She turns away from the fan, convinced it is making her nauseous, and there it is: that small piece of gum wrapper still taped to her ceiling from when she had stood on her bed on tiptoe as a young girl and stuck it there. She had drawn a small strawberry on the gum wrapper. Almost a decade ago. She had forgotten about it—saw it from time to time over the years and it had always struck her as silly and embarrassing, as if she were no better than the girls who wrote Mrs. next to the last names of their crushes. Still, she had never had the heart to take it down. The events surrounding the
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