Only If You're Lucky

by Stacy Willingham

Some words should be ours to own, at-times-vicious yet tender terms of endearment we toss around like glitter that suddenly taste sour in the mouths of men. Girls is one of them.

Mom says I have attachment issues; Dad says I’m a slob. I think I’m just afraid of getting rid of something prematurely; of dipping my hand into my purse and looking for some familiar comfort only to remember that I had disposed of it. That it’s gone forever. That I’m left with nothing.

I remember wondering if that kind of power imbalance was normal in a friendship—if every pair consisted of one half who seemed to love the other just a little bit more—

You’re only young once, and only if you’re lucky.

I’ve only ever been Eliza’s best friend, ever since that first day in kindergarten when we clicked so easily. And even though we were opposites—me, brainy and bookish, and her, wild and alive—I was the yin to her yang, the quiet sidekick who talked reason into her ear when she got the sudden urge to do something stupid.

funhouse-mirror version of regular life. A college town in summer isn’t actually a college town at all and our little pocket of it has felt like a ghost town to us, a bunch of bored girls roaming around with nothing to do and all the time to do it. Deserted and dangerous and ours for the taking.

once you bend one rule without consequence, it feels a lot easier to break the others.

I am an investment to them, their only child. If I fail, they fail, and everybody knows it.

I could never imagine waking up one morning and just actively choosing to be somebody else. Shedding my insecurities like a too-small skin, leaving them behind. Outgrowing my old self and simply morphing into someone new.

“You read Jekyll and Hyde,” I say, remembering that line, radically both, one of the many I’d highlighted before flipping it closed and tossing it across the couch. The concept of being mutually good and evil, dark and light, tickling my subconscious like an incessant itch growing stronger, harder to ignore. What a profound notion: that neither of those things needed to cancel out the other, but instead, could simply swirl together until you became your own unique mixture of each.

Marmalade sky reflecting off the surface, casting everything in an orange glow.

we got away with murder, not just once but three times over. One was an accident, one a mistake, and one a necessity to save us all.