Audre & Bash Are Just Friends(4)

“Where is it?” hollered Audre over the bass.

Reshma cackled. “Bash Henry’s.”

“Not this kid again.”

“Right? I feel like if we say his name three times, he’ll appear.”

“Like Beetlejuice.”

“Sparrow would immediately die.”

“She better not—she owes me forty-five dollars.”

As the girls zigzagged their way through the galaxy-light-spotted clusters of kids living, laughing, and loving all over Reshma’s manse, Audre couldn’t help but think that she had felt safer in the bathroom. In there, therapizing Sparrow, she was in control. At the height of her powers. But out here, surrounded by unselfconscious people giving in to Having a Good Time just for the sake of having a good time? She felt like an alien. Suddenly, she was too aware of her hands. She felt scrawny. Out of step. Exposed (one of her least favorite feelings).

Parties, drinking, flirting, small talk? Not her skill set. And what even was the point of liking somebody when most high school couples break up before college, anyway? Even tougher, how did you resist the urge to debate when someone lightheartedly brought up a problematic conversation topic? Audre knew too much about human nature, was the thing. She knew why people acted the way they did, and what choices caused which outcomes. How do you let go and just… live… when you knew how every story ended?

Just then, she and Reshma stopped in their tracks. The hallway was blocked by Benji and Delia, two juniors high off edibles and hooking up on a beanbag. Benji was shirtless. Delia, a proud furry, had on bunny slippers and bunny ears.

“Ew! It’s barely 5 PM, have some fucking decorum,” Reshma hollered over the roaring bass.

Audre said nothing. She couldn’t. She stood there, frozen, staring at her phone. An icy, ominous chill ran down her spine. She’d just received a text. It was a version of the same one she’d gotten several times over the past month.


Ellison: pls answer. we deleted the video. pls don’t tell anyone what happened. no one saw the vid. ok?



“What’s wrong?” shouted Reshma.

Audre shook her head. Her chest was tightening; her throat was closing. A weird tingle stung her palms. Hot tears sprang to her eyes. She felt out of control.

She managed to holler, “Gotta run, I’ll text later,” and then hopped over the Delia-Benji pretzel, rushed downstairs, and ran out the back door into the late afternoon heat.

She didn’t stop till she was a block away. Then she sat down on the stoop of someone’s brownstone. With an anguished groan, she clenched her teeth and her fists, fighting off waves of nausea and rising hysteria.

No one saw it. No one saw it. No one saw it.





1, 2, 3, 4… THRIVE!

A Teen’s Rules for Flourishing on This Dying Planet


By Audre Mercy-Moore


Rule 1:

Always know when to leave a party.





CHAPTER 3


After several minutes, her breathing slowed to normal. With trembling hands, she deleted Ellison’s text. She always did.

And then she headed home. She lived a short ten-minute walk from Reshma’s—the same neighborhood—but today the walk seemed to take forever. It felt like she was walking in quicksand.

I’m in denial, she thought. A therapist in denial, so dumb. Do I really believe that if I ignore Ellison, he’ll go away? That if I delete the texts, they never existed? That’s not how life works.

When Audre opened her apartment door, her stomach sank—the same way it had for most of eleventh grade. There was barely a trace of the tidy home of her childhood. Now, there were boxes of books, bags of clothes, piles of kitchen tiles (why?), and baby furniture crowded in the living room. The clutter spilled into Audre’s bedroom, which had been demolished.

The disorder drove her insane. Every time she opened the door, she expected to walk into a home she recognized. The home she grew up in. Before it smelled like sawdust and sweaty construction guys. Before her bedroom had been demolished. Before The Goblin.

The Goblin was Audre’s secret name for her year-old sister. Everyone else called her Baby Alice.

She knew it was a terrible nickname—after all, her sister was just a blob, as harmless as an amoeba—but facts were facts, and Audre could trace the disintegration of her life directly back to The Goblin’s birth.

That’s when her mom, Eva, and her stepdad, Shane, decided that instead of moving to a bigger place, they’d split Audre’s bedroom in half and build a nursery (“since you’ll be off to college in a few years, anyway”). That’s when Audre became a displaced person, packing up her bedroom into plastic bags and moving to the couch. No door, no privacy, no good night’s sleep.

That’s also when Eva and Shane started planning a wedding. They’d already gotten hitched at city hall, but for some reason they decided they urgently wanted a big celebration.

Eva had a lifelong medical condition—daily migraines that sometimes required hospital stays. And Shane was a recovering alcoholic. He’d been sober for six years, but still. She’d read enough about alcoholism to know that sobriety was a daily battle.

They had real shit to deal with! So why complicate things with a baby, a wedding, and home repairs? Audre was glad her mom had found her person. It was a relief, not watching her juggle single parenthood, illness, and a big career alone. And Eva and Shane were both authors, so they “got” each other. Great, but sometimes Audre felt like the only adult in the family.