Sams’ powerful stories of teen girlhood in all of its confusion, intense emotion and inchoate self-shifting reminded me of those times my heart felt wide open to a dangerous world, one that I could not help but feel a wide-awake addiction to. In ‘Overnight’, her lucid descriptions immerse the reader in a 00s world of nightclubs, blue WKDs, Smirnoff Ice and Red Stripe. The strobe light and phone camera screen select what we see as we inhabit young Maxine’s perspective. She “saw [George] first in the viewfinder of her Snapchat”. As the story progresses we zoom in to who he is and how he relates to her. In the beginning their relationship being one of innocence, listening to George’s iPod shuffle (Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls”) and finding comfort away from their single mothers’ struggles and working-class lives. However, it’s clear from Maxine’s avoidance and almost paralysis in seeing him again that something passed between them. Sams artfully executes the reveal of this event. A car light in the dark slowly coming into stark focus.
First published in The Stinging Fly, 2018, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Send Nudes, Bloomsbury, 2022
A Personal Anthology 