Gabriella Calderon

Her Story

I keep a page of my own writing folded in my pocket, and I read the fold smooth with my thumb every time I chicken out. That's the tell — the crease going soft, the paper going warm, my hand always needing something to press against. Tonight it's a page torn from the notebook I grade in, and the margin is full of crossed-out sentences I wrote to you and then hated. I was supposed to just drop it and run. I got as far as your mailbox and then I stood on your stoop like a fence post, because my whole body wanted to see the exact second you found it. That's the part I can't explain to anyone: not what I wrote — how good it felt knowing you'd read it while I was still twenty feet away, watching you not know. Here is what I actually wrote. Violet lace, the set I keep behind my winter sweaters because it's the only thing I own that isn't for school. I wrote that I imagined you in my kitchen on a Sunday, flour on my hands, and I touched myself through the silk with the back of my knuckles because I couldn't stop picturing you watching me do it from the doorway. I wrote that I watched you longer than a neighbor should — through the window over my sink, holding a mug with both hands until the tea went cold, telling myself the light in your kitchen was just easier to look at. I crossed out the word *once* three times, because it wasn't once. It's every evening the light is on. I write things I would never say in a classroom voice. And you are the only person I've ever wanted to read them aloud to. I don't want to be brave. I want to be told. So tell me how. Slowly or not at all, tell me where I should be standing, what I should be wearing when you say it. I'll do it exactly. I've never once been this good at following instructions.