Building Forever

The satin dress was emerald, green, bought on final clearance, and entirely unsuitable for the humidity radiating off sixty teenagers in a rented banquet hall.

Vicky Anderson wiped a layer of sweat off her forehead, careful not to ruin the foundation her mother, Collette, had applied using a sponge older than Vicky’s high school career.

“Stay still, let me take one more,” her father, Darren, had begged three hours ago on the front lawn, holding his camera like a weapon. “My baby, off to conquer the world.”

Right now, Vicky wasn’t conquering the world. She was sitting on a folding chair near the punch bowl, watching Daniel Roberts execute what he clearly believed was a high-level dance move. It involved a lot of elbow-snapping and a posture that suggested he was trying to look casual while dodging an imaginary stray bullet.

He was brilliant. He was handsome in that sharp, square-jawed way that made the girls in senior trig drop their pencils on purpose. More importantly, in three months, he was heading to the State University on a full ride, and Vicky was going to the state capital’s community college to major in communications. They had their whole lives meticulously color-coded on shared Google Calendars.

Daniel skidded across the parquet floor, caught her eye, and offered a cocky, crooked grin. He slid into the empty metal chair next to her, smelling of expensive cologne and cheap stolen rum.

“You look ridiculous,” Vicky said, though her heart did the stupid, fluttering thing it always did when he was within arm’s reach.

“I look like a king,” Daniel corrected, leaning in to brush his lips against her jaw. “Our king. Prom King runner-up, technically, but we know the vote was rigged by the lacrosse team.”

Vicky laughed, leaning into his shoulder. The music thudded through the floorboards, a heavy bass line vibrating right up through the heels of her thrift-store pumps.

“Two more months,” Daniel murmured into her hair. “Then no more high school, no more curfews, no more your dad standing on the porch holding a flashlight every time I drop you off.”

“My dad likes you,” Vicky insisted.

“Your dad told me if I brought you back past eleven, he’d turn my Honda Civic into a toaster.”

“He was joking.”

“He wasn’t smiling, Vick.” Daniel pulled back, taking both of her hands in his. His eyes were bright, filled with the terrifying, brilliant promise of eighteen-year-olds who think they’ve figured out the universe. “We’re going to own college. Weekend trips, cheap pizza, no parents. Just us.”

“Just us,” she echoed.

When they left the dance an hour later, skipping the after-party in favour of the backseat of his Civic parked down by the reservoir, the air was warm and smelled of pine needles and damp earth. Every promise felt solid, grounded, and entirely guaranteed.

Six weeks later, Daniel left for early-summer freshman orientation.

Vicky went to the local pharmacy.

She sat on the edge of her bathtub, staring at two distinct pink lines on a plastic stick, feeling an eerie, calm sensation—like watching a train derailment in extreme slow motion.

She picked up her phone. She opened their chat.

Daniel, hey. I really need to talk to you. Please call me back.

The message sat with a single grey checkmark.

An hour passed. Then a day.

By Friday, the single checkmark hadn’t changed. When she tried to view his profile, his picture disappeared. User not found. His Instagram was gone. His phone line went straight to a generic automated voicemail: The subscriber you are trying to reach is unavailable.

He hadn’t just left for college. He had vanished into thin air, dropping her from his life like a piece of junk mail.

Six Years Later

“Mom! Luca ate a green crayon!”

Vicky Anderson, twenty-four years old, stood in the aisle of Fresh & Easy Supermarket, holding a scanner in one hand and a half-crushed box of off-brand bran flakes in the other.

She didn’t even look up from the register display. “Is it non-toxic?”

“It says ‘non-toxic’ on the box!” Rose shouted back from the end of Aisle 4, where she was currently trying to climb the display rack of discount sodas.

“Then he’ll have colourful poop tomorrow. Rose, get off the 2-liters before you break a collarbone. I am not taking another shift at the pharmacy to pay an ER co-pay.”

Vicky swiped a bag of frozen peas across the scanner. BEEP.

Six years ago, she thought her life ended in that bathroom with a plastic stick and a blocked phone number. It turned out life didn’t end; it just got aggressively loud, exceptionally sticky, and split into two distinct entities named Luca and Rose.

Luca was currently sitting in the bottom basket of a shopping cart, happily chewing on a blue Crayon—having clearly moved on from the green one—while Rose, his twin by four minutes, managed to successfully untie Vicky’s left sneaker without breaking stride.

“Vicky, dear, line’s backing up,” her shift manager, Greg, called out, leaning over his podium with all the enthusiasm of a damp sponge.

“On it, Greg!” Vicky called back, flashing a smile that was 10% customer service and 90% survival instinct.

She looked down at her kids. Rose gave her a gap-toothed grin, her face smeared with what Vicky deeply hoped was chocolate spread. Luca let out a triumphant burp that smelled faintly of paraffin wax.

Her prom dress was long gone, cut up into rags three winters ago to clean oil leaks off her dad’s pickup. The Google Calendar was extinct. But as Vicky finished ringing up $140 worth of groceries for a woman giving her kids the side-eye, she adjusted her green supermarket apron, bent down, and scooped both chaos-demons into her arms.

“Right,” Vicky muttered, balancing a toddler on each hip. “Time to go home and tell Nana why the living room carpet is seafoam green.”