Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

But still, she thought, she should have felt the earth shift or the sky crack, at the very least a tiny sting or snap or click, even a hiccup, some signal that he had died, that she had lost someone irreplaceable.

It takes only an error to father a sin.

“Don’t be like that.” The cashier waved her off. “All you girls are like that. You don’t got the swagger of the boys. Believe it, hon, you’re here, you’re smaht.”

You’ll find that most people here are more adept at appearing intelligent than actually being so.

“Okay. But you don’t need to be embarrassed. I went to a psychiatrist back home. I used to have anxiety. But I beat it.” “With yoga?” “No. Zoloft.”

Do we all pick only the best snapshots to remember in our mental scrapbooks and throw away the bad?

They were ghosts, after all, and happy endings don’t haunt anyone.

And they would fill the space as best they could, together.

But home didn’t mean a perfect place with only good memories, it meant a place where you grew up.