I.

The summer we moved to Florida was the same summer Bug Juice premiered on the Disney channel. We were living at the Westin hotel in Fort Lauderdale. We spent our days house hunting and our afternoons swimming in the hotel pool. We didn’t have any furniture. We didn’t know where we were going to school come fall. But it was June, and then July. And every Saturday night, I’d beg my brother to let me watch Bug Juice for the twenty-two minutes it aired.

There was a curly-haired girl named Stephanie. She said the girls in her cabin were mad at her because all she cared about was boys. They called her “boy crazy.” I watched Stephanie slow dance with boys at camp; I watched Stephanie walk around twirling her hair, flirting.

In the hotel elevator, I practiced slowly blinking my eyes.  I played with my hands.

I wanted to sway on a wooden dance floor in the middle of the woods.

II.

I drank a Java Chip Frappuccino every Wednesday night during Lit Theory. I hated the class, but I liked using the green straw to spoon out whipped cream and lick it to stay awake. I wore Hollister sweatpants and Target flip-flops. My favorite top was this halter top that said I love you to the moon and back across the chest.

My boyfriend was forty-two. He worked as a financial advisor at some bank in Boca Raton. All we ever did was peck on the lips because I told him I was still heartbroken over someone else. He lived in a high-rise near the beach that had a lobby and a front desk. We met because he came into the sports bar where I worked. He was eating wings and drinking beer but I knew it wasn’t really his kind of place. He slipped his number into my checkbook.

He took me to the Seminole Hard Rock Casino. He lost money, I remember. If he’d won, he was supposed to buy me a purse.

When we got home, he started yelling. I wanted to ask, Why don’t I feel real? But instead, I sat there on the edge of the bed and let him yell. It was easier to sit there and take it.

III.

A boy I dated in camp had just moved to California. He was in Anaheim, just around the corner from Disneyland. He didn’t have a car, so I drove the hour south from LA and picked him up from his halfway house. He brought a friend with him so I knew right away it wasn’t a date. He looked so different, anyway. At camp, he had shoulder-length hair that all the girls begged to run their fingers through. But when he opened my passenger door, his head was shaved into a buzz cut.

We drove to an indoor gym with trampolines and bought an hour’s worth of jump time. He was making friends with all the little kids there, helping them flip into the ball pit and running races back and forth along the canvas floor. I was sweating through my t-shirt from all the jumping.

At camp, we’d only kissed in the dark outside of the Great Hall. We’d had the kind of unspoken love that drew us together until he got kicked out for smoking weed. For the rest of the summer, he wrote me letters that I had to hide from the other girls. They thought it was ridiculous to pine for someone who wasn’t even there.

IV.

I met Andrew at a bar on a Tuesday night. Jen got mad at me and left. She didn’t have a car. She had to walk to the closest bus stop and get herself home. I kept texting her but she didn’t answer.

Andrew saw me sulking and took me to the dance floor. I hadn’t even finished my first drink when he asked if I wanted to go home. He meant my apartment up the hill.

It was the first time I had sex that hurt. He was sweating a lot. He was sweating so much his hair was wet. I kept thinking about how I’d need to change my sheets. I wondered if I had enough coins for the laundry. And then his wet hand slid across my back.

I kept texting Jen all night and she didn’t answer. I knew I’d made the wrong choice, but there was no unchoosing.

V.

The last boyfriend I had asked me out by sneaking a note into a pack of Reese’s Cups. I wasn’t in the mood for chocolate, but he kept begging me to open the fridge and have the candy he brought.

I took us out to sushi for dinner, this place in Westwood that looked like somewhere they’d film a movie. It was a two-story restaurant with crystal chandeliers and gold columns. I paid for dinner because I could.

We mostly hung out in Westwood, my neighborhood, my neck of the woods. We saw a lot of movies. We once saw a Kung-Fu movie about a Samurai who leaves home and goes on this long adventure. There’s a love interest, but he leaves her to go find his true purpose.

Halfway through the movie, my boyfriend wanted to leave. We got frozen yogurt and he said it was stupid that I only got mochi in mine. But that was how I wanted it.

When he told me he was moving, as in leaving the state, I gave him a plastic bag of stuff he’d left at my house. It was mostly full of things he could easily replace like a spare toothbrush and some vitamins. I folded up his silver bomber jacket nicely before shoving it into the bag with everything else.

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Joyland, and more. Her first collection of essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was published with Red Hen Press in 2018 and her debut novel, The Brittanys, is out now from Vintage. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

One Wednesday morning my husband Jerry brushed his teeth and then disappeared. He is still gone. I lay awake in our bed each night, wait for the sound of his keys in the lock, and study his birds. I prefer to keep our bedroom sparse, but Jerry likes whimsy. So I let him line the window sill with these porcelain birds, most of which are white and faceless. Smack dab in the middle of them sits this single brown owl that’s been expertly painted. Its wings are open, its claws are stretched behind a fist-sized body. It watches me with sad eyes when I wake in the morning and before I go to sleep at night. But my husband will return.

When we first married, Jerry wrote me bad poetry and fried spaghetti on a hot plate. He was passionate about grating fresh parmesan. We would lounge on the double bed in our studio and argue about the Iraq war. He was a pacifist and I was not. Still am not.

Later, after our boys were born, we would hire a sitter and walk to this joint downtown called the Duck Inn Bar & Grill. There were ducks everywhere. Wooden mallards lining the bar, duck head handles for the beer taps, and a gigantic sign above the ladies’ restroom that read Duck Girls with an image of a cartoon duck wearing a fuchsia bow around its head. One of the duck’s wings rested on her hip while the other wing rested below her chin as if she was blowing a kiss. Jerry and I got to know the regulars, one of whom was a maudlin 50-something named Cheryl with shaggy blond hair and a long, lean body. Cheryl was always whisper-crying in the bathroom. If one of the guys at the bar wasn’t too drunk to notice, he’d yell Duck Girls! as we walked out of the bathroom together below the sign. Cheryl would turn towards the wall and swipe the mascara from under her eyes with a shaky finger.

Most of the regulars came to the Duck Inn to escape the inevitable boredom of life. They came for conversation, to see something different than the stained beige walls of their ordinary kitchens. Take Cheryl. She spent her days taking care of her frail father. In the mornings, she organized his pills. In the afternoons, she read him the local Phoenix news. And in the evenings, she took a god damn break and drove her rusty pickup to the Duck Inn.

Now that I think about it, Cheryl wasn’t always whisper-crying. Once in a while, Blondie would blast through the speakers and she would dance in circles with her hands in the air, her T-shirt hugging her breasts and waist. One time, Cheryl grabbed the inflatable duck and kissed it long and hard. One way, or another, I’m gonna find ya, I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha, she belted as she smooched that giant plastic thing. My husband stared and stared as she hopped and sang. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Nicole Hart is a lawyer living in Westchester, New York with her husband and two children. Her flash and poetry have been published in Bath Flash Fiction, BULL, Flash Flood, JMWW, The Lumiere Review, and Whale Road Review. You can find her on Twitter @nicolehart_blog.