Grand staircase, marble bathrooms, Tuscan-style columns, the stink of air freshener and cleaning products filling up the whole house. I was so afraid to touch anything the first time I came over to Callie’s house. I put my feet up on the patio’s glass tabletop and feel the stick from the humidity. When the temperature dips below 70, people pull out coats and fleece-lined boots from a dust-covered bin they keep out in the garage. On Christmas Eve, the mall hauls in some sort of artificial snow they call snoap. LED snowflakes hanging from palm tree fronds. People were barricaded inside their homes, freezing with no power, no heat. There was a big snowstorm up north a few days ago, in Boston or one of those places.
LYN FOR MAC FULL
Thick and hot and so full of water that it might as well be the sea. It’s December in Florida, but the air feels more like June.
“Where do you even come up with this stuff?” “I just don’t want to think about a baby barfing.” She shudders. “Yeah, I obviously heard you, Faith,” she tells me.
LYN FOR MAC MAC
When our hands get sticky from Amy’s Mac and Cheese, we walk to the pool and wash away the clots of orange cheddar from our fingertips.Ĭallie doesn’t respond, so I repeat myself. When the sun sets, we bring all the freezer food out to Callie’s back patio, not even bothering with plates or utensils or napkins. It sits rotting in the fridge or unworn in the back of some massive closet. It pours out of the air conditioning unit in cool bursts. I could picture his mouth curling around words like “budget” and “waste.” Money is no issue at Callie’s house. I could imagine the lecture he’d give me on the price of food with such clarity that it was almost as if it had really happened. At that moment, I thought only of my dad and how upset he’d be if I tried that sort of thing at our house. Doesn’t that sound like fun?” and I nodded, though I wasn’t sure why it sounded like any fun. We were tanning out on the roof deck when she turned to me and said, “Let’s do a feast of frozen food for dinner. Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza, spoonfuls of Reduced Fat Cool Whip, Ham & Cheese Hot Pockets, these health-food enchilada things that Callie’s mom likes. One-Hundred Percent Humidity by Michelle Lyn Kingįor dinner, Callie and me stuff our faces with frozen food. Most importantly, it’s a story about stories-the ones we tell about ourselves, and the ones we actually believe. “One-Hundred Percent Humidity” is a story about a girl trying her damndest to appear like the “right” kind of girl, “the kind of person who says yes to things.” It’s a story about the vast ocean of teenage cruelty, and how leaning into powerlessness-how saying yes-is a survival tactic until it isn’t. And Faith is beginning to suspect that she’s “on a raft no say about where it goes next.” Look casual. Her peers believe a rumor about her that spread like wildfire through the hallways of teenage hell. Her mother is dead of breast cancer and her father is dating someone new and large-breasted. Her best friend is engineering fun that feels a lot more like pain. It doesn’t help that Faith is in a particularly vulnerable state of mind. It is possible to pretend to want something you don’t quite want, to play make-believe. Which is why, when she finds herself in an uncomfortable situation with her best friend and a much older boy, her first reaction is to focus on “looking casual, like nothing strange is happening.” Faith understands, intuitively, that reality is slippery. If she hasn’t had sex yet, it matters if she’s the only one who hasn’t had sex, it matters more.īut at the same time, Faith registers that in high school, it matters less whether you actually did something and more whether people think you did. She understands that markers of maturity, like sexual experience, matter-and she is aware that the noteworthiness of her virginity depends on the behavior of others. At 14-the age of the central characters in Michelle Lyn King’s “One-Hundred Percent Humidity”-I was less “me” than I was an amalgamation of my friends, characters in novels, song lyrics, and pop culture protagonists.įaith, the narrator of this evocative story, is on the cusp of self-awareness. Perhaps more so than any other stage of life, it’s a time when identity is malleable. The Only Thing More Humiliating Than Virginity Is SexĪdolescence is a peculiar period of self-discovery.
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