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By Root 268 0

dental floss, socks, a lint brush. Or condoms, which is proving to be more important for the Girls than it is for her because over the past two years, Jessica has provided more prophylactic devices for her teenage mentees (ten) than she has used for herself (one). She’s tired of single-cup coffeemakers and scary nondairy creamers that flake like dandruff into the bitter blackness and contain ingredients like sodium aluminosilicate that she suspects might be the root of the short-term neurological impairment that restricts her airport reading to the exclamations (BAD BRIT! LOCO LILO!) accompanying tabloid paparazzi shots. She’s tired of using her suitcase as a makeshift dining table, tired of using plastic knives to pop open individual packets of cream cheese to smear on the doughy, flavorless bread products that other states try to pass off as bagels, tired of dropping half of her breakfast on her knee, tired of unsuccessful attempts to paper-towel-and-spit-clean the gluey smudge off her jeans, and tired of having no choice but to wear those jeans all day, all throughout boarding, taking off, accelerating, cruising, decelerating, landing, deplaning, claiming baggage, renting a car, driving, checking in, and unpacking, at which point she’s so damn tired that she gives up on getting re-dressed, strips down to her underwear, yanks open the overtucked sheets, climbs in, and calls it a night. Tired of feeling like a close but imperfect counterfeit self.

Jessica feels another shoulder poke. It’s Garanimals again. “It only works if you actually press the numbers,” the woman jokes.

“Right.” Jessica looks down at the phone resting in her hand. “Thanks.” She flips open the cell and is about to start dialing when it lights up. She had unintentionally taken it off vibrate after fumbling for the video from the Virgin Islands. Now the phone plays its customized ring tone, a song that hit number one on the adult contemporary charts in 1978 and has been vilified or deified ever since.

You know I can’t smile without you …

Twenty heads turning. Twenty voices overlapping. Twenty middle-aged women wearing “Music and Passion” T-shirts, “COPA” baseball caps, and ticket frame necklaces commemorating the most memorable of all the many thousands of standing ovations for the Showman of Our Time. Twenty members of the Tristate Chapter of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club.

“A fellow Fanilow!”

“Look how young she is! A mini Maniloony!”

“Headed to Vegas?”

“The Final Farewell tour …”

“Stop saying that. I can’t handle it!”

“I really, really can’t believe it’s his final Final Farewell show and we’re gonna miss it…”

“Shaddap! I’m having a mental breakdown over here!”

“He’ll be back. He always comes back …”

Jessica thinks of the Girl who genius-rigged her phone to play Barry Manilow for every incoming call or message, the sixteen-year-old sophomore (now eighteen-year-old senior) she visited in Pineville last night, and for whom she rearranged her travel plans. Jessica works hard to remember this Girl as she always knew her—in graphic-print thermals and baggy jeans, dark hair hidden under an assortment of scarves, headbands, and caps until she finally, finally got through the awkward and never-ending growing-out phase—and not as she left her last night. Jessica fought against this most recent memory to see the Girl who claimed that she was so fiercely against cosmetic enhancements that she refused to get any piercings, not even in her ears, but later confessed to Jessica that the real reason she rejected body mods was because the sight of needles made her pass out. The Girl who described herself as possessing a “postmodern sensibility trapped in a prepubescent body,” whose first story for the Do Better High School Storytellers project was about (in the sixteen-year-old’s own words):

… the out-of-the-womb chasm separating her from her parents. When Mr. and Mrs. Dae chose to name their colicky then melancholicky daughter Sunny after the opening words to the Sesame Street theme song, they guaranteed there would be no crossing the gulf between