By Danielle Shorr
In my environmental science class senior year, we are given caterpillars to take care of. The goal is to learn about their life cycle and release them. We have them for almost a week before they die. Not a single monarch makes it to chrysalis. The larvae die in their tiny enclosures, alongside the thick milkweed pods we collected from the prairie behind the school. Must have been a bad batch, our teacher tells us. In all her years of teaching, it is the first time this has happened. There’s no telling why it has, but it has.
***
My boyfriend is in a band with our other friends. I am not in the band, but I watch as they rehearse and sit front row at the gigs they play at local coffee shops and bowling alleys. I’m a singer, too, although I’m beginning to doubt my abilities. I want to be in a band, this band, but I’m not asked to be and I wouldn’t know how to. I’m a singer, too, I think, but the band already has a singer and she’s my friend, and I don’t see a need for two.
***
After what feels like months of endless noise in our house, my dad takes the dog and starts sleeping on an air mattress on his office floor. My mom drinks her weight in Pinot Grigio and loses thirty pounds in two months. On the weekends, she orders Dominoes for my friends and I, and extra for me to binge eat in the kitchen after they leave.
***
My boyfriend and I break up. It is my first experience of being alone in a relationship and I realize I prefer actual solitude.
***
My family takes me on a tour of the colleges I might actually be able to get into. One school, recommended to me by my second-rate college counselor, is positioned at the peak of a winding hill in a city none of us have ever heard of. When we reach the top of the mountain, we are met with a large statue of Jesus pinned to a cross. Because we are Jews, we do not stay for the tour.
***
My prom night is not a night to remember. My ex-boyfriend takes a tall and slender girl from the waspy high school two towns over. She is stunning, blonde, and unlike me, naturally so. Her gown is one-shouldered and white. I do my own hair and makeup in the poor lighting of my bathroom, and wear a dress that doesn’t fit quite right. My date is a friend I am hopelessly in love with, a frequent scene partner in acting class whom I have kissed on more than one occasion in character. He has a girlfriend. She is younger than us, too young to go to prom. I spend the night sending unreciprocated signals and wake up alone.
***
On the night of graduation, in an effort to ensure our sobriety, the senior class is gathered at the community center to be bussed to an arcade in the middle of Illinois. At the lake bonfire after, I crouch in a corner trying to keep ash from blowing into my eyes. On the bus ride back to the parking lot, I am too tired to object to being groped by the guy I’m sitting with. We are finally returned to our cars as the sun starts to come up. I get home and proceed to sleep for twelve hours straight.
***
I win the senior superlative for best musician and stop writing music not long after. I won’t return to it.
***
The night before I leave for California, my ex-boyfriend and I reunite to see a movie and fuck in my backyard in front of the fire pit. That good? I ask him, as he loudly sucks air between his teeth. My ass is getting burned by the fire, he replies.
***
On one of my first nights in LA, I share a couch with a friend of my friend’s boyfriend. He lives in New York, has a foot fetish and a girlfriend, and promises he is coming back for me. Of course, he never will.
***
I find out that my theater teacher died from cancer as I am disrobing for a massage. I cry for the entirety of the sixty minutes, while instrumental pop hits play in the background.
***
I spend my summer auditioning for anything and saying yes to everything. Roles in music videos, spec commercials, photoshoots. I do background work for the free lunch and drive fifty minutes to make twenty bucks.
***
On one set, I talk with the photographer in between takes. Before leaving, he slips me his number. For weeks we text, sending pictures, and speaking on the phone. He is on tour with his father’s band. I stalk the dates of the shows, taking note of what city he is in, when he will be back in mine. On a phone call one night, he asks my age. I am afraid to tell him, embarrassed of my youth. Eighteen, I admit. From the other end of the phone, he releases a sigh of satisfaction. Eighteen is the sexiest thing a girl can be, he says and I smile, learning this for the first time. We have been naked for each other, but never together. We talk continuously until the day that lightning strikes the sand outside my apartment and kills a young man surfing. There is no correlation. He stops responding to my texts and eventually I stop longing for a stranger.
***
I start college and cry in my dorm room, in the cafeteria, in classes where I understand nothing. The literature doesn’t make sense, the vocabulary is beyond my comprehension, and my professor writes in red pen, on every test I take, that I am failing the class. Our chairs are forcibly turned to face each other so the class format can be a roundtable discussion. For months, I hide behind books and paper so that no one will see my red face and consistently wet eyes. I finish the semester and the class dehydrated, with a B+.
***
I go through every brand of deodorant in an effort to find one that will stop the wrath of my overactive sweat glands: Dove clinical that costs over $20, Mitchum that gives me a rash, and a natural brand about as effective as water. Every laundry day, I wrestle the pit stains from my favorite black t-shirt. I fry my hair with the same flat iron I was given in eighth grade. I get deep, cystic acne on my ass that can only be healed with medical grade cleanser. When exiting the shower, I often forget if I have rinsed the conditioner out of my hair. When I bring this up to my doctor, he suggests that maybe I lay off the weed, which is not yet legal recreationally but fully accessible. The suggestion is a fair one.
***
I love the boy down the hall from me who will sleep with me for four nights in a row and never acknowledge me in public.
***
I love the boy who is a senior and who listens to me talk like I have something important to say, and who I sacrifice half of my twin size bed and a full night of sleep for so that he can be next to me in it.
***
I turn 19 and the clock starts spinning and keeps going until I am no longer a teenager. I turn 20 and stop crying in lectures, continue to love anyone and everyone who gives me attention, affection, the right eyes and a moment. I get older, only slightly wiser, and eventually every feeling stops feeling like the end of the world or the first day on earth.
***
It amazes me what I remember, what I should remember but don’t, how fast the years unravel and what they leave in their sticky wake. I stand in my yard now, watching the monarchs sip the nectar from my California milkweed and wonder how they got there, what they had to survive as caterpillars to make it to their fully-winged form. Somehow, metamorphosis happens. Somehow, we both ended up where we are.
Danielle (she/her) is an MFA alum and professor of disability rhetoric and creative writing at Chapman University. Winner of the Touchstone Literary Magazine Debut Prize in Nonfiction, a finalist for the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Non-fiction, and nominee for The Pushcart Prize 2022 & 2023 and Best of the Net 2022 & 2023, her work has appeared in The Florida Review, Driftwood Press, The New Orleans Review and others. @danielleshorr danielleshorr.com