When We Were Bright and Beautiful

by Jillian Medoff

Eleanor was raised in a subculture that enforces firm codes of conduct for both genders, but particularly girls. So, she raised me the way she was raised, the way her mother was raised, the way her mother’s mother was raised, and so on, all the way back to that naked slut Eve, whose downfall could’ve been prevented had she made better choices.

You can’t choose who you love, but you can choose how you behave.

Cyclonic drama is how we achieve balance. The world is chaotic and irrational. At sixteen, we lack a way to control it. So we lean into the chaos. We become the chaos. We express what we feel in real time because we believe, mistakenly, that unburdening ourselves will stop the tumult, or at least help us make sense of it.

The other point he didn’t make, though I know he thought it: Anton Rivera is a doorman. Joey Rivera is his son. Neither of them is a person worth considering, if a person at all.