Maybe I should dye my hair purple? Maybe I should try to be more social? Maybe I should stop talking to myself? It’s Friday afternoon and there’s a thousand voices telling me what’s wrong, examining the problems, making up new ones. I looked around the classroom, tried to imagine everyone twenty years from now: Who was the housewife? Who was in jail? Who was the car accident? I had a scary thought that nobody would even notice, and then, in the middle of the night I’d be swept away in the rustling bristles of the janitor’s broom. Sitting in my algebra class, listening to the formulas, the calculations, the answers, the endless steps that needed to be memorized, I started vegging out and began to imagine myself crumbling into dust and falling onto the floor. Parked on a blanket, burning calories reading dirty books loaned from my mother’s library, sometimes I feel like the sun is my only voyeur. It makes me feel like an oversize Lolita without anyone to seduce. I’ve outgrown my pink and white gingham bathing suit. Which is good, “cause I’m definitely in need of a change. I’m seventeen years old, it’s summertime, and there’s an underlying sense of anticipation churning through my nervous system, as if a meteorite were screaming toward me this very second from the black depths of outer space. He says I was conceived during a crystal meth excursion in the north woods of Wisconsin, hence the name. Dad signed off on the name while Mom was in a narcotic dreamsleep, totally wiped out after fifteen hours of labor.

The name was part of some bad joke my parents formed in the confusion of my birth. My name is Crystal Methedrine Swanson, but my friends call me Chrissie. Pressing my fingers between the blades of grass I focused on the gravity sucking me to the surface, imagined the slow rotation of the earth, its massive size, its ambient orbit, the endless void of the universe, but curiosity only seemed to accelerate my potential for a psychotic break.

The faces of movie stars, the shapes of dead pets, all lurked within the shifting vapor.

Fluffy white clouds towered into the heavens like one dream piled on top of the next a whole sky of afterthoughts polluting the air. LYING in the yard tearing out clumps of grass, watching a jet draw a white line across the sky, I wanted to have a vision or some major introspection, to feel possessed and hallucinatory, to know, if only for a moment, that God really existed.

Bongwater by Michael Hornburg