Ohio

by Stephen Markley

Love was a marketing strategy, but every ad campaign lost its zest in the end.

He then smuggled himself past his self-loathing and straight out of town.

“We are all travelers, Stacey. The only difference is how much baggage we choose to burden ourselves with.”

That’s how teenagedness works: everyone lives in a bubble of their own terrifying insecurities oblivious to the possibility that so does everyone else.

“These self-denigrating comments. Especially as it relates to you being from your—how did you say? ‘Bumblefuck’ town? You should break yourself of that habit. You’re here. You’re curious about the world. You read widely. It doesn’t matter where you come from. Neither does it really matter where you go. It’s all the sex and sandwiches in between.”

it was kids like Jonah who tended to command high social status, the “preps” as they were all called, and when you’re a teenager and have never read Marx, you just think in this tautology: “These are the popular people because they’re popular.” Only in hindsight do you understand you could probably correlate the cliques of high school directly to each family’s bank account.

The heady first days of any new relationship always have that new-toy excitement about them,

“People got a real problem with that. So they go about trying to explain it any way they can, adding up numbers so they get letters.”

books. The Phay-stoss disc, bro, that’s aliens. It’s solved. I told you.’ ” Dan burst out laughing. They all did. Their lives took place in such a claustrophobic sliver of space between suffering and laughter.

agent of chaos

How do you describe love, though? It was a totally ungrippable idea. A slick bar of soap you had to snatch out of the air with one wet hand.

she wanted to return to all the memories so badly, even the ones that throbbed, that brought so much shame.