Yes, Virginia, I am writing

We’re on the porch, on each other, tearing, close to ripping, nearing the pain point from which there is no turning back. My skirt is up to my hips. My sweater is askew, a slice of skin exposed to the night air, puckering up with goosebumps. The front door opens and then quickly closes. Chirps of giggles, gossip, emerge from the cracked windows.

“I’m parked over there,” he says. Inside the stereo has been hijacked by house music. I know without looking that throngs of Piedmont Avenue girls are dancing around MacArthur Boulevard Gregory, and that he will bed one of them tonight, and that one may not be Medea.

His is a 1960s-era American car, a classic model that I’ll wager was a Corvair. It has wings and chrome and inside is a giant fucking mess. As we slide inside – him opening the door for me first, then slamming it shut and trotting over to the driver’s-side door – I remember one of the few things Medea told me about her friend Bill. He lives in a loft in Fruitvale, she said. If you took the H-bomb and dropped it, just chucked it down repeatedly, it could only help matters.