In this chapter from Amy Stuber’s The Natural World, readers find Neena at two different moments in her life: 18-year-old Neena, cutting class to spend her morning in a hotel room with a 37-year-old man named Brian, a friend of her parents; and then, months later, there’s freshman-in-college Neena spending Thanksgiving not with her family back home but with her suitemates in upstate New York. The excerpt neatly bifurcates these two moments in Neena’s life, but it is clear that Neena is still processing her trauma, still coming to understand who she is, even as she tries to distance herself from that life before. “The Natural World” was chosen by The Masters Review staff as an honorable mention in the 2023 Novel Excerpt Contest.
I.
Neena’s eyes are closed. She’s diagonal on the hotel bed.
“Why do they do this?” she says to the man. She opens her eyes and brings her knees up to make her legs two triangles.
The air conditioner comes on with a rattle. The man is 37. His right arm has a rash of simplistic tattooed birds falling from shoulder to wrist. He’s two decades older than she is, but she can trick herself into feeling a little bit in charge. For example, she would not be caught dead walking around with those birds on her arm. How 2005 of you, she wants to say to him but doesn’t. 2005, the year of her actual birth.
“Do what?” he asks.
“Do this,” she says and points to the hotel chairs with her toes. “Put two chairs a foot from one side of the bed at hotels, as if we’re going to roll over there and play checkers or something.” She’s been with the man in a hotel room exactly three times. Prior to that, her hotel experiences were limited to overnights with her parents and brothers in dusty in-between places like Wendover, Utah, or Santa Maria, New Mexico.
The man has some clothes on, boxer briefs, and she has no clothes on. It’s always like this in hotel-room scenes in movies, she’s noticed: the women are naked, and the men are covered.
“Checkers?” He sits up on the edge of the bed. The sheets are thin, and there’s no mattress pad. “How does someone your age know about checkers?”
Let’s just say his name and stop withholding: Brian. A name that reminds Neena of fine-grit sandpaper and hamsters and a time before she was born.
It’s 10 AM on a Friday, and she should be in AP American Government.
“I played checkers as a kid with my dad. We had a thing where we both cheated, and we both knew it, and we never said a thing.” She picks at an eczema patch on her shin that has scabbed over.
Brian brings his face close to her face. They both have brown eyes salted with yellow bits. She prides herself on being aromantic, unsentimental, but with their eyes close like this and the same, the fact of their togetherness seems fated. It’s such a dumb thought, she wants to slap her own face.
She picks up her phone and messages Ralphie: what time? Ralphie sends back, 1030. Neena hearts it and opens Instagram where there’s yet another photo of someone from her high school in a bikini and prone to remind her that their bodies still matter most.
She’s known Brian for a month or two. She met him at the restaurant where he made artisan pizzas and she, weekend nights, stood at the front and ushered people to tables. No, that’s a lie. She’s known him since she was a baby, and Neena and her older brothers were friends with his kids, and his family came to Neena’s house and drank drinks and played ping-pong in the driveaway with Neena’s parents and talked about things like dry pickling and Joan Didion. Now, Neena is 18, and, though the man, Brian, still hangs out with Neena’s parents on weekend nights, his kids and ex-wife moved years ago to Idaho and into a house the ex-wife curated to look like a shrine to Chip and Joanna Gaines.
Water hits the window glass, and Neena stands to pull the curtain aside an inch. On the other side of the glass, an automatic sprinkler ticks in a circle. In the wooded area beyond the parking lot, the world is exploding itself open. Everything green and the birds probably incessant. A train passes in the wooded area beyond the suburban hotel building. Its whistle isn’t sad like it would be if she heard it at home. Instead, she can almost feel the air passing around the train cars moving west.
She puts on the long gray t-shirt of her dad’s she’s wearing as a dress. She’d gone without a bra as a kind of experiment in provocation. It had been a good move upon arrival, but now, leaving, going out into what will be the rest of her day, she’s less happy about the tumble of her breasts loose in the fabric.
Brian looks at her and raises his eyebrows, and for a moment she thinks she’s succeeded at seeming interesting. She laughs and says, “Later,” which is nothing like something she would normally say.
The elevator carpeting is stained with what is maybe child pee and swimming pool water. She exhales, and it makes her shrink two inches. Ralphie’s car idles by the hotel entrance. She’s listening to the same space ambient music she listens to every morning.
“Bro,” Neena says and opens the car door. Since fourth grade, she’s had this one friend. Raffaella, youngest of four, princess-themed bedroom unchanged from childhood, her house with a basketball court inside and on the edge of a suburban golf course with its chemical runoff and packets of old men lithe as grasshoppers.
“Bro, it took you forever,” Ralphie says.
Neena turns down the music, echoey vibrations that sound like seals being pulled into underwater caves. Here they are, Ralphie and Neena, having been inflated over childhoods with the best their parents had to offer. So full now of potential, they turn out of the parking lot and into the town of their youth, a town that had looked at the options and decided, yes to tan brick rectangles, yes to Slim Chik’n, yes to closed car windows, yes to drive thrus and soccer fields and treelessness and bee death and buy two get one free and shakes so thick with Polysorbate 80 you can turn them upside down and they don’t fall out of the paper cups that will be sticky later in dumpsters.
They drive to the school parking lot, share a flattened granola bar, read a bad poem and pretend to care about it for the sake of the one teacher they both like, paint particleboard to look like a Paris street scene on the floor of the gym after school because, yes, you need activities, go home. They are nothing special. They have done nothing to write spectacular college essays about. Still, they want so many things.
* * *
That night, they drive around for a couple of hours in Ralphie’s Prius drinking tequila out of a metal water bottle. They’re not quite the types to be studying for the ACT in their Friday bedrooms but also not quite the ones to stand in clumps drinking hard seltzer at someone’s backyard party. They stop at the pond by campus to search for a snapping turtle they named Alan and then spend the twenty dollars they have between them on the most calorically unbeneficial foods they can find at the convenience store around the corner from Neena’s house.
When they get back to Neena’s, the man, Brian, is at Neena’s kitchen island drinking a watermelon mint sparkling water from a pink can. Neena stands in the dark of the dining room and counts to five. Neena’s mom wears a silk scarf in her hair like a fucking fortune teller. She’s talking with her hands big and her face full. Brian used to drink too much, and now he doesn’t drink at all. She remembers him stumbling at the neighborhood party, remembers his now-ex-wife scream whispering at him on their back deck when Neena and her brothers and Brian’s kids were playing some Star Wars game in the garage. Neena’s dad yells from the other room about which record, Eccentric Soul or something else, and Neena’s mom shrugs, smiles, takes a long drink of Prosecco from a vintage glass with a hand-painted peacock on it and wipes her hand across her mouth.
“Oh my god,” the man says. “So, you just ate them?” Brian says to Neena’s mom, and then he hears Neena and stops. The windows above the sink are dark. The string lights that double-cross the back yard bob in rows.
“Oh, hey, Neens,” her mom says.
This is a nickname Neena hates, which her mom knows. Her mom doesn’t say it maliciously, though, just habitually, the way someone might scratch at something without even realizing it, and, somehow, that is worse.
“So, Neens,” Brian says and laughs. Neena rolls her eyes, feels twelve, gets a water.
Brian is beautiful, and it’s the thing everyone notices about him immediately. It embarrasses her both that she picked him and that he picked her. Prior to Brian, she’d fantasized about being with someone who wouldn’t even hit the algorithm, who’d look pickled or bent in unpretty ways and thus make her unique for having selected him.
Ralphie comes in next, right behind Neena. She’s slightly drunk, but they are the kind of family to not make a thing of it.
“Let’s get some eggs for you, Raffaella,” Neena’s mom says, and she cracks eggs one-handed into a pan while finishing her drink with the other hand. The dishwasher is going. It’s an old one and not the quiet kind.
Neena looks at her face reflected in the windows and her mother’s face next to it, her mother with the dumb scarf she has in her hair and her expression too big and her voice too loud.
Neena’s dad comes back to the kitchen and sits at one of the stools. The music is up, and the vintage glassware on the open shelf above the counter vibrates with a squeaking so high-pitched she’s not sure her parents with their old ears can even hear it.
Ralphie eats the eggs, quick scrambled, straight off the walnut spoon. She pours salt on her hand and licks it off, and the eggs are so hot her mouth leaks steam when she opens it to yelp a little but to also say, “so good Neena’s mom, thank you.” Neena’s mom pats Ralphie’s head like Ralphie is an actual cat.
Neena grabs the Kwik Shop bags that Ralphie dropped by the kitchen door, and Ralphie and Neena go to the basement.
They unroll yoga mats on the concrete basement floor alongside spider carcasses and dust balls and camel crickets, the kind that look both alien and prehistoric and that levitate at shocking diagonals.
“Tell me my bedroom is tiny and unprivate without telling me my bedroom is tiny and unprivate,” Neena says. Neena checks her phone. The last message from Brian is from this morning and says nothing but, I’m here.
“Tell me I’m a teenaged dirtbag without telling me I’m a teenaged dirtbag,” Ralphie says and dumps the bags’ contents between her crossed legs. Snack cakes. Bright-red chip bags. Frozen cookie sandwiches melting in their crackly packaging.
Neena pulls her knees up under the gray shirt, and her breasts squeeze together in a way that reminds her of biscuit dough. She hears footsteps in the kitchen. Step step step stop. Step step step stop. It’s probably her mom going from dishwasher to cabinet and back, but Neena imagines it as a dance. Brian, her mom, her mom throwing her head back, the soft arms of her silk scarf dangling down like jellyfish tentacles, her dad nearby. One of the bad jokes in their family is that Brian, at a messy 37, is far too young to even be a conquest for Neena’s mom, almost 50, so Neena’s dad doesn’t have to pay attention. And Neena has studied her mom’s phone enough to know that her mom and Brian are not fucking. Still, she knows her mom to be a very good liar, so maybe her mom is expert at covering it up.
A camel cricket lands on Ralphie’s shoe, but it’s not startling because Neena’s basement has always been swimming with them. Ralphie and Neena had spent a summer making iMovies that featured the crickets and included voiceovers where the crickets were ghosts or aliens and talked about other worlds and the hereafter.
The cricket on Ralphie’s shoe twitches and then jettisons off to a rafter.
“I’m just a cricket,” Ralphie says in the high nasal voice of their childhood movies.
“Flinging myself into nothing,” Neena says in a similar voice. “I’m just a cricket who doesn’t want to go to college,” Neena says. It’s true. She doesn’t. She who has rarely spent a night in a house not her own is supposed to pack a few bags and live in a room with a stranger in a city she visited for a day a year ago.
“College is a capitalist mindfuck in a dying world,” Ralphie says in the cricket voice. “Let’s steal an ice cream truck and drive around the country.”
“Cheers,” Neena says and raises a row of cinnamon buns, tucked together in cardboard like a family of baby mice. Two of them fall out of her hand and onto the yoga mat, but she eats them anyway. She downs an ice cream cookie sandwich and some chips and lies back on the yoga mat and doesn’t care about her hair trailing onto the dirty concrete. It’s a relief to let her body spread, to ignore the laughter upstairs.
When they’ve eaten all the food, they take turns vomiting into the old toilet in the corner of the basement. Like they always do, Ralphie goes first, and Neena puts in her earbuds and turns away. Then Neena goes. It’s not altogether unpleasant to vomit sweet foods, not in the way of, say, spaghetti, which comes up in an acidy tangle or popcorn whose kernel shards can lodge in the throat. She wipes her face and hand on one of the makeup wipes they’ve left on the back of the toilet for this purpose.
“Could we be any more obvious?” Neena says, which is something she’s said before.
“I know. Two insecure middle-class girls and their eating disorders, a memoir,” Ralphie says. They both laugh, but it sounds like trying to swallow gravel.
Still, there’s a sparkle to the immediately after. The basement trembles around Neena. Spiders spin down from shiny strands. Crickets perch spring-loaded. She can feel how her face is pinpricked with broken capillaries and loves and hates that the way to feel most alive at this time in this place is erasure.
* * *
Two a.m. and the stone animals in the neighbor’s back yard start moving. The lion, the bear, the banjo-playing frog. Twitch, ripple, sigh, strum. Neena, suddenly very awake, presses her hands against the window screen, and Ralphie’s sleep breathing rattles the sheet on Neena’s double bed. The curtains ruffle. Neena pulls the blanket up to Ralphie’s chin and tucks it around her toes. Her throat is scratchy and dry.
Neena doesn’t stop at the door to her parents’ room but instead goes down the back stairs and to the back door where the dark liner smudged around her eyes makes her look like a cartoon villain.
The back yard is a fucking cemetery to their childhood, hers and her brothers’. The bolt holes from where they’d once affixed a slide to the side of the deck, the ancient plastic egg shards near the base of the outdoor table, her stupid old kids’ bow and arrows leaning against the back of the house.
Her mom is in the yard on the old iron lounge chair she’d helped her mom carry from someone’s trash through the alleys and back to their house. Neena holds her breath. She lets her hand rest on the doorknob.
Whether Neena wants it to or not, everything keeps plummeting out and forward, and in a few months, all the things that surround her, that she’s surrounded herself with, will all be different and gone, and she’ll be someone other and elsewhere.
Of course, the man, Brian, is lying right next to her mom, and her dad is nowhere, wherever, probably unworried and sleeping. It’s not sex. They aren’t fucking. It’s almost worse. The two of them are like one of those fused shells you find on a beach where it seems like years of ocean and time had made them nothing but together.
She pulls the bow and aims one of the arrows at her mom. She was never good at this. Besides, these are Ren Fest arrows made to soft-lodge into a cloth-covered board. Neena’s been hit by one years ago, by one of her brothers. It didn’t break skin, but it left a bruise.
“Oh my fucking god!” her mom says when Neena lets the arrow loose, and it hits the redbud a few inches up from her mom’s shoulder. The stone lion and the stone bear and the stone frog sit at attention on the other side of the fence. Her mom pulls herself from prone and sees Neena on the deck.
“You scared the living shit out of me, Neens,” she says and wipes something from her eye. “Fuck, Brian, did you see that?” She laughs. “This kid.”
He stands up quickly like he’s been caught at something, though it isn’t that strange for them to be out late in the yard talking. Her mom adjusts the cotton sweater she’s wearing. The scarf has slipped back on her mom’s head, and she looks, in the triangle of the flood light, frazzled and old and unpretty.
“Ha,” Neena says.
“Ha, ha,” her mom says, and Neena walks back inside.
II.
The third Wednesday in November, her first year of college, Neena and her suitemates arrive at Kate’s parents’ house upstate. Kate drives down the long driveway, through a stretch of dark woods, and up to the red door Neena is sure a founding father once walked through. They haul in backpacks and bags of groceries for pistachio pasta and kale salad with a lemony dressing and limes and cranberry juice and rum and store-bought cookies, the pale, spongy kind that look like they’re made of flour bleached three times. The first quarter of college has taught Neena you can mainly divorce yourself from who you were before, box it up, keep moving.
In the kitchen, Zoe makes cranberry mojitos in a glass pitcher, and Trinity unloads the food, and Neena, without a task, sits on a bentwood stool at a sprawling kitchen island and scrolls through pictures of classmates on flights or in family living rooms or taking runs on pretty paths elsewhere. Neena’s childhood kitchen is straight Home Depot, but Kate’s has a chrome hood as big as a coffin hanging over the stovetop and three different sinks, one of them so deep and wide Neena could sit in it.
Kate says, “You know how before you came to college, it was like you thought there’s be such urgency to go home at Thanksgiving, to have all these big family moments?”
Trinity laughs. “Now we’re like fuck family, Friendsgiving.”
Kate moves the pitcher from the refrigerator to the center of the island, so it’s equidistant from the four of them: Kate, pretty but plain in the way of an old-school British queen. Trinity, the type to be running across cobblestones holding her viola case. Zoe, pixie cut, tall as Neena’s brothers, always in flannel. And Neena, tentatively a design major, an edge-of-the-stool kind of person, wearing her trademark knee socks, though it’s a look she fears has grown tired.
“Oh my god, look at my mom,” Kate says and waves her phone in front of them. Neena sees a picture of a woman parasailing above a see-through ocean. Kate says, “Go Lindsey,” but it has an edge. Their mothers are not the old ladies their grandmothers were and had been to their own mothers, but women who wore bikinis while being lofted into the sky attached to sailcloth wings.
It was the first Thanksgiving Neena hadn’t spent with her parents, at home. Neena had called her mom that morning, feeling one part guilt and one part sadness, and her mom said, “We’re having tacos with Brian. It’s going to be unseasonably warm, so we’ll sit outside. No bland food this year!”
“It’s a win for you then, mom,” Neena had said, and her mom had gone quiet. Brian, the family friend Neena had spent her senior year of high school sleeping with in various Kansas motel rooms.
Kate sets a glass in front of Neena. Mint leaves float up in the pale pink. “Drink!” Kate commands, and her mouth is wide, her teeth too white. She holds a Marlboro Gold in one hand, unlit.
She passes a cigarette to Neena, and Neena sets it on the counter next to her phone. The kitchen smells like lavender, not like old ladies, but like actual plants in a field in the morning. Which is the right move, she wonders, to light the cigarette, take a long drag, or to down the drink in one dramatic swallow. She drinks her drink like it’s a contest, two thirds of the glass without pausing.
“Yes, girl!” Kate says, and she claps her hands together in the cushiony way Neena assumes people do at operas. The sleeves of Kate’s tweed jacket are too short, but it’s intentional so the lace edges of a vintage nightshirt they’d bought together at a thrift store in the city near their college poke out around her wrists.
Trinity changes the music from a Taylor Swift-heavy playlist of Zoe’s to soul, something old sounding that Neena has never heard before. Though high school Neena might have been sloppy and asked, “I love this, what is it?” college Neena would never.
“Such a vibe,” Kate says, and Zoe nods, and Trinity taps her fingers, and Neena bites halfway across the white overgrowth of her thumbnail, and then leaves it ragged for the risk and thrill of possibly snagging it on something. No, that’s a lie. She bites the edge fully off, holds the white sliver in her hand, then drops it to the floor where she swears it makes a plink everyone can hear. No one reacts, though. Trinity is looking at herself in her phone camera but trying to pretend she’s scrolling. Kate lights her cigarette off the stove and then cranks open the window above the kitchen sink. Zoe shivers and buttons her flannel.
“I’m usually not a Mojito girlie,” Kate says, “but these, with the cranberry juice, are,” she moves her hand to her mouth to make the sign for chef’s kiss. Neena can already see the dinner parties Kate will host in three to five years.
Zoe unwraps the cookies. “I love shitty cookies,” she says, “the shittier, the better.” The cookies are decorated with little turkeys in top hats. “For the record,” Zoe says, “These turkey top hats look suspiciously phallic.” Neena laughs. Kate says, “Oh my god, Zoe.”
Neena takes one of the cookies and eats it quickly before grabbing another. A blonde hair is lodged across the frosting. She pulls it out when no one is looking and winds it tight around her index finger, hands in lap, until the tip of her finger is red with trapped blood.
“Should we go out?” Zoe says.
“There’s only one bar, which may or may not be open, and it’s all always old men,” Kate says.
“Old men aren’t so bad,” Trinity says.
“Gross,” Kate says. “Neena?”
“I’m down for whatever,” she says, which is a lie. She gets up and walks to the bathroom at the end of a long hall with real art, not things printed on a home printer and put into Target frames. When Neena first made friends at college and told them she was from Kansas, everyone assumed weekly tornadoes and ranch houses surrounded by corn. She hadn’t grown up like that, but she also hadn’t grown up like her friends’ families. Their parents employed people to handle the things her parents did themselves: plant waterer, house cleaner, dog walker, and yet they often did not consider themselves wealthy.
On the toilet, Neena unwinds the hair from her finger and tucks it into the front pocket of her skirt. Her mom used to make a lot of the fact that women’s clothing had small pockets, but Neena didn’t want the burden of carrying so many things clanking around her thighs. It was fine to be able to fit nothing more than a lip balm, phone, key card.
Neena runs the water for noise and pushes three fingers back until they touch that triggering part of her throat. She’d written a college essay about an arduous high school recovery from bulimia, and, though central to her getting into a selective college, it was complete bullshit. Here she is as always: glazed eyes, dizzy, drink water, return to life where everything will be pointy with the same sharp-tipped instructions: want less, feel less, be less.
Outside the window next to the sink, the forest expands, and there are no humans, just quiet night where some animals are nested and sleeping, and others move as ghosts over dropped leaves and needles, looking for something to kill.
Down the hall, she can hear her friends’ voices but can’t make out the words, which is like being in another country.
Instead of heading back toward the kitchen, she walks to the front door and looks out the window where she sees the car, Kate’s, with its hatchback open from when they unloaded their bags. So used to having things done for them as children, they were still not adept at checking all the boxes themselves.
Neena goes into the cold, closes the car’s hatchback, and then sits in the driver’s seat. She pushes the start button, and the car turns on. Kate is the kind of person to probably always leave a key hidden inside because who cares really if the car goes missing on any given day? Neena puts the car into drive and pulls forward.
The trees on either side of the long driveway are old-man trees with craggy trunks and arms reaching to the road.
Neena’s first month at school, she’d cut off from Brian completely, and it had felt like a beautiful mastery. She walked through unfamiliar buildings light and inflated by the cast-off burden of him. And then out of nowhere, Neena forwarded Brian a photo of Joan Didion’s sunglasses. They’d sold at an auction of the author’s things for 27k, and Neena, who was taking a class with a unit on Didion, texted Brian, can you even imagine, which was not wistful but more condemnation, the subtext being: rich people. He responded immediately with, Joan Didion the writer? as if there was another one, and she’d thought what a fool. She screenshotted the exchange and sent it to her older brother, Jacob, and he’d since texted her several times, Joan Didion the writer? which made her feel cushioned in the familiar bed of her family’s love language of jabs and sarcasm.
At the end of the driveway, Neena turns right. She presses the heated seat button on. The car’s interior is leather, and the dash is simple without the cartoony excesses of lower-end cars. Kate hasn’t kept it clean, though. The floor of the passenger seat has several empty plastic juice cups rolling around it.
The town a few blocks from Kate’s house is one street with old-timey hand-painted wood signs over storefronts. Neena takes an exit for something west, and she turns her phone off.
The road winds, and Neena thinks of calling one of her brothers or Ralphie or Brian or her mom or her dad, but she doesn’t want to have to explain anything to them. I’m in a sort of stolen Tesla in upstate New York. And then what?
It’s only when she gets to full speed on the highway that she hears the sound in the way back of the car. She thinks it’s something broken, a whine or a whistle, something drastic about to happen, and she’s signaling to pull over when, without warning, a cat is visible in the rearview mirror. The cat, a tabby, climbs up onto the ridge of the back seat and meows in the most frantic way. Neena nearly crashes. She steadies the wheel, and the cat climbs up into her lap and settles there, purring.
“This,” Neena says into the deadspace of the dark car, “is unexpected.”
At the next exit, she angles the car off the highway. It has been the most futile attempt at escape. She turns into the drive-thru of a chicken place and orders three biscuits and a Diet Coke. The person taking her money leans over and says, “You have a cat on your lap,” and she says, “I do,” pays, and drives back the way she came.
When she was younger, she thought everything in life was going to be big and colorful: event, event, event. Really, though, most of it is small and can breeze by if you’re not paying attention. She shoves one hand in her front left pocket and somehow secures the dumb strand of hair that’s still there, puts the window down, and lets it fly into the cold. “Goodbye to all that,” she says to the cat who reacts not at all to her Didion reference.
She drives back into the town with its silly quaintness, all the ye olde signs made to look like they’re from the time of some revolutionary war man on horseback warning everyone of bad things coming. At the last intersection of the town, the cat springs up to standing and bites hard into Neena’s forearm, and she, all impulse, opens the car door and lets the cat loose.
She pulls over, parks badly, gets out, yells for the cat, but the cat is nowhere, not behind the dumpster at the side of the bagel shop, not in the alley that separates the antique store from the other antique store, not in the boxwood hedge littered with dead leaves and discarded coffee lids. She sits on the curb until her knees are freezing, until a group of old men, one in novelty paper pilgrim hat, tumbles out of the one bar, says niceties to each other, and heads to parked cars.
Neena drives back to Kate’s where, in the living room, her friends are castaways on the u-shaped sectional watching Heathers. They probably haven’t noticed she’s been gone.
“I mean, high school kids getting murdered by their classmates, maybe not the best in the 21st Century,” Trinity says, laughs, and takes a handful of mini Reese’s from one of the big glass jars on the coffee table.
Then Kate, Trinity, and Zoe all practically scream along with Winona Ryder, “Dear Diary, my teen angst bullshit now has a body count,” and they laugh together.
Zoe sees Neena at the edge of the room. “Oh, NEE-na, there you are,” and the others say, “Neeny!”
Neena sits on the floor at Kate’s feet and takes a picture of the TV screen where Winona Ryder is cross-legged by her bed writing in a diary. She sends the picture to her brother, Jacob, and to Brian who, unlike Neena and Jacob, was probably alive when the movie first came out. Whoever answers first is my soulmate, she thinks, but no one answers.
The coffee table in front of her is covered in a mess of what her mom way back when had called “junk food,” until they chastised her about not assigning value to food. Still, it was junk, tall, pretty jars someone had filled with various kind of cookies, candies, snack cakes, chips. She would have thought Kate’s house would be all branchy food, keto, maybe gnawable jerky hand-dried by someone on a farm nearby.
Neena eats Oreos and Red Vines and tiny pink frosted cakes and salt and vinegar chips and gathers all her ghost selves back in, pulls at strands of things past and future, while the rest of the movie plays out, until Winona Ryder is wrecked, triumphant, alone on the stairs, having burned nearly everything away.
They all applaud, and then there’s a noise at the door. Zoe screams, and Trinity pulls a pillow in front of her face, and Kate drops her drink, and the liquid makes a puddle on the white shaggy rug.
They prepare for the certain attack or death by unexpected stranger they as young women have been trained for, but it’s not someone coming to kill them. It’s the cat, whose claws scratch at the glass in a way that sounds like cicada shells on concrete. Kate runs to open the door, picks up the cat, and says, “You bad cat, where have you been,” but she’s not mad. She holds the cat close to her face, and Neena swears the cat looks right at her chastisingly.
Neena sits, leans her head back on the sectional and closes her eyes, works at needing no one, at not checking her phone, at not thinking beyond the fact of her own body.
“Look at Neeny, she’s asleep,” Kate says, and Neena doesn’t say otherwise. Her phone doesn’t do anything. She’s not going to walk to the bathroom. There will be no emptying out or hard reset. The cat comes and curls up around her bare knee, and her arm throbs where the cat bit her. Still, it’s the pulse of something, something new.
In Kate’s giant living room with a TV screen that drops down and reels itself back up into the ceiling, as her friends talk about viral Target sweatpants and the way Thanksgiving is a gross celebration of colonizers, Neena expands. She’s a parade balloon. She’s twice her size, three times, more, animated, hovering, full of largesse. She’s a whole forest. She’s the David Hockney Woldgate Woods spring print her brother Jacob had on the wall of his teenaged bedroom. She’s the treeline outside every suburban Midwestern motel room. She’s the dark night surrounding Kate’s parents’ house. The soft-crunch rug of abandoned pine needles. She’s not letting any of it go.
Amy Stuber’s writing has appeared in The New England Review, Flash Fiction America, Ploughshares, The Idaho Review, Witness, The Common, Cincinnati Review, Triquarterly, American Short Fiction, Joyland, Copper Nickel, West Branch, and elsewhere. She’s an editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her short story collection, SAD GROWNUPS (Stillhouse Press) will be published in October 2024.