I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

It was the one where she was young enough and white enough and pretty enough and rich enough that people paid attention.

What bothers me now is those boys internalizing girls as audience, there only to act as mirrors, to make their accomplishments realer.)

The movie director who lived in my brain wanted to scrap it, send the actors home for the day.

But no one around me was changing; here was my entire high school, preserved in amber. The only thing changing was my vision—like the first time I put on glasses and looked in wonder at the trees, and felt inexplicably betrayed. Those clearly delineated leaves had been there all along, and no one ever told me.

My stomach was a mess. It was time to get to class, time to talk to these kids like I had any idea how the world worked.

I couldn’t figure out who knew more about what happened to Thalia: me now, or me at barely eighteen. My adult self, looking back with experience and perspective, or my raw teenage self, both jaded and naïve, taking everything in fresh.

She said, “Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess.”

Here’s the soundtrack of your tragedy: Dance to it.