We knock – softly – on her bedroom door papered with posters Food Not Bombs People of Color Unite and crack it open – carefully – as if not to detonate an explosive in some dark corner. All winter the house has been on tiptoe as she trailed clouds behind her, wearing on her back like a Molotov cocktail the faintest intimations of self-annihilation. We look past the not-the-prom dress dumped across a chair, along with the thrift-store bell bottoms, black with a butterfly spread across the butt, the purple Chucks with the holes in the toes, the shiny black waitstaff shoes. We step around the detritus on the floor – horn mutes, broken choker, incense burner, empty Zoloft bottle, odd socks, what’s this? a kindergarten keepsake – the melamine plate she’d painted a rainbow on – and fondue forks, guitar picks, sidewalk chalk, a nose ring, a scattering of Tampax. We trip over the literary heap Of Mice and Men (in tatters) The Student’s Bible (stuck with sticky notes) Das Kapital (all underlined) How It All Vegan! (soy fingerprints) We peer behind the closet door scarred with manifestos and poetic whimpers and there in the back in the dark curled in a ball like a small terrified hedgehog bristling with spikes – tongue bolt and safety-pin earrings and black fingernails and white-girl dreads – there in the dark she waits to be coaxed inch by inch back into the daylight
