Stacy’s Basement | Kelsey Francis

In Stacy’s basement, we sit on berber carpet around a coffee table and eat from a tray of loaded nachos her mother partially burnt in the broiler. Stacy’s older brother, Craig, used to buy us beer with a fake ID but now he’s in rehab. Stacy says no one in her family talks about it. Instead, her mom burns dinner and her dad fixates on collecting more Beanie Babies. 

“He said they’re a good investment. People are actually paying him a lot of money for those stupid things–can you believe it?” Stacy bites into a blackened chip and washes it down with a mouthful of Sprite. 

I pick burnt cheese off a tortilla chip and add it to the tiny charred tower growing on the edge of my plate. 

I stand up and walk around the room in my sock feet while the rest of the girls dissect the nachos. On the wood paneled walls of Stacy’s basement are family photos from vacations and birthdays and confirmations. People smile from inside photo collage frames, their faces bordered by round and square mat windows. They wear bathing suits at the beach or three piece suits outside a church. In the photos, Craig is a little boy in a wading pool with a sandy bowl cut and then a tuxedoed high school senior with a dark brown mullet. 

One of the collages holds pictures of a family vacation to Washington state to visit Stacy’s grandparents. Stacy’s mom stands with her hands on her hips in front of a rocky outcropping on the coast. Craig is wearing an unzipped windbreaker while standing on top of a boulder, the wind blowing back his long hair. Stacy is seated cross-legged on the sand squinting into the wind. Her dad must have been taking the picture.

Next to the photo collage is a single framed 8x10 photo. It’s a close up of a dense forest of pine trees on a mountainside. A thick cloud obscures the mountain’s upper half. The whole image looks heavy and wet.

Stacy sees me staring at the picture. “Craig took that on our trip,” she says. “It used to hang in his room.” Stacy walks over to the picture and lifts the frame, revealing a fist sized hole in the splintered wood paneling. 

“And my dad did that,” she whispers. “Right after our dog chewed up Mystic the Unicorn. I guess it was worth 500 dollars or something. Craig took the picture out of his room and hung it here.”  Stacy lowers the frame, concealing the hole once again and walks back to the girls and the nachos. 

The little leaning tower of burnt cheese has fallen over on my plate. I sit next to Stacy on the carpet and listen to the girls talk about how much they loved Reality Bites. I’m quiet because I haven’t seen it yet.  

Behind me, the thick cloud in Craig’s photo covers a whole mountaintop making it hard to see anything.

Kelsey Francis is a writer and high school English teacher living in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Her essays have appeared in HAD, The Washington Post, Adirondack Life Magazine, and The New York Times, among others. She can be found on Twitter @ADK_Kelsey