Lisa Locascio

FRIEND REQUEST


Susiecide's Orientation is Bisexual. She Loves kids, but they're not for her. Her Body Type is Slim / Slender, her is Ethnicity White / Caucasian. Her Religion is Atheist. Her Favorite Movies are a parade of crap horror interrupted only by The Pit and the Pendulum. Her Favorite Music is indecipherable to me, especially the terrible mechanized song that screeches out of my office speakers when I view her webpage. Her Heroes are the lead singer of her favorite band, a famous actor, and Amelia Earhart. Her background is a mosaic of images of women in various states of undress and men with women's hairstyles.

The About Me section is what interests me.

SUSIECIDE'S TEN COMMANDMENTS

1. Don't message me "Hey" or "What's up." I WILL NOT REPLY.
2. I do NOT add private profiles. Don't even try.
3. Comments = LOVE! If you want to get to know me, send me some and I'll return the favor.
4. I LOVE LOVE LOVE guys that look like girls and girls that look like guys!!
5. I hate fakers and people who rip-off my style. I worked long and hard developing my look, so why don't you do the same instead of copying mine?
6. My favorite ice cream flavor is green tea. I wish I could get it outside of Japanese restaurants! Bring me some and I'll love you forever!
7. If you live in the Chicago area, I definitely want to meet! I also do makeup for special events.
8. I am original, bitchy, incredibly sexual, funny, and honest. Don't try to be my friend if you don't appreciate these qualities.
9. I am currently home schooled and loving it!
10. I hate my life and am open to any and all possible escape plans.


Susiecide, here are my edits. Teased hair and heavy makeup, both of which my mother employed for special nights out with my father in the late 1960s, do not an original look make. You do not have the expertise, permission, or transportation necessary to be a professional makeup artist. You are not allowed to meet strangers from the internet. And whatever combination of babysitting and coping your mother is currently doing with you on weekdays, it does not count as any kind of education, which is probably why you are "loving it," and hey, if you're "loving it," could you tell Karen, please?

Green tea ice cream is of course available outside of Japanese restaurants. It can be bought at any Asian supermarket. I could drive up to the Mitsuwa in Mount Prospect right now and buy you a gallon. I used to buy it at the deli below my apartment when I lived in New York City. If you asked, I would drive all night, I would go right now and bring you home an entire case just to see you smile at me again, just to show you that I know what you like. All this time I thought your favorite was red bean.



The YourPage website describes it as a "personal webpage collective, the first of its kind." It had been in the news for months before I realized that Susanna was a member. Setting up a YourPage is supposed to be simple, but it was not for me. The form wanted my name, and then it wanted another, fake name. It asked if I was married, but when I said I was, the computer asked if I was interested in meeting people for "sex or relationships or both."

I hated the stupid yellow interface, the little hand blinking open and shut in the bottom right hand corner of my screen. But in the interest of monitoring Susanna, I've had a YourPage of my own for a while now. It's mostly blank, no pictures. My name is C.J. and I'm In A Relationship. I'm Looking for Friends. I created it because I'm concerned that Susiecide might make her YourPage private, visible only to her Buddies. She has had some trouble with other girls stealing her images. I need to keep an eye on her, but I can't be Chris Jordan on there. I have to be someone Susiecide would want to get to know, a girl who looks like a boy. Or a boy who looks like a girl.

But I have a battle plan. Over the course of several slow days at work, I've created a YourPage belonging to a seventeen-year-old boy named Devon (or maybe Thom, I can't decide) who goes to St. Pat's, just like I did. Devon hates school and likes horror movies that Susiecide's never heard of. He could tell her things she doesn't know. They could private message each other. I'm going to add her soon.

One time when I was looking at Susiecide's page on my lunch break, Carl snuck up behind me. "You are into some sick shit, Jordan," he said, then let out a low whistle. I closed the window as calmly as I could and muttered something about viruses. I smiled until he walked away. Carl and his wife Melanie came to our Fourth of July barbeque this year. They met Susanna. But he couldn't have recognized the girl in the pictures I was viewing, Susiecide's "Money For Nothing" photo series. My daughter in a neon bikini against a black backdrop, her skin lurid in the flash.



My daughter's name is Susanna Jordan. She has brown hair and small hands. She stands five foot four inches in her socks. She is fifteen years old and slim, with clear skin and straight teeth. She has a few respectable outfits for family parties and the like, things Karen picked out, including a gray dress I think is very becoming. When she is bored she holds her right elbow behind her back in her left hand.

But Susanna Jordan is not who my daughter wants to be. According to her page, she believes that she has a "true self exploding forth," a better girl inside of her: Susiecide, who has three hundred Buddies, who can change her appearance at will, who runs at night with wannabe street toughs. School doesn't "make sense" to Susiecide, despite the fact that Susanna's test scores place her in the gifted bracket. Susiecide is taller than Susanna, six feet even thanks to black platform boots and teased hair.

She photographs herself with disposable cameras she buys at the Jewel-Osco on Lake Street. Some slack-jawed teenager develops the film there, I'm sure, gawking at her nightmare glamour shots in the darkroom. Rachel, that horrible friend of hers, helps Susanna post the shots on her YourPage. Last week she uploaded a series titled "Putting On My Face." In it, my daughter, sitting in front of a mirror, the laptop I should not have given her for her fourteenth birthday visible behind her, coats her perfect face with skin-colored goop. She rims each eye with liquid black eyeliner. Susiecide fills the space between her lash line and her brow bone with neon green eye shadow. She draws eyebrows with a purple pencil -- the real ones are long gone -- and heaps on black mascara. She drags a swipe of something glittery across her temples. Last, she powders herself in a thick layer of the translucent dust I sometimes find on my jacket.

If I click through the pictures fast enough, they form a sort of flipbook. I can almost see her hands move.

Susiecide's clothes are little wisps of nothing: repurposed bathing suits, net shirts, tubes of fabric that just cover her top or bottom. Her photographs of herself are shot in that strange fisheye mise en scene that results from holding a camera over her head and looking up into the lens. The pictures are a museum of her favorite body parts: her collarbones, her flat tummy, the pale shell-like indent where her leg bone meets her ankle. There are at least ten shots of the spot, just under her left breast, where Susiecide has a tattoo of a skull with a rose in its teeth, a tattoo that should not exist, because in Illinois you have to be eighteen to get a tattoo, and Susiecide is not, even though her page lists her age as ninety-nine years old.



At her eighth grade graduation Susanna wore a long white shift and a crown of flowers. We took a picture of her with Elise and Kara, her best friends, and told her to have fun but not too much fun at the graduation dance. She was a gentle bookworm who didn't even wear lip-gloss. Our biggest quarrel was about whether or not she was allowed to read at the dinner table. I worried that she was too shy, too devoted to school.

She did spend a lot of time on the computer. But Karen and I had observed hours of her browsing and were certain nothing illicit was going on. Besides, she had probably already read things much worse than anything she could find on the Internet. We believed strongly that Susanna should be allowed to read anything she wanted. We thought we were blessed to have a child who loved learning.

We should have had more daddy-daughter time that summer. Maybe that would have prevented this. I wanted to take Susanna to the Hard Rock Cafˇ downtown and swimming at Oak Street Beach. But the Kaiser account required me to take six trips to Omaha in July alone, so Karen and I didn't get to spend much time together with Susanna. Neither of us noticed the small shifts in her behavior until afterwards. She stayed up late on her computer and hated getting up in the morning. But it was summer break. We figured she deserved a little freedom.

In late June, she began clumsily smearing dark drugstore makeup on her eyelids. Her clothes and the covers of her books became the same color: black with slashes of red. She lugged a two-liter water bottle with her everywhere, chugging from it constantly. She said she was "interested in hydration." Maybe the water had something to do with the amount of weight Susanna lost that summer. By August she was so tiny that she had to push her black plastic bracelets up over her elbows to keep them on. The week before high school started, she curled up in the blue wingback chair in the living room and told me she didn't want to join swim team after all. I was shocked -- she had been on the community team for eight years in preparation -- but Karen told me to let it go.

In her first weeks at the high school, Susanna stopped talking to Kara and Elise. She began bringing awful loud girls home and closing the door to her room. She went to their houses, too, before Karen and I wised up.

"Susanna's such a stranger lately," Karen told her sister on the phone. It wasn't until a couple of weeks ago, when Susiecide forgot to clear the browser history, that I discovered Susanna was in fact a different person now, that our daughter had been replaced.



Susiecide has over four hundred digital "signatures" in her guestbook. Some are from teenage girls who speak her secret Internet language: xxcaryluvstar, Konkrete Heart, Janna Fast. Many have taken "suicide" as their surname: Mindy Suicide and Caroline Suicide. The girls want her to know that she is crazy beautiful, that she is their inspiration. More than one has written, "I wish I could be you!"

But most of the guests to Susiecide's website are male. Judging by their pictures, they are not teenagers but men: grinning guys in their thirties and forties in caps with cars or boats behind them. They don't speak the secret language; their names are Joe and Ethan and Bill. They're from Cincinnati and Tucson and, disturbingly, Downers Grove, twenty minutes from where we live. I'm disgusted by how well I understand them. Whatever brings you to this corner of the internet -- where girls exchange bikini pictures and proclamations of love for one another, where teenagers who look like warped versions of the sophomore you fingerbanged on prom night set up "photo shoots" with light bondage -- whatever brings you here, it is hard to resist the thoughts these girls are working hard to put in your head. A man imagines he might say just anything to these YourPage girls and they would look up at him adoringly, admire his knowledge. I am not unsympathetic.

What man, what husband, what father, even of a teenage girl, wouldn't click around and look at every picture of a particular girl, a certain Jackie Orgasm or Miranda Suicide, someone whose pretty, vacant eyes promise hours during which you would never have to think about your upcoming performance review or the twenty-five year old coworker with the earring that you caught your wife flirting with at the last company party? Karen is a different creature than the pretty girl who sold me a ski ticket on Purgatory Mountain when I was nineteen. She bears little resemblance to the young wife in our photo albums, holding our daughter in her arms and laughing. I have come to love the woman she is now, but that person is a stranger to me nonetheless, changed so much by time that I have had to relearn her again and again. I have had to let go of the woman I chose and learn affection for her later iterations.

But this doesn't excuse the YourPage men's messages to Susiecide, which can be matched to a sort of tiered template of the things a guy with a mortgage and a leased Toyota would write to a high school freshman. The first, potentially least threatening group simply writes Hi or What's up. I can rest easy that Susiecide will not respond to these. The next group ventures forth with Would you like to hang out? as if they want to discuss their yearly bonuses and their wives' fertility treatments with my daughter over a Miller Light. Some claim to have similar interests; they, too, like horror movies and loud music. But these hesitant guys are amateurs. They think they can somehow worm their way into the rank of friend and go from there.

The seasoned pros know better. They go in guns blazing.

You are hot.

And a few daring pioneers go for broke: Damn I would like to fuck you.

Damn girl I'd tear you up, wrote one with a full graying beard.



Last night she blew in the door at the exact stroke of midnight. Susiecide has been eerily punctual with her curfew since we threatened to erect a password-protected wall around her Internet access. As usual, she smelled of smoke. On the news they say teenagers are now smoking crack mixed with crushed pills, that dealers over in Maywood are sprinkling PCP in with their shitty weed as the first strike in some sort of class war, and so Karen and I are at the point where we hope our daughter is smoking cigarettes. Susiecide shucked her heavy shoes in the front hall. She paused in front of the mirror to fluff her hair back up and then disappeared upstairs without a word to the idiot waiting for her on the uncomfortable barstool.

My agreement with Karen is that I wait up until Susiecide appears for curfew. Then she takes the night shift, dozing on the downstairs couch to make sure Susiecide doesn't slip out of the house before dawn. When we started doing this I kissed my wife on the forehead to wake her, but now I just wander into the dark bedroom and turn on her lamp. We developed this method after the third time Officer Bill Folder brought Susiecide home in the early hours of the morning. Each time she was smirking, not tired at all. She stood wide-legged next to the policeman, jaunty as a little sailor, her forehead greasy with sweat from some secret exertion. "Hey, you should give this guy a tip, he was a good cabbie. Brought me door-to-door!" she joked once, jabbing Officer Folder in the side as if he was one of her idiot buddies, or better yet, one of her Buddies.

Sometimes I wish he would arrest her.

It's early October, still hot, especially because we've switched off the air-conditioning units in the windows. Susanna should be settling in to her classes, maybe making some new friends in the cafeteria or on swim team, but instead she's spending her weekday mornings in the kitchen with Karen and a pile of textbooks on loan from the high school. Karen assigns exercises on sentence structure, intermediate Algebra, rudimentary Spanish, the periodic table. My wife studied education at Eastern, even taught for a little while before she got pregnant, and she says it's going well, that our daughter is responding to this alternative form of learning. But I know that this improvised ninth grade can only go as far as Karen's memory of her first year of high school. My wife's degree is in early childhood education. I majored in film at Eastern, but I don't have any illusions about being able to make a movie. Karen's hair, always fine, has begun to thin visibly around her temples.



The next day, I work on Thom's website (I've decided it's Thom now, for sure; Devon is a little too ambiguous) all afternoon. He has a little brother he looks out for. He loves steak tacos and soccer and Blade Runner, which Susanna should really see. He lives in Burr Ridge, which is just far enough away that she won't come looking for him, but it's a respectable suburb. I found a decent picture of a kid on the Hot Topic website, sandy hair in his eyes, nondescript black t-shirt, skinny. I'm still incapable of deciphering her musical interests, so I just cut and paste Susiecide's entire Favorite Music field into Thom's profile.

Now the webpage is ready. Thom's headline is "I love the girls who hate to love because they're just like me." I write Susiecide a message, telling her to check out my site. Then I pull up the spreadsheet I'm supposed to be working on. I don't let myself look at the website again until it's almost time to go home. I wonder if there's anything new on her page, what I should write her in my first message. This will be the start of a new relationship for her and I, a good thing even if it involves deception. Thom will tell her to study. He will caution her to not become like the people I see waiting for the bus on Lake Street. Pretty girls with perfect nails and blow-dried hair, high school dropouts, pregnant or soon pregnant, staring into the distance in their imitation designer jeans, having permanently forgotten whatever they once thought about.

There's an email from Susiecide in Thom's inbox. I try to finish all of my work for the day before I open it, but every time I close a window on my monitor the line of text floats back to the front, FROM: Susiecide SUBJECT: Re: hi jumping around, begging for my attention. The black Arial starts to look like a promise after I've let it sit there for over an hour. Just to torture myself a bit more, I go and fetch a glass of water before I let myself click on the email. It's half-past four. I can go home soon.

Susiecide's response is a single line, just a few words in response to my carefully worded message: Your page is BOOOORING.

Tonight she comes in with blazing and glassy eyes. She smells so illicit that I put down my magazine and stare as she tries to creep across the kitchen unnoticed. I'm used to the shock and anger but there's something different tonight, a sense of certainty, a great strong rush that tells me I will do something about it and it will stick. She will listen to me tonight.

"Hey," I say.

Susiecide nods goofily, still heading for the stairs. "Susanna," I say louder. The smell is beginning to place itself in my mind. It's not just smoke. The scent that got my attention is different. Sex.

She stops and turns around but does not stop idly stroking her exposed belly. Her hand nips up and down her smooth white skin, sometimes tucking under her little black fishnet half-shirt. Will she actually cup her breast in front of her father, idly wrap four fingers around? Yes, she will.

"What, Daaaad," she says, not a question. She's clearly intoxicated. Golden anger rises in my gut.

"What did you do tonight?" I say.

"Hung out," she says. She looks down, bored, hand still working at her breast.

"With who?" I say, studying a gray smear under her eye.

"Billy and Gary and Adrian and --" There's a flicker of self-awareness. She withdraws her hand from her shirt, drops it at her side. She's named too many boys. "Oh yeah and Rachel too and her cousin Kiki." My daughter, who is not the most talented actress in the world, feigns a yawn. "Well Dad, I'm pretty tired, I better --"

"Just a minute." I'm on my feet and my face is blazing up out of my collar, I'm standing right next to her. "How about you hold on just a good goddamn minute." Susanna flinches and blinks very slowly. "How about you not try to get away with every fucking thing in your sick little head?" I want her to go to college. I want her to read books she loves there, to go camping with other girls, to meet a nice boy. All of the things she wants will come to her in time, if she would just wait, if she would just show a little insight, a little forethought. I want these things for her because I love her. Because I am her father.

"Dad." She tries putting on a hard face. "What did I do? I'm not late. I'm actually early." She nods towards the digital clock, and she's right. There are still ten minutes until midnight.

"It's not about what time you come home, Susanna, it's about what you do when you're out of the house and in it, too. You might not know this -- maybe your mother and I have not exactly done the best job teaching you about these things -- but it costs money to live here and one of the main reasons why we live here is because we love you and we want you to have a nice life. And when you love someone it doesn't just mean doing whatever they want all the time, it doesn't just mean giving them a big goddamn Christmas present and letting them wear whatever fucking thing they care to when they get out of the house. It doesn't mean letting my own goddamn daughter become a burnout, a good-for-nothing, the type of girl who can't even stay in school, and comes home smelling like men, like strangers and god knows what else, like men --" She has been staring at the floor until this, maybe smiling a little, testing out the arches of her feet in stretches as she stands on tiptoe against the floor. She looks up now.

"I don't smell like men," she says, eyes full of tears.

I am happy, happy. "Yes," I say. "Yes, you smell like men. Remarkably like men. And another thing, you smell like marijuana, and also I don't know if we should bother home schooling you. Maybe we should just send you away, to a place where you won't waste everything, where you won't stand in our kitchen like some little homeless person who would rather be anywhere than home, who would go out just for a sip of beer, who would go to a diner in the middle of the night instead of stay in her own bed, who would do anything to get away, to escape her horrible life. You are like a little transient, you are."

But the feeling of good righteous warmth has left me. I feel pinched and spent. The kitchen seems too dark, and Susanna is weeping in front of me. Lines of black makeup leak down her cheeks, revealing the face that I remember. I try to think of something worthwhile to say, something to save it, but all I can do is stand and look at her until Karen comes rushing in. "Oh, Jesus Christ, Chris," she says.



The summer Susanna turned five years old, I taught her to swim in Lake Michigan. My parents own a lakefront place in New Buffalo, about two hours from Oak Park. We spent almost every weekend there. The water was a strange gray-brown color that summer, and the alewives had come unseasonably early. Most of the decaying fish had been cleared from the beaches, but I detected rot under the fresh lake air. Aggressive seagulls patrolled the borders of every beach towel, nodding like psychotic cops.

Each Friday afternoon I pulled out onto the Dan Ryan, put the Cubs game on the radio, and headed for the Skyway smiling at the skyscrapers. Sometimes I changed into my trunks before I left my office in the Loop so that I could go straight from car to lakefront. Karen and Susanna were already out there, having driven up with my folks on Thursday night. Even the industrial nightmare of Indiana looked starry and purple on those drives, the smoke from the factories billowing into the sky like cotton candy.

On the beach I installed Karen under an umbrella and set to work on Susanna, coating her in sunblock and then outfitting her with yellow floaties, a lifejacket, and two bright blue noodles, the long foam tubes that they didn't have when I was a kid. Susanna called the lake the "oceant." I picked Susanna up and walked into the water, chattering happily with her the whole time about whatever she had doing with Karen, until I was waist-deep in the warm water.

At first Susanna was scared. She cried and begged me to take her back to Karen. But I and told her that I was right there, that I would never let anything hurt her.

"Promise?" she'd ask, sniffling.

I promised. The tears stopped. I lowered her into the water and waited for the sweet moment when she smiled.

There was nothing better than splashing around in the shallows with her, pulling her through the water and letting her clamber over my chest. When she squeezed me and said "You're soft, Daddy," my gut seemed like a badge of honor.

The beaches in New Buffalo are pebbly. Susanna was fascinated by the little rocks and kept an assortment of them on her window ledge. "I love the ocean," she announced. She sat on my shoulders and screeched with joy as I collapsed gently into the water over and over again. I was so slaphappy with accomplishment and pride that I sometimes wondered if I'd had one beer too many at lunch. After two weekends, the lifejacket came off; after four, the floaties were discarded, too, and she retained only the noodle. I was a success. I was tan. My clothes were always damp. I fell into a catatonic sleep at the end of every day.

On our last Sunday at the cottage I led my daughter to the water's edge. I took her in my arms and walked into the lapping dark water. She always smelled like Karen's lemon shampoo. To my surprise, she began to struggle. "Let me go, Daddy," she said. I did, forgetting that we had not taken the noodle this time. I stood there, hot sun beating down through the tufts of white cloud moving quickly overhead, and watched her bumble through the water, humming to herself. After a while I turned and waved to Karen, pointing excitedly to Susanna.

When I turned back, my daughter was gone. I dove, groping for her in the four feet of water, and found only handfuls of sand and rock. I forced my eyes open under the water. She sat on the sandbar, six feet below the surface, her eyes closed solemnly, hands folded as if she were praying.

I scooped her towards me and charged back up the beach, yelling for Karen, trying to summon my high school CPR training. Karen shook out a dry towel, repeating, "Oh shit, oh shit," over and over like a prayer. We laid Susanna's body out between us. I aligned my hands, trying to recall the right way, and traced them down under her rib cage, ready to push.

My daughter opened her mouth, revealing a handful of tiny gray pebbles. As Karen and I stared, Susanna removed them from her tongue and placed them on the towel beside her like a jeweler laying diamonds on black velvet. Then she looked up at us, smiling.

"Why?" my wife and I asked her. "Why would you do something like that?" Now we were both crying, giddy with relief.

"I wanted to sink," she said, eyes glittering.

"But why?"

"To see what it felt like."

We stared at her.

"To see if Daddy would keep his promise," Susanna said.



The impasse has held all week. I've written Susanna a note of apology and slipped it under her door. I brought home green tea ice cream on Tuesday. But morning she meets the sight of me with a blank and broken stare and then she disappears upstairs. Karen says Susanna "needs time." And now it's Friday afternoon at the office. Even most of the secretaries have taken off already, I should go home. I have a few browser windows open, protective coloration in the form of the ESPN and Wall Street Journal websites. But I'm refreshing one page over and over: Susiecide's, of course. At five -- she must be home already -- she posts a new photo set, a series of seven photographs called "Killing Myself To Love You."

The pictures were taken in our upstairs bathroom. Susiecide crouches in the corner of near the window -- she has moved the upright scale out of the way -- wearing an unusual outfit: several layers of torn-up black fishnets, her boots, and the gray dress that I like, which is bunched and tied in strange knots. In the first picture her knees jut like they used to when she fell and scraped the hell out of them every other weekend. She has meticulously applied a great deal of black mascara to the skin beneath her eyes. It streaks downwards, as if she has been crying, but it's clear to me that she meant it to look this way -- Susiecide's face is otherwise perfect, nothing like the veiny pink mess Karen's face becomes when she cries.

In the second picture Susiecide's legs are stretched out in front of her. Her open hands lay palm-up against her knees, exposing the shining whiteness of her wrists. In the third she toys with a razorblade, looking intently at the sixty-watt bulb I recently replaced in the light fixture above the bathtub. Picture four, Susiecide holds the razor against her left wrist, her eyes closed in pain or ecstasy, a shadow of red seeping behind the blade. In the fifth photograph Susanna's left wrist is bleeding profusely, but her left hand holds the razor steady against her right wrist. In the sixth picture she has climbed into the bathtub, her wrists thrust out over each side like the paddles of a canoe, streams of blood moving slowly down both sides of the white ceramic.

My breath catches in my throat. If I get in the car now, maybe I can get home in time. Staunch the blood. Close the wound. I dial Karen. The phone rings while I wait for the seventh to load. My daughter sits in the bathtub laughing, hair wet, most of the makeup gone from her face. She holds a plastic bag of fake blood and smiles.

Behind me in the office someone begins to take the copy machine apart. I look at my daughter while piece after piece of the machine's innards are removed. The mechanical clunking soothes me, slows the beating of my heart. I see her well and alive in the tub. I look at the photographs again, one by one. My first thought is that I should get Karen moving on enrolling Susanna in some theatre classes. Maybe Village Players has a stage makeup course. I make a note. I feel a weird sort of pride. These pictures are well done. The lighting is just right. I believed them.

I open up Thom's profile and delete everything. I image search for "alternative teenage girl," "goth teenage girl," and "emo teenage girl," trying different combinations until I get what I want: a spunky self-portrait of a girl slightly younger than Susanna with dyed red hair and piercing blue eyes. I give her the name Chrisa Suicide, worry that this is too obvious and change it to ChrisaStar. She lives in Oak Park like Susanna. She is in the eighth grade at Ascension. She loves Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes -- the originals, no remakes. Her background is bright yellow, her text pink. Her heroes are Wes Craven, Amelia Earhart, and her parents.

I open up ChrisaStar's email account and write to my daughter. She'll get it any minute, she's home from school right now and see she has a new message.

Hi. What's up?

Lisa Locascio's fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Northwest Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Faultline, and other magazines. The winner of the Daniel Alarcon-judged 2011 John Steinbeck Prize for Fiction, she has received honors and support for her writing from the National Association for the Advancement of the Arts, New York University, Western Michigan University, and the University of Southern California, where she teaches writing in the honors college.