Selected Work
Milk Teeth
(Chapter 10 Excerpt)
Mount Auburn Cemetery looked like an arboretum, where pale headstones sprang up uninvited like new teeth. I’d always imagined cemeteries mapped like New York streets, easy to navigate with numbered rows and organized lines. But this was mapped more like Boston. Tombstones scattered with no organized pattern, curving with the hillside. It was easy to get lost.
The roads narrowed the deeper we drove in, petals and pollen swirling over the windshield. A gray stone chapel rose ahead of us, tall spires reaching upward. I wondered if Mom liked this cemetery.
Boston Sports radio rang over the speakers, Dennis & Callahan discussing the upcoming Patriots season. A bouquet of zinnia rested in my lap. I glanced at Opung in the sideview mirror, her eyes looking out the window.
“So I had an idea,” I said, casually.
“Yeah?” Dad turned down the volume.
“I know Opung’s going back at the end of summer. But I was thinking we could extend her visa? So she could stay longer.”
He hesitated. “She said she has to go back.”
“She said that or you did?” I looked out the window. “Let’s ask her right now.”
“Gigi—”
“Opung,” I said. “Do you want to stay in America?”
The car bumped over a divot.
“Oh… Opung no can.”
I tightened my grip on the seat belt. “Why not?”
Dad replied, “Gigi.”
“You don’t want to stay with us?”
“Opung come back,” she said quietly.
I glanced at her through the sideview mirror. “For Christmas?”
“Ya.”
“Promise?” I asked.
“Promise.”
Dad locked eyes with her briefly in the rearview mirror before slowing the car to a stop. His thumb pushed the volume back up, radio filling the space where conversation would be.
After Winter
(Chapter 2 Excerpt)
Summer stood so quickly the chair almost tipped backward. She turned the bag upside down. Notebooks, pencils, sticky notes, and Nature Valley bar crumbs rained down across her desk.
She grabbed her keys and opened the door.
But there was Billie Bloom, standing in the doorway, reading her pages. She looked up.
“It’s a little long for act one,” Billie said.
“How do you know where I live?”
She shrugged. “I asked around.”
“Asked who?” Summer said. “And why do you have my script?” Summer yanked it out from her hands.
"You left it in Annenberg.”
“This is an invasion of privacy,” Summer snapped.
Billie let out a faint laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m serious. These pages weren’t yours to look at,” Summer said. “I don’t even know what it means yet.”
“Then we will figure out what they mean.”
“We?”
“We should do this together.”
“Do what together?”
“Finish this.”
Summer let out an amused sound she immediately hated.
Billie’s eyes softened. “I think this could be a movie.”