Story of the Week

Stacy Wakefield studied graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she graduated with a specialization in book design in 1994. With her sister she founded Evil Twin Publications, which released Not for Rent: Conversations with Creative Activists in the U.K., a collection of interviews with squatters, which Wakefield coauthored. She is also the author of the coming-of-age novel The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory (Akashic Books, 2015). Wakefield lives in the Catskill Mountains.

A Place of Our Own

New York City, July 1995
A Story

by Stacy Wakefield

For a while I thought Lorenzo would be my boyfriend. I’d had guy friends like him before, I should have known better. They think I’m great because I’m not girly, we like the same bands and talk about records, and they really like me, but when it comes down to it, they can’t deal with the size of my ass. Lorenzo practically told me to my face that I was a million times cooler than the little waitress from the coffee shop who wanted him to come over to her apartment and screw in a light bulb. She stood over our booth in her little skirt, twisting a curl on a finger. Lorenzo seriously wanted to complain to me about how she was kind of a twit, like I should have sympathy for him.

Whatever. I just wanted a house. We had been sleeping on the roof at ABC NoRio all summer, it was like a tent city up there. It was fun at first, but summer would be over soon, we needed a place to live.

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