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We used to call it Pit City.
Section eight housing.
My mom called ahead—
I was sixteen and still scared
to ask for what I needed.

I was on work-study
at a clean family practice
just around their corner.
A freak snowstorm.
They still lived there.
My mother’s friends.
Less lucky.

Sue was the daughter.
She’d shown me a bong
when I was nine.
She was cool in a way
I didn’t understand—
but I knew she knew something
I didn’t.
I hovered around her constantly.

She tolerated it, mostly.
Once, when I let myself in,
she wasn’t dressed.
She screamed.
The door smacked me in the face.
I bled, but didn’t complain.
It felt deserved—
for being curious.

That night in the snowstorm,
twice as far from home
as Sue’s bedroom,
I thought about how far I’d come.

I tried getting snotty with Anna once—
Sue’s mom.
Corrected her grammar on the phone
while asking for permission to go to the pool.
She corrected me back, said,
Have fun with the cool kids.
I did.
Trotted off in my XL two-piece
thinking I was all that.

That night, Sue answered the door
and handed me hot chamomile,
a change of clothes,
a pink sweat suit—
top and bottom,
obviously new. They matched.

We had moved on,
but not up enough
for pink sweat suit money.
I told her it’d do.
I was the best version
of my worst self in that suit.

I left early the next morning,
still wearing it.
I was store-bought cake with ganache,
climbing into my two-hundred-dollar car,
the smell of hot exhaust 
me revving it up,
shouting promises to return
over the highway noise.

Sue kept calling for her sweats,
long after 
it was polite.
At sixteen, I was embarrassed
she didn’t have the pride
to let it go.

She was thirty, and still cool.
I didn’t understand
why it mattered.

She died seven years ago.

I couldn’t return them now
even if I wanted.
But I would—
if I still had them,
if she were still alive.

Instead, I’ve folded
everything I owe her
into this poem.
I still think about her.
I just don’t know
how else to make it even.
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