Spring is over — but the Spring 2019 issue of The Hopkins Review has just come out, and it has a story of mine in it!
“Dumbo” is about a floor of smart girls in college who all happen to have hooked up with the same guy. Here’s a short excerpt:
We lived on the girls-only floor for the science scholars. The opportunity to live there was sold to us and our parents as a privilege and a perk, a reward for our high AP Biology scores and violin playing and community service projects, and as good girls we checked yes, we would welcome this social privilege, come to us at long last after the lonely years of high school. It was only after we arrived that we found out a floor of female scientists was not valued highly in this keg-stands and undie-runs college. We were, on the whole, not lookers. Glasses wore coke-bottle lenses. Skinny tied her hair in ponytails that gave her scrubbed face a tight, pulled-back look. Amoeba’s soft, doughy limbs resembled pseudopods, slowly extending and contracting around cheap, cakey treats. Lisse was the exception, with her dark-red hair and big boobs. She wore makeup and tight T-shirts. She curled her eyelashes. On Sunday nights she slathered her face with an algae-green mask before going to bed. “My mom swears by it, for soft skin,” she said when we asked about it in the morning, the mask now hard and cracked like a putrid eggshell. Later, alone in our rooms, we wondered why our mothers hadn’t instructed us in any of these feminine wiles.
This story is part of a longer collection I’m working on called Defects, which you know about if you subscribe to my love notes…. Hope you enjoy the read —