With the Band

chapter 1. september scaries

Izzy stood and went to her mirror, a big, brown, smudged thing like the rest of the heavy 70s furniture that had always been in her room, like it had grown out of the shag carpeting. She looked at herself in the mirror, still in her work drip. Or anti-drip: 100% polyester, beige, and with enough ruffles to be a fire hazard. She had tried to turn the outfit into a clean girl look with some gold earrings and slicked back bun, but it wasn't working—the skirt and blouse and vest (yes, vest) were fucking crazy, with buttons and epaulets from the uncool part of the 80s. The part her parents were still stuck in. She didn't hate her body or her face; she had done the work on body acceptance. But did anyone look good in beige ruffles? Like, anyone alive? Why did she have to wear these fits every day? Why couldn't the store sell something from the last ten years? Izzy had tried to gently hint to her mother that they might consider some new suppliers. But her mom wanted to please her own mother, who had selected the suppliers herself when she opened the store, who was gone now. Izzy had been named after her grandmother, Elisabetta, who came here with nothing and had build a business with her bare hands. Izzy's mother Eleanor ran the store, and someday, it would be passed onto Izzy. She had gone to university nearby for business for that purpose, with minors in literature and music. Izzy had always told her mom that she would take over the store and loved working there; Eleanor had no reason to believe otherwise. Izzy didn't know how to tell her the truth—that she wanted out. Izzy could barely tell herself.

She hated that she lived at home, in the apartment above the store. She hated that she was inside when everyone her age was outside: talking, dancing, being with each other. Izzy flopped back down on her bed as the song ended, and went back into her laptop. She scrolled Pinterest, past hundreds of pics of interesting people doing colorful, beautiful things: pretty towns where you could walk everywhere, big group picnics in big city parks, dresses she had nowhere to wear, rooms with a reasonable number of lamps.

Izzy went to the door of her room and cracked it open, looking down the hallway both ways. Her parents door was right next to hers. The hallway was empty. 

She couldn't hear anything. 

She walked over to her closet.

Izzy had spent a long time living in her laptop, but she could feel that tonight, something was different: something had been building all summer. Since June, she had successfully kept three secrets from her parents, and that small separation felt like a huge step toward outside, where a better life was definitely waiting for her—if she could just walk downstairs and down the door. If she could just lift her feet. Izzy felt hopeful that night that she could: it was only August, and there were a few days of summer left. She could turn it all around.

Her phone pinged again with another message from Meg: concert tomorrow ?? you said stay up, this is staying up

And just like that, all of Izzy's yearning and planning turned to lead in her stomach. A concert? Go to a concert? It was like Meg asked her casually to go to another planet. Her phone pinged again.

see you in the PIT ! the pit is where it all happens

It was from her cousin, Lydia. 20. Whereabouts unknown. Lydia, who hadn't been home in months. Lydia, who was out right now, at a post-show party in another city. She always messaged her out of nowhere and never revealed exactly where she was: but it sounded like she was coming the city nearby for the concert tomorrow night. Izzy hadn't seen her in almost a year. An accident two years ago had flung Izzy's and Lydia's lives apart and careening in different directions, unlikely—in Izzy's mind—to ever join up again.

Meg was 23 and married and happy and had all the things. Ya, 23 and married. She had a house, an electric car, and pretty soon, a baby, probably. She had done everything right: she asked her husband out in university, in the first class the first semester, in a lecture that she and Izzy took together. Izzy watched her do it: Meg just walked over, smiled, said something about coffee after class, and that was it. To Izzy, this was more impressive than going to space. Meg said after that she had been rejected by guys a bunch of times before and you just had to get used to it, but Izzy didn't really believe her. Someone as beautiful as Meg, rejected? Meg said it was the price of admission for dating, in one of her barely concealed pieces of advice to Izzy. But Izzy was waiting for someone to come and find her, but at the same time—in some part of her—Izzy knew that hope was expectation without reason. She slumped down in her bed and played the song again, closing her eyes. Her mind flashed back to her ex, from... last summer? She couldn't believe that it had already been a whole year. She tried to shake it off, but she couldn't help it. That feeling of his hands on her hips sometimes washed over her in moments like this—his fingers in her mouth, his teeth on her neck—when she was alone in her room, another night in. can't :( i have to work tonight was a common message from her phone. And a total lie.