Other People Collection No.2

Editor Note

EDITORS’ NOTE

Editors’ Note - Fall 2020/Winter 2021 Welcome to the second issue of Other People Magazine. Though work on this collection began months ago, it feels as though we have witnessed a lifetime of events in America and at a larger global scale during this timeframe. As a literary and artistic community which seeks to explore the collective human experience—and the joys and struggles inherent in it—we hope you find stories, ideas, and emotions within this collection that resonate with you. In this collection of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual artwork, it was our hope to share with you a breadth of emotion and experience; to present pieces that offer solace, joy, reflection, and beauty.

We have framed this collection under the concept of the “Midnight Oil,” a theme created by one of our Design Team members, Caroline Tjoe. Midnight Oil in all its brightness represents “the tireless work of the artist making sense of current times” through the transformation of experiences and emotions into the solid worlds of words and images. Midnight Oil, then, is the creative fuel which illuminates the darkness of our “midnight,” the obstacles that we are faced with. This past year has been a collective “midnight” marked by many challenges, but it is our belief that through art, writing, and language, we can take refuge in the shared beauty of creativity. In this issue, we present glimpses of human connection, human spirit, and human experience. We present this collection illuminated by the Midnight Oil of art and the power that the creative spirit has to offer. We hope you enjoy these pieces as much as we do.

We would like to thank all of the people who have made this collection possible. The writers and artists who have shared their work with us by submitting their pieces; the dedicated and talented members of the Other People teams, who spent many hours and much creative energy on making this collection burn bright; the UCSD faculty who have offered feedback and support to this project; the generous advertising given by the Literature Department; the welcoming artistic and literary community at UCSD; the followers of Other People’s social media; the folks at The Triton; the readers of our first issue. We thank you all, and wish you the very best as we begin a new year.

Much love from University of California, San Diego-The Head Editors Montanna Harling Isaac Kopstein Janelle Kim Ashley Hirao

CONTENTS Now Playing

Visual Art

1

Kristy Lee

19

2

Fiction

Little Doll

Janelle Kim

Nonfiction

Nonfiction Riley Sutton

Play Now, Play Later

May Flowers

Fishbowl Brain

5

SDG

Poetry

23

Alexandra Jefson

When the Party’s Over 9

Toast Fiction

Sharon Park

Fiction

Rachel Seo

24

Interview (Toast)

12

Interview (When the Party’s 34 Over)

Underdog

13

CARS

Nonfiction

Visual Art

Rula De

blood pacts Fiction

14

Cathy Huang

Visual Art

Geraldine Wambersie

38

Poetry

Casey Lee

Life Cycle

Nonfiction

18

Other People Team

41

Now Playing Kristy Lee

1

Midnight Oil

Play Now, Play Later By: Janelle Kim Inspired by: Now Playing by Kristy Lee

Midnight Oil

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The gentle thud of record needles catching vinyl grooves had always sounded like a

beating heart. She found out later on that they left scratches, priceless records wrecked by reckless gashes, but neither of them noticed till they were old enough to care.

They watched it for the first few loops. Bina imagined the needle to be a little race

car, breathing not exhaust fumes, but music instead, tracing round the racing track. Adults always bent down to see the records at eye-level, crouching to the height that Bina stood at.

She practiced standing on her tippie toes and stooping down to feel like she, too, was old, and therefore tall. Grass-stained ballet flats kissed the wooden floors in time to the music; tiptoes raised and lowered to the beat.

“Unnie1?” She called, noticing her sister absent from her side.

She wondered how long she’d been alone, but time always came and went at different speeds, and she could never keep up. Keeping up wasn’t a five-year-old’s job, anyway.

“Unnie?”

“Yes, Bina?” The response came from the kitchen, and Bina knew she’d been right not

to worry. Unnie never went too far.

“Yes?” Unnie, nearly impatient now. Bina appeared at Unnie’s elbow, and Unnie start-

led, nearly falling off the step stool that gave her access to the stovetop. The kitchen burst with their laughter, and Bina noticed that she liked that Unnie was also small. Not eye-level with the record anymore, but still too young to see the stove without the step stool.

Bina inhaled, smelled the instant broth packet without looking. As Unnie guided

her up the step ladder to stand by her side, Bina watched the bubbles foam at almost-cooked ramen noodles. Actually, Bina had no idea whether the noodles were almost-cooked or not, but their parents always seemed to be saying everything was “almost finished”: car rides, grocery shopping trips, bloody knees that needed disinfecting from dirty playgrounds. Bina had accordingly begun to think of most in-progress things as “almost there.”

1: Unnie - Korean word for “older sister” when called by a younger sister, pronounced “uh-knee.” (Bina is pronounced “Bean-uh”)

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As if she could read Bina’s mind (a possibility which Bina hadn’t entirely ruled out

yet) Unnie warned her the noodles would be a few minutes. She’d just put them in. Bina left.

She tasked herself with watching the race car for a little while longer. Noticed a few

minutes later that they’d scattered plumeria petals on the armchair this afternoon. They’d relieved the scraggly tree on the front yard of any white blossoms, a worthy sacrifice for the bottle of perfume they intended to make, which would replace the one they shattered the week prior. She adjusted them so they spread out evenly. It had been surprisingly difficult to produce any juice by tearing the petals, even the juiciest-looking ones, and they were left with an absurd excess of flower petals upon giving up. Bina wondered what they were going to do with all of the leftovers.

Two clicks of the stovetop burner turning off was all it took to summon Bina, and

she and Unnie followed a wordless routine by heart, setting out bowls and chopsticks. Sometimes they raced. Bina liked racing, but she was glad they didn’t today. She was tired enough from just watching the race car; she didn’t have it in her to race, too.

Unnie switched out the record, which had run its course, setting it down among the armchair flowers. Later on, one of them would not check before sitting, snapping the vinyl in two. And even later on, Bina and Unnie would be mostly grown and still bickering lightly about which one of them had broken it in the first place.

But for now, they sat and ate. They were just happy chatter, they were just chubby

legs swinging underneath the same oak dinner table that they rested their elbows on, making plans for their perfume line and the next bowl of ramen. Slurping loudly, giggling.

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M ay Flowers Story By: SDG

Illustrations By: Elysia Mac

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Are you allowed to grieve the right choice?

It is an inexplicably lonely feeling to miss someone you’ve never met, someone that

most everyone around you doesn’t know ever existed. Someone who lived within you briefly and then was gone.

He misses them too, but it’s not the same. He didn’t feel life inside himself the way

you did. He didn’t feel death. Only you took the pills.

1 Hour After

It hurts so bad you think only of yourself, curled up and bleeding out on the white

tile of the bathroom floor—you think you’re going to die. You lie in bed for a couple weeks afterwards, nursing a heating pad and getting high so you don’t have to feel as much. As time passes you stay high so you don’t have to think as much. When you finally come down, your baby is gone and you are lost.

1 Week After

Suddenly you panic. You had been so lost in your pain that you’d hardly stopped to

wonder if your baby could feel it too. You killed them, and all you had thought about was the awful ache in your stomach. Now you wish it had hurt worse. You wish it had lasted forever.

You wish you really had died. It wasn’t the right time for your baby to come, but now you wish you could’ve left with them.

A wave of nausea hits you while you‘re at his house. You know the baby is gone

without looking—you‘re too scared to anyway. You cry, hysterical. You clean yourself up and walk back out to him like nothing had happened.

Now you can’t stop shaking. Why didn’t you hold your baby? You would never get

another chance. You were a monster. Babies need to be held. Everyone needs to be held. You feel sick. You killed your baby without saying goodbye.

5 Weeks After

He moves back home. You tell him you asked for your ultrasound pictures from the Midnight Oil

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doctor. He says it was a bad idea, but you know you need it. You keep crying yourself to a sleep full of nightmares. It‘s been over a month and it isn’t getting better. You never held your baby; you need something to hold onto now.

8 Weeks After

He comes to visit you. You

walk to the park, picking purple flowers on the way—soft and six petals each. In the bushes you see a cabbage butterfly; your mom always told you that there were cabbage butterflies at your grandma’s funeral, so when you see their powder-white wings now, you almost feel like it’s her fluttering around you. You sit down together by a big tree and write letters to your baby on the back of the ultrasound print. You write that you’re sorry. You write that you loved them. You bury the picture with the flowers and he holds your hand while you cry. He grew up going to church—you ask him what happens in a situation like this and he says they go straight to heaven, that they’re “at peace in the happiest place ever.” You ask him if you’d see them one day and he says yes. He says they’d always be watching over you.

You say you didn’t understand because they were just a baby. You have more questions but you’re crying too hard to get them out. You wish you believe in god.

7

He points out a hummingbird on a patch of flowers by your tree. He says it’s beautiMidnight Oil

ful. You don’t tell him but you decide this is your baby watching over you; this is your cabbage butterfly. You pick a dandelion and blow the seeds off together. You don’t tell him this either, but you make a wish for your baby.

You cry the rest of the day. You’ve been crying for nearly 2 months. Your mom calls

and says she misses you and she wishes you’d share more of your life. You wish you could tell her. You go to bed late, after your roommates are asleep, and you cry quietly so you don’t wake them up.

He says tomorrow will be better but he has god to talk to and you have no one. He

says you could go to counseling together but you’re scared that if that doesn’t work you’ll have nothing left to try. You’ll be stuck like this, trapped with the unbearable pain of closing a door you can never reopen.

You wish this would go away. It feels like a bad dream, a thick fog constantly clou-

ding your vision. Morning sickness has been permanently stamped into your brain: the smell of the corn tortillas he made you while you were pregnant makes you gag more than anything. You always loved babies but now the sight of them—peaceful and happy in their parents’ arms—strikes you like a viper every time you leave your house or even turn on the TV. The pain feels heavy and sempiternal and every day it gets harder to breathe under its weight.

You decide heaven is real because it makes it hurt a little less. You couldn’t have given

your baby what they deserved. You know this was the right choice, but you’ll miss them forever. You’ll love them forever, too. It’s not enough but it’s what you have. It might hurt forever but you’re holding out just in case it gets duller with time. You know how many people go through this, but it still feels like you’re stuck in this freezing void alone.

You hope tomorrow hurts less for all of you.

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Toast Story By: Sharon Park Illustration By: Kristy Lee

99

MidnightOil Oil Midnight

You only look up on the days I’m eating toast. But then again, I only notice in the

brief moments we get to be with the sun.

It grounds me that this is all I’ve ever known while below: wake up at 8:27, no sun.

Brush teeth and wash face under LED ceilings, no sun. Get dressed in incandescence, still no sun.

Here, there is no sun. It cannot hurt us. Not here.

But I miss it. I realize for the hundredth time while sipping on tea too hot and

swatting Hyun’s nasty old cat away from the deflated, soggy tea bag. I’ve missed it enough to apply to the aboveground commuting program, enough to say goodbye to the peaceful, silent walks Hyun and I have taken together to classes and jobs for the past five years.

I’m running late as always, careful to grab the singed corners of my toast as I slip out

the door.

9:17AM: rush hour. I push through right as the doors threaten to close, breathlessly

mouthing apologies and sweat pricking through my roots. There is a spot to squeeze perfectly into. I want to imagine the tiny space left open is your doing. Sometimes I listen in on elders scolding you lightly for straining your eyes with those tiny books you carry. Causes wrinkles, you’ll look like me, they chide, and sometimes I can hear the low rumble of your laugh, hesitant but polite.

I’ll never admit how

hard I strain to feel a hint of warmth from the chuckles in your throat, not even to myself. It’s at this point I want to look back Midnight Oil

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and say something, anything, but before the words crawl out, it’s 9:20, when the speed picks up. A slight pressure applies to the chest with the feeling of bursting forward, upward, and then it’s just sun. Tinted, filtered, safe sun.

I can’t think of anything else when it hits, and I know everyone else feels the same.

Minds blank, eyes shut, we breathe it in. That’s all I know: soft laughs, quick glances that come and go like the beams of light between pillars, between walls. And then it’s our stop.

9:47.

The day slurs by. In the brief time we’ve been down here, everything else slurs. But

even when I don’t think of you throughout the rushed conversations and lengthy agendas and meetings under buzzing yellow light, I never tell you that I wait for you after the day is done and it’s time to see the sun again. 5:37PM.

I know it’s you behind me because of the way you clear your throat, as if there are

words to spill out after. But the words never come, and the doors screech open for us to shoulder into. I grab the railing, keeping easy distance between us and look up in silent greeting. You nod back like you always do, lips pursed tight and eyes tired, dancing. The elders are right, I always recall; there are creases by your lids. And they’re crucial because they remind me to look away.

I train my eyes to the window to my right and you duck your head into that same

tiny book and all of us are lulled into that exhausted, swelling silence. Nothing but the creaking and rumbling and rushing. The sun races us home, slowly sinking below the empty buildings we used to know, descending down those bare skyscrapers and silent streets. Through tinted windows, we watch the sky turn red, purple, and we look up, all of us.

It’s glorious and tense and still so silent when the sun sinks and the sky bruises and

the doors open and we seep out. 6:03. Maybe this is all there is to say.

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“Based On An Interview With Sharon Park, Author of Toast” Written by Janelle Kim, Content Writer

Sharon stopped on her way to the kitchen to mark yesterday off the 2020 calendar

on the wall; another day closer to the workshop deadline’s highlighted date. Writer’s block wouldn’t be such an issue if she were where she’d normally be on a spring quarter Sunday: on southbound train tracks, speeding towards San Diego, maybe stopping off at the usual Oceanside coffee shop for their crunchy honey toast. She missed when public transportation was not a hazard; when daily bus rides were only temporary communal limbos with repeated strangers. She missed wondering and writing about where they were coming from and to whom they were returning.

The morning sunlight was almost painfully bright, but the whipped coffee (the latest

quarantine trend) foamed at the lip of her favorite mug, and there was something deeply satisfying about the way syrup trickled and steamed over a slightly crisp French toast.

Even as he sang about lonely nights and dancing with teary eyes, Frank Ocean’s

voice had her smiling. It welcomed her back to her room, underscored by the musical line of a softly strumming guitar. She sat at her desk, tapped her unnamed betta fish’s bowl, and grinned as he drifted through the sunbeams in the water and into the glass. “You like my toast?” she asked.

She loved her family, but she longed for her friends. There was a certain level of lone-

liness you had to reach to start talking to a fish. Even casual small-talk with bus strangers sounded appealing, and some parts of her mind were still stuck reminiscing about Oceanside toast. She reread the assignment prompt. What did she want to say? What was there to say?

She grabbed a pen and began scribbling on a notebook that was stacked on top of her computer.

“You... only...look up… on the days…”

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Underdog Casey Lee

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blood pacts Story By: Cathy Huang Illustrations By: Kevin Phan

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We’re gonna rule the world one day, but right now we’re running through the par-

king lot because the bartender just called the cops on us. He refused to serve alcohol to minors, so Lila drew lipstick dicks all over their windows and gave everyone the finger. We run and run and the moon is swollen like a black eye. The stars scatter like blood droplets. I think our brains are too full, with languages and secret codes and what happens to a human body when it dies. So right now, we let it loose. We’re the stupidest kids on the boulevard, howling and cackling through the alleyways while the police sirens blare.

By the time the morning comes, we’re sitting in the deputy’s office. The man who

pretends to be your dad comes in and picks us up. We always thought he killed your actual dad— took his identity to wear like a coat and his daughter to raise as a conqueror. We hadn’t met yet, but I think we were connected, anyway. Thirteen years later, it turns out we’re worth some pretty big bribes. The man— Mr. Poker Face, we call him, because of his stupid red-black-white suits— loads us into the back of his SUV and says he’ll kill us all if we keep causing the wrong kind of trouble. International espionage is the right kind of trouble.

Trying to steal the neighbor’s stereo is not.

We know he’s lying. He won’t shoot his investments. Not until we pay ourselves off.

I’m sixteen years old when I have my first time, stoic and unfeeling in Southern California.

The sea swallows up the gunshot and we throw the body into the Pacific, then sit and watch the waves. We talk about anarchy and death and after an hour, we take your car to an In-N-Out and eat burgers on the freeway. From the passenger seat, I stare at the side of your face.

You’ve always been so intense, so paranoid, watching the cars as though they’re enemies on the hunt. Your knuckles are white against the steering wheel, but I say something stupid and you still smile. The moon is our witness, and it follows us from the crime scene all the way down the I-5.

At ninety miles an hour, I think I am loved. With the rock radio shaking the car, I

think I am loved. As the three of us squeeze into a single motel bed, I think I am loved. But

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how could I tell?

There’s blood on my hoodie, but none of us realize it until morning.

Mr. Poker Face makes us stop

calling him Mr. Poker Face. It’s Mr. Claude Quintal, and we begrudgingly repeat it in the daylight. But he takes us to Berlin, Moscow, Zanzibar City, New York City. In Times Square, we manage to break away from him, only for a moment, to run into the crowd as giggling teenagers. Lila looks up into the cloudy sky and yells like a warrior going off into war, and no one stops to look or care. We run into the M&M store and buy fifty dollars of custom candies with our initials all together. Even with the noise, it took Mr. Poker Face Quintal an hour to find us again.

I don’t remember the moment when it changed. Maybe it was after Mr. Quintal kic-

ked the bucket, and we moved from motels to high-rise apartments in the different cities of the world. Lila was sent to Moscow, and when she came back for Christmas, she didn’t talk to us. We spun the web further, and set up political figureheads in Russia, Japan, Canada, anywhere we could. We made powerful friends, sorted through them with bullets and cyanide—and it seemed so easy for you. It was a Wednesday night, of all times, when we were sitting in your living room, drinking wine with the big window behind us and the computer Midnight Oil

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in front of us. In one screen we could see into the palaces of our labors. White House, Kōkyo, Buckingham Palace, the Kremlin— all at a glance. I don’t think I believed it until you quietly took my hand in yours. You hadn’t done that since we were eighteen and sitting in the parking lot behind CVS, drinking late night coffee and fearing the years ahead of us. I could feel the cold night air, as you squeezed my hand and we watched the President pick his nose in the Oval Office.

It changed because we’re not young anymore. It changed because your hair is already

going white. It changed when Lila died alone in Amsterdam, bleeding in the back of a truck.

Someone once asked me if I was ever scared of you. Why would I be? You know eight languages and could call for the Queen’s assassination any time, but you’re still my best friend. I’ve held your hair as you puked in a bird bath. You know the right bullet and the right head that could start the next World War. I think if anything happened to me, you would.

In my head, you‘re still looking back at me as we run through the parking lot. We always looked at the stars, but now I see there‘s a space between them. It‘s that darkness where I think we are now. So close to the dazzle.

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Life Cycle

Geraldine Wambersie

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Story by: Riley Sutton Illustration by: Caroline Tjoe

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If the summer of 2016 had a smell, it would be hydrangeas. Hydrangeas, and moss,

and whatever those green little weeds are that sprout out from under the dirt, whenever you walk loose-toed hiking trails. Because yes, we were hiking that summer. We were in Arkansas, and that was the only thing to do that didn’t involve stuffing ourselves with various meats. You were a vegetarian, anyway. So we hiked.

Your dad had all of the best sights to see, logged in the notes section of his old,

cracked-up iPhone. They were all far. Home was just one nauseating car ride away, and we complained, and held our hands out in erroneous prayer. But the sun was shining like daggers down on us, and the caves were cool and wet, and that’s where we found the moss.

And so you and I stuffed our gangly teenage selves into those slanted, claustrophobic caves.

There was water dripping, somewhere. It felt like a sweat on your upper lip, but all over the body instead, a constant shiver. We pressed on. Your sister was so young that she could slide through the cracks in the rock and run ahead, without letting us know that she’d left. When I realized that we had lost her, my heart jumped into my throat like a frog. The cave started to squeeze a little bit tighter. I used my tiny purple flashlight and illuminated every orifice of the rock, and the faces of quite a few unsuspecting people. They grimaced, sneering at the tiny beam of my flashlight. And then your sister was sitting next to the waterfall drip, toes dangling in the pool as though she was vacationing in the Bahamas.

My shirt was soaked clean through. The cave was pitch black, so dark that you cou-

ldn’t even see your hands, couldn’t be sure that they existed. It felt like the hollow at the end of the universe. But if you closed your eyes, and stood against a wall, you could hear the roaring thrum of the water. It vibrated against the rocks, and into our fingertips. The air was tangy, and it smelled like sweat and dust and salt. We left; but this time, I kept my hands on your sister’s shoulders.

Your dad said that the last hike was to a hidden lake cove, and that it would be so

short that we would laugh at him for calling it a hike. He lied. We walked uphill for two Midnight Oil

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hours, and my shorts were soaked through as well, and when we finally stopped walking I collapsed in the hydrangeas. There was a sign there, saying not to step on the flowers. I didn’t.

So technically, I told you, technically I never broke any rules.

The lake was gorgeous. Sparkling aquamarine in the midday sun, and so tranquil that

a rock would bounce right off, up and into the atmosphere. Your sister dove in first, little water wings cutting off any circulation to her grubby hands. She said it was cold. But still, the water beckoned. And so you and I, we peeled off our disgusting sweaty clothes, because we had bikinis on underneath. Do you remember those swimsuits? We had gone to Wal-Mart, in the middle of Nowhere, Arkansas, and we got cute matching bikinis in pink and lemon colors. I was so happy. We looked like a couple of lollipops, floating on top of the cool lake water, and doing everything in our power to become one with the hot, summer day.

Everything was so perfect, and beautiful, and I splashed water in your face and we

laughed. And what now? You have carried yourself and your memories and your matching swimsuit, and you have taken them so far away that I can’t begin to search. I can’t even say that I miss you. It’s not right, not enough. Do the flowers miss the rain? No. They need each other, attached by some mortal coil that even God himself could not break, but you did.

Painting faint blue watercolor all over my life, because now I am at the bottom of the lake, and I am alone. The flowers will wilt without the rain but you will be fine. My thoughts return to you like a frantic goldfish, swimming in circles over and over again, I can’t see where the bowl ends so I just keep spinning.

I fought for you tooth and nail, with scratches up and down my chest as you shoved

me out of your life. Maybe you don’t need my best-friendship in college. Maybe home is just a footnote in your book, and so am I. You don’t want me anymore, and my heart snaps, every day. To have mouthwatering victories and bitter defeats, to know that you will never care.

Never again, at least. I hope that back then, under the bright Arkansas sky, you loved me just a little bit.

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We floated, with hair cast out around our heads like halos. Your sister giggled from

the shore. And as our eyes met across the water, and the wind sung through the petals of the hydrangeas, I felt like I was home. Not the temporary, ramshackle kind, but a home that would forever last.

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Little Doll My mouth sewn into a smile, that constant pulling at my strings.

Pushing the boulder up a quarter mile, a little doll trying to scream.

Forced to play the puppet in your show, you tear the stuffing underneath my skin.

How long will this go?

Because this doll you treat so poorly has no more string for you to sew.

Story By: Alexandra Jefson Illustration By: Kristy Lee

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Story By: Rachel Seo Winner of the 2020 Saier Memorial Award in Fiction

Illustrations By: Hana Tobias

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If she closes her eyes, she can see it clearly: the pink lemonade in the crystal-clear

flutes, tiny sausages wrapped in phyllo, fairy lights spiderwebbing across the ceiling.

SABRINA’S SWEET SIXTEEN, stretched in lacy letters out over the cake table.

The cake, of course, is from Beverly’s, lemon with vanilla buttercream. Sabrina

Haverford smells it from all the way up here in her bedroom, even though the cake table is a floor below in the family ballroom. If she tries hard enough, she can almost pretend she’s down there with the guests—dancing, laughing, smiling. Can almost forget the Gordian knot in her chest.

Can almost prevent herself from imagining what would happen if she sliced it

through. Sharp edge of steel cutting through tangled mass.

Because why not? Alexander the Great did. Whoosh. Problem solved.

Sabrina turns over in her bed.

Problem not solved, she can hear her therapist saying in her head. He’s never actually

said that to her, but he might. She likes that he doesn’t treat her like she’s made of glass. She hates that she sometimes feels like she is. The smallest things happen, and then she shatters.

Problem not solved, she reminds herself. Problem not solved. Still, her lungs constrict.

Her heart stutters. Her world spins.

As if on cue, someone knocks on the door.

“Who is it,” Sabrina manages to say.

“It’s Cooper,” the person behind the door says.

Sabrina doesn’t answer, because too many thoughts have rushed her brain.

Twenty people, her mother said, one month ago. That’s all I ask. I’ll take care of the rest.

Mrs. Haverford smells like rosewater and champagne. She walks with her head held high, commands an army of maids and butlers and gardeners to manage the family’s twenty-acre property. She throws summer soirees and annual galas, runs a women’s book club and sits

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on the board of directors for three different charities. And now, after what happened with Sabrina, she’s officially the family’s damage control specialist. Hence, the Sweet Sixteen. It makes sense in a kind of twisted way. Normal daughters have Sweet Sixteen parties, and the Haverfords must pretend that they have a normal daughter, for the sake of preserving the family name, even if they know that they don’t. And while Mrs. Haverford doesn’t expect Sabrina to act normally, she at least expects her to play along when the time comes. Only twenty people, she said. Send me a list by tonight.

So Sabrina came up with the guest list. Cooper, of course—her best friend, even after

everything. A few of her dad’s business partners’ kids. The scholarship students in her grade from Hamilton Prep, because her mother might not know who they are or care to invite them. But as she added their names to the list, Sabrina cringed. If they came to the party and walked through the house, saw her life for themselves, they’d probably think she was stuck-up and spoiled and dramatic. And they wouldn’t be wrong. Sabrina grew up swimming in her family’s indoor pool during the winter and outdoor pool during the summer. Her mother’s dinner parties are always fourteen-course affairs, the meat tender and dripping with fat, the lettuce crisp and hand-washed, the last course a tall cake with melted chocolate pouring down the sides like a fountain. As part of the grand finale, the Haverfords’ butler comes in and douses the cake with alcohol, then lights it on fire, casting a bright warm glow into the dining room as the guests ooh and ahh. Sabrina loved this spectacle when she was younger; she assumed that everyone else grew up with this exact same experience. But the older she’s grown, the more she’s learned how far this is from the truth, and the more the overt excesses of her family pain her. She stopped going to those dinner parties last year. The Haverfords’ swimming pools sit empty, still and quiet. Sometimes, when she’s lying in bed, she squeezes her eyes shut even when she’s not tired, because she doesn’t want to think about how cavernous her room is, how every square inch that she doesn’t occupy feels like a waste.

She aches to be in a place where she takes up the exact amount of space that her body fills.

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No more, no less. A box, maybe. A cupboard. A coffin.

Cooper knocks on the door again. “Sabrina,” he says, more insistently.

“Yes?” she says.

“Are you okay?”

Short pause. Cooper won’t believe her if she says yes, but he’ll want to come in and

talk to her if she says no. “I’m all right.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

Sabrina turns over in her bed. “I’m fine. I’ll be down in a minute.”

Both of them know this is a lie.

She knows he’s scared of what might happen if he presses her. But he’s also scared of

what might happen if he leaves her alone.

Cooper knows all about the Gordian knot.

“Text me if you need anything,” he says, finally.

Sabrina says, “Thank you.”

She hears his footsteps fading out. When their sound disappears, her chest clenches

again.

Four months ago, they went to Olivier’s, the two of them. Their one-month

anniversary. Sabrina, in a gold satin Chanel with a sequined bodice. Cooper in his tuxedo, grinning from ear to ear. When he’d brought up the idea of going there, Sabrina had tried to protest; it was too fancy for a one-month anniversary, she said. Cooper insisted, though, so Sabrina tried to go along with it.

But when they got there and he pulled out the chair for her, Sabrina understood,

acutely, under the warmth of his gaze, that carrying this on any longer was unfair to him. She couldn’t keep lying and telling him that she was fine, but if she told him what was going on,

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he’d want to help, and that would only drag him down. Sabrina knew she was many things—snotty, spoiled, privileged—but she was determined not to be a burden.

Cooper ordered a steak; Sabrina asked for escargot. But by the time the entrees came, he was pleading.

“Can you at least,” he said, “give me a reason why?”

He was close to tears, Sabrina could tell; he still wore his heart on his

sleeve, especially around her. She’d only ever seen him cry once, about his parents.

But now he was clutching her hands, candlelight casting a delicate glow

over his face, which had recently sharpened into something less childlike, more handsome—more beautiful, honestly, which was something Sabrina couldn’t deny.

She liked him almost as much as she hated herself.

Her throat thickened. The waiter set their dishes silently on the table, then

left without grandeur. What was she to say? “Cooper, I…”

She couldn’t leave him without an explanation; she couldn’t lie to him, either, not Cooper, her best friend of ten years—Cooper, with whom she’d built pillow forts when they were younger. Cooper, who on that fateful day showed up at her house, walked upstairs and confessed that he’d liked her for years and years and years and would she please go on a date with him, just one date and then if it sucked they could pretend it never happened and go back to being friends again.

The date had gone sufficiently well enough for Sabrina to agree to be more than friends, but the storm clouds had been gathering even then. She’d just fooled herself into thinking she could ignore them.

By that point, though, they were undeniably present, and Sabrina couldn’t

drag someone else into the tempest with her. She cried before he did. She wept into his shoulder, left tear stains on his thousand-dollar jacket. She made him promise to send the dry-cleaning bill to her house. Then she told Cooper the Midnight Oil

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truth: about how every day, she thinks about how it would probably be so much better for the world, for everyone, if she didn’t exist.

When the party’s over, she thinks now in the darkness of her bedroom, there will

be a smashed mini sausage on the floor. Someone will have accidentally dropped one, then stepped on it, crushing it into a gristly pancake. A maid will sweep it up, leaving a shiny oily spot on the floor for another maid to mop.

A few of the fairy lights will flicker out. Her mother, in disgust, will order the staff to

throw them away, just like she has them throw out yards and yards of Christmas lights every year. Nobody will point out that you can replace the bulbs without having to replace the entire string.

A few guests might wonder about Sabrina. “Where is she?” they’ll ask.

Mrs. Haverford will have some answer ready. “Oh, she’ll be down shortly,” or, “She

wasn’t feeling well, but she still wanted to have the party.”

More than a few are bound to notice that although there’s a cake, there’s no happy

birthday song. The gifts are taken automatically by the housekeepers; Mrs. Haverford will open them later, keep what she thinks Sabrina wants, then give away the rest.

The Gordian knot tightens.

Sabrina wants to throw up.

She throws off the covers suddenly; they’re too heavy. She marches over to her closet,

fumbles a bit, turns on the light. In the corner, the dress. Her mother had insisted on buying her one for the party—just in case, she’d said, just in case. Like Sabrina hadn’t just come home from the hospital, like the two of them hadn’t been there by the bridge that one night, Sabrina sitting on the side of the guardrail, her mother screaming at her to stay put. When she thinks about it now, that night feels like a dream, but the reason why she hadn’t jumped was because the moment itself had felt real, for once. But then the month in the hospital

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happened, then the therapist, and the medication, and all of that had rid that moment of its realness, and rendered it part of the narrative. Sabrina is ill, Sabrina isn’t fine, but she’s getting better, she’s trying to be. And that’s the thing, too, is that she’s trying to be.

Sabrina’s hands are shaking. Why. Can’t. You. Pull. Your. Self. Together. She rips off the

pajamas, yanks on the dress, zips it up, the cloth getting caught on the delicate zipper. She tugs at it, one, two, three—

Rip.

What a quality dress. What a quality, quality, quality dress, that the cloth will be so

delicate she can rip it—she! a girl who cannot get out of bed! She who cannot cannot cannot think of how many people are downstairs, milling around, thinking they’re waiting for her, when in reality they’re waiting for the ghost of a girl she’s never been, the girl who wears pretty dresses and sips pink lemonade and laughs, when really she is dying, suffocating, drowning, hunched over, bent down, crushed by the weight of the world, and oh God, how dare she feel this way. How dare she feel this way when she has everything at her disposal, and nothing to lose. How dare she feel that she has nothing to gain, and that everything is nothing. But all of this does mean nothing, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it? she feels like screaming at herself. She catches a glimpse of herself in the

full-length mirror installed on the wall of her closet. She looks crazy: clumps of hair matted this way and that. The poor ripped dress, Oscar de la Renta, must’ve cost a pretty penny and look, the poor little rich girl ripped it in a fit of rage. A fit of self-centered, impatient rage.

This would be a good scene on a reality television show: how messy everyone is, you know?

Regardless of socioeconomic status? Rich People are People Too! Oh, how viewers would laugh at her: too soaked in her own privilege to keep her head above the water.

She sags against the wall. How nice would it be, she thinks, to take a break from your

own life. To never feel the poison of your own thoughts.

I would sell my own soul, my own self-awareness, my own life, if that meant I could finally Midnight Oil

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have some peace.

In the distance, someone knocks on the door.

Sabrina wakes up. She’s face down on the carpet inside her closet, still wearing the

ripped dress. She flips herself over weakly. “Come in.”

She hears footsteps, then the sound of Cooper’s voice. “Where are you?” he asks.

“Closet.”

He looks relieved when he sees her. “Oh my god,” he says. “Are you okay? What

happened?”

She rubs her eyes, sits up. “Nothing.”

“Everyone’s gone,” Cooper says. Then, in a softer tone, “We all missed you.” He holds

out his hand, an offering. Sabrina shakes her head.

He sits next to her instead, cross-legged on the carpet. “How are you feeling?”

She swallows the temptation to lie. “Not well.”

“People asked about you. They wanted to know if you were okay.”

Sabrina nods. She feels the manic energy slowly leave her body, seeping into the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“For everything.” She emphasizes the last word, meaning, everything. “I just feel bad

for putting everyone through this. Whatever this even is.”

“It’s not your fault,” he whispers back. “They get it.”

“I don’t think my mom does,” she says. “She keeps trying to pretend that everything’s

fine. She bought me a car.”

Cooper coughs. “A car?”

“A car,” Sabrina says, and then, suddenly, she giggles. Across from her, Cooper’s face

breaks into a smile. “It was nice of her, but I don’t leave my house! I don’t even have a license

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or a permit. What am I supposed to do with a car?”

“Maybe she’s trying to make you feel better,” Cooper says.

“Maybe.” Sabrina’s smile slips off her face. “But I think all of this is her way of

pretending that I’m okay, and her way of covering for me until I get ‘better.’ But I don’t know if I ever will.”

Cooper leans forward and looks at her directly in her eyes. “You will,” he says, with

force. “You’ll get better. It’s just a process.”

Sabrina tries to believe this. They sit in silence for a moment.

“How are your parents?” she asks. “We haven’t talked about—I haven’t asked about

them in a while.”

Cooper grimaces. “Still not talking to each other. Still living in separate wings.”

“You know you’re rich,” she says, “when your parents sleep in different wings of the

house, let alone different rooms.”

He rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling now, too, which is encouraging, so she keeps going.

“You know what normal couples do? They make each other sleep on the sofa. In the living room. I’ve seen it on TV.”

“I’ve actually heard them arguing over which side of the house they can take,” Cooper

says. “The Mauve Wing? Or the Lavender Wing?”

“Red pill? Or blue pill?” she says, and now both of them are laughing again, at the

ridiculousness of their world.

“I’ve been wondering about it a lot,” he says. “Why they need to do that. It seems

unnecessary.”

Sabrina turns around, leans back so that her head is propped on his shoulder. “I think

some people’s worlds are too small for them,” she says. “So they think making it bigger and grander will make them feel more whole. And then some people’s worlds are too big, so big that it feels like they’re getting swallowed by them.”

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She feels him hesitate.

“Is your world the right size for you?” he whispers.

For a long, tantalizing second, Sabrina wants to say yes. This is a good moment, she

knows, and in the good moments she feels most hopeful. But the lows come quickly, too, and right now they seem as if they never will stop coming.

So she settles for the middle answer, which is closest to the truth.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe.”

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An Interview With Rachel Seo (Author Of When The Party’s Over) Questions Asked by Sanjana Dhamankar, Content Writer Q: Let’s talk first about your creative inclinations. What kind of writing do you gravitate towards? How do you come up with ideas for them?

A: I love writing everything except for poetry. I probably gravitate the most towards fiction—usually book-length projects, although short fiction is fun too—and essays; I enjoy reading and writing cultural criticism. For fiction, I usually come up with a logline or a concept that has inherent irony in it and then work from that. I usually come up with essay topics based on how snarky or nit-picky I can be about something––a book, movie, trend, etc.

Q: Tell me about your writing process. Are you more of a “sit at a typewriter and bleed” kind of writer, or do you have an intricate planning system?

A: I enjoy structure and organization, so I usually don’t like starting a project completely blind to what I’m about to do. If I’m planning on seriously writing something, I usually incubate an idea for at least a week in my head before I start getting stuff down on paper. My general rule is that if I forget about an idea, it wasn’t one worth remembering. Once I’ve decided that whatever idea I have is worth pursuing, I map out what I think will happen in the story I’m writing. That being said, I’m usually pretty eager to get to the actual writing part, so I don’t usually plan with a ton of detail. No complicated organization tiers for me.

Q: What is the most important to you as a writer: plot, character, themes, message?

A: Structure, flow, and quality of prose are the most important to me as a writer. I wish I could say I focus on character, but the truth is that the stories I love the most are the ones Midnight Oil

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that feel deliberate in both their progression and presentation, and those emphases definitely inform how I approach writing. Story ideas come to me not through character, but in the form of full concepts, usually about the action that transpires within the story, and then I figure out the details later. I will say, though, that my favorite part of the whole writing process is trying to come up with different ways to say things that have already been said. The actual practice of getting the words down on the page and revising them over and over again to make them sound just right all together is torturously fun.

Q: Let’s dig deeper into “When the Party’s Over.” This piece felt very timely to me because of the ideas expressed about privilege and mental health. I was also intrigued by the protagonist Sabrina and wanted to learn more about her life. What came first for you when coming up with this story: the concepts you wanted to expand on, or the character of Sabrina herself?

A: The first mental image that popped into my head was this idea of a girl who couldn’t attend her own birthday party that was happening inside her own house. Then I started thinking of reasons why she wasn’t able to attend her own birthday party—was she trapped? By what, by whom? It all just spun from there.

Q: The piece talks about the various ways in which mental health issues impact not just the person who is affected but also the people in their life. What made you decide to write about this topic?

A: I wrote about this topic because I’ve experienced these issues myself, and I’ve had to rely on other people to help me through them, which then affects them by proximity. Asking people to come to your aid triggers this guilt that is a lot to handle and infuriatingly self-referential—it’s like, you need people to help you out of whatever mental hole into which you’ve dug yourself, but at the same time you feel bad, because you feel like you’re dragging them down

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along with you, which then leads you to think that maybe you should distance yourself, which then of course exacerbates your issues, and so on. One of the things that I appreciate about writing fiction, though, is that it establishes distance.

Q: Was there a specific reason you chose to write it in third person limited in a stream-of-consciousness style?

A: Writing third person limited is soothing, because zooming out relieves you of the burden of looking through your own eyes and plants you firmly into someone else’s body and life, which establishes greater perspective. As for the stream-of-consciousness section, I read a lot of young adult contemporary fiction, so to take some of the expectations of that genre— the concreteness of the narrative, flashbacks, the straightforward voice—and then to try to subvert those at the end by including passages that were a little more unorthodox was really fun. I like starting with a strong framework and then loosening the screws in it, because it surprises the reader in a way that extends beyond the standard plot twist.

Q: Finally, the piece also has a heavy focus on the nature of luxury and privilege, through the lens of a young person belonging to our generation. What made you decide to choose this particular point-of-view?

A: The most straightforward way to say this is that I grew up relatively privileged (not Haverford rich, though, LOL), and I always felt guilty whenever I went through trouble patches mentally and emotionally, because I felt like I had no solid basis to feel the way that I did. I knew that there were tons of people who were dealing with greater, more pressing issues in their lives. I wanted to express this feeling while also trying to avoid the “Oh, privileged people can feel bad too!” vibe, which always felt super simplistic and not at all the story I wanted to tell. I exaggerated Sabrina’s wealth because I wanted to draw a starker contrast between the poles within the story—the heights of obscene wealth, the lows of depression— Midnight Oil

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while also working more generally with the idea of self-awareness and how to deal with the fact that you don’t know what you don’t know. This is hard to do, because people who are aware of the limitations of their own perspective will either minimize what they’re going through and live in denial or slide into self-pity. In the end, though, if you haven’t experienced what you haven’t experienced, you can’t really ask yourself to be the wiser for it, but the first step to increasing compassion for lives outside of your own is to seek knowledge about other people in the same way you seek to know yourself. There’s a way to validate your emotions while also seeing your own life as one of eight billion on this planet, and staying steady while standing in the center of that see-saw is a hard art to master.

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CARS Story By: Rula De Illustration by: Jaiden McCrann

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You know those idiots That stayed in their small towns While we all moved away; the ones That stayed home and we said They’d be going nowhere Do you think those idiots are happier Than us Do you think they’ve found their people, found a group to grow with Do you think the bonds we make will really last because Lately I’ve been thinking about the years between 30 and 50 And how lonely they have the ability to be I can build a safety net of money But I don’t know if I’ll be happy I wish I could guarantee myself A lover and a child To hold when I have nothing left Do you think they’d be okay Knowing they were my backups

But lovers leave and children die And life’s just a game of uncertainty, I suppose If I give each version of myself The responsibility of being happy in the now Then maybe the nows could add up to forever I wish I could create a surplus of happy Bottle it up

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And save it for later Just like I do with everything else But there are no guarantees in this I guess No way to know for sure where I’m going So why do we live on I mean, do we have a choice?

I suppose death’s always an option But it seems silly to reduce Every possible timeline that could occur To one I could do so many things; there’s so many Branching possibilities It is scary to eliminate any because I don’t know which one I’d want But I guess ultimately that’s The only way to take control The only way to know how the story ends is to end it yourself But is that power worth it? Is a car in the midst of a journey Expected to crash because you don’t know where it will go But back to the idiots I think they’re happy And I envy what they have But I suppose I couldn’t wish it On myself.

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Other People Team 2019-2021

Editorial & Content Writting Montanna Harling — Co-Editor-in-Chief (Editorial & Production) Isaac Kopstein — Head Editor Ashley Hirao — Head Copy Editor Janelle Kim — Head Content Writer Cathy Huang — Editorial Rachel Seo — Editorial Stephanie Duncan — Editorial Zoe Wong — Editorial Jennifer Khuu — Content Ruisi Shu — Content Sanjana Dhamankar — Content Spencer Vossman — Content Sydney Kessler — Editor-at-Large (2019-20) Amy Cheng — Editorial (2019-20) Chloe Esser — Editorial (2019-20) Abigail Hora — Content (2019-20) Hemmy Chun — Content (2019-20) Jasmine Torres — Content (2019-20) 41

Midnight Oil

Design & Marketing Geraldine Wambersie — Design Director Nicole Lopez — Co-Editor-in-Chief (Publicity & Events) Elysia Mac — Design Illustrator Caroline Tjoe — Design Illustrator Kaley Chun — Design Illustrator Kevin Phan — Design Illustrator Hana Tobias — Design Illustrator Jaiden McCrann — Design Illustrator Kristy Lee — Design Illustrator Kela Sowell — Social Media Ana Castro — Social Media Katrina Ngo — Social Media Kelly Nham — Social Media Riley Sutton — Social Media Eunsoo Lee — Co-Design Director (2019-20) Jack Yang — Design Web (2019-20) Zhilin Li —Design Illustrator (2019-20) Imanol Tovar — Design Illustrator (2019-20) Kelly Tran — Design Illustrator (2019-20) Ruby Hays — Marketing (2019-20) Valeria Castro Abril — Marketing (2019-20) Midnight Oil

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