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decided not to mention that she really thought she meant
it.

Standing on the stage at college graduation, her life
flashed before her eyes, in dazzling diamond and the slide
of strings. Not the life she'd lived so far, but the life she
saw ahead of her. She knew, even then, the path she had
chosen. She knew she would live fast and die young, in
stage makeup and hot lights and fleeting syllables of
languages she'd never had the time to learn how to speak.
She would fall apart, sometime before she faded away,
when the pressure increased just enough and the hairline
fractures split into something more. She accepted her
diploma with an actress's smile and thought that the
burning and the tearing would be worth it, if for even a
moment before she winked out, she could shine.

She'd gotten a job in the chorus of New York City's
Metropolitan Opera and performed in multiple
productions by the time she realized that her favorite
operatic heroines both die of tuberculosis. She stared at
the libretti of La Traviata and La Boheme, thought about
Violetta and Mimi. They used to call it "consumption,"
the illness eating you from the inside out. Coughing up
blood, expelling the essence of your life out your lips.

She knows she doesn't have the disease, but she thinks
she might know how it feels.

She meets the devil at midnight in the 66th Street
subway station as she leans on the dirty brick wall and
waits for her train home. Not exactly a crossroads, but,

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