Stories Teens Love

The garage smelled of hot cedar and motor oil, heavy as a held breath. You were always there first: cross-legged on concrete, setting up the chessboard before I reached the driveway. I learned to play here, cicadas buzzing, my hand on the knight’s ridged head, the same grooves chipping my tooth when I flung it too high, trying to make you laugh. We could barely understand each other—your drawn-out Southern vowels, my clipped Mandarin consonants slipping between us. This was o

A red-eyed east now. I rend dreams of myself, chewing through their paper walls, my face is ceded in beautiful slivers. This silver-bellied plane, a wound I don’t rouse. I wake with the ache still in me, cabin lights flaring, cold dawn slinking down my throat. The day presses close: I move through and my chest is a room I keep trying to unlock, the door swollen and my hands already raw. Somewhere inside, a small animal waits, breathing in the dark. It cages in the shudder of

In a strange city, I’m given the news under the airport’s salt-white lights. The departures change above me: Newark, Denver. While a voice calls final boarding, I turn the words stupid in my mouth: Dingus David, Dead Dave, David dead. Grief conjugates in me in irregular infinities: a hallway at night, a wet match, the dead batteries we keep. Everywhere, the world rehearses disaster: the red EXIT burning above a door, the oxygen masks sleeping in the ceiling, sirens stitching

Anagram Poetry is a series we’ll be doing where an author contributes one poem, then re-transfigures it to create a second poem. At the Laundromat The washing machine turns my red sweater inside out. A quarter rolls beneath the chair where a woman sleeps, her yellow coat folded over her knees. Outside, rain gathers in the gutter. The fluorescent light flickers against the glass, and a small moth beats its wings above the empty change machine. Someone has left a sock on the

My mother cuts a peach over the sink, turning the knife against the pit until the flesh comes loose in pieces. Outside, the sprinkler ticks across the neighbor's lawn and turns the afternoon briefly silver. She gives me the better half, the one without the bruise, and stands there eating hers over the open drain. I am seventeen and cannot remember the last time I let her feed me anything. The juice runs down my wrist, gathers in the small crease of my elbow. She reaches for a

By the time the fire alarm went off, we had already spent forty minutes pretending to understand derivatives, and everyone seemed relieved to have something we could agree on. Outside, the football field was still wet from the morning rain, and the girls in front of me were discussing a breakup that had apparently happened over lunch, though nobody could agree on who had ended it. I stood beside a boy I'd known since seventh grade who was showing me a picture of the car he pl

With lines from “A true account of the 1958 Yellow River flood” Heavy rain. On the last day of the year, loudspeakers coughing production quotas into the dark, we climbed to midnight with the wounds in your chest, shucking skin from skin in licks of devil- fingered ink. Yellow River pressing loess into its mouth. Rungs of the past, clinging in every which way—the dike ladders slick with silt, mud-brick villages crouched under a sky of iron filings. Movement in service of move

Artwork by Gauri Sharma Before I turned 16, before I stopped dating, whenever I would talk to a guy, their friends would warn them that I’m “everyone's girl”. When you date so many people you start taking the endings less seriously. To most people, having an ex in their class is a big deal, one that they get jitters over, but to me it's a common theme recurring in every single class. I have so many exes, they're all around me, I don't even notice them. Sometimes I forget we

Artwork by Gauri Sharma When I was walking in the hallway of a museum filled with monotonous pieces of modern art that aren't even appealing to the eye nor the heart, all of a sudden, I stumbled upon a painting that finally caught my attention. I get closer and realize it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in the whole world. Its beauty could only compare to the Mona Lisa. It's something I want to look at forever and take with me everywhere for when I'm feeling sad. I

Artwork by Gauri Sharma Cool Girls don’t put their hands up when the teacher asks if anyone has tattoos. Cool girls turn their backs on the only girl who defended her against everyone. Cool girls date their friends' exes. Cool girls cheat on their boyfriends Cool girls take pride in doing dumb cool things Cool girls lose themselves to the concept of cool. Cool girls take the good they can control about their lives and ruin that too Cool girls regret their actions and come cre

There’s a stone inside my pocket the size of my heart. I found it when I was seven, but started carrying it at thirteen, its solid shape weighing down my every step. It’s nothing like my sister’s stone, smooth like a pebble by the steady stream, the one she leaves on her nightstand while she sleeps, the one she painted pink despite its natural slate gray color I once envied. My stone is a rock, with sides so rough they sometimes snag on the inside of my pants pockets and caus

I spent the better part of August trying to reach the edge of the map. Past the wheat fields, the shuttered gas station, a boy selling oranges for coins I had long since spent. The sky was doing its usual pink impression of a wound. I'd named my character after someone I no longer speak to, which made dying a little strange. By the third week I'd learned to live on wild mushrooms, to tell the poisonous ones apart by their blue undersides. There was a kingdom to save, some ter

The hallways are empty now. Not silent, exactly, but hollow, echoes settling after laughter faded. I move carefully, touching walls that remember the weight of a smile I cannot hold. Windows are gray, light diffused into something soft and strange. Corners we lingered in remain untouched, shadows stretching across the floor, still waiting for voices that never return. Fragments linger: a cup left on the table, the smell of rain on stone steps, footsteps fading down

We are peeling clementines at the kitchen table while rain climbs the windows like ivy, and my brother is laughing with his whole bright mouth, throwing rind after rind into the sink, its little enamel throat. Somewhere upstairs our mother folds towels over and over, each one warm and white as a small undressed flag, and the clock raises its small blunt axe. Outside, a fox slips through the yard with its red grief, and the lilacs make their dumb purple argument with spring. F

Here is the naked old house, boughs of light squealing through the floorboards. Here is first peek of red, a steaming bath drawn in lines of open sky. My teeth feel the water first. It’s too cold to swim, but I get in anyway: the gangling cat saps over the mossed wall, the car alarm laughs down the street, the hairs on my leg jump towards home. A child’s perfect outline in the concrete, pressed in by heat. Before I can say anything, my girl detaches from the overripe porch, l

Muscles are concentrated strung cells. The rawness of such is hidden in layers over la ye rs. From flesh to blood to skin to all it is underneath. Like clothes from the elements, there is skin from an everholding loud, holding a humid quiet. Atmospheres apart. A pickaxe to stone, bone strikes. A clamp shut, contact among like substances, foreign existing saturated between. An insatiable need to peel away. But refusal. Frustration at limits. Internalized hyperactivity. Concent

Before the laughter scattered, before the quiet settled between us, there were moments we held together, small, fragile, bright. Hands brushed in passing, smiles lingered longer than necessary, words carried weight we barely understood. Friendship, in its quiet way, was stitched into the edges of our days, woven into the pauses, the glances, the unnoticed gestures that kept us tethered. Now the rooms are empty, the echoes dim, but the threads remain, thin and tre

When I was eight I swallowed a loose tooth and for days imagined it travelling through me as a tiny white boat: passing my liver, my wet umbrella lungs, the ticking machinery of my heart. I thought my body must be full of movement, hidden channels turning to small rivers carrying away things we can’t keep. At urgent care they placed a lead apron across my chest and asked me not to move. My mother stood behind the curtain, peeling the label from a bottle of wate

i. find one a shard of light caught in a puddle, the silver trembling on a spoon, a firefly cupped between two hands. ii. hold it beneath your tongue Let it dissolve slowly, like sugar, all the beautiful things you are too afraid to open your eyes to iii. don't tell anyone iv. wait For the faint gold beneath your ribs, the strange warmth in your throat- to begin to shine. v. remember: Not everything that glows is trying to be found

At dusk, the garden fills with shadows, and the roses bow beneath the weight of rain. Their petals, bruised and velvet-soft, scatter across the earth like letters never sent. A butterfly rests upon the windowsill, its wings trembling in the evening air. For a moment, it seems almost willing to stay, to let the fading sunlight turn its fragile body gold. By morning, the roses will have fallen, the windowsill will be empty, and somewhere beyond the garden, something beautiful w