CREATIVE NONFICTION 67
the thin wire fence that separated us from them, that Kate and I were going to die
right there in the middle of nowhere in a llama stampede. “Get back in the car!” I
yelled to Kate. “It’s OK,” she said, laughing and moving closer to the fence. “They
aren’t going to hurt us.”
On the drive back to campus, after we’d stopped laughing, I told her that naming
what we were doing didn’t matter—that it didn’t mean we had to stop. And we didn’t.
in the spring of our junior year, a guy took Kate to a Disney on Ice performance.
After the date, lying next to me in bed, Kate told me, “We have to stop doing what-
ever it is we’ve been doing.” I lay there silently.
“It’s just that if I’m going to date Brian, we have to stop.”
The white cinderblock walls in the room glowed faintly in the dark.
“Say something,” she said. But my voice was stuck in my chest, in the tight space
between my lungs and my heart.
sarah was a biology major and a Baptist, so I began our friendship by asking her to
explain things to me, as she did in the laboratory on campus: how does water run up a
mountain, why do only our fingers and toes prune after swimming for hours, how can
people at your church not believe in evolution?
I didn’t tell Kate I had a crush on Sarah, because I wanted to keep it safe. But my
reasoning was more complicated than that, if I’m being honest. When Kate con-
tinued seeing Brian after the Disney on Ice date, I felt betrayed in a way I’d never
felt betrayed by anyone before, and I wanted Kate to feel what it was like to be
replaced.
the two lowermost ribs of the human ribcage are called floating ribs because
they don’t attach, directly or indirectly, to the sternum. They have no anchor in
the front of the body. When Kate started dating Brian, my whole body felt that
way—detached.
I suddenly understood, more viscerally than I had before, why people call the end of
a relationship a breakup. Why people want a clean break. A clean break means it’s more
likely that the recovery time will be shorter, that the bone will heal with less chance of
infection or complications.
When Kate started dating Brian, we didn’t make a clean break, the way a straight
couple would do if one person started sleeping with someone else. I didn’t tell her how
hurt I was. I didn’t tell her to end things with Brian, to choose me. I just stopped being
her best friend—because that felt like the only thing I could do without completely
falling apart.
on the day Eve was born, did Adam tell her God made her from one of his ribs?
And, hearing this, did she trace her fingers over his chest, searching for a scar?