Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

Jennifer the failed suicide, Greg the orphan by force, impoverished Manuel, and her, Sarah—they’ve all been robbed of heedless childhood and that’s why they’ve been chosen, their precocious adulthood acknowledged. All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked.

Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.

There is likely some psychological truth to this. Girls are complicated. They rarely love each other without also hating each other. They often react to differences of situation with envy even if the difference, the thing their girlfriend has that they don’t, is a thing they never wanted in the first place.

Years later—in fact, recently—Karen came to understand that she’d been pampered so much at the home because the home was a farm for growing White Christian Babies Without Health Defects of the type that’s so rare and in such high demand on the adoption market now.