I knew that was ridiculous, but she looked so serious that I stopped to think about it. was it even possible for your hand to be bigger than your face? I placed my palm against the upturned tip of my nose to check, and the next thing I knew my teammate's punch was slamming into the back of my hand, only a blur in the spaces between the fingers that fell across my eyes like bars on a jail cell window. I yelped and fell to the ground, half laughing at my own stupidity, half crying in deference to the daggers of pain that shot up the sides of my once-broken, never-quite-healed nose. the tackling drill was thoroughly disrupted; half the team gathered around me while the other half yelled at my overzealous teammate. I looked up from under my hands and tears and saw a circle of faces staring down at me, similarly torn between amusement and concern. as I rolled over and climbed to my knees, one of them asked me, "how did you ever survive fourth grade?"

"we didn't do that in my fourth grade!" I protested, still holding my hand to my throbbing nose, which was threatening to bleed. and I thought we didn't, but maybe I was wrong, rendered too oblivious by my incessant bookworming and self-inflicted solitude to ever know what was going on during recess and in the lunch lines. I knew about abc gum, and indian burns, and not to offer my hand to someone who said "slap me high," and a slew of dirty jokes involving headlights and trucks, but I couldn't remember any elementary school pranks that ended with a punch to the face. "why would anyone do that in the first place?" I said, still in disbelief that, at twenty, I was naïve enough to fall prey to a trick that the average nine-year-old would have seen right through.

because they can, was the concensus, and I quickly learned from one of my gentler teammates about planting a rose garden. "the amazing thing," she said as she lightly demonstrated the raking, digging, planting, and pounding of my left forearm, "is that people will let you keep hurting them after the first really painful thing, just in case something cool actually does happen at the end." I stared at her. "I've broken people's blood vessels this way. it kind of does look like a rose garden," she offered, perhaps in way of apology.

first thing this morning after waking up with my head halfway under my pillow, I went to my mirror to find the scar left behind on my cheek by my own baby fingernail, because sometimes it almost seems possible that twenty years of life and love and tears and sleep could have rubbed it away. it's still there, though, a faint inch-long line visible only in the right light and when I tip my head sideways, the way I used to do when I wanted to disappear; I have no petals to close up around myself.

I've been doing laundry. when I went downstairs to move my last load of wet clothes into the dryer, there was another girl standing in the laundry room, fussing over her basket of clothes. she watched me a little bit, and I worried that I was going to be asked to relinquish my dryer to some urgent laundry cause. there are so many swatties whose names I know, and who I can only assume recognize me in return, but whom I've never interacted with at all. it's strange, like living simultaneously on both sides of a fishbowl's glass wall. I was uncharacteristically self-conscious in my flannel pajama pants and florida-parrot t-shirt, and I felt her eyes on me as I put down my book and lined up my four quarters, all new ones with tiny state-shaped relief maps and trees and statues on the backs.

"will you help me fold my sheet?"

it was such a surprisingly friendly question that it seemed somehow out of place in the laundry room, which is usually filled with silent sideways glances as people wonder if you were the bitch who took their clothes out of the washer and left them in a big damp pile on the table, or if the service people are ever going to come fix the machines that leave your clothes covered in soap and the floor covered in puddles, and whether working washing machines are really too much to ask for in return for thirty-five thousand dollars, not to mention a dollar freaking seventy-five every time you want to make something clean. I carped for a minute before I found my smile and said, "sure I will."

I took the opposite corners of her light blue percale sheet and stretched them as far apart as my arms would spread, shaking out the wrinkles and the clinging lint flecks still left behind by the dryer tumble. and, mirroring each other perfectly, we folded the corners together, slid our fingers along the inside edge to find the new corners, folded again to make a skinny sky-colored rectangle, bright inside the dingy yellow-lit cement room, and finally walked together until our fingers met at the top of the sheet and she took my corners from me, like accepting a peace offering.

"thank you." smile.
"you're welcome." smileback, head tipped sideways to hide a sudden rush of shyness.