wildscape. literary journal

Freshman
by Kait Quinn

You wake in a 1997 L-Series Saturn, your skin the same shade
of sea green, swing open the creaky door just in time
to vomit vodka like acid onto asphalt. Lucky you

mixed with Sprite. Lucky there's nothing in your concave
belly to stain the white of your eighth grade cheer

uniform, hugging you now in all the places it sagged
at thirteen. Lucky you eventually bud breasts, still less
than a handful but dazing boys like headlights all the same.

They all want the drunk cheerleader at the Halloween party
except for the boy you want. The boy you fucked over—

couldn't keep your teeth off Chad's lip ring—but who still carries you,
crouched like a drunken Gollum in the backyard, to the bathroom
you can't puke in. That's what Saturns and asphalt and dorm room

trash cans are for. But back to boys. Back to making out at red lights
in Calvin's El Camino. Waking the guys crashed on the living room

floor to a symphony of bed springs in the morning. And maybe you
shouldn't have fucked John in the barn, too drunk on Mountain Dew
and Crown to remember a condom until he’s already inside you—bless

Jess for petting the horses and swelling like a cherry and getting you out
of there. You gotta get out of there! You gotta stop fucking Devin—

you have a boyfriend now! But until it's official, you fall asleep to Young
Frankenstein in his bed, let him take you from behind on his cracked
leather couch, wash your thighs in the shower, buy you blueberry

pancakes at the diner before dropping you off damp haired after dawn.
And soon you'll be nineteen. Soon you'll wear invisible bruises

from the boyfriend you stopped fucking Devin for. Soon
you'll carry your heart more like a splatter than a muscle. He'll cheat,
and you'll never want him more, still more when he leaves you

for another girl. Until then, it’s sex in the bathroom at a sophomore's house
party, under the porch's burnt-out bulb, interrupted by his roommates

on the balcony. And it's arm rests up in the movie theater, cigarettes
and "Crystal Baller" in the black Tacoma, one hand on the steering
wheel, one under your sweater. And look how you've grown!—

with your boyfriend, condoms, and monogamy! Such a long way
from drunken hookups, bad mixers, puking on a random street

in the Austin suburbs—until the truck screeches to collision, wraps
itself around a pole, spews black and blue across your bones like bile
on the blacktop, as if to ask: oh, honey, have you?

about the author // Kait Quinn