Sometimes, Abbey likes to take a moment to just breathe.

Sitting alone in her room, cross-legged on her bed, she looks up and catches sight of the small shreds of tape scattered across her ceiling. “You can’t have One Direction posters when you’re in high school,” she remembers telling her best friend Betsy. That was the day she made Betsy help her pull down the posters of the bright-eyed, wide-smiling boys that those pieces of tape had once held so securely, back when high school was still off in a distant land.

She hadn’t been wrong. One Direction had long since reached its expiration date. But sometimes she wishes that it was possible to go back to that time when she didn’t worry about things having a “like by” date. Not that she wants to be a middle schooler again or anything; she doesn’t even want to be a middle schooler again for a day; she just wants to go back for a single moment—just long enough to re-experience the strange innocence she didn’t realize she had then until it was gone.

But while she was innocent, she wasn’t stupid back then. She knew people in high school drank and smoked and loved and cheated and had friend issues and teacher issues and just general issues. She just...hadn’t expected these things to have the magnitude they did in her life. She’s not complaining, or whining, or praying to the gods to smite her from this life or anything. She’s gone to her fair share of parties, had a boyfriend who she’d crushed on, loved deeply, cried over, and gotten over. She’s had good classes and bad classes, teachers who loved her and teachers she was convinced hated her. She’s even kept her 4.0. She’s completed the perfect high school bucket list. But sometimes, she just...wishes she could go back for a minute. Before she knew the taste of warm beer and Svedka intimately, before she understood the depth of the pain one person could cause her, before all the things in her life, her GPA and relationships and family and friends and decisions and schooling and future and everything, seemed to gain this sometimes overwhelming enormity and gravity.

The sudden, sharp trill of her phone startles Abbey. She shakes her head to clear her thoughts. She rolls off her bed and walks to her desk, thinking of all the things she needs to do. The calc test to study for, the vodka to get for Betsy, the volleyball team tryouts to prep for. There’s no time for thinking about middle school now. No matter how she feels, that innocence has gone the way of the posters—ripped away for the sake of high school.