I wake up and fly into a taxi. I smile at the people in the elevator, rising up to the 18th floor. The girl at the door asks how I�m feeling, and I say great. I wear fancy clothes and answer telephones and write letters and rush around and smile a lot. I examine stock options and look into portfolios and new mutual funds and unlock safes and read confidential documents. At 1 pm, he asks what I�m doing for lunch, would I like to go out? No thanks, I�m having lunch with the girls. In the lunchroom I use a silver knife to cut a ripe green avocado into small slices while she toasts the tortillas. I drink water and we sit around the lunch table and have a party and everyone brings something and the table is covered in the bright colors of red pico de gallo and green peppers and grated mozzarella cheese. We sit around the table talking and I laugh so hard there are tears in my eyes and she asks everyone to stop because she�s laughing so hard her stomach hurts. He rushes for a camera and we smile for the photographs. He starts taking pictures of just me. At first I smile, then I just cover my face with my hands.

Scene 2

The air is cold. The windows are down, and the bob dylan songs being emitted from the dashboard remind me I�m not sixteen anymore. I�m not sixteen anymore, and sometimes with you I forget. With you I forget. I smile in the dark. I think of the simile �like a bullet� because it feels like we are flying. The night is black, and the lights glow, fluorescent flickers on the whitewash walls painted with advertisements in the tiny pueblos we are moving through. The mountains are outlined in the distance, I find myself singing along to like a rolling stone, and the road starts to curve. I think, he�s very smart, someone should tell him how smart he really is. I start thinking about chemical reactions in his brain and look over at him gripping the steering wheel. I think about my room and midnight and him as a ghost wandering through my house. Or eating standing up and sitting down with shaking hands. I think about writing these scenes in a creative nonfiction class, writing memoirs of these memories. Tell these stories because they have affected me. I want to write it all in detail, but I think he will be judged and thought of as something that he�s not, and I don�t want that. In the end it comes down to chemicals, and I can�t stop thinking it�s not his fault. Can we roll down the windows, she asks, and we do and I smell the familiarity of cigarette smoke as the wind carries it through the car.

Scene 3

I dream of this, I tell her, and she laughs as I spread my arms out and breathe in deep. Just look at this, we�re living in paradise. In the morning I spill down the stairs I am used to, I think of the words �spilling down mango steps� and all the words I have written about this place come to me in a flash. It smells like fresh grass and mangoes and the ocean. At the beach I wear next to nothing and they watch me and I dive through the waves and tumble in the sand. I am tan and happy. Later in the afternoon, I run to the end of the beach and my shoes fill with water and my toes squish in my socks and the music spills into my ears singing about blue skies, led zeppelin�s the ocean, and it couldn�t be more appropriate. Things have turned out ok, I think of him and his music and am glad for everything has happened, all of it. At night the air conditioner shudders softly and he shifts and the electricity flickers and the air turns off and I fall asleep and I wake up and it�s hot and he says, hey katie, you up? We sit outside in the cool air and sip red wine from cold glasses. I wear my duke sweatshirt and they talk about people I don�t know and then people I do know, and I speak spanish and hold my legs up to my chest and look at the stars and the ocean on one level plane, and listen to everything moving.

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