You Belong Here

by Megan Miranda

I didn’t understand how we had gotten here so quickly. The previous eighteen years had stretched into a lifetime, and suddenly time was catapulting, leapfrogging.

I often felt like Delilah had grown up more slowly than I had, a member of the post-Covid generation, where the rules seemed more important, the consequences more direct. There was no carefree game about their adolescence, as there had been in ours.

My mother always seemed confused that I’d managed to make a career as a ghostwriter. But it played to my strengths—I could copy any voice, any style, slip into someone else’s story and make it my own. I took on both fiction and nonfiction projects for all ages and audiences. And when I was done, I could leave them behind. Nothing to either own or answer for.

Though I made my living with language, sometimes, when the moment felt too big, I struggled to find any words at all.

He had always been a chameleon, at ease with any group. It had lured me in when I was younger, but looking back, I could never be sure which parts of him were real.

He always said human behavior doesn’t change, it just finds a new frame of reference. Forced gladiators become paid players, but we all still fill the stadiums and cheer for blood, don’t we?

I’d been in the middle of a disappearing act. And suddenly I was seen.

I pulled away from the curb, heading up the sloping road—heading home. I passed the spot I’d once stood with Maggie during high school, at a clearing beside the road, tracing out the ridgeline that would one day become the tattoo on my wrist.

Even when I was her age, I had already wanted to be a writer. I felt like I was reaching for some great truth, frustratingly out of reach. One that I believed I could wrestle into form, make concrete. There was the string of lyrics in cursive painted sideways down the wall. A stanza from Poe behind an empty ornate frame that Maggie had found in a thrift shop. On the wall directly over my wooden headboard, a collection of the first and last lines from every novel I’d read during my senior year of high school, in my own secret project. A meaning I believed I could extract from the pattern.

Maybe we didn’t become something in adulthood so much as unbecome.

kids, I knew, could do grown-up damage. They could cause just as much pain as we could.