Yesterday by C. K. Kelly Martin

screaming at someone I miss so much. I’m so fucked up inside that maybe it would be better if I were the one who’d died instead.
    But I can’t even feel that properly because as fucked up as I am, scrambling after delusions and dreams while distrusting what’s as plain as day in front of me, I know I want to live. I just want living to feel the way it should.
    I spend the conscious hours of my weekend trying not to think because it seems really letting myself go—allowing my mind to wander beyond the boundaries of everydaylife—risks loosening my grip on reality to a point that scares me stiff. I can’t handle one more doubt or feeling of suspicion.
    On Saturday night and Sunday afternoon I shove all my brightly colored clothes into a garbage bag that I hurl into the back of my closet. Then Mom, Olivia and I go out for a late lunch with Nancy, who acts as if I look the same as ever but then asks if I’ve been having any more headaches lately.
    “Nope,” I say truthfully over my buffet plate. “They must have been a flu leftover.” I resist the urge to tell her she sounds like my grandfather. Why do the two of them keep going on about my head when I haven’t said a thing about headaches lately?
    According to my mom a guy named Frank broke Nancy’s heart years ago and she hasn’t been interested in anyone since. Her nearest family is down in Kansas and my mom also says that Nancy spends a lot of time alone, which makes Nancy sound like a sad person but as far as I can tell, she’s not. If anything she’s perky but with a propensity to want to fix other people’s problems.
    I listen to Nancy and my mother chat about work and then toss around the idea of renting a cottage up north this summer for a couple of weeks so that we’ll all have the chance to soak up some scenery. “And make the most of the hot weather, right, Leila?” Nancy adds, staring first at my mother and then at Olivia and me. “How are you readjusting to Canadian winter?”
    My mom replies that she feels as if she’s forgotten theknack of driving in snow but I say, “I sort of like the cold. It’s not as bad as people say. It makes me feel …” I catch myself before blurting out something weird about how it stops me from overheating when my mind’s spinning, roots me in the present.
    “How does it make you feel?” Nancy presses.
    “Like I’m really home,” I reply, spearing salad with my fork. “It’s Canada. It’s supposed to be cold.”
    Nancy smiles but her stare feels like a microscope, as if she senses I’m editing myself and would like to stare through the façade to the real me. Maybe her real calling was to be a therapist.
    “How about school?” she continues. “Is it a repeat of things you already learned in New Zealand or do you feel like you’re ahead of the game?”
    With my mouth full of salad, Olivia answers. “All the geometry stuff I already know but French is hard. It’s funny, they call them grades at school here instead of years. I think ‘year’ sounds better.”
    I was in year eleven in Auckland but now I’m in tenth grade. It sounds like going backwards but I don’t feel like it’s a repeat. I’m behind the kids in my classes in some things and ahead of them in others, which is what I tell Nancy when she asks me directly.
    She doesn’t give me the microscope look from before but nods thoughtfully like this is precisely the reply she wants to hear. Maybe my mom is right about Nancy spending toomuch time alone after all. It’s nice of her to take an interest and everything but I don’t want to be analyzed.
    I get quiet and stare around the restaurant at the other diners—an old couple eating steaks in silence, a rowdy group of about ten people who appear to be celebrating some kind of occasion, and a lone woman puffing furiously on a cigarette. As I’m watching the woman give herself lung cancer I spot a familiar face in the booth behind her, my biology teacher, Mr. Payne. He notices me