* — November 18, 2022
Edie Patterson — Every Greener Summer

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At fourteen, we start wearing cheap pink lip gloss and making empty promises in Ulta parking lot crosswalks beneath suburban blue skies. I come back from private school to my porch with its peeling paint and long-legged brown spiders in the corners. I sit at a splintery picnic table at the County Fair in August, in between the broken primary-color skin of balloons and a blur of noise and neon lights and roller coasters. I am old enough to be here and to be everywhere, so why is it still like this?

Like every summer, we drive to California, eleven-hour days from our Kansas college town. Forest grows into sparse wheat fields as we keep moving away. The car is hot and angry. The fields are full of highway exits and little towns with plastic palm trees and shopping centers and abortion hurts and thank your mom for choosing life signs strung onto barbed-wire fences. In Fort Riley, close enough that the GPS still sends alerts saying one hour and thirty minutes to home, there is a fossil gray cannon sitting in the greenery against the morning haze. Further west, I watch Colorado pine trees in the side mirror and worry that this moment right now won’t last long enough. It doesn’t.
 
Fifteen is a cliché. We jump up and down on my hardwood floors, playing the bad pop music they play at our high school dances—sequined dresses and pinching high heels and a ballroom flooded with purple light where we hold hands not to lose each other. We look into my bathroom mirror, staring too hard.

I walk out of a movie theater, velvet seats and popcorn in waxy white bags, through double doors into a December night. I walk through static summers and lap lines at the public pool, air heavy with the smell of chlorine.

I start driving in circles around parking lots, through the cemetery. I watch my face in the rearview mirror. Do you believe in ghosts? my brother asks from the backseat. The cemetery is full of living things: gnarled oak trees, a patch of surprise lilies growing next to a headstone from the 19th century, a flock of crows. Sharpened wings cut the air above our car. I hold the steering wheel like talons on a branch. In parking lots, I turn through the yellow lines of parking spaces. I drive down streets in the suburbs while houses gaze at each other through the sheen of washed windows. When can I do this on my own?

We go back to the same place in California, a soft sand beach with driftwood tree trunks, where somewhere, with my parents’ house keys and my clumsy seven-year-old fingers, I had carved my initials. I never look for them. I am consumed by other things. I am older, old enough to be consumed by other things. The town we go to is too small to show up on the creased blue and green map my parents keep in the glove compartment. I study it, tracing my fingers along the curves of highways. We drive through Marin County hills, yellow and rough like a lion’s hide. I sit in the back seat, between roaring metal, locked doors, headlights, mirrors.
I remember the beauty store again and again, smoother and perfect from this far away. I think of my face in compact mirrors, watching my lips, waiting to see if they move. I am a girl in a mirror, eyes reflecting eyes reflecting eyes. I hold on tight to everything and every greener summer, an empty preparation. I swallow summer green, lily colors, and hope to become something.
 

Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.
2022 Young Writers' Prize for Prose, First Place
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Edie Patterson is a 17-year-old writer from Lawrence, Kansas. Her work has appeared in Atticus Review, Chautauqua Journal, Fractured Literary, and Lunch Ticket. She is currently an intern at Split Lip Magazine and Honey Literary.