You smell like a bar,” he said.I thought, You smell like a library. But I wanted to have sex right then, so I said, “You smell like a poem.

You can feel like he wants to own you,-not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having.

It isn’t you,’ he says, as though you’re to be comforted by the irrelevant role you play in your own life.

Finally, I asked how you got a boy to like you back. She said, ‘Just be yourself,’ as though I had any idea who that might be.

I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I’d ever experienced–the teachers who’d looked at me as though I held no promise, the boys who didn’t like me back. Around...

You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You’re tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it’s no bigger or more noble than...