STORYBOUND: Marian Crotty

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On top of the two weekly piano lessons and finger yoga, I give my son Smarty Pants Vitamins to support his brain health because what I'm supposed to say, it's not a competition. Of course, it's a f***ing competition. Choose Smarty Pants Vitamins to support your kid's brain health and help them master whatever their chopsticks may be. Shop on Amazon SmartyPantsVitamins.com or at Target today. Man, first love. What a feeling. That instant crush. That sudden heartbreak. It's crippling. Whether you're a teenager in your 20s, hell, even in your 30s, you'll get your heart broken. It's good to remember that heartbreak is temporary. With time, we heal, we move on. Summer turns to fall, turns to winter, turns to spring. I was thinking a lot about first love while putting this episode together. If you've got a long drive ahead of you or you're laying on the couch with your eyes closed, take a moment during these next 40 minutes to remember what that first heartbreak was like for you. And remember, you're not alone. Welcome back, everyone. This week we have Mary and Crottie on the show. Living in Baltimore as an assistant professor, writing at Loyola University, Maryland, and an assistant editor at the Common, Mary and Crottie short stories have appeared in literary journals such as The Southern Review, The Kenyan Review, and The Alaska Quarterly Review. With her personal essays appearing in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, The New England Review, and Guernica. Her first book, What Counts Is Love, was published with the University of Iowa, winning their Short Fiction John Simmons Award. The book was a semi-finalist for the Penn Robert W. Bingham Prize, received the Janet Hydinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American woman. She will be reading her short story, Halloween, accompanied by an original storybound remix with my son, The Doctor. Hi, I'm Mary and Crottie. I am going to be reading Halloween for the Storybound Podcast. Welcome to Storybound, presented by Lit Hub Radio in the Pod Glomerate. I'm your host, Jude Brewer. Have you ever been in love, but didn't know how to express it? Well, that's the feeling we're about to explore. As our narrator is nursing her broken heart over a summer with her friend and co-worker, Erica. My grandmother had fucked up ideas about love. This was something anyone who had spent about five minutes with her understood. She had been married three times, once to my grandfather, and twice to a guy named David, who I remember as a quiet, gray bearded man with a motorcycle. But who had also broken into Jan's duplex and set fire to the Ratan patio set, she'd always kept in her sunroom. When I asked if she'd been afraid of this guy, she shrugged. Sure, sometimes. In her mind, love was an undertaking that required constant vigilance and bravery. And when she spoke about her own relationships, I often thought of a woman I had seen on YouTube, trying to explain why she had been raising the tiger cub that eventually mauled her. We loved each other, the woman said, "I don't expect anyone to understand." "And you're making me upset." But when it came to Erica, the girl who had recently broken my heart, after what admittedly was just one relatively chased summer together, Jan was my ideal audience. "Got to say!" Sympathetic, almost always available, and the only person in my life who thought that getting back together with Erica was both advisable and likely to happen. "You're beautiful," she would say, as if this settled the matter. "Look at you. This girl is obviously having cold feet. Maybe she's just not ready to be gay." The logical part of my brain, thought the more likely explanation was that Erica had only ever gotten together with me in the first place out of boredom and convenience. We had spent the summer working together at a frozen yogurt shop called Eotopia. And now that FSU was back for the fall semester, it embarrassed her to be with a high school student. Sometimes, though, in the midst of one of Jan's musings, I could almost convince myself that there had been a misunderstanding. And that if I could just show Erica I was a mature and attractive person, she would, if not see that she had made a mistake, at least consider making out with me in secret. "I like that you're romantic." When it comes to love, Jan said, "You shouldn't have regrets. I have regrets, and I can tell you it sucks. I never should have divorced your grandfather." It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were walking along a paved path through a leafy park on the east side of town. During the week, it was mostly used by dog walkers and runners. But now the playgrounds were crowded with little kids, and under one of the covered civilians, a family of loud, happy people were having a birthday cookout for someone named Bianca. Jan walked very fast, and we were both a little out of breath. She had told me this story many times. My grandfather was a decent and hardworking man, who, after years of Jan threatening divorce, every time he drank too much, our came home late from work, had finally called her bluff. As a result, her life had been lonely and difficult for the past 40 years. "If you have a chance to set things right," she said solemnly, "the least you can do is try." Jan was my dad's mom, but he, along with his two older sisters, had a strange relationship with her, partially because of the yelling and chaos from their childhoods, and partially because of what they called her "attention seeking tendencies." Buying quizz and art mixers and flat screen televisions for people she barely knew, walking out of my cousin Trent's high school graduation party because she felt ignored by his friends, requesting an apology from my aunt Kelly for not having been invited to visit her newborn twins in the NICU. In large groups, especially, she often made provocative statements inspired by daytime television, and the youthful co-worker she knew from the various crappy retail job she held. Maybe I'll go and get my stomach frozen, like I heard on Dr. Oz, or, "Now what do you think it would be like to be married to Kanye West?" My mom, though, who had only officially been Jan's daughter-in-law for about a year after I was born, invited her over to our house anytime there was a special occasion or holiday. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, birthdays. Jan had babysat when I was little, and my mom had no money for daycare, and so as far as she was concerned, Jan was family. When my mom's mother complained that she would like just one family-only holiday, my mom would smile sweetly and tell her she was welcome to visit another time. That my mom would let herself flop on the couch with a glass of wine and shake her head. About a cayenne lemon water diet, Jan was trying for unspecified reasons, or a horror costume involving a fake dead baby that she'd worn to a children's Halloween party. "My God," she would say. "What do you think goes on in her head to make her act that way?" That fall, my grandmother was living in a new and supposedly high-end apartment complex that came with a gym, a garage parking space. A gated entry that required a code after 9 p.m., and a 25-yard outdoor swimming pool that was heated in the winter and where we spent at least two evenings a week together that fall. I was avoiding my mom's boyfriend. Jan was trying to distract herself from the job she'd recently lost at Nordstrom, and her fear that in her 70s she was too old to get hired anywhere else. The other residents were almost all college students and young professionals with seemingly endless amounts of time to splash around in the pool half-naked, drinking beer out of thermoses and playing rowdy games of follyball. But that didn't stop Jan from doing her water exercises, which involved a wide-weighted belt she'd bought off QVC and looked kind of like moonwalking and kind of like a person feeling around in the dark for a lost object. I didn't have an exercise belt and so would borrow one of the apartment complex kickwords and glide along beside her while she gave me advice about Erica and listened to me complain about my mother's boyfriend, who all of a sudden after two years of dating my mom seemed to be around constantly. His name was Pete and he was a social worker at the hospital where she worked. He was a thin, very pale man with wispy yellowish hair and wire-framed glasses that were always plucked with crime. He was in his early 50s about a decade older than she was and divorced with two kids in college. He was relentlessly polite to me and kind to my mother and I hated him. He's too skinny, I would say, and have you heard the way he coughs in another 10 years she's going to be taking care of him? I also didn't like the way he ate too quickly and with appreciative homosexual sounds, how he was always fiddling with his beard, how every single one of his hobbies, nature walks, invasive plant removal, pickleball, historical biographies seem like contests in with standing boredom. Jan didn't seem to have any issues with Pete, though I thought she usually gave men too much credit, including my father, who had followed a woman to Charlotte when I was two, and been absent for most of my childhood. But she let me complain and would admit at least that his clothes were terrible, clunky orthotics, worn with tall white athletic socks, multiple colors of pleated chinos and the same unflattering style. That's fixable though, Jan would say. If your mom wants to put in the work, men are just like that, they always need a lot of help. My mother, along with her sister, her friends, Jan, basically every other woman we knew, who was over 35, seemed to think that she was the lucky one to find Pete, a single employed guy who thanked her for all of the nice things she did for him and who didn't mind that she had just turned 40. The fact that I was the only one who seemed to notice that she was about a thousand times better looking than he was, or that she was always the one cooking dinner, filled me with a sense of righteous indignation. Though on some level I knew that no matter who she dated, I would see him as a trespasser. As for Erica, Jan's main advice was to wear revealing outfits and to behave as if my life without her was surprising and wonderful. I should be friendly in an easy, casual way that showed I didn't meet her and I certainly shouldn't ask her to go out with me again. Of course not, I said, though in fact I had called and texted Erica so many times in the past two weeks begging her to reconsider that she had blocked me on social media and was now switching shifts at Eotopia to avoid me. I understood exactly how pathetic this made me look since it was approximately the same way that my ex-boyfriend AJ had reacted when I'd finally broken up with him in July after I'd already been messing around with Erica for two months. But I was having trouble controlling myself. Being around Erica electrified my skin, my body, the air in the room. Didn't this mean something? When do you work together again? Jan said, "Swinting up at me while she bobbed along the deep end." Find out and look good that day. Okay, and remember, easy, breezy, lemon squeezy. What? You don't know that one? Customer service 101. If you feel yourself getting moody or sentimental, you just chant that in your head and it'll get you back on track. The music in this episode was sampled from the song "Stirty Ass Table" by my son, the doctor, and now for a quick commercial break. Exama isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebglis. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 and 10 people taking Ebglis, a cheek, itch, relief, and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebglis. Before starting Ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for a real relief? Ask your doctor about Ebglis and visit ebglis.lyli.com or call 1-800-lyli.rx or 1-800-545-5979. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The Secure Messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at WhatsApp.com 13. Adjective. You to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained, one who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions. They know the rules but behave as if they do not exist. You team. The new fragrance by Mimu. Defined by you. You are listening to Storybound, with Mary and Kratty and my son, the doctor. And now we return from our break. The next time I was supposed to work with Erica, she got her shift covered. But I saw her again the following Friday night. She worked the back cash register by the drive-through. And I worked up front with the face-to-face customers. Because of the three-for-one, decadent shakes promotion, which I was pretty sure Gina, the owner, was losing money on. We were slammed. Families with kids, college students, a little-leaf baseball team, along with about a dozen of their parents and coaches. There wasn't much I could do to look nicer. We all had to wear latex gloves, khaki aprons, and teal polo shirts with a company logo on the pocket. Yotopia, and a swirl of pink yogurt that looked like smoke rising out of a chunk of kiwi. But I thought about Jan's advice and tried to seem happy and outgoing. Willing the customers wasn't too complicated. You just smiled at their kids and offered them free samples. But being within a few feet of Erica made me queasy and stupid. There was her dark hair tucked behind her ears, her pink slightly puffy lips, the tiny circle tattooed on the inside of her wrist. While I made decadent shakes and parfaits and refilled the yogurt machine, my head swam with all the possible things I could say to her. But then, whenever there was a brief lag between customers, I wasted it. Finally, around 8.30, things slowed down, and we both found ourselves up front, sneaking crushed up candy bars from the bins of toppings, with tasting spoons and doing just enough side work to look busy. I was sweeping, she was wiping down tables. I knew that if I didn't say something soon, I'd miss my chance. Hey, can I ask you something? I said finally. She looked up at me from the plastic shield over the display freezer that she was wiping down with Windex. Okay. I could tell she thought I was going to ask why she didn't love me or why, given her obvious chemistry, she hadn't actually slept with me. But the truth was, I hadn't yet decided what I was going to say. I thought about apologizing for harassing her or suggesting friendship. I wanted to work St. George Island into the conversation so she remembered the afternoon we spent there with our co-workers. The two of us lying side by side on a beach blanket, nearly touching, making each other crazy until we'd snuck away to a changing room in the women's bathroom, wet sand everywhere, shivering out of our bikini tops. Then I thought of Jan chanting easy breezy lemon squeezy and took a different tack. Why do you think there were five cherry flavored skittles in the urinal? Erica squinted at me a little but her face softened and I could see that she was going to play along. How do you know they were cherry flavored? Aren't the red ones always cherry? Yeah, she said maybe. And then a few minutes later, she nodded at the tip jar out front, which we would split at the end of the night and told me I was on a roll. "Nice work jewels," she said, "the people love you." I shrugged. Decadent shakes special. Pretty soon after that, we hit another rush and it stayed too busy to say much else to each other. But something had shifted between us. The ice had broken and though things weren't exactly normal again, Erica no longer seemed like she wanted to avoid me. When I reported back to Jan later that week, she said, "Of course it worked. Why wouldn't it've worked?" After that Friday night, Erica stopped giving away so many for shifts. And for the next month or so, I got to see her two sometimes three times a week. It was my senior year and I was busy with the AP math and science classes that I'd taken in hopes of getting a scholarship to one of the liberal arts schools in cold and fortunate cities like Grinnell, Iowa, Enrichment, Indiana, where my guidance counselor thought other students might not want to go. Working, especially when Erica was there, began to feel like a break from worrying about the future. "Where would I go to college? How would I pay for it? What would my life be like if, when, I went away to school and my mom and Pete moved in together?" His house was nicer than ours. A creaky two bedroom house buried under a thicket of live oaks and pollen that always smelled damp. He lived on the very edge of Beton Hills, which was the fanciest neighborhood in Tallahassee, and a small, bright ranch house with new counters and appliances, a slate roof and bright pink azaleas out front. But even though I knew it was baby-ish to feel this way, the thought of moving out of the house I'd grown up in made me want to cry. At work, though, all of this disappeared behind the swell of pop music in the rush of customers. When Erica was there, I tried to demonstrate how likable I could be, chatting and flirting with customers, smiling so hard my face hurt. At school, I barely spoke to anyone but my friend Paloma, and never managed to talk in class without my entire chest and face going hot and red. But at Utopia, no one seemed to guess that this friendly, confident person was a lie, that you could just decide to be a different person, that you didn't have to actually change to convince people, felt like a revelation. In the laws between customers, Erica told me about how her parents were pressuring her to major in marketing instead of studio art. Or, at the very least, to pursue an internship they'd found at an insurance company through one of their South Florida accountant friends. She thought this was selling out, but she was worried about being broke. Usually, I didn't add too much about my life, because it was boring, and because I didn't want to say anything that would remind her that I was in high school. But I did sometimes talk about AJ, who was eager for me to admit I was bisexual. I think he thinks me being gay makes him a virgin or something, I said one day. He's seriously freaking out about it. I tried to make it seem like our relationship hadn't mattered, but I knew this wasn't true. There had been three years of inside jokes, flash drives of indie music slipped into each other's bookpegs. He had told me that he'd peed his bed until he was five, that his father had made him quit soccer because he was slower than the other kids, too embarrassing to watch. And I told him that I collected photos from social media of my dad, who, according to his wife's page, was a good father to his new family in North Carolina, but just not to me. AJ and I had made out and given each other orgasms and laid naked in his bedroom many times before the spring of our junior year, when we'd finally had sex. And all of this, too, had seemed like easy, uncomplicated happiness. Now, though, in comparison to Erica, nothing with AJ felt real. Well, it's probably hard for him, she said, but that doesn't mean you have to be the one to listen. By October, the awkwardness between me and Erica had all but gone away, but it was also making me crazy to be around her. My friend Paloma thought I should quit my job and concentrate and get into a good liberal arts school, which would undoubtedly be filled with lesbians who were even hotter and cooler than Erica. Jan said I should make up another girl who had a crush on me and look for reasons to casually touch Erica or invade her space. "Does that actually work?" "Oh, yes," she said. "Hellie's done men. Remember Gabriel?" "No." "Yes, you do. He looked like a chubby, George Clooney. Dark hair and a beard. We almost got married." I fixed his tie on a Tuesday, and by Saturday, I had a date. I didn't remember him, but nodded. I wasn't fully convinced about this plan, but I also knew that Froyo's season was coming to a close, and that Gina would probably soon stop scheduling two people on weekdays. The next time I saw Erica, I started a group chat with three of my classmates about chemistry homework, and Grin's stupidly at my phone, every time it lit up with a reply. Finally, after about two hours, she asked what was happening. "Nothing," I said. "Probably nothing." I met someone at Lake Ella, and now she's texting me. Erica smiled in a way that seemed a little forced. She wants to teach me how to skateboard. "Are you going to go?" "Maybe." "Is she cute?" My face burned. I wasn't used to making things up, and it felt dangerous and unsavory. It was hard to believe the lie wasn't obvious. I looked down at the tile floor between us, sticky with dried, pools of frozen yogurt, and covered with napkins, and little bits of candy, nuts, and fruit smashed into the grout. "Good for you, Julie," she said, "text her back." "Maybe," I said, "I don't know if I feel like it." Two hours later, when the store closed, I found Erica in the supply closet of tall wire shelves where we stocked the dry goods and paper products, reaching for a box of latex gloves. When I slid behind her, I put my hand on her back and asked her to throw down a box of paper towels. Except for a dull amber light bulb, the closet was dark. "I already changed those," she said, "both bathrooms in the kitchen." "Okay, thanks," I said, "but I didn't move my hand." "Also you shouldn't touch me like that." I stepped back and she turned to face me. There wasn't much space in the supply closet, and we were maybe a foot apart. She had taken off her polo shirt and was now wearing an FSU t-shirt, cut up into a tank top that showed the sides of a black sports bra. "I'm sorry," I said. But then she turned toward me and brushed my hair away from my face with both hands, and then we were kissing, fast and hard, more breathless than it had been before. I slid my hands under her shirt and against her back. She pulled me against her and grabbed my butt. I thought, "If she tries to take off my clothes right here, I will let her." But then we heard Gina arrived to count the money and lock up an Erica step back. I thought she was going to tell me she regretted it, that she made a mistake, but instead she squeezed my hand. Let's clean up and get out of here, okay? The next half hour of sidewalk was a slow, delicious ache. Erica, looking over at me, bloodthrumming in my ears. It was happening finally. The two of us, though I wasn't exactly sure what it was. All summer, she treated me more gently and carefully than I wanted. We'd make out, rolled around half naked, but if I reached for her pants, she'd stop me. Tonight, though, things felt different. Was it really possible that Jan knew how to make someone fall for you? After work, I followed her outside to the parking lot of the strip mall, walked in step with her without talking. The door to the laundromat, chewed doors down, was open, and the smell of bleach, wafted out onto the sidewalk. The Indian food market had closed for the night, but still had a neon flamingo in the window, advertising Florida lottery tickets. At the corner by a defunct car wash, cars slowed for a stoplight. "When we got to my son bleached Corolla," I said. "Are you going to take me somewhere?" "Is that what you want?" "Yes." She looked at me for what felt like a long time. "Okay," she said finally, "I'm texting you the address." She'd left the sub-lease where she'd spent the summer and was now living in a gray shotgun house on the other side of town, with little potted plants everywhere, and a brown leather furniture set I'd never seen before. The kitchen and living room were dark, but I could hear music behind a closed door in the other bedroom. Erica gave me a beer and told me to wait in the living room while she changed her sheets, and I texted my mom that I was hanging out with a friend and would be home late. It wasn't even a lie, exactly, but my mom didn't like Erica, and I felt bad for not telling her the whole truth. A few minutes later, Erica appeared in the archway between the living room and the hallway, and I followed her back to her room, which was painted electric blue and covered in small framed art prints. I took off my shirt first and kissed her, and then we were tangled on her bed's bread and her underwear under her ceiling fan. She kissed me and ran her hands along my body. "You're shivering," she said. "Are you cold?" "No." I felt impatient and dizzy. She had leaned away from me and was propped up on an elbow. "We don't have to do anything else," she said. "You know that, right?" I pulled her on top of me, slid off my underwear. "Come on," I said, "stop talking." The rest was a blur of nerves in adrenaline, until we were done, and I was lying in the crook of her arm, will link the her body against mine, and times slowed down, and I felt like I was floating. If nothing else happened between us, I knew that this moment was enough. The music you're hearing in this episode was sampled from Daniel Ferdell. They dreamed by day and Lionel Quick, and now for our final break. Love espresso, drip coffee, and cold brew with the Ninja Lux Cafe. If you can crave it, you can brew it. Espresso, balance, drip coffee, rich. Cold brew in a flash. With barista assist technology, you brew with no stress and no guesswork, and make perfect silky microphone hands-free from dairy or plant-based milks. Shopped in Ninja Lux Cafe at NinjaKitchen.com. A massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, especially these days. Eight different settings, adjustable intensity, plus it's heated, and it just feels so good. Yes, a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, but when it can come with a car. Suddenly, it seems quite practical. The all-new 2025 Volkswagen Tiguan, packed with premium features, like available massaging front seats, that only feels extravagant. You are listening to storybound, with Marion Cratty. And now we return for our final chapter. That Monday afternoon, she texted to say that she'd gotten the marketing internship. She was quitting Yotopia, and didn't want me to hear about it from someone else. Also, she'd had a good time with me on Friday, but didn't think we should do it again. Hopefully, I understood. Not really, I wrote back. Are you mad? She texted. No. Do you regret it? No, do you? The gray text bubbles of ellipses appeared and disappeared. Then she texted back. No. Although I wanted more than anything to guilt her into seeing me again, I knew that I'd only gotten to have sex with her in the first place by playing it cool. Hopefully, I'll see you around, I guess. I wrote back. Maybe we can be friends. To this, Erica responded almost immediately that she was sorry, but no. She couldn't be my friend. Although she wished me well. Stupidly, maybe. I felt fine. Maybe even good. I had found someone perfect, and she had slept with me. The fact that she had done so against her better judgment just proved that she was attracted to me in the same combustible way I felt for her. An attraction like that seemed rare and true, a tugging magnet that couldn't easily be ignored. Eventually, maybe in a year, maybe in several years, it seemed possible we'd find our way back to each other. Less than a week later, though, I was at Utopia when she stopped by to drop off her polo shirts and aprons. She was wearing tight jeans and a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves, showing off a sick banded watch she always wore. Just the way she walked made my stomach swish. It was midday on a Monday, but I had to day off for parent-teacher conferences, and I could see that Erica was startled to see me. She waved and then walked over to Gina, who was doing paperwork at one of the tables out front. I could make out the gist of their conversation. Good luck at the internship. Come back if you ever need a job. Erica had worked there for two years, and Gina genuinely seemed sad to see her go. Then she peered out the window at Erica's car, where a pretty girl and mirrored sunglasses leaned against the bumper. Is that cat? Erica nodded. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but my heart was pounding. Cat was Erica's ex-girlfriend, her first true love. And now it seemed that they were back together. Gina knocked on the window, cat waved. Gina motioned for her to come in, and she put her phone in her back pocket and walked toward us. She was wearing very short jean shorts with the pockets hanging out under the fringe, cowboy boots. She was thin, but curvy, with long, shiny brown hair, big boobs, smooth, muscular legs. I took a drive-through order, and when it came back to get the frozen yogurt, Gina was behind the counter, making two chocolate vanilla swirl cones. Cat was sitting across from Erica. Legs stretched out under Erica's chair. And Erica was talking to her, but also looking up at me, watching me in a deliberate way that was supposed to communicate something. That she was sorry, that she hadn't meant for me to see her with Cat. It was a guilty, pittying look, and I pretended not to notice. Gina handed them the cones, and then the three of them chatted for another 10 minutes before Cat and Erica stood up with their half finished cones and left. They were walking across the parking lot, side by side, close, but not touching, laughing about something. And all of a sudden, I understood. Cat might have spent the summer elsewhere, but there had been no breakup. All along, all spring, all summer, while I had been falling in love with Erica, they had been together. That front door is covered in dog drool, Gina said. It needs to get wiped down. Paloma said that Erica was an asshole, who deserved no more of my time or attention. And that if I couldn't stop myself from thinking about her, I should make a list of her flaws. This was what she'd done with her ex-boyfriend Christian, and now she barely thought about him at all. I can't think of anything. I said, "Everything's supposedly bad about her I like." She lied to you. She's 20 and into a 17-year-old. She has a girlfriend and a dumb haircut. She's not that good at art. Okay, I said, "Please stop." We were at school, sitting on a brick wall outside the cafeteria eating lunch. The summer heat and humidity was finally giving way to fall. Across the lawn, a plastic bag sailed in the breeze. Paloma took a bite of her sandwich, and then lifted her sunglasses and squinted at me. Do you feel sick, like physically? I nodded. All week it had felt like the flu, or how I imagined a drug withdrawal might feel. Naja, weakness, a lack of will to do anything, but sit very still and cry. "It gets better, I promise," she said. "You just can't let yourself contact her again, or the wound doesn't heal, okay?" Jan had gotten a job at a Papa Halloween costume store, and the lesser and mostly defunct Tallahassee Mall. So I was spending more time at home. Because of this, and because Paloma was sick of hearing about Erica, I told my mom about Erica one morning, while the two of us were folding laundry. I left out the part about us hooking up, as well, as my Jan inspired campaign to win her pack. "I know you didn't like her," I said. "So now I guess you'll say I told you so." "Oh, come on, Jules," she said gently, and put her hand on my knee. "You know I don't think that. This is why you've been sad?" I nodded. "I'm sorry, honey. I hate that this happened." To her credit, she didn't say anything else. She just hugged me and let me talk. That night, we got candy at Publix in ordered pizza and stayed up late, like old times, making fun of lifetime movies until we couldn't keep our eyes open. A couple days after that, though, Pete was over for dinner and said, "Out of nowhere, that breakups were hard, that even when he spoke to veterans and refugees and people who'd suffered great trauma, the issues they invariably came back to were about love." As humans were wired that way, he said, "Don't let anyone tell you a breakups not a big deal. If he hadn't looked so pleased with himself, I might have let it go." "I guess we don't have secrets anymore," I said to my mom. "So now I know." She looked like I had punched her, which I suppose was what I had intended. Though on some other level, I was just naming the truth. Pete was now her confidant and as much as she deserved to have him, I had once been her entire family and all she had ever seemed to need. On Halloween, I was with Jan, watching television and waiting for trick-or-treaters who probably were not going to come. When I got a text from another Eotopia employee inviting me to a Halloween party at Eric's house, I knew that I wasn't really invited, but I was still thinking about it. I shouldn't go, right? I said, "Probably that would be a horrible idea." "Yes," Jan said, "but I understand why you would want to go. But I shouldn't, right?" I repeated. She reached for a mini-snickers bar and then smiled at me. The way teachers did when they refused to give you the answer. "You're practically an adult, Jules," she said. "If you want to go, I'm not going to stop you." When I told her about Kat, she said that she'd never cheated, but had been the other woman a few times. And that she'd let things happen with David that should not have happened. That she was a person who understood how, in the name of love, you could do things that seemed foolish. David had been very jealous, had followed her around, gone through her purse. She'd been a cocktail waitress at the time, and he'd been convinced that she was flirting with other guys. I thought, but didn't say, that she'd been in her 60s at the time, but to me, this all sounded sad. Now she said, "You know about the furniture, right? About David trying to burn down my house and kill me?" I nodded, though I'd never heard it put that way. "Nobody knows this, and don't tell your mother," she said. But I was with him after that for almost a year. I sat very still and tried to look normal. On the television, a commercial for auto insurance gave way to a cartoon cat dancing in a tray of kitty litter. I don't regret it either, Jan said. To be with the person you want is heaven. It doesn't have to be the right circumstances to feel good. This was the opposite of what sounded true. The opposite of why my mom had told me she was with Pete. She loved him, yes. But the more important thing was that he was devoted and dependable, that he didn't jerk her around. I knew that Jan sounded crazy, and that it made no sense for me to crash a party, where a girl who had not only mistreated me, but also made it very clear she didn't want to see me anymore, would be hanging out with her girlfriend. But I also knew that I was going to go. I wanted to be in the same room with her, and I wanted this helpless feeling to go away. To imagine a lifetime of this feeling made me dizzy. I just want to be around her, I guess. That's all. Jan had a box of Halloween costumes. A few new ones she'd gotten on discount this fall. "Go for an hour," she said. "We're a mask, and don't say anything. I'll drive." Thank you to Marion Karate for reading her story, Halloween. You should get yourself a copy of her book, "What Counts As Love." It's available now at your favorite local bookseller. The song at the start of this episode was by the band "My Son, the Doctor." They got a fun sound, so go check them out on Spotify. Give them a follow. That's "My Son, the Doctor." Thanks to Loyola University, Maryland, for giving us a room to record, and thank you to Epidemic Sound. Our production assistant is Jordan Naren. Our Mixed Engineers Tim Carplus. Editing sound design, scoring, arranging, and hosting are done by me, Jude Brewer. Our executive producers are myself, Jeff Humbre of the Pod Glomerate, and Justin Alvarez of LitHub. You should find us on Instagram or on Twitter at StoryboundPod. And if you want to write to me directly, you can find me on Twitter at Jude Brewery. We love hearing from you. We hope you subscribe to the show. New episodes are released every Tuesday. Alright, we'll see you then. [Music] The Pod Glomerate. A Sonic Universe.