Claire pretended she was dead. Face up, hands clasped on her chest, she breathed in and slowly exhaled. Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Her nose tickled. It was harder being dead than she’d imagined. If she couldn’t be dead, she could be quiet. Claire had to make sure her parents were asleep.

Each night at precisely ten o’clock, as if responding to an internal alarm, her parents got up from their matching recliners in the family room, snapped their books shut and retired to their bedroom. Claire heard the drone of local news for ten minutes before one of them (Claire had no idea which) clicked off the set. Then silence. Her mom never stayed up, reading or gossiping with Claire about her day and her dad never watched the news on his own. They always went into the room together. Claire vowed she’d be different when she was married…if she got married. She wasn’t so sure she wanted to. But if she did, she and her hypothetical husband would have their own lives. They wouldn’t be like Siamese twins. This made Claire think about about Siamese cats — how she’d loved them when she was little! A friend in third grade had one called Mr. Biffles. Mr. Biffles was arrogant and cruel — Claire’s first lesson that beauty was often vicious. A lesson relearned in ninth grade when she’d fallen hard for Dan, who was on the football team. Football was the holy grail of her small southern town. The team and its cheerleaders were at the top of the school’s social hierarchy. The football players knew it and walked with a swagger. All of them, as if it was part of their training: fifty sit-ups, twenty squats followed by a eight-hundred yard swagger.

Claire’s own clique was so far down the social ladder it was practically subterranean. She ran the sort-of smart kids who earned As and Bs and tried to stay off the radar of the bullies. Her friend Jen from middle school had migrated to the geniuses and now baffled Claire. She could only vaguely follow when Jen digressed from their history teacher’s question about the Iran hostages to a lecture on how the Shah had been a puppet of American imperialism. Claire worried Commie talk like that would Jen kicked out of school and probably Louisiana.

Claire had developed a massive crush on Football Dan. Football Dan had perfect hair, blond and feathered, like the cute Hardy Boy. He looked like he’d taken a wrong from a California beach. (Pre)Football Dan had been in three of Claire’s eighth grade classes and she’d spent more time studying him than the textbooks splayed open on her wooden desk. If only he’d been the subject of all those pop quizzes, she would’ve had a 4.0. In ninth grade, she’d told her friend she liked Dan. After that, he’d regarded her with the sort of pity reserved for the girl on her bus with corrective shoes and headgear. A pity so pure it was more virginal than her.

After that, whenever she saw Dan in the hallway, she lowered her head and studied the linoleum, like it was an important part of the curriculum. She couldn’t even look at the back of his perfect head. Then, near the end of freshman year, she’d gone to a party. It was her first big party, without adults. Her red plastic Solo cup was always full. She kept calling it her “Hans Solo” cup and giggling. Then she didn’t remember much. Dan’s face, blurry, and his hand tossing teddy bears off a bed. Vomiting on a plush Papa Smurf. Blood in her underwear, the ones with “Wednesday” embroidered on the front even though it was Saturday. He’d driven her home and somehow she’d unlocked the door. She’d crept down the hallway to her room while her parents slept. The next day, sick, she stayed in bed all day, confused and crying. Claire didn’t tell anyone but, come Monday, everyone knew. Claire had a small scar on her arm where Mr. Biffles had scratched her, that had no sensation when she touched it. She was pretty sure the psychic scar Dan left was just as numb. How she hated him. She wondered if she could sneak through his window as he slept, decked in black, a ninja with a pair of scissors in her mouth, and shear off all that perfect hair.

Soon the air conditioner would whir to life. Once it did, Claire’d have about five minutes to sneak out her window. Claire was already dressed, in pastel blue terrycloth shorts and a matching tank top with satin trim. She and Dwayne had plans. That evening, she’d been talking to her best friend Sarah when the operator cut in. Claire had been lying on her bed, phone cord dangling like a fishing line, while she twisted the coils. A prim voice suddenly broke in: “You have an emergency call from Dwayne. Will you accept?” This was the only way to get through a tied-up phone. Claire and her friends all requested emergency operator break ins if the line was busy — and they usually were. Claire wondered if Ma Bell thought their town was especially emergency-prone.

Dwayne wanted to see Claire right then, but Claire told him to wait. Her parents would never let her go out during the week — not when she had summer school Drivers Ed in the morning. Plus, she was pretty sure her parents wouldn’t like him. She doubted they’d appreciate the qualities that drew her to him — his sexiness, self-assuredness and blond hair halfway down his back. He’d also dropped out of high school and had an actual criminal record for petty theft. (Claire wondered what serious theft was — ‘petty’ sounded so trivial and unimportant.) So Claire told him they’d meet him on the end of her street at 11pm.

Her Baby Ben alarm clock ticked. It was ten to eleven. The next time the air conditioner switched on, she’d leave.

When the unit whirred to life, Claire stood on her bed, slid the lock open and slipped the window up as quietly as she could. She heard a noise and froze. Her heart pounded — so loud she was sure her parents would hear it. She let the curtains fall in front of the open window and lay down. She heard the soft whistle of her dad’s snore. She exhaled, relieved. She had to hurry. She slid the window all the way up and shimmied through, stepping onto the compressor, closing the window, and jumping with a quiet thump onto the carpet of thick grass. She carried her shoes — wooden Dr. Scholl’s that would make too much of a racket, thwapping against her heels. Her feet sunk into the damp grass with a slight suctioning from the mud just underneath. Claire wiggled her toes. The yard never got fully dry. It was like the subdivision was trying its best to go back to being  the swamp it was before it was paved with semicircles and cul-de-sacs, and littered with small, identical ranch-style houses.

The night’s humidity hit her like a mugger. But Claire still liked summer nights. She pretended she lived someplace tropical, the jungles of the Amazon or Sumatra. Anywhere but this small town. It was more suffocating than the humidity. Claire walked barefoot to the end of her driveway, which still held onto the day’s warmth, and crept across the neighbors’ yard and driveways until she got to the end of her street, to County Club Boulevard.

While Claire waited for Dwayne, she pondered the pretentiousness of the street’s name. Yes, the subdivision had a “country club,” if you could call the community pool and deserted clay tennis court one. Anyone who lived there was a member. But by no stretch of imagination could the road be considered a “boulevard.” Claire hadn’t traveled, but knew that boulevards were in impressive places like Paris or New York City. She suspected Los Angeles might have them, too.

Back in seventh grade, when she told a new friend she lived on St. George, off County Club, the girl said, in a fake English accent, “Fan-cy!” Claire wondered how her brick ranch-style house could be considered fancy. That was before she’d visited Jen’s house, a small wooden frame building with a car on cinderblocks in the front yard. The streets that bisected Country Club Boulevard were named after plantations, she was later informed by a boy on the bus. He’d said it proudly, as if this was an honor. Claire decided she needed to move. After high school, she’d fill steamer trunks with all her belongings and flee. But first she needed to get steamer trunks. And through high school.

Claire searched for a four leaf clover. She quietly sang ‘Blinded by the Light’ until she realized she had no idea what the words were. She lay down and studied the moon, shrouded in haze. Maybe she should’ve stayed home and slept. She’d been waiting forever. Dwayne was a jerk. Then she heard his car in the distance, the broken muffler announcing his arrival blocks away. She saw his Audi from a decade earlier, covered with gray primer spots as if it had contracted a case of measles. Dwayne leaned out the window, and said, “Hey.” A cigarette dangled from his lips. He took it out and flicked ash on County Club Boulevard.

“Hey, you,” Claire said, smiling. She pulled down the back of her shorts, which had crept up her rear, making her short shorts into shorter shorts. “Got a smoke?”

Claire didn’t smoke, but she was determined Dwayne find her cool. He was cool. Probably too cool for her. Sarah had told her Dwayne was too good for her. Claire wanted to punch her, but she wasn’t about to turn away friends. She’d suffered through junior high friendless except for Jen and wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again — she’d hold onto any she had, even if it meant keeping what she felt inside. She should’ve told Sarah to go fuck herself but she’d said, “You think? Probably.” Claire was going out with the cool guy, if you could call sneaking out her window and making out in an old car “going out.”

Dwayne rummaged on his dashboard for a crumbled pack of Marlboros, and tossed it to Claire. She popped one between her teeth. It felt uncomfortable, like the wooden tongue depressor at the pediatrician’s office, so she held it between her fingers. She walked around to the passenger side, opened the door and crawled in next to Dwayne. Claire imagined a different boyfriend: he pulled into her driveway in the evening, parked, and walked to the door. He shook her parents’ hands, politely telling them he was delighted to meet them, before presenting her with a bouquet of roses — no, sunflowers. Less emotionally fraught. Plus, no thorns. She placed them in a vase. They have vases scattered around their house for this sort of thing. Her mom elbows her and grins, as if to telepathically exclaim, “What a catch!” He opens the passenger door and she smooths the ruffles of her evening gown as she crawls into the bucket seat. He  kisses her gently on the forehead as he carefully shuts the door, making sure her hands and legs are in. He waves to her parents and, arm in arm, they smile and wave. “Don’t forget to bring her home by midnight.” her dad says. He nods and says, “I’ll have her home by 11:59, sir.”

Claire crawled into the car and pulled her door shut. Dwayne leaned over, blowing out smoke, and kissed her. “Mr. Happy missed you.”

She hated that he named his penis. It was awkward and wrong, like a stuffed doll with a foot where its head should be.

Instead, she leaned over and kissed him, tasting cigarette smoke and french fries, and said, “I’ve missed you so much.” And it was true. She didn’t like him, but she’d missed him.

She didn’t like her town. She didn’t like her friends. She didn’t like Dwayne. She didn’t like her house or Country Club Estates or her parents. She didn’t like herself. But she held onto them all tightly because they were all she had.

Sue Sanders' essays have been published in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Real Simple, Vox, Islands, Parents, Brain, Child, The Rumpus, and others.