You are Cordially Invited to the Dirty Laundry Formal | Audrey Burges

You’d better not have showered and your hair should be tangled, knotted into snags from 200-count percale stretched over a lumpy extra-long twin. You’d better be exhausted, eyes shaded with lids that felt lighter at midnight, when you met curfew with a smile because you had a guest who broke it, before he broke you and you liked it, before he crawled out through the first-floor window and you watched the muscles of his back while he jumped over the wall, his leaping body lit by sunrise, Peter Pan taking flight. 

Your legs should be wobbly in their rhinestone stilettos as you heave your canvas bag of clothes, using your bitten fingertips to pluck the dirty sock off the doorknob. Don’t trip. Silky gossamer is unraveling near your feet. You catch one length in the dryer door and the girl from down the hall laughs—her teal crushed velvet, stretched to an ocean-colored sausage casing shine—never has that problem. 

Laundry is a task you once did on schedule. Now the schedule is: you are out of clothes. Your prom dress, one shoulder drooping off a hanger in a cinder block closet, is your last clean garment. A sartorial Highlander. There can be only one.

Your skin is commando-naked beneath polyester satin you chose when you were younger—a child, really—before you became worldly, a person who wears keys on a lanyard with a plastic card emblazoned with your face. You pulled the gown from a rolling suitcase with ten  pairs of cotton briefs and ten pairs of socks and stacks of slacks and shirts your mother washed and folded for you. She packed the suitcase for you, too. 

You threw the gown on top, an afterthought, before you zipped your old life closed. When it poured out onto the linoleum tile, your roommate held up her own explosion of red taffeta.

“Why did you bring it?” you asked each other, voices bouncing in unison off hard institutional boundaries.

“Because it makes me feel pretty,” said your roommate.

“Because I thought I might need it,” you said. 

And you were right. It slips over your ravished hips to stagger a walk of shame away from Never Never Land, lugging four weeks of adulthood in a bag meant to hold three, wondering if you have enough quarters, adding coins to a list of things to mention in your daily 5:45 call home.

Audrey Burges writes in Richmond, Virginia. Her debut novel, The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone, is forthcoming in 2023 from Berkley/PRH, and her work also appears or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, Pithead Chapel, Cease, Cows, HAD, Into the Void, Slackjaw, The Belladonna, and other outlets. More of her writing is available at audreyburges.com, and you can follow her on Twitter: @audrey_burges.