apartment with Sammy and Melani. She works at Buffalo Wild Wings. In total she has worked there for five and a half years, starting as a cashier in high school and moving up to server. There is safety in waitressing. Even when she wants to vomit thinking of back-to-back doubles over the weekend there’s a dowdy constancy that keeps her from focusing too much on herself.
At parties Maggie drinks too much and lies on unfamiliar bathroom floors and cries over him. She sleeps with a few guys. She lets them walk all over her. During sex she has flashbacks and has to stop. Right in the middle of fucking, she de-suctions her parts from the other body and flops away into the chalk outline of her own shadow. A lot of times she feels dirty and doesn’t want to be touched. She hates romantic gestures like holding hands. Cuddling repulses her. She feels used, like dirty underwear. She has a therapist named Dr. Stone and many prescriptions.
She moves back home again. She quits Buffalo Wild Wings and starts working at the soup kitchen–like Perkins across the river in Moorhead. Perkins sucks and life sucks. She has quit school and rematriculated so many times she can’t be certain of the actual number. She has spent many gross-out mornings in bed, the sun raying through the flimsy venetians and making the comforter too warm around noon.
One night in January she’s drinking Captain Morgan alone in her room. She opens up her email account. It’s 11:44 P.M. She begins to type in his name and her history automatically fills in his email address. She hasn’t written him since about a year after they broke up, at which time she asked for the letters back. She’d accidentally returned the letters he wrote to her when she gave him back his copy of New Moon, along with the Neruda book. She’d been saving the letters, folded into the pages of the former.
In that email, she said how happy it would make her if he still had the letters and could mail them to her at school. If he couldn’t—if, for example, he had thrown them away—she said she would be royally pissed. But she would not hate him. She would only hate him if he did not respond to that note. Her tone was mostly hurt but slightly playful, ever hopeful. He replied the next morning that he’d tried to call her, and said he would try her during his lunch, at 11:19. That was when they spoke and he admitted that he had, in fact, thrown the letters away. She was sad, hurt, but she was not royally pissed. As much as she wanted to, she still did not hate him.
She writes now because someone once told her that if you are thinking about a person all the time then he must be thinking about you, too. A profusion of energy like that, in the atmosphere, must be returned.
I keep wondering when the right time will be to say something . . . it’s been almost three years and I still don’t know when or if the time will come. Please put my mind at ease, Aaron. If I’m ready to see you, would you feel the same?
She waits by the screen for a few minutes, thinking something will come right away. She wakes up and there still isn’t anything. She keeps waking up and nothing keeps coming.
The following year, to get away from the memories and another summer in Fargo, Maggie flies to Washington state, where her sister Melia is living. She stays from August through November. Again, she tries to heal. The evergreens dwarf her: she feels insignificant beneath them. She signs up for the site PlentyOfFish and goes on a few dates but nothing sticks.
She waits all week to talk to Dr. Stone, her therapist. She plans lattes around the call. She plays with the children. She picks at food. She marvels at how beautiful the state is and wonders if she will ever be free enough from pain to fully appreciate nature again.
Everybody knows Maggie is depressed but nobody knows why. If people knew this was about a boy, they would tell her to get over it. They would all shake their heads and say that grief over a breakup should not last four years. If they knew the whole truth, that it was an older, married teacher she was pining after, the lot of them would condemn her. Especially