Andy and Allison disappeared right after graduation. Claire's family hasn't ever been clued into the gossip of people like them--her parents don't socialize with those kinds of people. Sometimes Claire wants to scream, "We live in Shermer fucking Illinois!"

It's not even like they live in Chicago. They're the poor relations in their family; the well-to-do Standishes live on the Gold Coast.

She's pretty sure that's where Andy and Allison went. Claire used to hear snatches of their conversations in the hallways and during class, and Allison wanted to go to college there, take art class.

Claire goes part time to the community college fifteen minutes away from Shermer HS. So far she's failed Intro to Poli Sci and conversational French. She speaks French fluently, but she spent all of class staring out the window and forgot to show up for any of the tests.

Sometimes Claire takes out the little box with her one diamond earring. She thought about having another hole punched in her ear so that she could wear it all the time, but never did. Anyway, she used to look for the other one in Bender's ear, but after the first Monday, he never wore it.

She could have handled that Monday better. She could have said hello to him. She could have looked at him while he was looking at her. She did pull him into the janitor's closet, but it was too late, it was the end of the day, no one was watching.

He'd wanted her, she realized, to make a statement.

He'd had way more faith in her than he should have.

He'd been too good for her.

Claire is just like her parents. They fight all the time, but they still haven't divorced. They just hit pause one day and never moved on from there. Claire's life is on pause. To be continued after this word from our sponsors. She still drives the same car and wears the same clothes and still listens to Madonna.

Yesterday she saw Brian as she was pulling into the gas station--he was leaning awkwardly against the pumps, squinting into the distance. He didn't see her. She pulled out and drove away, and barely made it to the gas station across town on fumes.

She used to go to the gas station in the middle of town, because it was the closest to her house, but then Bender started working there. It wasn't that he was rude to her when she pulled in--the opposite. He treated her as though she had been any other customer. He looked right through her.

Claire couldn't stand the feeling of being invisible to him.

That must have been how he felt that Monday.

When she pulled Bender into the closet, she took one of his handkerchiefs. She still has it and it still smells like him--sweat, gasoline, pot. She keeps it in her jewelry box from when she was seven, with the pink and orange plastic earrings she'd demanded (her mother said no, her father said yes; of course she got the earrings) and her pink plastic bangle bracelets.

She brings it to her nose and breathes deeply and can almost feel his tongue in her mouth again, his hand on her leg, sliding under her skirt, his breath hot on her neck.

Claire tries to stop remembering before he pushes her away.

She doesn't know why she can't get over this. Maybe it's because she had never been rejected before. But that Saturday her life was--it was jump-started. And now it's on pause, and she doesn't know what it's going to take to get her jump-started again.