journal | team | miscellany | podcast | home

You Must Not Return to Your Childhood Room

Jennifer Bannan

George was my boyfriend during sophomore year until that April when we both fell in love with other people. George was tall and handsome, with full dark hair and black eyes, unruly black brows, acne that gave him an edgy accent. His lips were wonderfully puffy and he was constantly manipulating them: stretching them out like elastic, sucking them in and pooching them out. He was a flute player at our performing arts school where we spent half our days; I was a dramat. He was always going to competitions in Fort Lauderdale, Naples or some other close-enough town.  I spent long hours at rehearsals.

On more typical days we would wait for the buses to take us to our home schools, at a platform with a raised perimeter where all the kids sat. He would strut around with his chest stuck out, his long legs bending and unbending in a storklike, deliberate way, conscious that he had an audience, that he had his pick of any of us. Everyone had thought he was gay until he’d gotten a girlfriend named Florence, a brainy pianist who was so down-to-earth as to be intimidating. Such a nice and normal thing, she served to shift him back into the girls’ prospect pool. Dancers, artists, musical theater girls, we were all after him. I noticed the gay boys turning away with amusement and patience when George approached one of us.

Soon enough he broke it off with Florence and started flirting with me, in a really physical way that I felt obliged to match – he would throw a leg around me, toss me backward into a dip near to the ground, laughing and twirling and yanking me around to the Wham! from someone’s boom box. At his house I met his parents, a perky Cuban mom with crazy curls and tube tops, a fire chief dad with a barrel chest and equally parsed fits of laughter or rage.  Louis and Thomas were the brothers, all three with names that had Spanish versions, but the family had preferred English. George in the middle.

My girlfriend Beth started joining me at George’s. We drank vodka drinks and the boys leapt off the roof of the house into the pool, taking a running jump so they would avoid impact with the tiled edge. Beth and I always said we would jump too, but chickened out, stretched on our chaises, shading our eyes and cheering them on.

“He won’t have sex with me,” I complained to her. “We get so close.”

George, Louis and Thomas pumped their arms. Louis held his nose and cannonballed. The pool seized in the middle like a slow motion close-up of a water droplet.

“Maybe he really is gay?” she asked.

I thought of all the barbeques. The mom in her short shorts bringing refreshments on trays. The dad with his steely spatula. The fire house radio alerts fuzzing in the background. How could he be anything but straight in such a traditional family? But surely they thought it unusual for a boy his age to collect antique typewriters. Surely it registered how neat his room was. How he played the flute. Beautifully.

I loved how we kissed, our mouths like powerful beings in their own right, raging into a joined destiny, a frenzied free will. We mashed and mashed our bodies into each other, we pulled off our clothes and threw each other this way and that. The bodies of Greek wrestlers entered my mind, I couldn’t shake the image. I played along even as it wasn’t consummated, the corny Anita Baker on his clock radio, his bed so tiny I once knocked an ancient typewriter from his bookshelf. The machine lay splayed, letter prongs jutting like tiny broken bones.

▪

BEFORE MY TRIP to Europe, April of my sophomore year, we were tearful in our goodbyes, sharing our cigarette and kissing small kisses. It would be ten days of touring with kids from my home school, a few chaperones. I would meet a boy from a high school that had joined our tour, from North Carolina. I would lose my virginity to that boy in a hotel room in Paris. My life would change as I fell in love with someone who would love me back straightforwardly and sexually, without all the mixed messages.

But George’s life changed too. Back at home at that Miami school of massive concrete blocks, I’d barely told him about meeting someone else when he said he’d done the same. He introduced me that day after rehearsals to a beautiful blond with an amazing smile, a boy with a Camaro, with starched Polos and tight jeans, slight of frame, stunning. I couldn’t believe our luck. I was off the hook for breaking up with George. I had my man and George had his. Mysteries were solved and we could all be ourselves. I was only a little jealous. My boy was hundreds of miles away in North Carolina. Scott was right there with us, riding us to the sub shop in his fancy car, passing us Yves St. Laurent cigarettes.

George, you lucky dog! Now George and Beth and Scott and I would go out together, order drinks and miraculously not get carded, prowl Coconut Grove.  Beth would bemoan her latest break-up, I would fret about some fling I’d had that jeopardized my long-distance love, Scott and George would bemoan having to hide being gay from both sets of parents. The beach, the mall, the park, our houses when our parents weren’t home – we got together, we got drunk. Sometimes I missed George’s body, those crazy kisses, but I tried to be happy to see him and Scott carry on that tradition.

▪

THEIR LOVE was tumultuous. They broke up over the slightest offenses – a rip in a loaned Tshirt, a phone number found in a matchbook, a crumpled McDonald’s wrapper left in the car.

And once during a break-up, more than a year into their relationship, George wanted to go out with me. I was wary. He wasn’t much fun when he was angry about Scott, and Beth was on a date. It would be just the two of us. But I missed Andy, I figured misery loves company. He wanted to go to Hobie beach, where we would watch the Centrust building change colors across Biscayne Bay.

He told me how Scott cheated on him, how Scott seemed to hate being gay, how he was always hiding it from his parents. Didn’t you hide being gay too? I asked. And George said he did, but he thought together they could be brave, they could slowly condition both sets of parents toward acceptance. “At least I invite Scott over,” he said. “He’s never introduced me to his parents. I doubt I’ll ever meet them.”

I really thought Scott loved him, I said, and I believed it.

Then I talked about how I cheated on Andy, how it came from a place of despair, of being stuck in Miami and seeing Andy only when one of us could fly to the other, so rare, so unsuited to our big love. The cheating, I tried to explain, was a distraction, a way to kill the pain of not being able to have Andy with me all the time.

I felt George getting more agitated and tried to lighten it up. “Takes a slut to know one,” I said of myself and Scott, laughing. I tried to make Scott’s behavior sympathetic, but it only seemed to change the vibe for the worse.

He sulked and I swigged at our shared bottle of beer. There we were at the beach, where he and I had made out so many times. The waves came in and we didn’t say much for a few minutes.

“You were obviously gay but I was trying to get you in my pants anyway,” I said.

“Women don’t disgust me, you know,” he said, looking out at the water.

“I know,” I said, though I couldn’t imagine what difference it made.

“I prefer men, but I have no problem with the female body.”

“Same here,” I said.

“Maybe I was afraid of hurting you,” he said. And I laughed.

He hadn’t had sex with a girl, I knew that. I figured it was his naiveté that made him think of girls as fragile. I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted sex all the time these days anyway. Just a horny, reckless girl.

“You wanted it from me,” he said. “But you have no idea what you were asking for.”

“Oh, I doubt it’s that different,” I said.

“Gay sex is different,” he claimed, as if he could define a whole category from his early experience. “And I’m not talking about this part goes there. I’m talking that it’s very energetic.”

I thought of the three brothers, always throwing punches at each other, the hulking patriarch of their house, the way my unconsummated form of sex with George had felt like Greek wrestling.

“You would like it,” he said.

“If I was doing it with a man it wouldn’t be gay sex!” I laughed.

Then he was kissing me, like the kisses we’d had before, those kisses that juxtaposed purpose and abandon. But now there was something more urgent underneath. I was trying to laugh, to keep it light, and he was saying “Come on,” and then we were crawling into the back of my parents’ station wagon. It was early summer between junior and sophomore year now, I had a license and I’d been doing deliveries for their business – the back seat lain out flat, the red dolly skeletal on its side. We had room, but George was large. Added to his height was now more girth from all the drinking and dinners out with Scott. And he was bent on being rough. This was my lesson — what he thought I had to learn. He maneuvered me quickly and roughly, but now with the relentless pounding. It wasn’t fun. It certainly wasn’t sweet. I was struggling to keep some part of myself, struggling to protect my neck as my head jammed harder into the back of the passenger seat.

About halfway through I said I was done, that I got the point. He grunted and continued. I wondered if he was trying to smash out the cheater in me who was like Scott, but also the young and silly me who’d been in bed with him all those many times, too stupid to know the truth right in front of her, and maybe also the girl who couldn’t make his life at home any easier by making him any less gay.

The only blessing was that it didn’t last long.

A few minutes later I was behind the wheel, driving us home. The smoke hissed out between his teeth with every exhale.

At a light I glanced at him and he looked back at me, those big black eyes.

“It’s rough all right,” I said, but he turned my scold back on me, nodding ruefully, as if to say I shouldn’t have gone there.

“Scott can’t take life,” he said, changing the subject. “He’s either pretending to be straight for them or he’s being such a slut he can’t be with me.”

I felt myself forgiving George right away. This wasn’t about me. I was capable of stepping back and letting another’s pain take center stage. A good actress knows when that’s appropriate.

▪

IT WAS EARLY evening, a Saturday halfway into that summer, when I heard the banging and yelling at the door. I had been packing for my trip to North Carolina to see Andy. I would stay with him for four weeks.   

The noise brought me down the hall and my dad was there, tensed but trying to stay calm in the face of George’s father screaming Where is George? Where is my son?  He saw me at the hallway and took it as invitation to push past my father, past my mother who’d appeared from the family room, past me. He plowed down the hall into my bedroom. I saw him stop for a beat to look at the suitcase on my bed. There was just the one closet and under the bed for further searching. He appeared again in thirty seconds and opened the hall closet while we watched. The ironing board jerked on its hooks like a dead thing. He glanced into my parents’ room from where he stood and thought better of going in.

It was a small house. There weren’t places to hide. He seemed sorry for what he’d done, for all the energy he’d had for the search, energy still unspent.

Back in the living room he rubbed at his face, got his breath, said George had been gone for two days. Said he’d last been seen with a friend. My surprise was genuine – I’d had no idea. But I had to conceal my exhilaration, how happy I felt that they’d gotten free of their families. I didn’t volunteer information about Scott, but I knew he was the friend. “Where are you going?” George’s father said, trying to figure out the suitcase he’d seen in my room, and I told him to see my boyfriend. He nodded distractedly. My parents spoke in low tones, reflecting the gravity appropriate to a missing child. George’s father was calm by the time he left, but calm in a lost and helpless way.

Beth and I got together that night. She said she had seen them not long ago when I’d been making deliveries. They had said they might be leaving town. Neither could take the hiding from their parents.

At some point I told her about the sex in the station wagon and I found myself weeping. She said she was sorry for me, but not surprised. “George is crazy,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, rummaging in the side door pocket for a tissue.

“Would you report it?”

“What? No!”

“You should demand his apology.”

“I’m sure he’d be sorry,” I said. “If he knew I was upset.”

“So tell him you’re upset.”

“He’s gone now.”

“They’ll be back any minute. How long can they last?”

▪

I HAD MY four weeks in North Carolina to distract me, but that proved a disastrous trip – Andy and I were better at long distance than in person. He said there was something wrong with me for wanting everything amped up so much – sex in weird places, fast driving, drinking. I accused him of being afraid of life.

When I returned Beth had found a new boyfriend, and they were always off together, not interested in a third wheel.

In the chill of the AC those long afternoons – watching through the window the mute show of trees blowing, birds flitting, cars glinting by – I dreamed of George and Scott. I marveled that they were still gone, that they had called no one. I worried they would claw each other’s eyes out, end up on the street, turn to drugs or prostitution, get hunted down and shackled by their parents. There was no way to know what would happen. Mostly I just missed them, dreamed of running on the beach, tumbling around the Grove, blasting from exit to exit on the expressway.

When her boyfriend was working, Beth and I would drive past George’s house, keep going if we saw the parents’ car. One time Louis was outside, leaning into the open door of his red TransAm. We parked one house over, ambled toward him. “Have you heard from him?” we asked.

Louis’s eyes were George’s – fluid and flashing black. Otherwise he was skinny and pointy-eared. He would be leaving for college in the fall. “My parents are losing their shit,” he said. “Don’t let them see you around here, they think everyone who was George’s friend knows something.” He shook his head, rubbed at a spot on his car with a dirty t-shirt.

He didn’t know where they were. He had no contact. “I just hope they’re not dead,” he said.

The palm trees blew hard with their papery rustling, went still. Then Louis’s TransAm door shutting seemed like the only sound on that West Miami block.

Three more weeks of summer were near torture. Dire Straights “So Far Away” would play on the radio, and I’d throw myself into the pillows, sobbing, or let the tears stream down my face as I smoked in my little car, the windows open, the heat pouring in. I didn’t even have the long distance love to keep me going –  after the lousy visit Andy had stopped returning my calls.

▪

LIFE WENT ON without George and Scott much longer than we had predicted. That fall’s senior play was Summer and Smoke and I was the lead. I had sex with my co-star at a Thespian conference in a scuzzy motel room in Jacksonville. Without much pressure to get good grades, my final semester of senior year was less a ramp to the future and more a random sampling of the people I hadn’t yet gotten to know, other flautists, dancers, painters: the beach, Rocky Horror Picture Show, our cars, driving from suburb to suburb.  All the places reminded me of George, of our old times. Once it struck me that if I’d pressed charges for what he’d done at Hobie Beach I might have kept him home. But of course that had been Beths’s idea, not mine. I had been burned by George, gotten some place with him I didn’t like, but isn’t that how it was with some wild people? I’d look around at the carload of kids, their college plans set, their dreams of Julliard, Berkeley and Broadway, and find myself nostalgic – they were fun, but they weren’t crazy like George. By March I’d decided on a liberal arts college out of town, for humanities, not acting. My parents had said they wouldn’t pay for an acting degree, and I didn’t have the courage to declare myself financially independent. I didn’t bother to audition for the end-of-year play.

One June evening Beth said I would be excited about special guests. First I was overcome, my breath catching in my throat, my body like a spring. In the excitement I made a jealous little comment, like why did he call her, when I was his friend first.

We went up to a favorite spot in the Mayfair mall, a balcony that overlooked a busy intersection of walkers and rickshaws, a perch of glittering arches tiled in pottery-chunk mosaics.

Scott and George showed up within minutes, let us batter them with a high tide of hugs and squeezes – making them real again because the sight of them alone wasn’t enough. They looked amazing, but pale, doughier than their Floridian selves. They seemed older and happy – George had sexy little wire rim glasses now. They had lived in Chicago that whole year. They found jobs at Neiman Marcus almost immediately, with the fabricated stories of their resumés. They both moved up into assistant management roles. They made a little money, but it was a far cry from comfort, particularly from Scott’s prep school Cutler Ridge life.

Beth and I were dumbfounded. Our questions were silly – different versions of how did you get away with it. Of course there wasn’t that much mystery to it. Scott had stolen cash from his parents, then signed a lease for the apartment. They had lied about their ages during the job application.

The mystery was why come back. And on that they were less confident.

“I missed my parents,” Scott said, and George nodded.

“Me too,” George said, “and you guys of course.”

“You can’t know how much we missed you!” I said, throwing my arms around George and  holding on.

“They have to accept us at some point. Maybe we gave them enough time,” Scott said.

“We have to start saving for an apartment,” George said. “But I want to finish school too, at least get a real GED to replace the fake one.”

“It’s ok to live back at home for a bit,” Scott said, giving George a strangely wide-eyed look. “They deserve a little bit of our teenage years before we’re off again.”

“It’ll feel like we have a pile of money,” George said. He rubbed his hand on Scott’s shoulder. It struck me they were more open with their touches.

The way they glanced at each other, relaying these circumstances, stirred something in me. They had been gone almost a year, they had proven their love for each other in the face of injustice, and now they were separated back to their boyhood bedrooms on opposite sides of the city. Shouldn’t they seem more dismayed?

But they preferred to laugh about the good times they’d had – the nights out till dawn, the snowed-in cars, the parties, the clothes they had stolen, the run-ins with cops. Chicago was big. It was cold. It was expensive. But it was a blast.

That night we would ride the rickshaws and sniff from the little brown vials of Rush, drink Long Island Iced Teas. We would give each other big clumsy hugs, and smoke off each other’s cigarettes. We would trip down to the bay and kick coconuts at the seagulls.

The light glittered on the bay, it glittered in our eyes.

▪

JUST LIKE BEFORE, there was a barbeque at George’s. Only now things were charged and uncomfortable. His parents had promised him they accepted Scott, they accepted George was gay, but only because they’d been desperate without him. We’d arrived before Scott, and the parents gave me and Beth guarded looks, like somehow we were guilty accomplices.

When the tension was too high George pulled us into his bedroom where we sipped rum, bumped shoulders on his tiny bed, spoke in hushed tones. We could hear his father’s voice from the patio, more relaxed now the errant teens had gone inside. With good nature, he hurled commands at the kitchen – the hot sauce, quick! those lemon halves – move it!

Scott arrived but he didn’t stay long, jittery, making me wonder if he was doing coke. His hands passed a heavy chunk of keys back and forth as he grinned on the patio, declined the barbequed chicken– he had to get back to the work he was doing for his dad, bookkeeping because Scott hoped to be an accountant. There was more stiffness, more discomfort, and with Scott present we were no longer permitted escape to the bedroom.

George walked through the side yard with Scott, out to the driveway. George’s parents were inside behind the sliding glass doors. Beth turned to me, twin reflections of the swimming pool in her sunglasses. “So George is back. Are you going to confront him about the date rape?”

I stammered, thinking how to answer her. Date rape was a new term then, one people sometimes misused. I wanted to remind Beth of this but wasn’t sure what that would say about me.

“I consented,” I said.

“He hurt you. You cried about it.”

“Look,” I said, “It was weird. Maybe a little scary. But he was still George. He was probably working something out, probably mad at me because being gay is complicated. His life would be easier if he could have a girlfriend and want to have sex with her.”

“Are you worried about HIV?” she asked.

“There was a condom,” I said.

She nodded.

I laughed and she asked me why.

“He wants something easier and sweeter,” I said, “But it never goes that way for him. I want something crazier and mostly I just have him, my gay boyfriend, for that.”

“Why are you so crazy about George?” she asked.

“You don’t have fun with him?”

“We’re going off to college,” she said. “He’s got to stay and finish up high school. Just don’t get all mopey again, being away from him. There are other crazy friends in the world.”

▪

SCOTT STARTED on a weird binge. He bought a Porsche. He bought outrageously expensive clothes. George was worried, but he was busy working at TGIFriday these days. George wanted to get serious about his GED, about college applications. Scott wasn’t being serious about anything.

One night George and Scott and I went out – Beth was working. The Porsche enveloped us in its vibration as Scott shifted us onto the expressway. I sat in the back surrounded by leather and watched George work his gorgeous lips on themselves.

We arrived at Scott’s house, one of those with the dramatic live oaks curving and contorting. His parents were out. He moved quickly through the living room and the dining room, all tasteful and Colonial, decidedly un-Miami. The style was like my own house, but bigger, with more money to back it.

Scott’s room was surprisingly small and sparse. A mirror, a green bedspread, a bulletin board without anything pinned to it. I wondered if his mom had cleared everything out when he was gone, then reappointed it on his return.

From his large closet he pulled out beautiful suit after button down after silk tie after Italian loafer.

“Custom-tailored, anyone?” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. But there was something glassy in his eye, something hollow in his voice.

I couldn’t read George. I watched him loll around, waiting for Scott to decide what to wear. I asked him if he was playing his music again, now that he was home. He grimaced, puffed out his lower lip.

“Don’t you miss it?” I asked and he shrugged.

There was a sound from inside the house, and Scott left his bedroom for a minute. He came back agitated, going to his window and cranking it open till the panes stuck out strained and perpendicular. He said, “My parents are back early.” George shot up from the bed. “Sorry to do this,” Scott said, as he popped the screen out of the window. George was already squeezing himself under the bottom pane. “I’ll meet you at the usual place,” he told George. I was next, slipping out onto the grass, my heart pounding. George took my hand and we ran fast across the back lawn, through a sparse patch of hedge, clinking through a garden gate. First a Doberman, then a beagle, then a German shepherd, a relay of them behind fences, mad with teeth and spittle. A light went on at the window as we passed, a face appeared and I gasped, George yanking me along faster. We crouched and ran along a stand of hibiscus bushes. And all at once we were on another sidewalk, walking calmly as if we’d gotten there in a conventional way.  

I was seized by a fit of nervous laughter.

“What a blast!” I said. I threw my arms around George. My heart pounding was the best feeling I’d had in a long time. We pumped down the block, arms juiced and jangling with adrenaline. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

George looked at me, shaking his head with a grinning disapproval.  “You’re leaving soon anyway,” he said.

“Aw, but maybe I should stay,” I said. “Maybe you guys need me.”

I’d take a year off before college, I thought, overcome with a love for Miami, for Scott and George and running around crazy, for all of it.

He pulled me to him too hard, crushing my shoulders. Then he turned me to face him, and I felt the terrible grip of his fingers. “It’s not fun, always running away. It’s not exciting or glamorous.” His eyes on my face were like cruel judgement, draining out all the pleasure from minutes before. “It’s not fun. It sucks.”

Back in my bedroom that night I tried to understand his scold. It was true there was something perverted, about wanting, from my easy vantage point, the kind of drama those boys had. But then I looked around my room – the dusty Thespian trophies, the same ruffled bedspread from when my mom had helped me redecorate for my eighth birthday, the photo collage of me and George and Beth and Scott and all the other minor character friends. George might have a point about me living by proxy, but there was no harm enjoying all of this before I had to pack it in and go. There was one thing I’d learned, I thought, with a new conviction. I would never come back. I was thinking about George and Joe at the Mayfair, back from Chicago and acting like there wasn’t defeat in that. But no matter how clumsily you’d performed, once you had exited childhood, you had to stay offstage. Once I was gone, I would be gone.

▪

I’D BIKED WITH Beth to the beach that first day of summer break, and the phone was ringing when I opened the front door. My skin was still tight from the sun, my hair stringy from the wind. It was Beth again, saying George had been trying to reach me, that there was bad news. I looked at the blinking red of the answering machine, the signal that I’d missed him.

Scott was dead, she told me. His father had discovered him, had gone down the hall toward a sudden noise. Minutes before they’d been watching TV together. Scott was in a corner on the floor, dressed in his new Versace clothes, a brand new gun between his legs, the mess on the wall and mirror behind him.

I couldn’t get George on the phone – it rang and rang. I drove by his house but didn’t see his car. Finally I found him at TGIFriday’s.

His skin was sickly like putty, his eyes darting, crazy. He bongoed his hands on the hostess stand, a creepily light gesture, and told me to meet him outside.

Then George in the TGIF parking lot – George’s big head and face now red and wet with tears on my shoulder – how I tried to be everything to him then, telling him like a mother that he should not be working his shift, that he should let himself break down. Kissing his tears away and wishing we could run away from everything the way he and Scott had run.

They never should have come back, I kept thinking. If only they hadn’t come back.

George looked at me, rubbed rough at his eyes, and said he had to get back to work.

▪

IF THERE WAS a funeral, it came and went without me and Beth. We couldn’t find a listing; we couldn’t track down George on the phone or otherwise. And I tried, as desperate as ever to connect with George.

And then on one of my many passes by his house, he was outside. He was putting his flute and an antique typewriter in the trunk. He told me he was selling them. “Might as well,” he said. He had found a dealer who wanted them.

He turned to the house, his long legs taking him through the door to retrieve another lacquered treasure. We were in his room now, face to face and I was actually shaking him, trying to get him to leave the typewriter alone. “Stop! You can’t do this. Not now.”

I told him of my plan, now so clear, now that I’d tracked him down.  I would defer college for a year, stay and take care of him, be with him. “You need me. I’m your ex-girlfriend. No one knows you like I do.”

He laughed bitterly, turned from me, his motions calm as he shut the wooden case on the Underwood. “My ex-girlfriend?” He looked at me. “What are you talking about?”

“George,” I said, the ache spreading like lead through me. I pulled his face to mine, tried to force his lips into the same powerful freedom of all the kisses we’d once had. He pushed me off him.

“I can’t leave you after Scott left you,” I said.

“Grow up,” he said, his voice flat. “This isn’t some soap opera.”

I couldn’t believe his coldness. I’d finally gotten to him and he was being cruel. “It’s like the sex in the car,” I said. “You think I can’t understand. But you’re wrong about me.”

“About you?  None of this is about you.”

“I’m here aren’t I? I’ve always been right here.”

“Yeah, safe on the sidelines. You know? Fall in love and get hurt already,” he demanded. “Instead of watching the movie of my life.”

“I loved Andy and that ended. That hurt,” I said.

 George scoffed. “Long distance – yeah, that’s perfect for you.”

“It wasn’t perfect, but –”

“If you want to be heartbroken so bad, just. Don’t be heartbroken on my behalf.”

He stalked to the door, the heavy typewriter at the end of his straight arms. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was scanning the room, looking for something else to get rid of.

“George,” I went to him. “I’m here,” I said.

For a moment his eyes cleared for me, and I saw the openness and confusion and sadness, his full possession of those feelings, the kind of possession I would finally learn in years to come, in part because I’d had his example.

But then his eyes were barriers again, black and glossy. “And I’m not,” he said.

He left the doorway. I stood in his room, thinking he would come back and tell me he was sorry, thinking we could collapse into each other with the sadness and wonder of the world. But he didn’t come. I’d already seen him for the very last time. When I went to the front door he was inside his car, it was rolling away.

▪ ▪ ▪

Jennifer Bannan’s latest short story collection, Tamiami Trail: Miami Stories, released in the fall of 2025 from Carnegie Mellon University Press, was included in “The Best Southern Books of October 2025” at the Southern Review of Books, has received excellent reviews in The Library Journal and Foreward Reviews, and was named a finalist in the Eyelands International Awards. More about the author is available at jenniferbannan.com. Read the author’s commentary on her story.

journal | team | miscellany | podcast | home