In the sober house, rules loosened, and I was allowed to turn on my phone. Aside from texts from my ex about my daughter, which I deleted due to a roiling, threatening pain, was a flashy ad for this receipt-scanning app. The app advertised itself as an easy, safe way to get rewards from the shopping you were already doing. And I was already doing the shopping; at the sober house, I was the cook. If you weren’t comatose, or aggro, you had a role; cook was king. It meant I got to skip afternoon meeting and shop at Pick N Save, the store I shopped at in my old life, the life I was trying to win back one day at a time.
In that life, I cooked every night for my daughter; steam hissing through the lid while Otis Redding wailed about yearning, lonely arms. At one and a half, my daughter ate what we ate—coconut lime chicken cut with shears; minced meatballs dusted with fresh grated parm; tender, breaded tilapia—but I don’t want to talk about her, yet.
For the sober house, I cooked out of restlessness, not out of love. The kitchen had clean knives with mean bites, like slippery steel extensions of my hands. In the living room reserved for meeting, refined woodwork, the staged furniture so impersonal that I mentally sketched my old life into the room until it flickered into animation like ineffective artillery, hope for the past the hardest thing to combat.
One hostile morning in December, I joined meeting, my chewed-up yellow fingers smelling like antifreeze, cold and sweet. With coffee under my chair, I clapped twice then said, “Let the healing begin.” All I wanted was a guy to eye, or be eyed by, like a spy movie’s well-timed glances, all that menacing secrecy, speed, and illusory ties. But the sober house pamphlet spoke of empowering women in recovery by surrounding them with other women who were facing similar challenges so that all I saw in meeting was every far-gone version of myself.
Candy, our liver-spotted meeting leader, emphasized the importance of making better life decisions, which was suspect as she liked to wolf down two Filet-o-Fish on the porch. Sometime in her twenties, on Christmas Eve, she’d set her house on fire when she’d locked herself in the bathroom to down nips, the gas range cranked as the flame mouthed a dish towel, narrowly killing her sleeping kids, but impossibly, it wasn’t her bottom: she’d been in rehab seven times.
Amy, our resident librarian in her ill-fitting jean dress and dreamcatcher earrings said, in a voice soft and squeaky as a doll’s, “It was a lot of this: turning the car off in the garage then turning it back on. Going eighty down the highway, looking at the overpasses, the underpasses, thinking it would look like an accident . . .”
All the while Dibs with her potbelly and butterfly lashes to eternity was rudely securing her bleached, crunchy hair into a unicorn-like bun then spraying Suave Max Hold around the rat’s nest until it cemented. Amy looked at the hairspray like Dibs had clicked a cartridge into the chamber of a machine gun at the library. “That’s a concealed weapon,” I said, so Dibs stepped to me, misted the hairspray between us in a Z clap and said, “Bitch, you want it to be?” Then Candy broke us up and we said the Responsibility Prayer. Dibs wasn’t her real name, and I knew this would keep her sick.
I never mentioned my daughter.
The rewards app, it tempered the violent uniformity of days. That afternoon I drove twenty-four extra minutes to the Pick N Save I shopped at in my old life, the one on Seventy-Sixth by the old Packard plant that my daughter loved to point at from her car seat, its punched-out, aquamarine tiles like fish scales lit by the sun’s godly fingers.
Soon I’d be back in the car, uploading my receipt, or any receipt, and the receipts were everywhere, if you really looked—discarded heaps of them in the mini bins, littered on the linoleum, trails of waxy receipts past the Coin Star, the lotto machine, and the foldout table with its purple pamphlets recruiting catatonic teenagers with excruciating, unresponsive-to-treatment acne. Uploaded, the total captured in a click, check-marked in lime green, then exploded into change, buzzing like one of those ancient guest pagers at the Cheesecake Factory. When I earned enough points, I could pick a reward in the form of a gift card. Target was my gift card of choice. At Target, in the toys section, I’d been standing in front of a Minnie Mouse watch as Mariah Carey dog-whistled “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” So far, I was halfway.
In the parking lot, tattered receipts skittered like vulnerable leaves past the community ashtray and absolutely bloomed from the trash, free for the taking. I stuffed them all into my puffy coat, wanting to see if I could come out the way I came in, with no alcohol. Today I was making Swedish meatballs and consulted the items on my list with the overwhelm of a new mother stuck with triplets. But then I pulled up the rewards app, mentally organized the list so I could menu based on points, switch brands if there was a bonus on Barilla, things like that. I wheeled around a loose-wheeled cart and found a receipt wedged in the baby-seat with its garlic peel confetti.
At first, shopping for the sober house felt like the confusing misery of a k-hole. Day after day, I pushed carts of bagged, bruised potatoes, hefted them onto the checkout, heavy as biblical rocks. But now, with the app, all around me lay possibility, and within that possibility, choices, and with those choices, a cost.
And the rewards math had this simplicity. Unlike seventh grade when my math teacher liked to force tiny numbers onto the shoulders of big numbers on the white board, his equations hurtling towards an answer. Then he’d cap his marker and call on me, his bunched khakis frowning. “Let’s see if she can figure this out,” he’d say as I hunched over my desk to mask my muttering, stalling as I tapped fingers, a ridiculous tear snaking its way past my headphone as the popular boys whipped pencils at the back of my head.
Something was wrong with my brain.
The math moved fast, and my mind moved slow, or was it the other way around? But then I turned fourteen and met Angie. Together, we discovered this magical substance called alcohol. My mom’s Pinnacle vodka on its side in the freezer, frozen over like hell. From the Boston Store, we stole thongs with flaming devil horns and condom-sized pockets, traded them in brown paper bags on the cafeteria’s black market then flaunted the straps above our pocketless jeans, screaming at the top of our lungs on residential streets for no other reason than to hear ourselves shrieking, feral and relentless. Alcohol our only goal, our days curated by our cold pursuit of it, and I slept-walked, gloriously. I knew what to say and do to those boys. Name something more effective than alcohol.
By the sacks of soccer game oranges, everyone bustled in their private worlds, ruled by their private lists. I told myself, focus, you dumb bitch. As if on cue, I spotted a crinkled-up receipt by the generic birthday cakes and hurried over to swipe it. On my way up, I caught an aproned butcher monitoring me as he furiously sliced deli meat, but his judgment didn’t faze me; my sense of purpose outpaced my shame.
Before my technicolored affairs, before the scrim of alcohol, I’d only felt this alchemy of adrenaline and peace once, with Angie, but she was married now. Half my life ago, we’d lay on her Beauty and the Beast comforter inhaling whip-its until my bones were boiled to noodles and my chest swiftly unscrewed like I could stumble into traffic or walk off a balcony. Shot into deep space, my neurons sizzled like sauna coals, and I watched Earth, the only place I’d ever known, its insignificance. I looked again at the meatball list, wondering why it was so difficult to retain such basic information.
You can tell a lot about a person by how they shop. By the elitist, spritzed veggies, I stood next to a trim man with long piano fingers as he methodically slipped leafy radishes into a baggie; one could assume he was a pediatric surgeon. But this was the Pick N Save on Seventy-Sixth, he was most likely a pedophile. Into my cart went chives, onions, garlic. In the next aisle, a sack-of-bones high school girl bore fuzzy arms, scrutinizing the back of a Quaker Oats tin, motored by her anorexia. No receipts in sight so I grabbed breadcrumbs, then headed towards the freezers, the ground meat like an abyss of packaged brains.
I chose the beef with the highest percentage of fat, the most rewards points, then spun and crashed into a cart whose pusher wore a Hawaiian shirt and Lion’s beanie; we locked eyes, and it was like looking into a mirror. His pallor coffin- white, cart stacked like a doomsday prepper, three High Life thirties and a liter of well-earned Stoli rolling to a stop under the carriage. I pulled the cart and steered the other way, then looked back and it was like the devious intensity before a stepbrother fucks his sister in a porno.
In front of the buzzing refrigerators, I had to pee like crazy, and thought, just hold it. Before I thought to return here, my old Pick N Save, I’d shop at Whole Foods because I could, where women in yoga pants swung open the fridge for oat milk, their hair in donut buns that said: I exist. Yoga, it was for women who knew how to close their eyes and contort their bodies, dialing past the psychotic religious chatter and static, tuning into some exclusive channel between NPR and symphony, a metaphysical realm I could only achieve between beer four and six. I had three choices, skim, 2%, or whole, but I wanted those women to tell me what to pick.
The liquor section was roped off at the other end of the store, and it helped to stand in front of all those wholesome gallons of milk, even in my indecision. My back to all that alcohol. I saw it by heart: discount chard, a twelve pack of ice-cold, rattling High Life, a stack of verdant limes, Four Roses, Ketel. With my chest rasping, strangled by mucus, I patted my pockets for my inhaler, tumbled it out, and depressed the canister. Then I pulled up the app, just to see. If I bought a twelve-pack of High Life before seven, I’d get twenty-five thousand points. If I bought the Kroger-brand milk, twenty-five points. I opened the fridge, unscrewed a sweating half gallon of whole milk, took a sip then shoved it back in the rack.
On the way to the checkout, a box of blueberry Pop-Tarts on the endcap stopped me dead in my tracks. I liked the weight of the box and the promise of all those Kellogg points, the Pop-Tarts doubled in their silver sleeves. My mouth watered, tasting candied specks on hardened frosting, the warm crunch of the cracked shell though I’d only ever eaten them cold. When was the last time I had a Pop- Tart, I thought, when George Bush read a children’s book upside down? The sober house credit card allowed for recipe items and recipe items only, but I chucked them into the cart, thinking, arrest me already.
Then I cruised through the cereal aisle, a pop-art tunnel of talking bunnies, tigers, and leprechauns in various stages of mania. It was like I smelled a receipt; turned and clocked it under the wheel of a cart, molded by a fist, and bent down to straighten it out. On the way up, I registered the looney aura of a three-year- old girl belted into the seat of the carriage as she owl-swiveled her head to quiz me, her face bright as a hologram. She smiled back with shark-shaped teeth and her fiery eyes went, let’s play.
With a finger over my mouth, I whispered, “Shhh.” A woman gripped the end of the cart, busy with scanning the less colorful cereal, her Herbal Essence hair tied in a low pony through an Under Armour baseball hat like a news anchor on her day off, merely in lip gloss and tinted moisturizer to cover her rosacea, her look said, please, no staring. Her modest engagement ring winked, refracting jumpy diamonds of light onto the bright boxes like a sad game show. Meanwhile, the girl was elongating her vowels as we colluded. With my tongue out, I yanked my ears, crossed my eyes. She covered hers then peeked flirtatiously through birthday-candle-sized fingers. My heart tenderized like pounded meat and it hurt to love that helplessly, that deep. Then the news anchor caught on and I jumped back. She shot me a look, fused her face with the girl’s fattened cheek, palmed her head as if she was soothing her, shielding her, all while tracking me with one eye. It felt so personal, like she was God in disguise, reminding me of what I couldn’t have. I wondered then if there was a God who loved alcoholics.
The previous night, in my twin bed, I’d gone over decisions that would have led to a better outcome. If I hadn’t moved to Chicago with its stumbling-distance bars, the constant feeling of anonymity. If I’d secured a real job, the service industry just a bunch of unmedicated, incestuous werewolves. If I hadn’t given up, moved back to Detroit, got knocked-up in a hot second by a mechanic I thought I loved. If I’d been loyal to the mechanic, hadn’t cheated with the dealer, denied the evidence. If I’d been a smarter girl, finished the math homework, got into college, and left the vodka to my mother.
Past the sinister built-in pharmacy, the entrance of the store was chilly. I followed the woman and girl past the quarter machines for banana-shaped hard candy and friendship bracelets in Easter eggs; I went further. The second sliding door opened to the drizzling outside world where an Atkins Diet couple in matching sweatpants loaded their paper bags into the trunk then slammed their hostile doors in unison. I spotted a pulpy receipt by the trash but had no time for it. The way the rain fell felt like violence, glass splashing in steady impactful drops by my combat boots, shattering.
As the woman pushed the cart towards the liquor entrance, my daughter turned her head in the baby seat, the parking lot lit by a sky so gray she glowed ruddy like that girl in Schindler’s List, like the photo I took of her in the cornfield, her cheeks weighty with fat, looking back because I wasn’t in front of her, like she loved me enough to despise me for leaving her, even for her.
The woman parked the cart by my ex-boyfriend’s Galaxie coupe, my daughter’s car seat in the back. The thought came and went, I am steering this cart outside the store. It rattled on the wet concrete in my crazed pursuit. A man in high vis indignantly worked a train of carts as my daughter reached her hands out and writhed in the seat, maddened by her inability to move. She said, “Mama!” “I’m coming,” I said, but the woman lifted her so swiftly out of the seat that
it calmed her, and she clung to her hip. With my daughter all coy at her neck, this woman looked like the most threatening babysitter, slim and pretty, hair sun-streaked at the ends, skin quenched and surreal from vitamins or genes, that luck.
I said, “Put her down,” like this was a hostage situation.
My daughter started wailing, pouty lips downturned, confused as to why she could not be consoled. “You’re not allowed near her,” the woman said, disappearing her into the car seat. Her voice a bark when she slammed the door: “Stay away.”
“You’re not part of this,” I screamed.
“You’re an insane person!” she hissed, fumbling for keys. “You can’t do this to me.”
“You did this to you,” she said, pointing her finger at me, the shock of it like being shot.
“No,” I sobbed, indistinct from the rain. “Stop.” The woman revved out of the space as I held onto my cart like the counter I held onto when my ex- boyfriend took my daughter away from me the first time. Like my daughter, I couldn’t move or be consoled.
Before I could make a good choice or bad choice, a man gripped my shoulder then marched me inside, the liquor entrance doors swooshing open. I was too tired to question him, I kind of liked that he’d taken over, I felt like a different person entirely as we stood in front of the liquor rope. Then my heart palpitated as I computed my position in this mix-up, looking down at the presumably stolen items. I went slack, like a runaway orphan in a school play getting manhandled by my keeper before he ferried me back to hell.
“Where were you going?” said the security guard under the janky, overhead light, a venereal crazy in his eyes. He looked like he’d chosen the military over college, mainly because he couldn’t get into college. But this man was a security guard, and I was a woman, or whatever he thought a woman was. In other words, he was an animal, and I was a smaller, weaker animal. The only thing that could save me from this feeling was the roped off palace behind him, those amber, merlot, and green glass pyramids.
“I’m not stealing,” I said, and the guy said, “You’re not anymore,” then waited for me to crumble under his meanness. “I wasn’t stealing,” I said, then consulted the scuffed linoleum that had seen me through many entrances and exits, at all hours of the day and night.
It was so hard not to drink. Every second. All the time.
At rehab it was like I’d been in a terrible accident, pieces of a wrecked plane bobbing around my neck as I kicked my feet in open water. Only to survive, I had to defy gravity and force my way down into the deepest part of the ocean, where no one had ever been. Down in the void was a black so unfathomably black you couldn’t close your eyes to see it.
It wasn’t always other people’s receipts. At first, I only uploaded my own, the ones the visored girl handed me at Dunkin’s. A hundred points. But then I was doing what everyone does at Target, dissociating. At the self-checkout, I looked deeper into the bin with the discarded hangers and fished out a receipt. Self-consciously, I untwisted it, just to see. I wondered if the app would recognize it wasn’t me. But to my relief, the app didn’t care who I was. It uploaded just the same.
The security guard repeated himself like I was ESL, and I had no other way to say it: “I didn’t mean to go all the way out there.” Words were meaningless between us. He wore a camo hat with a stitched-on rifle indistinct from the shape of Tennessee. I could practically see the American flags rippling in his eyes. It didn’t take much to understand that his wife, Miranda, with her parched yellow hair, had worn cutoff denim to a Kenny Chesney concert, crushing one too many Bud Lights by the bed of a pick-up, possibly belonging to an old high school flame who she kissed in a moment of weakness, or was it strength; day after day, she’d knifed Miracle Whip onto shredded ham, sliced the security guard’s sandwich with a clean, seething cut while dreaming of being eaten out by someone who actually looked at her.
“You expect me to believe you?” he said. What was unbelievable was that it was him that could choose my fate, do what he wanted with me. I’d sometimes felt this way as a kid with my stepdad. He drank Crown and Cokes and when he entered my bedroom it was like his eyes were filmed with bug spray. My bedroom where I never fully slept. The worst part about being a kid is understanding the need to protect yourself but not knowing how. More recently, I’d felt it with the judge at my sentencing as he sifted through my files. Except his was a more exhausted, impassive kind of authority. It brought him no pleasure to punish me. I was anyone, meaning no one, at the mercy of a law he hadn’t written.
By instinct, I glanced up as the security screen monitored me, the camera working to digitalize my features with its image capturing technology, how the green lines moved when I moved. The next order of business the 5-0, the pig who’d cuff me, gladly, the footage stored and catalogued. Once, when I was seven, my mom ripped off a ticket and let me stand in the lapping pink light of a funhouse mirror. With my arm up, my fingers thinned, lengthened, then returned as an army of hands. I shut my eyes and when I opened them, my whole head was a single prying eye. I watched it rise above my wavy chest, and saw how I could leave myself, be two places at once. Kids cried, and left, but I wasn’t scared. I stood there watching my powerful warped body, a fixed thing that could multiply or evade me if I wanted, it all depended on how near or far I stood from it.
But the security cam I was locked in now was grainy and distant, the guard gripping the handle of my cart, how I was totally in his control. I didn’t know who was worse, him or the judge who sentenced me. With the judge, I didn’t matter. I was just another fly to swat at then dismiss. But the security guard was after an admission I couldn’t give him.
And I couldn’t be arrested, not again. I’d been at the sober house forty-seven days with thirteen more to go. Not seeing my daughter at the end of all of this— the prospect was like being forgotten by God, charred at the throat, something worse than suicidal. When my ex-boyfriend took her away that first time, I hurled my phone at the fridge, heaving as I gripped the counter, stiff as a stroke victim. Weeks went by, and I was off the beam, couldn’t follow a conversation. I slept like owl’s sleep—standing up, in crevices. I’d stop dead in my tracks and think— why am I brushing my teeth in the kitchen? I’d wake up in motels—sore—then take the bus home and find nothing but Pabst and ketchup in the warm fridge.
The second time, the state took her. Wasted on a Tuesday night, I fed her a plate of stale cookies from the floor, crawling with fire ants. I drove drunk to the ER as she threw up in her car seat. The nurse called CPS and the court ordered rehab and the rehab ordered the sober house. I hadn’t seen her in eight months.
At rehab, the therapist was excellent at nodding. She held her clipboard like a shield and extracted all my secrets, that I’d never actually slept with the dealer, it only ever happened over text, explicit, incessant texting that at some points felt like an ambitious construction site, an isolating skyscraper, and at others, a Public Enemies-like gun fight, with no clear villain or victim. I told her I’d once slipped a laptop up my sweatshirt at Best Buy when I was fifteen and felt no fear, only purpose. But she wasn’t done. “I sense you have some fear now, can you talk about that?”
I thought for a moment, but I was only pretending. “That I need alcohol more than I need my daughter.”
She said, “And how does that make you feel?”
I recovered from the slap, then said, “On your pain-scale, ninety billion.”
At another meeting, she probed me about the ins and outs of all that texting, then gave me a second diagnosis, that I was a sex addict. I crossed my arms and fought back tears like my daughter when I told her no more Oreos. That place cost me five thousand dollars. In this economy, all they wanted was for you to focus on more than one thing at a time so they could spin you in circles while robbing you blind.
When I got my first DUI, I was twenty-six and still living in Chicago, waitressing like my mom had waitressed, turning tables with a fake smile, her fate my fate. But not anymore. Maybe not. One night, driving home as the sun came up, my cupholder liquor blasted with fountain soda, I hugged the winding curves on Lake Shore at top speed like it was Tokyo Drift, the lines doubling as I closed one eye to keep them straight. The cop who pulled me over smacked his gum as the radioactive blue waves hurled themselves at the bike path only to be pulled back as if on a leash. The buildings in the rear view’s Gotham-like skyline like headless, dark-suited men that the amorphous clouds slipped through.
“Where are you coming from?” the cop said as he probed my ID. “Pilsner,” I slurred, then a moment of horror. “I mean Pilsen.”
“Step out of the car,” he said, and I spat, “Why?” in my back-talk stepdaughter tone.
You’re not my dad, I thought. At least that guy had the decency to leave me alone.
“I was actually looking for something,” I told the security guard. He stared through me in the way men do when they want to frighten you into submission. “Oh yeah,” he said. “What were you looking for?”
I knew if I tried to explain the whole receipt business, he’d peg me for some zombified prostitute pumped with meth, skittering around, collecting scraps of paper. My brain warped around this parasitical conquest, this game between me and the floor. “I lost my necklace,” I said, slowly running my hand down my throat. “My mom’s cross.”
It was true, you know the one, bronzed Jesus with his arms up like, damnit, now you owe me. I tilted my head, slipped out my inhaler and shook it, sucked it while holding his gaze. I don’t know what I thought about more, sex or alcohol. I wanted it like a guy wants it; I understood why so many men were incarcerated.
Before the security guard knew what to do, I swung us around, my back to the camera. I shot him a look that said trust me, then reached down into my tank top and twisted my nipple. I said, “You want to touch it?”
Now I’d confused him.
He looked at me like I’d changed the rules in a game he didn’t know we were playing.
“No, I don’t want to touch it,” he said, like I was mentally hilarious.
Then he glanced around, no customers coming or leaving. I cupped my tit, jacket open, like it was a bag of heroin in an alley. I had him where I wanted him, noting the gun on his waist. I bit my lower lip, daring him to shove it down my throat. I wanted to hear it click against my teeth and taste the metal, but it would only be another form of foreplay. The security guard glanced up at the camera like it might tell him what to do.
I’d already had a confusing week. At the urologist, I peed in a cup before the nurse gave me an ultrasound. She scrutinized the screen then said, “Everything looks good,” and I said, “Really?”
Then I marked a weirdly comprehensive form that asked questions about how often I peed. In the night, countless times, interrupting my sleep. The asthma. My overactive bladder. It all started when I was a kid, maybe eight, and I’d sometimes wet the bed. The form asked if I was anxious or depressed, how pleasurable my orgasms were on a scale of one to five. I checked five meaning very pleasurable. How often I craved sex, easy five, all the time, then thought back to the question about pleasure, how indistinct it was from pain.
“The doctor likes to know everything. He’s really smart,” the nurse said, then disappeared with the paperwork.
When she came back, she said, “I’ll check your wrist now for your pulse,” and wormed two fingers between my sweatshirt cuff and fingerless glove. It felt old-fashioned, how she pressed down with warm fingers, looking away but like she was listening. I hissed at my heart, stop it, stop it, but my heart never listened. Twenty seconds went by. She held her fingers firm. Twenty more. Two minutes. Three. How long can this go on, I thought, but then the thought passed, and finally, our breath synched, and I shut my eyes, remembering this one time a pediatrician laid his hands on my chest so gently and with such care that I pretended he was God. She looked at me, said, “There it is,” and I thought, this is what normal people feel like.
Then the doctor barged in and ruined everything. He looked like an under- the-table dentist, a gold chain glinting under the neckline of his pale blue scrubs. He sat with his knees splayed on the wheely stool as he blew through more wildly invasive questions with the energy of an auctioneer. I stared at my frayed Adidas sneakers as he explained with both hands how my bladder was connected to my nervous system. He told me my bladder was a liar, that it was misbehaving, then asked if I’d ever been sexually assaulted.
“Alright, I believe you,” said the security guard, after he’d touched it, squeezed it, twisted it, flicked it, sucked it, slapped it a little and grunted. I guess he’d had enough of me. He wanted to go check his phone so he could tell Miranda what to cook for dinner and re-tweet a Proud Boys meme. Because his phone knew who he was, and my phone knew who I was.
When I’d downloaded the rewards app, I’d willingly sold my information, but who cares, they had it anyway. They knew where I went when I typed in directions. They knew when I was hungry, why I was hungry. What got me off, how to boss me around, end me. That’s why I’d ended up here, in the liquor section. At least it meant I wasn’t alone. Like that creepy thing they say at meeting, God’s footsteps in the sand when you thought you were alone. The security guard limped back towards his station by the information desk, and I turned into the liquor aisle. Then, at the same time, over our shoulders, we looked back at each other.
He needed me.
He wanted my fear.
I had so much of it, it was almost a relief to give it away like that.
Kate Wisel is the author of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Min Jin Lee. Her fiction can be found in places that include Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Tin House online, Adroit Journal, The Best Small Fictions 2019, Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere. She was a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works as an assistant to music critic Jim DeRogatis and teaches at Columbia College Chicago and Loyola University. She is also a screenwriter in the Writers Guild of America.