‘I’m good.Seventeen-year-old Hannah wants to spend her senior year of high school going to football games and Mardi Gras parties. Hannah stomps, buries, suffocates, wishes for death. ‘You alright?’ Baker asks, when Hannah says goodbye to her after school on Friday. By refusing to align her heart with the growing sunlight and the nurturing heat and the flowering plants and the tall, proud trees.
She carries herself through the end of the school week by refusing to acknowledge it. So she lies to herself that everything is normal. I can stomp on it every time it springs up within me. She tells herself that she is stronger, that she can fight it, that she has control. Still, she pushes it down inside of her, buries it as far as it can go, suffocates it in the space between her stomach and her heart. It’s no more or less of a feeling than everyone else has had at 17.īut deep down, deep below the topsoil of her heart, she knows it’s not. It’s intensified only because she’s a senior and all of her emotions are heightened. It has sprung up at last, and it refuses to be unseen. But now, as the days grow longer and the Garden District grows greener, she can actually see it. If she’s truthful with herself, she’s probably known it all along. Like the late March mornings, which arrive carrying a gentle heat, rocking it back and forth over the pavement in the parking lot, letting it crawl forth over the grass and the tree roots, nurturing it while it is still nascent and tender, before it turns into swollen summer.īut while the whole earth prepares for spring, Hannah feels a great anxiety in her heart, for something dangerous has grown in her, something she never planted or even wanted to plant. Like the sunlight, which stretches longer each day, asking for one more minute, one more oak tree to shimmer on. She should feel infinite and hopeful, like the growing earth around her. “She knows she should feel excited about her acceptance to Emory and the promise of spring break.
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