smile, the feeble phone lights highlighting the black lines between his teeth. Trevor bobbed with excitement, the only sign of nervousness betrayed by his neck tattoo, the illustrated spokes undulating as he swallowed uncomfortably. Connor nodded quietly in affirmation, though he didn’t understand what they were taking, or what their ultimate goal was. Resell them?
The guy tiptoed over, peered around, then waved them over, signaling they should go with a grunt. When they snuck in, Adam immediately went left. Idiot. Ahead of him were a series of tall vertical shelves divided into rows, plus a forklift, the metal claw glinting in the dim light. The air was tinted with the papery smell of cardboard emanating from the hundreds (if not thousands?) of boxes in here. It seemed cold, a fact which was possibly true, but was less felt than reinforced by the smooth, almost glassy concrete flooring tapping under his shoes, tracking his footsteps. By the time he got back to the area he thought he’d seen drawn out, it was just another set of boxes that looked like all the other boxes. Did he miss something special about these particular boxes? What kind of warehouse was this, anyway? He kicked one of the boxes that was sort of in his way, which budged with a grainy shuffle. It was lighter than he’d been expecting it to be.
As he slid his hands under one of the stacks, lifting a few of them to bring back out front, he thought this was interesting, maybe a life experience he could bring up at parties someday. This was pretty cool, actually. Did I ever tell you about that time I went on a warehouse raid? Sure, he’d have to embellish a little, up the stakes, the sense of danger, the importance of the mission. Wait, who would he be telling this story to, anyway?
Fear clicked on at the sound of a jingle, which he at first assumed must be Adam retracing back from the other side. Then a beam of light passed in an upward, sweeping motion. Some deep, subconscious part of his brain processed it faster than his frontal cortex rational one could: security guards. The others had already bailed. He had to leave.
He turned his body to make a run for it, realizing, with horror, that he couldn’t move. At first he thought maybe he was having one of those deep, evolutionarily-seated reactions to mortal fears—one of those “deer in the headlights” levels of paralysis he’d heard about on crime shows. But then, no: he was actually, physically stuck. The tip of his shoe was covered, the rubber indented under a bar he hadn’t seen running along the bottom of the warehouse’s steel-encased shelving.
Fuck. Shit. Shit fuck. He looked up at the levels and rows of boxes arranged on shelving, labeled with numbers that led to decimal points. That led him to start calculating the set of events that would need to be involved to retreat undetected like a math problem, which involved force of his foot against the topside of his shoe against the escape route to the exit divided by the amount of time he had left until the row he was in was discovered. His eyes darted to assess the space, continuing to solve for X, which triggered a zooming out of the warp of his mind, the brief microsecond where he had any clarity of thought, before his veins shot through with animal panic. He saw himself getting arrested, his parents posting bail, maybe court or something, followed by certain humiliation, then killing himself from the shame brought on his family, like those Japanese fighter pilots in World War II.
How had he screwed up his life this badly? He reviewed the events of the past year and it was like a sudden divergence had happened, a slide had opened in the floor and he’d tumbled along a trajectory against his will, slipping into an abyss that led here. But the schemata didn’t map out to anything. It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense, the stages that led to him getting caught lifting who the hell knew what. As he pictured this, a shot of adrenaline raced to his heart like a needle piercing in, draining into the ventral cavity.
With that, it was like his foot was no longer attached to his body. He was willing to bear any load of pain just to remove it from its juncture. He wriggled as much as he could. The one side of his sneaker that was jammed at an angle could move maybe a centimeter, he figured, without a shooting discomfort. Somewhere in him, though, he accepted with squeamish resolve that it had to happen. Following a single deep breath, he wrenched out his foot with an enormous strike of agony; he had to force himself not to yelp the instant the stabbing sensation heightened to its peak. His foot suddenly free, he felt light, and moved swiftly, nimbly squeezing behind a single row of boxes for cover before shimmying back to the other side. Then, he was out.
Despite the heavy feeling overtaking his one foot he ran like a shot, his years looping the track as a long distance runner kicking into place, moving with an automatic memory recessed somewhere deep in his muscles. He was grateful to see the back door they’d entered into was still open—the guards, or whoever, must have come in from the front side—which made it easy for him to fly out without slamming a door behind him, making any more noise than he was. From there he was pounding blocks, then streets, then miles, cutting through well-kept front yards and turfy gas station planters and at one point hopping a construction site to make himself less traceable, an abandoned tractor standing eerily motionless, surrounded by clods of dirt. Even when he recognized, with certainty, that they weren’t really running after him—that no one was chasing him—he continued to scale the city streets by moonlight. He could hear his coach in his head, Lengthen your stride, and he did so reflexively, sublimating the active adrenaline coursing through his body into his form.
Through the dark, he whipped past blinking orange streetlights and unlit intersections and some instinctive memory surfaced of an impression of driving past here, long ago, or maybe it just looked like something he knew. At one point he was on a frontage road, pacing parallel to a highway, where he kept an eye on the fluorescent white headlights winking toward him, then past him. He thought he could hear the faint roar of the ocean to his left, which kept him in check; if that was true, he was going north, and at some point would hit a series of familiar landmarks that would lift the geography from unidentifiable into abrupt recognition. A cold breeze skimmed his skin, inflected with a light spray: of ocean, fog, probably car exhaust in there. It chilled down to his limbs, which he noticed even as his whole body was radiating warmth.
He ran like that for a while, down long stretches that weren’t familiar until they were, until he was suddenly back in Santa Monica, back on the streets of his childhood. Of safety. Soundlessly, he let himself in through the back door, closing the screen behind him with a gentle click. Then he crept through the unlit rooms of the house—the dining table picking up the faintest shimmer of light, the quiet ticking of the mantle clock, his dad’s golf bag leaning against the closet door, the wrapped clubs sending long, ominous shadows up the wall. He padded upstairs, avoiding the creaky parts of the stairs (left side of the fourth one up; middle of the twelfth step) and the warped parts of the hallway, the floor making only a minimal groan as he stepped past his parents’ room. Finally, he reached his own room, and crawled into bed. Slowly, gingerly, he moved his throbbing foot under the covers. The dull pain while he had been running rushed up with a roar as he turned over, curled up, and attempted to sleep.
In the dark, in his room, he was so fucking unhappy, even more unhappy than he’d been. He was disturbed by an alienation so powerful it randomly recalled a memory of a documentary he’d seen once, when he was a kid. It was about the first Antarctic explorers, describing in journals how when the sun would drop behind the horizon, they’d be dimmed into extreme isolation: frozen, silent, desolate. Or—this was silly, which occurred to him as the thought passed through—but what he had once imagined it would be like to be pulled under the bed at night.
And like those nights, his imagination ran wild with terror. At this point, he was so disconnected from everything that had once made him, him. His striving social circle, prestigious college acceptances, the accolades, the luminous future awaiting him—that had all capsized and drowned, and the stuff that had emerged from the water was—what? His identity felt formless, shapeless. It was harrowing how quickly it felt like it had happened; that just a few short experiences could so totally eclipse his sense of self.
Reviewing the past few months in his head again, all he could think was: Seriously, what the fuck? What in god’s name was going on? It didn’t feel fair. It felt like he was being picked on by a higher being, or something—like his life was just a plaything in their hands. And now he thought: Having dropped so low from his prior advantages, was there even a point to climbing back up anymore? Should he just give up and say, you win, and stop trying to claw his way back to some semblance of his old life? Right now, reclaiming his old ambitions felt… exhausting. And useless. But the alternative path he saw ahead prompted a full-body wince, it was so brutally bleak.
He squeezed his eyes shut. A sprinkler turned on somewhere outside, spritzing sounds filling the stillness.
Kelly Anne Bonner is a writer and creative director based in San Francisco, California. Her nonfiction has appeared in Jezebel, VICE, Refinery29, and elsewhere. Fictionwise, she is an alum of Lynn Steger Strong’s year-long Catapult novel workshop, Vanessa Hua’s ZYZZYVA fiction workshop, and Tracey Rose Peyton’s Sackett Street advanced fiction workshop. She is currently at work on her debut novel, California Natives.