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We Were Seventeen, a story

I. 

There is a girl with impossibly long and unkempt hair standing behind me. I’m not aware of her until she says, “What’s all this?” Her voice is sweet. Her voice is kind. Her voice is completely void of malice. 

     Her presence startles me. I say,  “It’s just something we do, me and Leonard.”

     We are in a thicket of trees looking at the thirty-plus fire extinguishers piled neatly on a sleeping bag. 

     “Leonard’s an ass. You shouldn’t hang out with him.”

     “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me what to do.”

     She shrugs and picks up one of the fire extinguishers. “I was wondering what happened to all these. Everyone’s pissed about this, you know?”

     “I know.”

     “Why did you do it?”

     It’s my turn to shrug. I say, “It’s just something we do.”

     “You need a hobby.” She sets the fire extinguisher back on the ground. 

     “I have hobbies.”

     “Like?” She seems older than me, like she has everything figured out, like nothing scares her. 

     “I surf.”

     “Get out of here. You don’t surf,” she says. “Where do you surf?”

     “Newport, usually. It's the closest.” 

     “I’ve always wanted to learn to surf.”

     I look at her for a long time.

     She says, “Only child. No one to teach me.” 

     “Me too,” I say. 

     “Yeah?” she says. “I mean, I got two older brothers, but you know…” 

     “What?”

     “Nothing,” she says. “They’re not around much.”

      “I could teach you,” I say.

     “Teach me?”

     “To surf,” I say. 

     She laughs.

     “What?”

     “Not as long as you and Leonard are friends.”

     “Hmm,” I say. Then I say, “He doesn’t tell me what to do.”

     “Okay.”

     I think, and I think. “He only pesters you because he likes you.”

     “Then he should tell me that so I can tell him to screw off.”

     If you had a pair of magic binoculars that could look through time, you would see a boy who looks older than his age, sweating, trying to manage his emotions. He likes this girl and he wants to be friends, but he has no idea how. He is thinking that the offer to teach her to surf was a good idea, but now it feels so contradictory, such a reversal of the previous days and weeks. He wants to go back in time so he could meet her before he meets Leonard, and be her friend instead.  He’s too young to imagine a scenario where that’s possible. 

     I say, “I should probably go home.”

     “Yeah,” says the girl. She is looking at me. I can feel her eyes on me, and I want to run away. 

     I turn and look at her for a moment. I see the months and years unwind before us, and she’s there, always with me. Except no, she’s not. In one vision we are inseparable, two children on the playground chasing each other in a mad, unscripted routine. But in the other, she’s nowhere, and I can’t even remember her name. 

      You are me now, and you see yourself swallowed in a dream, and when you wake up, everyone is speaking gibberish, and when someone says something like, “Hookee-hay-choo,” everyone laughs. And you laugh too, but it’s forced because you don’t want to let on you have no idea what’s happening. Then someone else says, “Got-chee-gin-towe,” and everyone looks at the ground with dire expressions. You look down too, and when you look up five hundred years later, everyone is staring at you with concern, bordering on anger. You are alone on a stage, you are naked, and you are looking out at the twelve and a half million people in the audience. You look up at a sign hanging from the rafters. It is the title of the show, and you are its star. The title reads: This is How You Are Going to Feel For the Rest of Your Life. 

     Tell him. Look through your magic binoculars and tell him: he’s just a boy and he has no control over anything. Things beyond his control will dictate his every action, and this is true for everyone. Tell him. And tell him that it’s okay. The whirlwind will pick him up and carry him - just like it does everyone - and set him down a thousand miles away once, twice, a hundred times. Tell him it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Tell him everything is fine. Tell me everything is okay. 

      “I guess I’ll see you at school,” she says.

      “Yeah, maybe,” I say, though I know I will avoid her. 

     She looks at me as if to say, “Why are you the way that you are?”

     I look back at her as if to say, “I have no idea, but if you figure it out, let me know.”

     Her expression changes, as if to say, “I will, if I’m around.”

     “Well,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else. 

      “Well,” she says.

      I walk away, back toward my friend Leonard who will want to steal more fire extinguishers. But before I get too far, I turn, look at her for a long time, and ask her why she’s being nice.

If you look down at us with your magic binoculars and turn back time just a few days, you will see me calling her names and throwing sticks at her. Ask me why I’m doing this, and my response will be, “I can’t help it.” I’ll be busy picking the right projectiles, and laughing when they hit their mark. 

     “Why are you being nice to me?” I ask. Only, I don’t. I don’t say anything. I just walk away. 

 

When the future came, and I was the only one left to bear witness of the thousand meaningless stories that made up our little lives, I would look back at this moment: 

     I am on the floor looking at my best friend from the other side of the library. She has curly blond hair and blue eyes. Her mascara is dripping down her cheeks. She is staring at me. I think she is trying to say something. Her lips are moving. But this is probably the passage of time and faulty memory. Surely she isn’t saying anything at all. Surely she isn’t even seeing me. 

     I should be sitting next to her. We should be holding hands, the way you do when you love someone without expectation. Just smile when you see me. Acknowledge me in the hall. I might be feeling lonely and overwhelmed, and you can wake me up just by saying my name. But she’s an ocean away. I see the bookshelves behind her. I see the clock directly above, and the blue window. 

     Outside against a backdrop of the California sky, a bird flies by, and how strange is it that that bird, the outside world, knows so little, if anything, about what’s going on inside. Decades will pass, books will be written, movies made. There will be protests so outraged faces can contort and spit and squeal at the universe. But this remains true: no one on the outside will ever really know what is going on inside. There are too many miles of brick and mortar for anyone to see.

​

There was a somewhat famous writer here in this room just a few weeks ago. I was not excited to see him, happy only because I was able to get out of history class for an hour. The man’s son was two years behind me in school, so I didn’t really know him. But I did think it was interesting that his father was a somewhat famous writer. I can tell you his name, but I just call him The Somewhat Famous Writer Who Wrote About War. His name doesn’t matter, and neither does mine. The man’s son, I will tell you, was named Carl, and as far as I could tell, he was exactly the kind of person someone named Carl would be. 

     Carl’s father had written books because someone told him it would be cathartic. Someone told him when you experience The Worst The World Has To Offer, you have to write it down for others to see. You have to share so you can see your experience reflected back at you in the faces of others who have never experienced The Worst The World Has To Offer. Somehow this was supposed to help with things that, in the end, couldn’t be helped.

     I’m not saying that The Somewhat Famous Writer Who Wrote About War hadn’t experienced The Worst The World Has To Offer. He was eighteen when war grabbed him by the throat and pulled him across the world where he killed a bunch of people and a bunch of people killed a bunch of his friends. 

     But the details in his books are sketchy. For example, in one scene he sees his best friend drowning in the mud, but later, at home in a small town outside Milwaukee, his friend appears, alive and well, insisting he never went off to war, but had instead run off to Canada, and that if the cops find him, there will be trouble. “What was it like?” his friend asks.

     “You were there,” says the Somewhat Famous Writer.

     “How did I do?”

     “You did beautifully, like always.”

     “Did I?”

     “Yes.”

     “So what happened?” 

     “You drowned in the mud.”

     “You sure it was me?”

     “Yeah, I’m sure. I know it was you because you had on that necklace you’re always wearing.”

     “Oh,” says the friend. “Can I have it back?”

     The Somewhat Famous Writer reaches into his jacket pocket and retrieves the necklace. The friend takes it and hangs it around his neck. “Thanks,” he says.

     “It’s nothing,” says the writer.

     I was seventeen years old. This made no sense to me. I raised my hand. “I don’t understand,” I said.

     “Which is exactly the point,” said the writer, punctuating each word with his finger. 

     “How could his friend still be alive?” someone asked.

     The writer stood there for a long time. You could see his eyes turn dull, then glassy, and later we admitted we hoped he was having a seizure. Our history teacher was about to intervene when the writer said, “Because when you’re a writer you are all-too aware that the truth of a thing can never be experienced through words on a page. Stories, at least stories that obey the rules as we understand them, can never be true. You’ll never be able to share the truth of a thing by telling the truth. You have to lie to them, and they have to go along with you.” 

     I leaned over to my friend, who was ignoring the whole thing and playing with the cross necklace around her neck. “He’s a lunatic,” I said about The Somewhat Famous Writer Who Wrote About War.

     “Who is?” she asked.

     “Maybe he got a brain injury in the war,” I said.

     “Who?”

     “The writer.”

     “What writer?”

     I turned toward her in my seat. I wasn’t sure what was worse: the fact she didn’t know there was a Somewhat Famous Writer talking to fifty of the most uninterested teenagers in the world, or that she wasn’t keeping up well enough to make fun of the situation with me. “Rachel,” I said, too loudly. Our history teacher hushed us from across the room.

     I sought out my other friends, hoping they might help. All you really had to do was throw your hands up and mouth, “I know!” to communicate the absurdity of a thing, and how much more worth to the world you could be if but for the fact you are being forced to be here, in this room, with these people. Because you’re just so much better than all of it. 

     We were seventeen. We had our whole lives ahead of us, as they say, though some clearly had more than others. We were seventeen, which was plenty of time to learn the things life had to teach us, except the worst thing. That would have to wait. For today, it was this: that every time you think you are above it all, you are most certainly not. In fact, you are barely keeping your head above water. The fact that you are not drowning in mud on the other side of the world is a miracle, no matter how much it feels like you are. Does everyone feel that way? Yes. And that’s lesson number one.

 

We are sitting in Mrs. Blankenship’s Advanced English (this is what she insists on calling it, and based on her age and appearance, we’re pretty sure it’s appropriate; she clearly lived through the invention and evolution of the language, so it’s only fair) listening to her lecture about tigers, or bears, or penguins, or space aliens, burning bright in the forests of the night. So it’s probably not penguins, but who knows? This is Mrs. Blankenship’s Advanced English; if she wants to talk about penguins spontaneously combusting in the middle of the Amazon, who am I to argue?

     Terry is staring at me from behind glasses that look like they can see little men on Mars, and suddenly I’m thinking that whatever Mrs. Blankenship is lecturing about must not be penguins spontaneously combusting in the Amazon, but little men on Mars setting each other on fire, and all the little women trying to save their lives with stolen fire extinguishers. 

     “What?” I say, wondering how, with those glasses, her eyes don’t burst into flames every time she steps out into the sun. 

     “You’d be perfect,” she says.

     “What?” I say again, because, you know, vocabulary. 

     “What are you doing Friday, fifth period?”

     “What?”

     “Friday. Fifth period.”

     “Uhm. I’ve got trig, I think.”

     Because of my schedule, everyone thinks I’m a genius, all evidence to the contrary. Even Yuyang, our eventual valedictorian, looks at me with competitive suspicion. He interprets my ineptness as false humility, as if I'm making fun of everybody. I most definitely am not. 

     I think my conversation with Terry is over, so I look up at Mrs. Blankenship, who has stopped her lecture and is glaring at me. This goes on for at least three decades.

     “As I was saying,” she says. 

     “Perfect,” says Terry.

     “What are you talking about?” I say.

     Mrs. Blankenship looks at me and I’m pretty sure flames are about to burst from her eyes. 

     “I need a scene partner for an assignment Friday,” says Terry. 

     Mrs. Blankenship is still staring, and I can’t help but think, “How is any of this my fault?” but of course it is. Of course it is. 

     “I don’t know what that means,” I say to Terry once Mrs. Blankenship has continued with whatever she’s talking about. 

     Aaron breaks in. “We’re supposed to find a scene partner who’s not in drama, and do a scene with them.”

     “What kind of scene?”

     “Nobody knows,” says Aaron.

     “Wait. What are you asking me to do?”

     “A scene,” says Terry.

     “It’s improv,” says Aaron. “We find a partner who’s not in drama, and when we go on stage, we’ll get what we’re supposed to act out.”

     “Like what, for example?” I say. 

     “Penguins exploding in space!” Mrs. Blankenship shouts. Looking back now, though, that’s probably not what she said. 

     “Oh, could be anything,” says Aaron. “Could be you’re in the middle of a war. Could be you’re getting married and you’re trying to get out of it. Could be you’re meeting the President of the United States and you have something very important to tell him.”

     Terry says, “Could be you’re falling in love for the first time.”

     “Or maybe you just got drafted and you have to break up with your girlfriend before you leave. Something like that.”

     Heather, who sits beside me and is student body president and is frightening beyond imagination because 1. she’s beautiful, and 2. she seems to have been best friends with everyone at the school since kindergarten, leans in close to me and says, “Or maybe your English teacher hands you a note telling you that she’s desperately and hopelessly in love with you.”

     I know she’s being funny, but my head is already spinning and now Heather is talking to me - Heather! - and I nearly faint because I've forgotten how to breathe - not to breathe, but how to breathe. I can feel my anxiety growing in my throat and I have to focus hard to avoid dying. 

     Mrs. Blankenship does, in fact, hand me a note, not to profess her deepest emotions toward me - except for maybe anger - but to send me to the office, where I will have to spend thirty minutes explaining my behavior from the last five minutes, apologize to the class, and promise to mend my attitude going forward. 

     “Friday. Fifth period,” Terry says as I’m talking out the door.

     Even from outside, with the door closed behind me, I can hear Aaron laughing. 

​

Lesson number two: it doesn’t matter what you look like.

     I wanted to tell Aaron he’d do well as one of those statue street performers in Venice. But I never did. He was so stiff and awkward I was sure he had fallen off the mannequin truck. He looked like someone had taken parts from a five-year-old girl and parts from a sixty-year-old man and poured superglue over the whole thing. Because of this, I never told him what a great street performer he would be, because I was fairly certain if he stood that still for more than five minutes he’d freeze and the rest of us would have to carry him around all the time. He’d have conversations with people, and every time he wanted to talk to another person, we’d have to pick him up, rotate him so he’d be looking at that person, then set him down again. It would be exhausting. I told him once, in a group of maybe ten people, that he looked like he stole his hair from one of those Lego characters, and everyone laughed because it was just so painfully true. And when he did move it was like he’d been set on fire. His movements were so manic and ridiculous that if you were within five feet of him you’d fear for your life. 

     I was Aaron’s opposite in just about every way. I grew up wanting only two things: to surf, and to write. While Aaron was stiff and clumsy, I tended to slide through the world, landing with occasional, almost imperceptible thumps onto people and things that welcomed me primarily, I suspected, because I went so easily unnoticed. I was someone's fish that could be left alone while the family went on vacation for a week or a month, hoping only vaguely, on the way home, that they wouldn’t return home to find me floating at the top of a green ooze. 

     “He was a beautiful fish,” they’d say, which, looking back now, I can say was true. He was a beautiful fish, and Aaron was the kind of fish that would latch on to your fishing hook only to be thrown back for fear that it was riddled with disease, and would probably spoil your belief in God. 

     We knew each other from English class, but our friendship didn't really happen until the fall production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My only previous experience with Shakespeare was a movie version of Hamlet I watched with my mother, and reading Romeo and Juliet my freshman year of high school. In fact, Romeo and Juliet was the extent of all our exposure to the Bard, or the Great Poet, as our student director, Mia, called him. Blissfully ignorant, we found - at least the male actors found - common ground in the Olivia Hussey nude scene from the Zeffirelli film, the only movie version available at the time.

     I am sitting ten rows from the stage eating a Togo’s sandwich. My friend Terry works at Togo’s and we sit together sharing a honey-ham with extra olives that I’d have to pick off because I am convinced that olives are the source of most of the world's problems. 

     Terry, on the other hand, loves olives. She consumes them with a joy that makes you move a few inches away from her. She moans softly each time she tosses one in her mouth. She lets them sit in her mouth for long stretches before chewing, swallowing, and tossing in another, then another. She could be eating live puppies and I wouldn’t be more horrified, or more transfixed.

     We’re watching Aaron and Rachel rehearsing a scene between Lysander and Hermia, two of the four lovers in the story. They’d run off to get married because Hermia’s father threatened to have her killed if she didn’t marry Demetrius. This seemed pretty harsh to me, but I was seventeen and I assumed all fathers before the year 1950 or thereabouts did such things.

     They make an odd pairing. Aaron, the wound up mannequin with Lego hair, and Rachel, who with blond hair and blue eyes looks like she belongs in a Van Halen video. 

Rachel, as Hermia, says, “Find you out a bed, for I upon this bank will rest my head.” They are supposed to be in the woods, and it’s getting dark.

     Aaron, as Lysander, seeing his opportunity, says, “by one turf shall serve as pillow for us both. One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth.” He says the line too loudly, and his head is moving from side to side with each word. He’s trying to be seductive, but he has no idea what he’s doing. Rachel, for her part, is doing much better. She’s smiling at him, taking his hand, leaning in close. I’m pretty sure Aaron is afraid of her. 

     She says, “Nay, good Lysander. For my sake, my dear, lie further off yet. Do not lie so near.” But her body language is telling him something different. 

     Rachel’s line, with its use of the word “lie” and its two meanings, makes me think that this play is about control. Hermia’s father wants to control her and force her to marry Demetrius; Lysander wants to control Hermia so he can have sex with her; and Hermia wants to control Lysander by tempting, but ultimately refusing him. I'm proud of my insight, and I want to talk about it with someone. But I'm seventeen, and I'm worried that I'm wrong, or that it has taken me far longer to understand something so basic that everyone else has been talking about it for weeks. Yuyang had probably even written a book about it. 

     Mia, the student director, and Aaron, are dating. This was information I wish I’d had earlier. Mia stood under five feet tall, had black unkempt hair, was so thin she looked incapable of holding up that mountain of hair. She made up for her small stature by being loud and expressive. She threw her arms about when she spoke. And she was passionate about things I knew nothing about.

     I couldn’t help but have a crush on Mia. She was tiny, had hair that seemed to mimic deep sea creatures thought to be extinct, dressed like she was preparing for a long winter in the Klondike, but she was passionate about life and kind to me at a time when I was lonely and didn’t always express myself well. At that age, or at any age really, you tend to hold on to the people who are kind to you. 

     So one day I gathered the courage, bought flowers, and asked her out. Aaron was there when it happened. I’m sure this happens to every guy one time or another, and I’m sure every guy wants to run away and live alone in the mountains after he does it. 

     Mia turned me down, explaining why. I was crushed, and I did want to run away and live in the woods. But Aaron, though far from a perfect boyfriend to Mia, was always nice to me. 

     Rachel says, “Gentle friend, for love and courtesy lie further off in human modesty. Such separation as may well be said becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid. So far be distant. And, good night, sweet friend. Thy love ne'er alter till thy sweet life end!”

     Aaron, resigned to not getting what he wants, sulks off and lies down to sleep. 

     Mia claps her hands, says, “It’s wonderful!” even though it’s not. She climbs onto the stage, walks over to him, and gives him a kiss. 

     Terry elbows me in the arm and asks, “Jealous?”

     “Of him? No,” I say, and I mean it. Aaron is my friend now, and I know too much about him. 

     Mia dances off the stage, looks over at Terry and me, smiles and waves. I wave back. “You don’t still like her?” Terry asks.

     “Of course I like her. Mia’s great.”

     “You know what I mean.”

     “I like everybody. You know that.”

     “Do you like me?” Terry asks.

     “I like that you always share your sandwiches with me.”

     “You think I’m adorable,” she says, and puts her head on my shoulder.

     “I do,” I say. 

     “You wanna go to Sadie Hawkins with me?”

     “I don’t know. Maybe.”

     She sits up and slaps my arm. 

     “When is it?”

     “Next Friday.”

     I look at her. She looks back. Now that I’m a middle aged man with children, it’s hard to think of her in that moment as pretty. But the seventeen-year-old me certainly thought she was pretty. She let her hair cover her face, and sometimes she wore unflattering glasses. She seemed to fall in love with different guys each week, guys I thought weren’t good enough for her. 

     On the stage, Puck has emerged from the wings looking for Demetrius and Helena, the other two lovers in the story. The problem is, though Helena is in love with Demetrius, Demetrius is in love with Hermia. He has come to the woods to find her, and Helena has followed him. The only thing Puck knows about the two is that they are wearing Athenian clothes, so when he sees Lysander and Hermia sleeping on the ground, he thinks it’s Demetrius and Helena. He places a potion on Lysander’s eyes so that he will fall madly in love with the first person he sees when he wakes up. Again, I think, control. 

     The intent is to get Demetrius to fall in love with Helena, so that everybody will be happy (except for maybe Hemia’s father, who had, after all, threatened to kill her). But when Puck puts the potion on Lysander’s eyes, he sets into motion a series of events that almost leads to tragedy. “What hast thou done?” I say under my breath. It’s my line a few scenes later. “Thou hast mistaken quite.”

     I’ve lost myself in thought, and forgotten Terry has just asked me to the Sadie Hawkins dance. She is looking at me and there is hurt in her eyes. She gets up and walks away and I don’t try to stop her. 

     On the stage, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius have left Hermia alone. Rachel looks out at the audience and meets my gaze. She looks so sad and alone. I know that feeling and it breaks my heart a little. I say the line as she says it: “I am amazed … and know not what to say.” She smiles at me. I smile back. Mia is applauding and cheering. Rachel laughs and says thank you to Mia. And just like I had hoped, Rachel looks back at me and smiles. 

     Then I look over and see Mia and Aaron embracing. Their mouths are locked in a deep kiss that sounds like crowds of people chewing. It’s horrible to look at, but the truth is I am a bit jealous. Terry was usually right about me; I did still have a crush on Mia, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it was about ridiculous guys like Aaron that attracted so many girls. Every part of him was wrong, and when you looked at him you felt a deep need to apologize. He seemed so oblivious, lacked any sense of self-awareness, yet somehow he walked through life as if he belonged on the cover of romance novels. And I couldn’t help but be just a little bit in awe of him. 

 

Lesson number three: you can trust a man with an absurd tie. 

     I’m sitting in a blue plastic chair across a desk from my school counselor, Dr. Barnsford.

     “You’ve been here a week?”

     “Three weeks.”

     He is a thick man who wears glasses that magnify his eyes, and ties that make him look rounder than he really is. He is covered in hair and I’ve already heard people refer to him as “Sasquatch,” though the general opinion of him seems positive. 

     “How’re you doing?”

     I don’t know how to respond to this. I’m not averse to going into detail about how lonely it’s been not knowing anyone, not having anywhere to go during lunch, sitting by myself in class watching other students who seem to have known each other their entire lives. Feeling as if I belong nowhere, to no one, to no thing. 

     I don’t get the impression he wants to hear all that, so I say, “I’m thinking about auditioning for the play.”

     “What play?”

     “The school is doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

     “Shakespeare? That’s ambitious.” 

     “It’s not Hamlet.”

     “No. But what is?”

     I force a smile, and nod.

     “Do you know A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

     “Not really.”

     “You should study up on it before your audition.”

     “Maybe.”

     “When is the audition?”

     “Today, I think.” 

     Dr. Barnsford sits back in his chair and folds his hands behind his hairy neck. He is looking at some random spot over my head. I almost turn to see what he is staring at, but I catch myself and examine his tie instead. When I look up, he is staring at me again. “It’s a funny play,” he says. “I’ve always thought it’s kind of the opposite of Romeo and Juliet, which is also very funny.”

     “Funny?”

     “They meet at a party and get married a few hours later. That’s funny.”

     “They die in the end,” I say.

     “The way I see it, what’s really tragic is you and I will never feel about anything the way they did about each other.”

     I thought that was a terrible thing to tell a teenage boy. I also thought it was funny coming from a man with the general appearance of an aging, overweight werewolf. I said, “So does everyone die at the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

     “No. Everyone lives happily ever after.” He wheels himself over to a bookshelf and grabs a book. I think it is going to be Shakespeare-related, but it turns out to be something about the Constitution. I had heard that he used to be a history teacher. He holds the book in his hands, flipping it over and over. He is full of nervous energy, and I wonder what he is nervous about. 

     “Romeo and Juliet is about love at first sight. Audiences eat that stuff up. But I think Shakespeare knew what he was doing. A play like Midsummer Night’s Dream takes those common tropes - common tropes! -  and turns it on its head - turns it on its head! That’s what makes it funny, even with the fairies and all that.”

     “I didn’t know it had fairies.”

     “Loads of ‘em! Girl fairies. A guy like you will do well in a play like Midsummer Night’s Dream. You’ll be one of the four lovers, if I had to guess. You’re tall and good looking and girls like that kind of thing.”

     I nod, not knowing what to say. 

     “The way I see it, I’m glad you’re not doing Romeo and Juliet. Love at first sight! Sure! Ha ha!.” 

     I don’t understand what he is talking about, and he must see the confusion on my face. 

     “You kids are funny, you know that?”

     I do, but I’m not going to admit it.

     “You buy into that stuff. You think Romeo and Juliet would feel that way forever! No one has that much energy. Time passes and you get bored. I’m not saying they wouldn’t have loved each other. I’m not saying they wouldn’t have grown old and had a nice life. But to think they could keep up that level of intensity is absurd. It’s like running a sprint. You can go fast for a little while, but pretty soon you have to slow down. Life is a marathon, if you’ll forgive the cliche. No, no. You can keep your Romeo and Juliet. That’s not real. That’s teenage wish-fulfillment. Now, I know that crap sells, but it’s nonsense.”

     I am having a hard time keeping up. I look at the clock and wonder when I can leave. Can I interrupt him? Give an excuse to go?

     “Midsummer Night’s Dream. All the characters are so ridiculous in that one. The four lovers. The actors. Everyone falling in and out of love. Magic spells replace costume parties. Shape-shifting replaces dueling in the streets. All the idiotic teenage rage and passion is replaced by running through the woods and getting lost.”

     “The woods?”

     “The woods!” he says, holding up his book. “You ever notice it’s the woods where all the chaos happens? All the mix-ups, the shenanigans, the violence, the confusion? That’s why I never go into the woods!”

     “Never?”

     “Never!”

     Here I am, in this uncomfortable plastic chair, thinking, this man is crazy. But I like him, and though I won't know until months later that he is right about going into the woods, I trust him. He does look like a werewolf; he is fat and loud; the room smells like burned coffee, but I like him. He is Santa Claus’ crazy brother, the one the Claus family never invites to dinner. I want to leave, but I also want to stay. I have nowhere to go, no real friends, but the feeling to simultaneously run for my life and stay where I am is powerful. 

     Looking back, I should have stayed. There’s no particular reason for thinking this way, other than it was the braver of the two choices. I think he would have appreciated my company, and I’m fairly certain I would have appreciated his. But instead, like usual, I took the lesser choice, and told him I had to pee. He looked at me, smiled, and waved me away. 

 

Lesson number four: dogs don’t do treadmills.

     It is late April in the final year of the millennium and I am grading papers in a closet-slash-office that I hope will be mine one day. I am able to hide away in this cubby when my boss, whom I will refer to as Professor What’s-His-Pants for reasons I may or may not explain at some point, is, as he likes to say, Otherwise Engaged. 

     You might imagine a professor’s office walls filled with libraries and covered with artwork depicting the entire scope of a discipline’s history - from some bit of shale clinging to the side of a mountain being struck by the tiniest raindrop, causing it to fall through the night sky, spinning and curving through the air to the invention of, at last, the latest social media platform - but this is 1999, and this office shares more in common with the inside of a worn sock than anything where living beings might dwell. The only bit of artwork in this room is a framed three by five daguerreotype of a young woman in a white dress standing next to an old man dressed in Confederate gray. 

     The woman looks as if she could exist anywhere, anytime, as long as you dressed her in the fashion of the times; the man, however, is from a bad dream. The skin of his face and neck look like it is being held up with invisible wires and his hair seems to be crying out to the world, “Get me out of here!”

      I never knew who they were, and I never asked. I was happy not knowing, happy that my imagination could get carried away by the image. I could tell you any number of stories my little brain made up for these two, but neither of us have the time or patience for that, so I will spare you. The point is, this was the only bit of artwork or decoration displayed in the office, because this was the kind of space where nothing but this kind of artwork could be displayed. 

      The significance of this current time in our history may not have gone unnoticed to you. It’s late April, 1999, and the box where I am currently working is a forty minute drive north of Columbine High School. I am sitting, unaware of the world around me, when someone knocks on my door. I look over at the door, just the tiniest bit puzzled because it’s not a door that invites knocking. Then the door opens, and a familiar face appears. “There’s something happening in Littleton,” she says. “You might want to see this.” 

     “No,” I should have said. “I don’t want to see this.” What I should have wanted, had I the magical foresight, was to run away and bury my head beneath several thousand feet of concrete. What I should have wanted was to turn time backward and sail on that mysterious blue photon until all of it - the gunshots, crying, screaming, the stink of fear and death - blew away from my memory, my heart, my spirit, my blood, even the atoms that contain me, turned to smoke in some far-off fairytale land, and vanished. 

     And even as I walked into the room, TV bellowing out the news as if trying to communicate with someone living at the farthest edge of the galaxy, those familiar sensations returned, and I was tossed back into that library a handful of years earlier. And I could see it all in their faces, that horror, that shock, and in hindsight I have to admit some part of me was angry - pissed - because these people here in this room, my colleagues, teachers, and advisors, now counted themselves members of a - forgive the pun - fraternity of baffled souls, of remember-whens, and can-you-believe-it. They hadn’t just witnessed the partaking of the forbidden fruit; they had lived it, tasted its sweetness and that hint of bitterness. It brought them all together, a kind of mirror-experience to watching together as their favorite team wins whatever championship title they’d been working toward for the last two decades. And there’s me, here but not here, with them but not with them, together but most clearly and decisively not together. 

     One-thousand-twenty-one miles away; my blood and bones desperate to leave my body; my best friend in the world looking at me as if I could somehow reach across the room and carry her out of here to safety. 

     If you don’t know what happened in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, don’t worry. No one knows what happened in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. Because an infinite number of things happened on that day, at that school. What happened that day if you were among those first to see (note: I am struggling with what to refer them by. They were shooters, yes; murderers, yes; psychopaths, yes; devils, evil personified, shadows. But how to refer to them without mythologizing them, and without giving them the attention they are least worthy of having?) the two its walking down the hallway is not the same as if you were a parent dropping off your child in front of the school. The principal and security had their experiences; those who heard the shots but saw nothing experienced something else. The first to call 911 and the first police officers to arrive at the school five minutes later. Those lying dead in the cafeteria, and their friends who saw it happen. The library. The man watching the news who sees his boy shot down from behind. “I knew it was him,” he would say. “I knew it was him.” 

     I can’t take my eyes off the television. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I know, even now, that there is something about the rush of memory and pain that reunites me with my friends. It is both punishment and catharsis. I deserve the punishment, and the catharsis is release. I am with them all now, the dead, and we are - I don’t know what we are - we are seventeen. 

     Rachel is holding my hand, and I ask her why we don’t learn from our experiences. It’s like we’re all on a treadmill and we’re going nowhere. We run faster, and we run higher, and when we get off we act surprised that we are exactly where we started. How do we get off the treadmill and begin walking like normal people? 

     “Are you okay?” Rachel-not-Rachel asks.

     “No,” I say, but I don’t tell her why. She thinks she knows. Blood and bits of bone are seeping through my skin, though she can’t see it. I can’t even see it. But the ghosts can, and they feel so sorry for me that it makes me feel even more alone. 

     Funny thing is, I didn’t feel alone before. Sure, in the weeks following those events in the library - our library - when my friends were no longer with me and the few who understood what I was going through didn’t want to talk about it, I felt tremendous loneliness. But graduation was only a month away, and life took us all to new places. New friends. New experiences. People didn’t ask me, a thousand miles away, if I had been there to experience The Worst Thing Ever, because I did not offer that information any more than I would offer up - now that I’m well into middle-age -  information about my prostate. 

     Rachel - Ghost-Rachel - says to me, “Dogs don’t do treadmills.” She doesn’t explain. 

     “We’re all on a treadmill,” I say to the television. Sandy Hook. Virginia Tech. Orlando. Parkland. Las Vegas. Uvalde, Texas. Even here in Boulder in 2021. “Why can’t we get off the treadmill?” 

     Rachel says, “Maybe it’s better to ask why we’re on the damned thing in the first place.” As if to elaborate, and to cheer me up, she shows me her dogs - their names are Kitty, Bill, and Ronald - running at Newport Beach. The morning is overcast and chilly. I had been surfing that morning and I walked now with my wetsuit unzipped and hanging at my waist. The beach is not crowded this early, so Rachel lets the dogs loose. They run with such joy and abandon that they sometimes trip over themselves and tumble so violently they must surely have broken their necks. But they get right back up, ears and tongues flapping ridiculously, water splashing behind them from the impact of their paws. 

     The few who are here early laugh and point and say hello, good morning. It is utter madness, these three dogs, sprinting and bounding, kicking up sand and jumping over each other as if they were children who’d just inherited universes. Their running seems endless, and all I have to do is watch and enjoy and hold my friend’s hand. “Do you see? Do you see?” Rachel asks, and I think that I do. The next lesson: there is nothing in the world more ridiculous to look at than the appearance of pure and unrestrained joy. 

II.

When you’re seventeen, you can boldly state, without irony, things like, “But there’s nothing here for me,” with that awkward emphasis on the word “here.” That my mother didn’t laugh at that, and other such protestations, does her incalculable credit. She could have dismissed me, mocked me, but she chose instead to give ear to my complaints. I felt heard. I felt valued. 

     Little did it matter, however, since we ended up moving early in my senior year of high school. Not only did my new school have a reputation as a haven for underprivileged but highly-athletic neanderthals (the football team had won state four years straight but due to poor academics failed to send more than a handful of players to any colleges you or I have heard of), but it was, worst of all, twenty minutes farther from the beach. 

     We are sitting on a gray couch that looks like it belongs in 1968. The room is brightly lit and my eyes hurt from the overwhelming white-ness of the room. It glows like one of those movies where the characters, the movie coming to an end, are waiting for death. I did not know it at the time, but I was experiencing my first anxiety attack. I almost say something about the lights to my mother, but stop; she will take it the wrong way, thinking I’m making fun of her or complaining. 

     I was not a complainer, or at least, I didn’t want to be. When I turned twelve, I announced in front of a large gathering of friends and family, “Well, I guess birthdays suck now!” because I hadn’t gotten whatever ridiculous thing a ridiculous boy wants for his ridiculous twelfth birthday. 

     There’s a lot of things I don’t say now because of that one comment made mid-1980s. I don’t tell my mother, for example, that this room doesn’t want me here. I don’t tell her we should go back to my old school and tell them the whole moving away thing was a big charade. I don’t tell her she’s crazy when she says things like, “What’s with the ducks?” A man sits down next to us and my mother says again, “What’s with the ducks?” and I want to tell him how sorry I am that we are here, and that we really don’t mean to be such an inconvenience. 

     The lights grow brighter, and I close my eyes. My heart is beating fast. My throat feels like it’s about to close. 

     “The ducks?” asks the man. Because he is kind. Because he doesn’t want to tell us what he’s thinking: that we are lunatics, that he’s already called the police and he’s stalling until they arrive. He’s sizing us up for straightjackets; he’s looking at his watch and wondering what on earth is taking them so long to get here. 

     “Ducks,” says my mother. My mother, a UCLA graduate and former hippy who’d given up everything - her ideals, her dreams, her identity - when she married my father, a Stanford-educated attorney who, only three months ago, had gone swimming out at Balboa and never returned. In my dreams, I see him drinking Coronas and dancing with women half his age in Puerto Vallarta. But we all know what really happened. That’s why we’re here. That, and the fact that a week after my father’s disappearance, we learned that his firm had let him go some months prior, and that he’d been facing lawsuits for misconduct. The details were, and remain, fuzzy to me, but apparently a client had surrendered several hundred thousand dollars - evidence in a money-laundering scheme - to the police. My father was in charge of the transfer, but the money never made it to the police. The money was never found, but the evidence was clear. For years after my father’s disappearance, my mother and I would be hounded about the whereabouts of the money. And though I suspect my mother might know more than she is letting on, the money was never collected and is still out there somewhere. 

     The lights become brighter. My eyes, now my head, feel like they are about to explode. “Ducks,” I hear someone say, laughing. “Quack quack!” 

     “We haven’t received the records from the previous school,” says a man. I open my eyes, but all I see is a blue and orange tie so enormous it could have served as a sail that would have saved the Titanic. “Quack, quack,” I hear again. I look in the direction of the voice and see, only vaguely, a pretty girl with black hair exploding out of her head. Surely she can see that I am dying over here, that the events going back to my father’s disappearance - no, to the events going back to my birth, seventeen years ago - had coalesced into something new for me: an anxiety attack. 

     “Oh,” says my mother. “I thought the school would mail them.”

     “That’s true,” says the man. “We just haven’t received them. We can’t finalize his schedule until we get them.”

     “Does that mean he can’t start yet?”

     “We can give him a temporary schedule until we make an official one. If you can tell us, for example, what math he was taking? We shouldn’t have to make any changes if you can tell us these things.”

     “You mean math?” asks my mother.

     “As an example, yes. If he was taking math.”

     My mother looked at me, but I was far from capable of speaking. “Oh,” she said, “I believe he was taking trig.”

     I was not taking trig. I had taken my last math class two years ago - basic geometry - and hadn’t planned to take another math class ever. I can’t tell her this, though; I am staring at the girl with the insane hair and pretty smile. I am thinking that she is probably the only person in the room other than me aware that my brains are trying to escape by drilling a hole through the back of my skull. 

The man writes “trigonometry” on his yellow notepad. 

     “Science? Language?” asks the man.

     “Oh,” said my mother, “all the advanced ones.”

     “All of them?’ asks the man, looking at me. 

     “All of them,” confirms my mother.

     The man clears his throat and makes notes. “Sports? Electives?”

     She says, “Only surfing. He did play baseball when he was a boy.”

     “We don’t offer surfing. Baseball is second semester.”

     “Oh,” says my mother. “His old school had surfing.”

     The man clears his throat again. 

     “He would get up every morning before school and go surfing. He would get up at five o’clock, can you believe it? I’ve never seen anyone love anything like he loves to surf.”

     “Electives?” asks the man.

     “Oh, he does love to sing. He sings in the shower like you wouldn’t believe.” 

     This is true. I do love to sing, and you wouldn’t believe it because of how bad I am at it. A neighbor once called the animal shelter to find out what kind of howling monkey or dying raptor had found its way to our, at the time, exclusive neighborhood that would never allow howling monkeys or dying raptors within its exclusive gates (note: that did not happen). 

     The man leaves with his notes and my mother asks, “What’s wrong with you?”

     I look at her and shake my head.

     “You said you’d be helpful.”

     I thought about that last sentence for a moment. Though I’m sure I had said, probably more than once in my life, that I’d be helpful with one thing or another, I couldn’t remember saying it in this context. The conversation “I’m taking you to your new school and I need you to be helpful,” followed by, “I will be helpful,” just did not happen. 

     “I think I might be dying,” I wanted to say. What came out was, “Quack, quack?” like a question.

     “What’s the matter with you?”

     There came to her an answer - though not the right one - to her question when Mia approached us and handed me a copy of my class schedule. “This is for you,” she said in a voice that was, impossibly, brighter than the room we were in. 

     Life sends mercies from time to time, as if to apologize for the many absurdities we deal with each day: the woman who cuts you off in traffic, gives you the finger, and turns out to be your English teacher; the racist who moves in next door who is always offering you tickets to a concert or sporting event you really want to attend but can’t afford; the disappearance of a parent; being forgotten by your friends only a few weeks after moving to a new school; the cops coming to your apartment, pointing at you and saying things like, “We know you know where all that money is!” and you laughing because you’re pretty sure you’ve seen this movie before and it’s even more ridiculous in real life.

     Mia takes my hand the moment we are outside the main office. My first reaction is to pull away and tell her I’m not in kindergarten and don’t need anyone to hold my hand. But I resist that initial thought and - as if I’d known her my entire life - stand as close as I can to her without knocking into her. Her hair brushes against my arm, and her clothes smell like a thrift shop. 

     In a couple months I will be in the library listening to an Almost Famous Writer tell me that “a writer must lie to his readers.” So I am going to lie to you here and say that I fell in love with Mia the moment she took my hand. I’m a middle-aged man now, with children who are all older than I was when I met Mia. I know what it means to truly love someone, so to say that I loved Mia from those first moments is in fact a lie. But it’s also the truth. The walk from the office to my first class that day took no more than three minutes, but to seventeen-year-old me it contained a lifetime. Mia and I grew up, went to college, married (each other, or other people, it doesn’t matter), and lived the next two-hundred-and-eighty years as neighbors or man and wife in complete bliss. 

     She says, “You should meet Rachel. Rachel will luhhhh-UHHHHVE you, hahaha! Rachel loves surfers. Surfers and skaters. Are you a skater? Of course you’re a skater. I mean, look at you! So Rachel once dated two surfers and a skater on the same day, morning, noon, and night. Maybe it was two skaters and one surfer. Anyway, they never knew. They never knew! We were going to a movie one day and we pull over and the skater - I mean the surfer - pulls over and takes a dime bag from his pocket and does this whole thing with a Coke can and lights up the weed and we all start taking a hit. But it must have been cheap weed because all it did was make us sick. I never smoked weed again after that even though it was only a couple months ago. I got so sick I don’t even remember the movie. When I got home I threw up and my dad was like, ‘What’d you eat?’ and I was like, if only he knew! Haha! Do you do drugs? You don’t look like you do drugs, but you never know. You are a surfer. Surfers aren’t as bad as skaters, and skaters aren’t as bad as surfers who skate, but at this school? Man! It’s the trifecta, I tell you.”

     I hesitate to relate this very one-sided conversation. I have, after all, admitted to being in love with Mia only to make her out to be what I had so freely labeled myself only moments ago: a lunatic. Think of this as one of those black and white photos from past centuries that were incapable of capturing one’s true beauty. You may have a photograph of a great-great grandmother, a woman who appears to be on the verge of wringing the necks of a thousand baby birds, and all you hear about her is how funny and contagiously joyful she was. You imagine her serving soup made from the corpses of dead Union soldiers to her abolitionist neighbors while plotting Lincoln’s assassination in her spare time. But to everyone else she was “sweet,” and “kindly,” and “so full of life you couldn’t help but adore her.”

          Things I learned about Mia in those three minutes: 1. Rachel was her best friend; Rachel lived in “the hills” where all the rich people lived, including several well-known actors and writers; Rachel did not “do” drugs either, but she did use them, a distinction that made sense to me only after meeting her; 2. Mia was president of the drama club, which met every Friday after school. She’d been involved in one way or another in all the school productions since her freshman year and planned on moving to LA after graduation to pursue a career in acting; 3. James Dean was her celebrity crush, and didn’t I think it sad he only made three movies before he died? I agreed that it was, though I hadn’t seen any of his movies (something she would remedy in the months to come); 4. Her older brother Manny had run off when Mia was a freshman and she was the only one he ever talked to, making her promise each time she wouldn’t tell anyone.

     I would meet her brother Manny, and we would become friends for a time. We would call each other, and sometimes we’d catch a movie or a bite to eat. We went to each other’s weddings. We sent each other birthday and Christmas cards. Under different circumstances, we would have been lifelong best friends, I’m sure; but as it was, we couldn’t help but remind the other of what was lost, so about twenty years ago the cards stopped coming, and then I stopped sending them. It’s funny - not haha funny, but isn’t-that-interesting funny - to think that Mia and I knew each other for only a few months, while Manny and I were friends for years. But Manny’s presence in this story - in my memory, my mind, and in my heart - is fragmentary. It’s hardly there at all. Yet Mia is, even today, the sky and the mountains I see everyday (even now) outside my window, behind my house. 

     Mia opens the door for me. It is advanced placement senior English. I step inside. The teacher, Mrs. Blankenship, glares at me over her glasses. “What is this?” she asks.

     “This is your new student,” Mia says. And even though I haven’t said much of anything in the previous five minutes, Mia looks around the room and says, “You’re all going to love him!” She directs me to sit down in one of the several vacant seats. Mrs. Blankenship looks like she is about to object to Mia’s choice of seats, but Mia looks at her, smiles, and Mrs. Blankenship says nothing. We all watch as Mia walks to the door and waves to us as she leaves, her enormous smile remaining in the air for several minutes. 

     It occurs to me that no one has seen what I have seen. They go back to their discussion - something about Joyce’s Ulysses - while I do my best to turn back the clock over and over to relive that walk from the main office to English class. The teacher calls on me, but I don’t hear her. The class members stare at me, then laugh, and only then do I hear my name. “Yes?” I say.

     “Have you ever read anything by James Joyce?”

     “Who?”

     The class laughs again.

     “Joyce.”

     “No, ma’am,” I say. “I’ve never heard of her.”

     “Him.”

     “Him, ma’am.”

     From the way she looks at me, I assume she is wondering if I’ve ever read anything before, let alone James Joyce. “Already this year we’ve read some Dickens, Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Swift, and, and who else?”

     Several hands shoot up.

     “Yuyang,” says Mrs. Blankenship.

     “Samuel Beckett,” says Yuyang. 

     “Have you read Samuel Beckett?” Mrs. Blankenship asks.

     I look around the room waiting for someone to answer. I don’t realize she is talking to me until I look at her. I say, “I don’t know who that is.”

     The class laughs, louder. 

     “This is Mrs. Blankenship's advanced placement English. Are you sure you are in the right place? We’ve also read Shakespeare’s sonnets, Milton, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Virgil, Homer, and twelve novels by William Faulkner. Are you sure you’re in the right place?”

     I have no idea if I’m in the right place. I look around for my schedule and begin to panic when I can’t find it.

     “Yuyang, for example, has already written and published a book. What’s your book about again, Yuyang?”

     “Magical realism and its effects on Central American relations.”

     “That’s right, Yuyang. That’s exactly what your book is about!”

     I’m looking under my seat. I’m looking under everyone’s seat. I'm grabbing people by their pant legs and lifting so I can look under their shoes. 

     “Are you looking for this?” asks Mrs. Blankenship, holding up my schedule.

     “Yes, ma’am,” I say. 

     She looks at it for some time, then holding it at a corner with her forefinger and thumb, holds it out to me and says, “Take it. I’ll see about this at lunch.” 

     I look around. No one is looking at me. They are either looking down at their desks or outside through the one window in the room. Reluctantly, I get up from my desk and walk over to Mrs. Blankenship. I stop several feet from her outreached hand. I take a deep breath and reach out to her, bending dramatically at the waist, and take the slip of paper from her. I breathe deeply and return to my seat. 

     It’s not until later that I learn that Mia has seated me next to Aaron and Terry. Terry has her hand over her mouth and is trying not to laugh. Aaron leans over and asks, “What was that?” 

     I shrug as if to say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

     After class, I tell him, “It was clear she thinks I have leprosy. I wanted to respect that.” 

     Terry says, “She was holding your schedule like it was trying to bite her.”

     “No way she’s letting you stay in that class now,” Aaron tells me. 

     “You’ll be in regular English with Mrs. Bern. You’re lucky. All she does is show movies.”

     Aaron says, “Not anymore. One class got her sub one day to show Fast Times at Ridgemont High and now she can’t show movies anymore. They got as far as the pool scene.” He mimics removing a bikini top and laughs. 

     This is the moment when I realize they all thought this was a big act, that I was not at all the fool I knew very well that I was, but that I was playing the fool to establish myself high on the pecking order - higher, even, than Yuyang, higher than the teacher. This is the power of the new student: they have no idea who you are, so they mythologize you, they grant you powers you never possessed. I never should have been at the top of that pecking order. I never should even have been at the bottom. I should have been miles away, threatened with violence if I so much as thought about the pecking order. It was all a misunderstanding, but it set me up for so much of what was to come. 

     Later, during lunch, I see Mrs Blankenship, and she sees me. I look for a place to hide, but find nothing. When I look back, Mrs. Blankenship is gone. I am not driven from Advanced English, but remain - pariah that I am - until bigger events would chase us all away. 

 

Lesson number five: you can only say what it wasn't like. 

     You are looking out at storms, and the wind catches the lightning, rages over golden hills, and carries the raspberry dust it found on the backs of tulips and blood-soaked daisies. It comes to you as fine powder. It stains your lips and gathers on your eyelids. Soon it covers you, and the difference between you and the storm is unclear. 

     Because:

     It could have been you holding the gun. Maybe it was. Maybe you just don't remember. You never liked guns; in fact, you have always been a little afraid of them. So it probably wasn't you, but the fact that you think about it tells you something. And are you just going to pretend you didn't think about it? Or are you going to let it seep out? Oh, what to do with such thoughts? What to do? Let them lie in the ditch next to newspapers and days-old rain, or fly off into the universe to create another Big Bang? 

     Fortunately, none of this happened, even though it did. Because like I said, no true story can ever be told, like these:

     I have a friend named Leonard. It is a mystery to me how someone our age can be so attractive. We are barely teenagers and Leonard is deeply tanned - even in winter - and muscled. His blond hair covers his forehead, stopping short of his crystal blue eyes. He's also dumber than sand, and girls from fifteen to fifty are falling in love with him every day. They say things like, “If only I were younger,” or,”If only you were older,” then go home to their boyfriends or husbands, compare them to my friend Leonard, and immediately walk out of the relationship without explanation. 

     Not that they would run back to Leonard. He was obviously too young. What they ran to was the idea of Leonard. He exuded a kind of stupid masculinity that said, “I know what it's like for you. We live in a culture that makes it difficult for women to express what they really want from a man. But don't worry. I know what you want without you having to say it.” 

     This was my friend Leonard, who on this particular day wants to steal fire extinguishers from the apartment complex where he lives with his mother and grandparents. His mother works at the apartment office where she collects rent, signs leases, shows prospective tenants around, and answers calls from tenants complaining about anything from a clogged toilet to the roof caving in when a pet boa constrictor busted a pipe. Sometimes she goes to court to evict tenants who've stopped paying rent. Sometimes she cleans apartments after a meth lab is discovered, forcing the evacuation of the ten closest apartments. There was a time when a man came into the office and sat there for an hour. A few minutes after he left, the police showed up and explained that the man had murdered his wife earlier that day. 

     We have to break the glass covers to get to the fire extinguishers. This makes a racket, so we grab the fire extinguisher and run down the alleyway and across the street into the small grove of trees where we are keeping our loot. There are over twenty now - an impressive haul - but Leonard wants more. It never once occurs to me to ask why. 

     “Looks good,” he says for the fortieth or fiftieth time. 

     “It does,” I agree, wondering if he is seeing something I am not. 

 

The girl with impossibly long and unkempt hair lives in the apartment complex. I have three classes with her: math, science, and PE. In math and science, she sits in the back of the room, and rarely speaks. In PE she sits on the top row of one of the two sets of bleachers just outside the locker rooms. She never dresses out; never participates in any physical activities; and rarely acknowledges that any other human being exists. She reads books, draws, or does homework. This was before iPhones and earbuds, and the Sony Walkman was still prohibitively expensive for most kids our age. So we know she can hear us when we taunt her. 

     It is her hair that draws most of our attention. It is rich and tightly curled and you can see it coming long before you can see her. We call her Bigfoot, Chewbacca, and Cha-Ka, the ape-like character from Land of the Lost. We throw things at her: cans and rocks, bottles and dried out pieces of gum. 

     This is a time when bullying is an accepted part of growing up, and even the teachers are involved. PE must be a particular horror for her, since both teachers - men in their early forties - seem comically pleased with any form of abuse. When a kid steps out of line, they send us on a lap around the playing fields. The stronger kids, including me, know that once we reach a spot behind a strategically-placed storage shed, we are expected to abuse the kid in some way: a kick to the groin, a gut punch, sometimes more. 

     These are kids who act out in class and cause problems for teachers. They are the nerdy kids, kids who show any sensitivity that can be construed as - in the less-than nuanced parlance of the time - “gay” or “faggoty.” These are kids who know nothing about football and everything about Broadway musicals. Or maybe they just don’t like it when stronger kids knock them on their backs while playing flag football. 

     They listen to the wrong bands and wear the wrong clothes. They are poor. They speak with lisps and their skin is acne-scarred. They spend too much time with their mothers and have nothing to say about the designated hitter rule. When asked what they did over the weekend, it is never basketball or surfing, but reading, watching TV, Dungeon & Dragons. They drink milk from a glass, enjoy vegetables, have opinions about the fat content of foods, talk politics, and always smell faintly of urine. 

     And so we, the strong, who know nothing about politics or the fat content of foods, who smell like sunscreen and sweat, have to, in the words of our teachers, “take care of it,” but hopefully without leaving evidence of our brutality. Nothing broken or bruised. No blood. Only pain and tears and the bottomless well of despair knowing that you are not wanted, you are not accepted, you are not one of us, and no matter how long you live, no matter how your life changes for the better, you will never completely lose that desperate feeling of falling, falling, falling, while the world laughs. 

     What was “to be taken care of” is never clear. The kids we brutalize don’t somehow snap out of their otherness. They don’t grow muscles and sharp jaw lines. It doesn’t help them skate or surf like all the other good blond California kids. It has the opposite effect - of course it does - but the teachers leave pleased and satisfied, and those of us who commit the crimes are left - at least in my case - empty, the rush of adrenaline having drained and my heartbeat slowing to its usual rhythm: puh-PUH, puh-PUH, puh-PUH. 

 

It’s Friday, fifth period. It’s my first time in the drama room. When I enter the room, everyone stares at me. I take a few steps in, and a few smiles appear. I wave, and a few of them laugh. 

     Ten minutes later and I’m on the stage with Terry. She’s not wearing her glasses. She’s wearing a blue dress and orange shoes. Her hair is tied back and her face glows. She is smiling at me. She holds her hands together in front of her and is rocking back and forth happy, but nervous. She is beautiful. 

     The teacher welcomes me.  

     I say, “Thank you.”

     She thanks me for being here. She says it’s very brave of me. She asks if I’ve ever been in theater before, and I say no. She tells me I’m welcome anytime. 

     I say, “Thank you.”

     I see Aaron, Rachel, and Mia. They are sitting together in the back next to the teacher. I see Heather off to the side and she waves at me. I smile back and look down. I might throw up. I might run away.  I might drop face down and die.  

     The teacher says, “This is your scene: Terry, it's the end of a war and you come home to find an enemy soldier in your home.”

     Terry and I look at each other. She smiles. I try to keep my insides from exploding. The house lights are turned off, leaving us in darkness, and now stage lights are turned on. It is a warm light, almost yellow. 

     “What are you doing here?” Terry says. It is almost a whisper. 

     “Who, me?”

     Terry stares at me. 

     My heart is racing. I look around. The lights keep me from seeing the audience. I want to raise my hand. I want to tell them it's all a misunderstanding. I want to apologize and run. 

     “Hey,” Terry says. But it is not her voice. 

     “Hey,” I say back. And it is my voice.   

     “What's the matter with you?” I am looking for her voice. I am looking for her face. But this is not Terry; this is another Terry, and somehow, strangely, she lives inside me. 

     I stare at her. Just stare. Her eyes are made of laughter and kindness and courage. My heart calms and my breath slows. In a voice that is not mine, I say, “I have nowhere to go.”

     “You shouldn't be here. You're going to get us in trouble.”

     “Us?”

     She hesitates. “My daughter,”

     “Where’s your husband?”

     She looks around. She looks to the floor. Quiet. More quiet. 

     I say, “Oh.”

     “Oh,” she says, mocking me.

     “I'm sorry,”

     “Why are you sorry?”

     I say, “War. It's a mess.”

     “Is that what it is?”

     “What is it, then?”

     “Madness. Ugly old men, unimaginative, unloved, hollow old men who don't think what they're doing has any real consequences.”

     There is a long silence, and I think these kinds of silences aren't good for the theater. I think the teacher is going to stop us. We're not doing it right. Terry is going to get a bad grade and it's going to be my fault. 

     She is looking at me, pleading. I am failing here. I shouldn't be here. I hear someone in the audience cough and the feeling of urgency creeps up into my throat. 

     But then I see that it isn't Terry who is looking at me, begging me to pull myself together and say something, anything. Terry isn't there at all. It's a young French woman, a mother and a widow. And I'm the enemy. But the war is over and for some reason I have nowhere to go. 

     I look down and see the German uniform I'm wearing. The sight of it must cause Terry immense heartache, regret, and fear.  “I shouldn't have come,” I say. “I'm sorry. I'll leave you now.”

     I make for the door, and Terry says, “Wait.” I can hear pain in her voice. 

     I turn to her. I say, “I don't have any money. I can't give you anything. But, but I'm handy. I can fix things.”

     “And what would you expect in return?”

     There's more quiet between us. When I look at her, I can't help but fall in love. The beautiful French mother/widow, yes. But the lines between that fiction and Terry blur. “Not much,” I whisper. “I can sleep in the barn. Just a day or two.” 

     She takes a few steps toward me. She looks me up and down, and something transforms. I can see it. There is no more fear on her face. The power dynamic has switched in her favor, so I let my body shrink to the size of a grain of sand. 

     Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. Twenty. Terry had told me this would last no more than three minutes, but I'm lost in the scene and time isn't real. I am perfectly still, and Terry walks, dances, floats around me, building a prison or a cocoon and I am absolutely helpless to stop her. 

     I can see her clearly now. I know her childhood, I know her fears, and I know her pain. She is afraid of being alone, and somehow we make something utterly impossible and implausible real. And while all this is happening, I realize, these are not my thoughts, and these are not my words. I have conjured them from somewhere, and they have become part of me. I am lost in the moment for the first, but most definitely not last, time in my life. 

     Then the teacher calls out, “Scene,” and there is silence. I come back to myself and Terry comes back and still there is silence. Then applause. 

     I have no idea what just happened, so I run. I find a trash can and heave my lunch into it. I sit down against a wall and tremble and laugh and wave at people as they pass, taking a wide berth to avoid the weirdo whose shirt is covered in vomit. 

 

Rachel talked me into a lot of things, but mostly she talked me into ditching school. This happened weekly. The first time she did this, we were sitting together in our creative writing class. We were supposed to be proofreading each other's stories, but at that point we were so familiar with each other’s writing the exercise was pointless. She was halfway through a story about a girl with the power to turn things to glass. I was writing a story about a brooding rock star in Seattle. I was desperately searching for a plot, and Rachel kept telling me to give up on it. “You think you’re deep and poetic,” she told me. “You’re not.” 

     A girl I was only vaguely familiar with sat down next to us and said, “What are you guys talking about?” 

     “We’re gonna ditch, and - ”

     “Can I come?”

     “ - get some ice cream.”

     “I love ice cream,” said the girl.

     “Everyone loves ice cream.” This came from a girl sitting in front of us. 

     “But neither of us has a car,” Rachel said. 

     “I have a car,” said yet another girl. 

     “What kind of car?” 

     “Volkswagen Bug,” she said.

     “That only holds, like, what, four of us?”

     “No, no,” said another, the only other guy in the class. “During World War II, the Germans used those to transport troops to the front. They’d get at least ten soldiers in each one, rifles and bullets and everything else.”

     “How’s that even possible?”

     “Germans were at least two feet shorter back in the day. They were all excellent hiders.”

     “Where’d you hear that?” asked the owner of the car.

     “Mr. Baker’s history class, junior year.”

     “Don’t you know Mr. Baker made up everything?”

     “That’s not true,” said The Only Other Guy in the Class. He said the words slowly, as if each word were its own chapter in a book. 

     A chorus of anecdotes erupted:

     “He told my class the Vietnam War ended with a coin flip.”

     “He wouldn’t even consider grading my essay on man going to the moon. He said it was all hand puppets and stop-motion animation.”

     “He once got us to debate which was more likely: that Martians had already landed, or that Colonel Sanders was a communist stooge.”

     “What’s a communist stooge?”

     “How the hell am I supposed to know!”

     “At back-to-school night, he tried to convince my mom President Roosevelt died right after Pearl Harbor, and they used a Hollywood actor to pretend to be him, only that actor was Italian and talked with a startling lisp. Those were his words: talked with a startling lisp.”

     The Only Other Guy in the Class was listening closely, and with every story his eyes seemed to sink back into his head. 

     Fortunately, the bell rang a few minutes later and we were set free. Rachel and I headed toward the parking lot, careful to avoid Marvin, the security guard who rode around campus in a golf cart yelling random things at random people. “Hey kid! Pick up that trash!” he’d shout. It was never clear who he was talking to, so five or so students would look around as if Marvin were talking to them. Marvin ended every interaction with the words, “That’s right!” punctuated with a fist pump. We imagined Marvin doing this at home with his wife and children. He probably replaced “I do” with “that’s right” at his wedding. He probably used his famous phrase each time his wife gave birth. I have no doubt that if I were to visit his grave, it would say only this: “Marvin,” and “That’s right!” No last name, no birth or death dates, no inspirational Biblical quotes. Maybe an outline of a fist. Maybe an outline of a golf cart. 

     There were eight of us standing around the Volkswagen Bug. I looked at Rachel hoping she’d tell me why we were all here. But a minute later, I was in the driver’s seat, and Rachel was orchestrating something akin to Roosevelt’s land-lease deal with Great Britain (something Mr. Barnes often confused with any number of broken treaties the United States had made with the indigenous peoples). Rachel managed, by shrewd judgment of each person’s size and shape, to place us all inside the Volkswagen Bug. As long as no one breathed or spoke or moved a single muscle, we would survive. 

     For my part, my seat was as far forward as it would go; my forehead was pressed against the windshield, and every time I changed gears, someone would cry out with shock, surprise, and/or pleasure. There were three girls in the passenger seat, and five in the seat behind us. My vision was limited to a spot directly in front of me the general size and shape of a Rubik’s Cube. The right side mirror was blocked, the rearview mirror had gone missing soon after Rachel started packing us in, and I couldn’t move my head to see the driver’s side mirror. 

     Luckily, the ice cream parlor we were going to was only a couple miles away, and we could take side streets. The area around the school was a mixture of low-income and middle-income houses. This was the 80s, Southern California, and each house was a faded yellow or blue. The garage doors were usually open, looking like they were barely hanging on for life, and the lawns were, for the most part, bright green and neatly mowed. 

     Someone moved and my face was pressed harder into the glass. My neck was twisted and I was reminded of the bird and the boy from that story The Scarlet Ibis. If it starts to rain, I told myself, or if the cops show up, or if Marvin sidles up in his golf cart shouting “That’s right!” instead of “Pull over,” I’m going to drive this car over a cliff, even though there were no cliffs within miles. 

     “I can’t breath - ”

     “I have to pee - ”

     “Stop moving, Carla - ”

     “Carla’s my mom - ”

     “How are we going to get out of this - ”

     “If everyone takes a deep breath in, do you think the car will pop - ”

     Then I said, “I’m supposed to be at work in half an hour.”

     This was true. I’d just gotten a job at the local movie theater and had worked only one day. I hated it, because when a customer ordered something, and I was supposed to push the button on the machine, the customer usually found the button first and pointed it out to me. 

     Rachel said, “But isn’t this better?”

     Of course this was better. 

     “Yes,” I said. There was blood coming out of my nose, but since it had nowhere to go, it pooled as if placed between two pieces of glass under a microscope. 

     I drove at a safe twenty miles per hour and we reached the ice cream parlor in only a few minutes. It was one of those old-fashioned ice cream parlors, the kind where words like “shop,” or worse yet, “place” do not apply and are in fact unwelcome. The workers wore long-sleeved white dress shirts with red or black suspenders. Sometimes they rolled the sleeves up high on their arms, exposing biceps that had grown solid from scooping hard frozen ice cream. Carnival music played, and pencil drawings of clowns and trains covered the walls. There was a framed ten-dollar bill and a page from a novel by Dean Koontz who had included the ice cream parlor in one of his books. The page contained mentions of not only the ice cream parlor, but the high school and the Carl’s Jr. across the street. 

     I was surprised to see Leonard behind the counter, red suspenders, sleeves rolled up almost to his armpits. Rachel was staring at him as if experiencing God for the first time. This was Hercules, Adonis, and yes, Aphrodite rolled into one. He grinned stupidly at the girls, back and forth, back and forth. I hadn’t seen Leonard in over a year, and I stayed back by the entrance. Did I tell you Leonard is dumber than rocks? It took him forty minutes to serve the ice cream cones. Other customers had come in and were annoyed by how long it was taking. My friends kept changing their orders, and Leonard kept mixing them up. But each time he made a mistake, my friends - especially Rachel - laughed and held their hands over their mouths. Lots of “Oh’s!” and “Isn’t he’s?” flew around our heads, each one answered with a resounding “Yes!” and “Yes!”

     Then Carla - no, not Carla; Carla was her mom - approached me holding a shocking collection of flavors: chocolate, cotton candy, and grape, leaned against the wall, and said, “That’s it. You’re too late. You’ve lost.”

     “Lost?” I say. 

     “Look at her.”

     I was looking at her.

     “She’s already got him in the backseat of her car. He doesn’t even know it yet.”

     “Okay.”

     She is taking broad licks of ice cream. She is looking at Rachel and Leonard.

     “But don’t worry,” she said, “she’ll pick you in the end.”

     “What?”

     She takes a few steps away, turns and looks me up and down. She says, “I would,” and turns again. 

     I don’t know if Leonard knew I was there. He may have seen me and not recognized me. More than likely, he was too focused on Rachel, or any of the other girls in our group. I didn’t order an ice cream, and I never went back to my job at the movie theater. Half of our group decided to walk back to school, which by now was over. I sat in the backseat of the Volkswagen, and Rachel sat in the passenger seat. She was far away during that short drive, her reverie broken up by unfinished thoughts like, “Isn’t he - ” and “Do you think - ” 

     I never told Rachel I had known Leonard and that we’d been friends. We’d surfed and skated together, had stolen fire extinguishers and bullied a girl who was nicer than any of us. These were two worlds separated by growth and experience. I didn’t want them to come together. Rachel turned and looked at me. “What did you think of the guy at the ice cream place? Wasn’t he nice?”

     I smiled and nodded. Rachel was my dearest friend until the end. We ditched school, served detentions, watched movies and sat holding hands on her couch for hours. But some slight thing broke when we entered the ice cream parlor and she beheld my friend Leonard. I had to take the tiniest step backward, and even though Carla’s daughter had said that I would win in the end, I knew she was only being nice. We both knew what had happened. 

III. 

Now my heart beats wildly and I am sure it will explode. I am behind the shed, and so is the girl.               

     “Why did you choose this day to run laps?” I want to ask. Why couldn't you have stayed on the bleachers and left me out of this?

     She sees what's coming when she looks at my clenched fists and tensed arms. She is half my size and shrinking. She makes no sound but the tears and trembling lips speak thousands and thousands of words. I see how pretty she is behind all that hair. She wears no makeup and I can see smooth skin and light freckles. I can see round eyes and a nose that arches gently up, like a cartoon princess. She is, I am convinced, made entirely of glass, and the sunlight shining through her becomes an ocean of color and sound. Why have I been so cruel to her? She is paper folded into shapes to match the stars; she is running water and the smell of grass. 

     Leonard punches her square in the face. I can still hear the sharp pop it made when his fist struck her nose, and the rip as delicate cartilage and flesh were torn. 

     She falls to the ground with a scream and Leonard kicks her in the stomach. Other boys laugh, kick, pick up rocks and throw them at her. 

     Jimmy Gaines, who would grow up to teach at our school, spits on her. 

     Carlton Allen, who'd marry and divorce three times before turning forty, calls her “slut,” and “whore.”

     Dennis Hendrickson, who would compete in the winter Olympics only six years later, pulls out his penis and urinates on her. 

     Then there's Leonard, who laughs and laughs and laughs and kicks and kicks and kicks, who in a few years would meet a woman at a club, ask her to dance, and marry her on his twentieth birthday.  He would join her parents’ fundamentalist church, get a job delivering bottled water, and gain fifty pounds. 

     They are beating the poor girl, laughing, and having the jolliest time of their lives. She's no longer screaming, no longer holding up her hands to defend herself, no longer begging us to stop. She is still and silent, her body twisted unnaturally. 

     We see this, and we stop too. We look at her, motionless, eyes open. We detect no breathing, no heartbeat, no life whatsoever, and we just look at one another realizing what we have done. 

     But then she starts to cry, and we are relieved. We realize we have forgotten to breathe, and the sudden inhalation of air feels so good. We relax. Some of us even laugh. 

      The girl looks up at me and through soft tears, says, “I thought you were the nice one,” and my heart shatters. My eyes tear up and I look around embarrassed to have my friends see me reacting like this. Only, my friends aren't there. It's just me standing over the girl. Leonard, Dennis, Jimmy, Carlton - none of them even had PE with me. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, none of them were real at all. 

     Not even Leonard, who is standing with me counting the stolen fire extinguishers. I count forty, but he counts thirty-eight, necessitating a recount. Thirty-eight or forty red fire extinguishers. Thirty-eight or forty bouquets of roses, tulips, and unlit birthday candles. Thirty-eight or forty entry wounds from bullets whizzing by and the sound of laughter like black sludge being hung on our bones. 

     The girl is looking up at me. The fear that covers her face is for me. I will never wash myself clean of this. A hundred lifetimes and these will always be the clothes I put on in the morning, the face I wear, the blood that retreats from my beating heart: puh-PUH, puh-PUH, puh-PUH. 

     She takes a handful of dirt and throws it at me, letting out a desperate, guttural cry. But it's a feeble attempt that somehow makes me feel even worse. The power I hold over her is poison, and even then - boy that I am - I know what this is really about. The teachers could not control her, so they reached for the next best thing: fools like me who mistake slavish obedience for power and belonging. 

     What's worse: I remember the smell of sweat and fear. I remember the brown and gold of her eyes and the constellations of freckles on her cheeks. I remember the sound of the gravel under her body as she moved, so unsure of herself, trying to position herself in a defensive posture. I remember her expression changing from defeated to fierce in a way that was subtle but must have required tremendous force. 

     But the one thing I don't remember is her name, which probably explains why I get weird with names when I write. If I can't remember that one breath of humanity for her, then maybe my punishment should be to go nameless; maybe I should forever be the person of whom people ask, “Who was he?” 

 

Here's another one: it's the Friday of the first week of rehearsals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Aaron and I are sweeping the stage after everyone else has gone home. We're pretending our brooms are race cars and we're running around wildly, knocking into things and each other. He says, “Hey, wanna see a movie tonight?”

     This should not be a difficult decision, but this is a different time, I'm seventeen, and I'm pretty sure Aaron is gay. So I stumble through an assortment of hmms and uhhhs before he saves me by saying, “No worries. Maybe next time.”

     I worried that next time would be the following day, or the following week, but it wasn't. Two weeks. Three weeks. Nothing. My worry that he was gay and that he thought I too was gay turned to a nagging - borderline obsessive - unease that he'd forgotten about me. 

     Finally, I approached him and asked, “Hey, what about that movie?” in a tone that was just a bit too desperate, and an hour later we were standing in line for some Tom Cruise movie I have little memory of. 

     This was the time before assigned seating, before you'd be interrupted several times throughout the movie by someone offering you a menu, or spilling drinks over half the patrons while attempting to carry forty pounds of Coca-Cola and boxes of popcorn bigger than the doors they had to pass through to get to the fool whose mortgage costs less than the food that's now threatening to drown us. There's an old woman in the front row who's having flashbacks to the Titanic even though she wasn't born when the Titanic sank and now she's grabbing at the rivers of popcorn crying out, “Get on! Get on!”

     But I digress. 

     What I wanted to say was that because there were no assigned seats, and because I was still uncertain about Aaron's romantic intentions, I sat a seat apart from him, establishing a pattern that would last through dozens of movies and well passed knowing he had no romantic intentions toward me and in fact was in love with most of the girls in the theater department, including each girl I've mentioned so far in this narrative. 

     This sitting a seat apart thing continued to be an issue even when we brought dates to the movies. My date would sit down first, and I'd remain standing, looking back and forth between the two seats next to her as if choosing the method of my execution, and then at Aaron, who seemed unnervingly interested in where this was going. Finally I chose to sit next to my date, with no seat between us, if for no other reason than I didn't want to be known for what remained of our senior year as, “The extra seat guy.” 

     As I said, I don't remember much about that first movie, the one with Tom Cruise, but I do remember it started a trend of watching several movies a week, either at the theater or at home on VHS. 

     We were theater nerds who thought ourselves intellectually superior to every other person alive, except for maybe Arthur Miller or the guys who wrote Les Miserables. We spent hours discussing Rebecca, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, The African Queen, and Singing in the Rain.  Then we'd run through the John Hughes library and argue which was better, Ferris Bueller or The Breakfast Club. We each had our favorite mobster movie (for me, it will always be Goodfellas) and movies some of us refused to watch, like Friday the 13th and any of the Rocky films after the first one. Disney was having its animation comeback with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, so of course we had to go through as many Disney cartoons as we could find, which in those days was more difficult than you'd think. 

     I remember all of these movies with clarity, but the first one eludes me for some reason. Maybe I focus too much on my seating problem, or what came after the movie, when I drive Aaron home. 

     He has this nervous energy that makes you think he is going to break in half. You want to tell him to relax, but you don't know him well enough yet to say anything. But it pains you, you in the driver's seat, relaxed and comfortable to the point where you might melt into the seat. Your window is open and your arm is extended out where you feel the rush of cool Southern California air. You are driving your mother's car, a stick shift, and you're so relaxed and comfortable that when you change gears, you let go of the steering wheel completely. When you do this, Aaron jumps a little and you think he might cry. 

     It's after midnight when you pull into his driveway and tell him you had fun and you should definitely do this again soon. And because this is not the first time you've dropped off a friend or a date, you know this is the cue for the other person to leave. But this is not what happens, and you're a little perplexed. 

     Aaron is telling you that he thinks he might be pretty sure if not completely convinced he's in love with a girl named Abby, who I had dated several times and who  was really good at knowing when it was time to exit the car, though that is not why I dated her. 

     Abby holds an almost mythical place in my imagination. She was never involved in theater, but she was president of the literary club. She wrote poetry that was good, and not just by high school standards. I have on my shelf two books of her poetry and essays, some of which she wrote in high school and, I'm afraid to say, some of which is about me. She had the striking beauty of someone fifteen years older, and a confidence that seemed to expose your every insecurity. In short, she terrified everyone, including our teachers, and if at any time she'd announced to the world, “I'm ruler now,” I have no doubt we would have gone along with it. 

     For my part, I had to work very hard to maintain the illusion that I was worthy of her. And knowing that I would be found out sooner than later is probably what doomed us before anything really developed. 

     Aaron is telling you he thinks he might possibly but probably is in love with Abby. You don't know if he knows you've been on dates with her, and you don't say anything. You don't say anything about his current girlfriend either, though you think you probably should, since you are friends with her. 

     Here are some things you should say, but you don't because you're seventeen and you're an idiot:

  1. He has no idea what love is. But of course, neither do you. You know that it's more than a feeling, that it requires work and dedication. You know that you have to decide every day to make a relationship work, and if either of you decides not to, then it's probably over. 

  2. There will always be other people who you could just as easily fall in love with, who are compatible and good and attractive and fun and wonderful. But you have to decide that the one you're with is the one you're going to commit yourself to. You have to accept that there are others, but you've chosen this one. 

  3. He will never be happy because he will always be looking over her shoulder at what else is out there.

     That last thing is what you should tell him: he will never be happy. But either because you think he already knows that or because you don't want to sound like a ten-cent philosopher, you don't say it.  In fact, you encourage him to pursue Abby. You tell him that Abby is great, that Abby is brilliant and funny and when she laughs she throws her head back like she's singing to the sky. You don't tell him what her lips feel like, or her breath, or the way her body feels when your arms are wrapped around her. No, that you keep to yourself. Because you can see it already: he's going to fall in love with Abby; he's going to break up with Mia; and even though he and Abby are intellectually much more suited for each other than you and Abby are, you want to keep something of her for yourself. 

     It's five o'clock in the morning and he's still talking. 

     You don't remember when you decided to turn off the car engine, but it wasn't that long ago. Your foot had gone numb from holding down the brake. You worried you'd drain the gas tank. You knew he couldn't keep talking, yet he continued. 

     Light is emerging from the east. Somewhere out there people are celebrating birthdays and anniversaries. Babies are being born and the elderly are passing into the next life. He's talking about Abby, then Mia, Rachel and Terry. He's talking about his parents and his bald, fat dad who spends his time on one knee in front of the television, smoking, and conversing with the news anchors. He's talking about college. Shakespeare. Now he's talking about reading A Brief History of Time, and how it's sparked a passion for physics. He talks about the two branches of physics, both true, both accurately describing life on a micro and macro level, but never agreeing with one another. 

     “It's like you're inside a room,” he says, “and everything in the room is chaotic and weird, but totally real. And everything outside the room seems to be a completely different reality with its own rules, but totally real. How do you explain that?”

     When he says this you begin to question your fears about sounding like a ten-cent philosopher. 

     “It sounds like growing up,” you say. 

     His eyes go wide and he says, “Yeah! Yeah!” 

     You want this conversation to be over. You want to be asleep in your bed. You want to yell, “Get out!” But you think about what he's been telling you about his parents - especially his father - so you let him talk. 

     This gets repeated the following day. Then again the following week. It doesn't matter what day it is, if you have school or work or rehearsal. You see the same movie five or six times. You sneak in food and leave pizza and hamburgers on the seats. Others join you, but at the center it's always the two of you. Abby, Rachel, Mia, Terry. They all tag along, but remain bit players in a show starring you and Aaron.  And at the end of the night, you drive Aaron home, hoping he'll get out of the car and allow you to finally get some sleep, but this never happens. Quickly enough, you learn to turn off the engine, pull up on the parking brake, and remove your seat belt. You're going to be here for a while. 

     And now, as a middle-aged man, you're thinking about life when you're seventeen, about how lifetimes are packed into small moments. I could feel myself aging during those conversations. Each story was a month; each topic was a year; each confused detail a century. My hair turns gray. My skin wrinkles. Five minutes and five centuries fill the same amount of space. I'm still in that ugly old three thousand dollar car. I'm still listening to Aaron talk about love. I'm still trying to figure out how to grow up. I'm still looking over shoulders - not at what's out there, but at what has been left behind. 

​

“What's this!” I say. 

     Mia is holding a flier out to me. 

     “Read it!”

     “Just tell me.”

     She smiles. She laughs. She's still holding the flier out to me, and I take it. I read it. 

     “Auditions for the fall production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

     “Yes! You'd be perfect.”

     “Perfect for what?”

     “I'm the student director. I get to cast the show. I want you to audition for the part of Oberon!”

     “Who's Oberon?”

     “He's king of the fairies.”

     “Excuse me?”

     “Promise me you'll audition. After school. Today.”

     “Today?”

     “Promise?”

     “I don't know, Mia. I was thinking about trying out for the baseball team. I might get a job at Blockbuster. I've never even been in a play.”

     “Rachel's trying out for it.”

     “What's that mean?”

     “Aww, come on! It'll be so much fun.”

     “I don't know. I don't really know anybody in drama.”

     “You know me. You know Rachel. You know Aaron.”

     “Yeah. Kinda.”

     “It'll give you a chance to get to know everyone better. It'll be great. You'll fit right in.”

     “I don't know.”

     “After school. Today. The drama room. Be there.”

     “I've gotta see Mr. Barnford. I'm very busy.”

     “Right after school. The drama room. Room F-125. You know where it is!”

     “I'll probably get lost.”

     “I'll send Rachel to find you.”

     “I'll probably get kidnapped. You know how these things go.”

     “I gotta go, S–. But I'll see you after school. Room F-125.”

     She's walking away. “Lots of kids getting kidnapped. Haven't you been watching the news?”

     She's gone. I'm holding the flier. I take a deep breath and shove it into my pocket and imagine the conversation I'll have with Mia tomorrow: “I forgot all about it,” I'll say. “I was abducted by drug dealers.” Or, “I got caught up in a conversation with your boyfriend that lasted twenty-seven years.”       But those wouldn't start for another month, so that wouldn't work. 

     It's then that I see Rachel and Terry talking to two guys I don't know. They are laughing and casually touching each other. I only watch for a few seconds, but it is enough. I feel a surge of jealousy that borders on anger. It is something I've never felt before, and I am torn between apologizing and running away. Fortunately, I choose the latter, and fifteen minutes later I am in my councilor’s office talking about Shakespeare. 

 

Now I'm going to tell you what you see. 

     You are looking down at the school. It is four feet long and about a foot and a half feet wide. It's not a perfect rectangle, though, since what they call pods at various intervals - clusters of classrooms with offices at the center - make it look more like a building you might find on Mars. 

     You and a friend stand at either end of the building and lift the ceiling off and walk it over to another table a few feet away. 

     You take your magic binoculars and look down into the exposed building. 

     You see one of the vice principals, Ms. Blue, looking frantic as she gets ready for the day. She downs her coffee, which she hasn't checked for temperature, and hops around comically until the liquid cools enough to swallow. She laughs and runs out to tell this story to her administrative assistant, who says, “That's just crazy,” which is how she responds to every one of her boss’ stories-slash-anecdotes-slash-mishaps that are undeserving of retelling. 

     Ms. Blue is divorced. Ms. Blue has three children, representing each level of public education: one is in ninth grade, another in seventh, and the youngest in fifth. The fifth grader has recently decided to go into politics and spends a tremendous amount of effort trying to convince anyone who will listen that she doesn't need further formal education, as education is not a requirement for holding public office. Furthermore, she will explain, all you have to do is find out what people want to hear and then say that. And then you just lie about who you're running against. 

     How will you find out what people want to hear? you might ask. 

     Easy, she will say. You use spies. Spies can find out anything.

     And who are the spies?

     Anyone you want to be can be a spy. You just give them money or food and they will do what you want.

     It's that easy?

     It's that easy. 

     In an hour, her mother will be the first to die in what will be, for the time, the largest mass shooting in California history. 

     You keep looking and you see the library halfway down the wide second-floor hallway. The library is brightly lit, with large windows looking into the hallway, and others looking toward the athletic fields behind the school. You see the auditorium, where only a few months ago A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed. You see the gym, locker rooms, band and choir rooms. You see the Panda Express and Pizza Hut on the main floor. Visitors were always oddly impressed by the food court, always commenting how it gave the school a quote-unquote college feel. 

     You see a freshman girl and her senior boyfriend making out by her locker in the C-Pod. Her parents even now are at home talking about transferring her to a private school. She used to play piano, but not anymore. She used to spend time with family, but not anymore. She used to bring her friends home, but not anymore. She used to get good grades. She used to come home well before her curfew. She used to do chores without being asked. 

     Used to, used to, used to. 

     In an hour she will be the first to die in the library. She'll be there because she's going to tell her math teacher she wants to go to the library to make up late work the teacher has been pestering her about for two months. But she's really there to be with her boyfriend, Mike, who ditches her to meet up with his other girlfriend at Carl’s Jr. This decision probably saves his life. 

     You see Kenny, the head custodian, a tall man from Mexico, who will come up behind one of the shooters and hit him with the handle of a broomstick. The shooter will cry out in pain and fall to the floor, but the second shooter will get off two shots before dragging his friend away. Kenny will survive, but he'll never get over the guilt of thinking he could have stopped the massacre in its early stages. 

     You see the two shooters park behind the school, but no one gets out for several minutes. At one point a student walks up to the car and appears to talk to the shooters and then abruptly runs away. 

     The first period bell rings and still no one emerges from the car. The rest of the students casually make their way to class. A quarter of the students will arrive late to class, and give all manner of excuses: my dad didn't wake up on time to drive me to school; my stupid brother crashed the car; traffic; weather conditions; hurricane; Soviet invasion; zombie apocalypse. The teachers know they are lying, but it's early and there's a long day ahead. The students will tell their friends how clever they are, and how dumb their teachers are. When five teachers die trying to save their students’ lives, that thinking will change. 

     Aaron is already in the library when I arrive with Rachel. Mia and Terry show up a few minutes later. We're here under the pretense of prepping for our senior one-acts, which serve as our final for the year. We'll get as far as gathering a few scripts and half heartedly assign ourselves several to look at before deciding which one to do. But really we're here to spend time with each other and avoid responsibility. 

     We're also all-too aware that these days together are slipping away. Mia will be moving to the valley in a few weeks to attend Cal State Northridge. Aaron has been accepted to Stanford, but he doesn't want to live so far from Mia. Terry is going to school in Utah. Rachel is moving to New York to try modeling, though she made me promise not to tell anyone. I said, “I promise, but only if you marry me,” and the pause after saying that was both awkward and thrilling. 

     Okay. Look away now. Put the binoculars down and look away. Because once the shooting starts, everything changes. Nothing changes. But everything changes. 

 

Lesson number seven: The Hovering O. 

     Rachel liked writing stories too. She wrote a story she called The Hovering O. She said it was about me, that it was for me, and that no one else must ever read it. Here's my summary:

     There's a city shaped like a giant O that hovers a couple hundred feet above the ground. It doesn't stay in one place; it moves around with the wind or a storm. Sometimes it bumps up against buildings or tall trees, like the ones in California. It spins and rotates and you could find yourself upside down or standing on your front door. Sometimes bill collectors come and stand five thousand feet below you, yelling at you, throwing envelopes containing dire warnings about what will happen if you don't pay this or that bill. “It's an obligation,” the bill collector hollers, throwing the bill up at you only to see it catch in the breeze and fly away. The bill collector chases the valuable documents, tripping and cursing, until he retrieves it only to begin the process anew, having learned nothing from his previous embarrassment. 

     Weeks and months pass, and every time the bill collector returns, he repeats his failure. The people living in the Hovering O laugh and have a jolly time making fun of him. 

     But then one day he returns riding the back of a giant lizard. This lizard is five miles long and can take the bill collector anywhere he chooses - even to the moon, some say.

     This enormous lizard was not a bad lizard, though it didn't like taking orders from anyone. It didn't eat anything other than five-hundred pound flies and leaves the size of continents. He was slow to lose his temper and hated arguing with anyone about anything. 

     He was, however, a lazy lizard, which is why he decided one day to climb onto the inside of the Hovering O and take a nap. 

     This solved a myriad of problems: for one, the lizard’s tail was so long that it dragged on the ground, allowing for a trade route to be established between the Hovering O and the ground people. It also anchored the city in place, so it no longer spun uncontrollably, no longer bonked into things, causing a plague of terrible headaches. 

     But as time passed, the people who lived in the Hovering O began longing for the days before the giant lizard came to nap on the inner ring of their city. For one, the pesky bill collector was able to deliver his important documents whenever and to whomever he wished. Second, the constant spinning and rotating gave the city a uniqueness that was missed. It set them apart from other cities, boring cities, cities that claimed nothing more spectacular than a twenty-five mile long robotic arm that was great for removing stubborn lids from jars and swatting away enormous flies. Cities like New York, that had grown so large they began connecting their buildings to the point where their city was one enormous block of concrete and steel filled with offices where people could sell you things like edible handkerchiefs or adult diapers or chocolate bars that look like bean burritos. 

     They brainstormed ideas for waking up the lazy lizard and chasing him away:

     “Light him on fire!”

     “Shoot him with a canon!”

     “Cover him with duct tape!”

     “Drown the hideous thing!”

     “Play country music from giant speakers!”

     “Call in the Air Force!”

     “Call in the President!”

     None of their ideas, thoughtful as they might be, seemed feasible. Then one day, after hours of debate, the mayor remembered that his cousin, a land-liver who drove a school bus for work, had a pet turtle that had grown to about the same size as the giant lazy lizard. Perhaps they could get the turtle to chase off the lizard. 

     So one day the mayor's cousin walked out into the forest, found his pet turtle, tied a string around his neck, and led him back to the city. 

     “I don't know whatcha gonna do with ‘im,” explained the mayor's cousin.”He don't do nothin’ but sut around and eat water lilies all day.”

     The mayor stood looking at the enormous turtle for the longest time. He tilted his head this way and that, holding his hand up to his chin. His cabinet members, all forty-six of them, copied his every movement, even when the mayor snapped his fingers and shouted, “Ah-hah!”

     “Give me the rope!” the mayor commanded. 

     “String,” corrected his cousin. 

     The mayor grabbed the string and began yanking on it until the enormous turtle began to follow. The crowd oooooh’d and ahhhh’d as the brave mayor walked the turtle up close to the O. “Cover the lazy lizard with lily pads,” commanded the mayor. 

     This caused some awkwardness, since no one had on their person a water lily, let alone the thousands it would take to cover the lizard. 

     So the mayor's cousin, having resigned himself to such deeds many years earlier, took a deep breath to communicate his long-suffering, and headed back out into the forest. 

     The wait was long and uncomfortable. Every time there was a sound from the general direction of the forest, the crowds would take notice, only to be disappointed when it turned out to be the mayor returning from a pee or a parent discovering a child that had been kidnapped and raised by wolves so many years ago. 

     When the mayor's cousin returned, it was clear he'd been busy. His collection of water lilies towered up into the sky so everyone had to squint to see the top. When the turtle noticed everyone looking up at something, not wanting to be left out, he too looked up. 

     And seeing this monumental treasure, he broke free from the flimsy string that had been holding him prisoner and walked, trotted, leaped toward the prize. I say “leaped” or “sprang” or “catapulted” because he did indeed achieve liftoff. A foot. A yard. A hundred yards. Maybe a mile. 

     The poor lazy lizard didn't stand a chance, even if he hadn't been asleep for the last few years. The turtle was just too strong, too determined, too enthused by his new-found freedom to be held back. The lizard awoke just in time to see the turtle, eyes wide and mouth agape. The poor lizard had a heart attack and died. He fell from the Hovering O and landed with an earth-shaking thud on the ground. This freedom from so much weight allowed the O to rise, catching the turtle around his neck a split second before he reached his prize. “Oh no!” he must have thought before thinking, “It's just as well.” 

     The Hovering O rose and rose, and to everyone's astonishment - not the least of which must have been the turtle - kept rising until it couldn't be seen. 

     And this, as I'm sure you know, is how the Earth - our Earth - came to be. A giant turtle with a city around its neck. But as you know from this story, this is not technically an origin story. Earth did not begin on a turtle’s back any more than “In the beginning” truly means “in the beginning.” Because it should read, “In the beginning of what?” There is always something before “In the beginning,” and before that, something else. A clown riding a motorcycle, maybe. Or a balloon running away from a fire. A spiraling trail of wonder dust going all the way back and all the way forward. In the middle? That's us. Clinging to the back of a hungry reptile. 

     You may think that's the end of the story. But there's just a little bit more. Because what happened to the turtle and the Hovering O after many thousands of years? Another “In the beginning” must have taken place, right? So the two, like unmatched elements on the periodic chart, attached by magnetism or absurd destiny, began to decay, having used up all their half-lives and given in to entropy, becoming finally the red dust that settles on your lips, on your cheeks, and on your fingers. 

 

“You wrote this for me? About me?”

     “About us,” she says. 

     I am beyond perplexed. I'm thinking I will never be able to catch up to anyone. 

     “Am I supposed to be the turtle?”

     “Maybe.”

     “Does that make you the O?”

     She laughs at what I assume is the obvious connotations. “Maybe,” she says again. “Maybe sometimes two things come together only to be destroyed. Like in science. Like sodium and water.” 

     I think and I think and I think and I think. This is not the first time I've had a conversation I neither wanted or understood. I say, “Here's a story: stop burning down buildings before they are built.”

     “It's not that,” she says. ”You're missing my point.”

     It's too late. I want to tell her how I'm feeling. Like she woke me up to something only to take it away. To love something before you've put words to it only to see it vanish. Entropy. 

 

You can look again if you want. Pick up those binoculars and take a peek. You see the two shooters enter through the front, their weapons concealed beneath their coats. Three security officers wave them through because they know them. They are good boys. They never cause trouble. And even when the metal detector goes off when they pass through, still the officers wave them on. Good boys.       Never any trouble. 

     Except they are not good boys, and they are trouble. Not just today. They have a history of fighting, dealing drugs, vandalism, coming to class drunk or high. The security guard knows this, but he still passes them through. 

     This is the first time you think to yourself, “This doesn't make sense.” 

     This is the first violation of the rules as you know them. The second is when the boys begin shooting - at random, aiming at nothing - and people emerge to get closer to the shooters, not away from. 

     Remember, this is before Columbine, before the maniacal and completely understandable attention to safety. People wanted to get a good look at what was going on. 

     Ms. Blue comes out of her office and into the center hallway. She can't believe what she is seeing and hearing. Students have brought guns and are shooting at the walls and ceiling! She holds her right hand up and when the first bullet tears a hole in her hand she must realize her mistake. These boys have come not as a result of a horribly misguided prank, or dare, or a desire to leave their mark before graduating. 

     They've come to hurt people. Maybe even to kill. She looks at her hand. She feels nothing even though she can see through the hole. Her body is numb. Her body is no longer her own. She holds up her hand again, just as before, and this time the bullet doesn't hit her hand. She falls to her knees. She falls forward. The boys laugh. The screaming begins. 

     Which is why you put down the binoculars again. You feel a mixture of horror and confusion. The horror is obvious, so you let it run through you and do whatever it wants with you. The confusion is different. Your brain is a spinning top. Your thoughts turn to something like sand that refuses to hold its shape. You are looking down through those binoculars and you can't make any sense of anything you are seeing. The rules of the universe have been turned inside out and nothing works the way it should. Your car is indeed talking to you and the tree outside your bedroom window has packed its bags and is moving to Detroit. The sky is taking photographs of squirrels and every movie ever made is running backward and being projected on the inside of your skull. 

     Yet there I am, hiding in a corner away from my friends because I'd left them to use the bathroom. I'm looking out the window at the blue California sky and I can't shake the feeling that what's really wrong with the universe is what's happening outside. How does the world go on as usual while the world inside the walls is being destroyed? I reach for an answer - I'm still reaching - but there's nothing. 

     I think about Leonard and the girl with the long hair. I think about the conversation that must have taken place to have that shed placed where it was. I think about Aaron, thinking maybe probably just kinda maybe thinking I might be in love with… I think about Mrs. Blankenship, who after one look deemed me unworthy to be in her class. I think of Rachel, as Hermia, left out in the dark and crying out, “Help me, Lysander! Help me! Look how I do quake with fear!” I think of Mia, whose sole purpose in life was to make you feel wanted, and Aaron, who would break her heart at every turn. 

     I am looking out that window. Birds fly by. A shot, and Aaron's voice is stopped. Another shot, and Terry's voice is stopped. Again for Mia. And again for Rachel. I see the gun pointed at me, and the shooter smiling, laughing, hooting, the joy like fireworks exploding out of him. This is it.

Farewell.

     And goodnight.

     And goodbye.

     But not for me. Mr. Barnsford, wearing his favorite orange and brown tie that has inspired so much scorn and ridicule and adoration that even the school mascot was often seen wearing a similar tie, comes up behind the shooter and wraps his arm around his neck, pulls him down, and holds him to the floor. 

     I get up and walk to my friends. I kneel beside them and touch them - their hands, clothes, faces, hair. I tell myself to never move from this spot, and I don’t. I’m still there. Always there. I reach to Rachel’s throat and take her cross necklace in my fist. I pull it free and place it in my pocket. I brush Mia’s hair from her face. I lie down with my head on Aaron’s shoulder. The tears are almost enough to wash away the blood. 

     From my place on the floor, I look out the window and I curse the world. I curse every living soul outside these walls for their ignorance, for their lack of empathy, for their rules and lies and what happens when they try to control us. For the way they turn away whenever we cry out, “Help me! Help me! Look how I do quake with fear!” And yes, again and finally, the acceptance that what is happening here inside these walls - unimaginable though it is - makes far more sense than what is happening outside. 

 

Lesson  number eight: There is no curtain call.  

     There is no curtain call that will bring back the dead. No parading everyone in front of you one final time. My friends came into my life a lightning storm, and at the very moment their lights shone the brightest, they were gone. It took the slightest bit of time, just a sliver, and they were no more. 

So even though there is no curtain call, no bringing them back to life, no last second glance back to make you see that none of this is true, that it's really just one big metaphor - no, none of that - there's this:

     Aaron has just finished reading his book about the history of time. He is puffed up with thoughts about quantum mechanics and relativity. He can't get past the idea that two worlds can coexist under conflicting yet true laws of physics. He is looking for, in his curious yet ridiculously underdeveloped brain, what physicists refer to as the god equation, that mathematical explanation for very different but equally true realities. We sit and let the mystery hang over our heads. 

     Several minutes later,  I say to him, “Love.”

     And he says, “Huh?” I think he's forgotten what we were talking about. 

     I say again, “Love. If you're looking for the thing that bridges two different but equally true realities, then the answer is love.”

     To which he says, “Sure. Okay. Whatever.”

     I am nearing fifty and he is seventeen. He's laughing at me. I'm his ten-cent philosopher once again. But he can't argue with me. He can't argue because he knows I'm right. Also, he isn't real. 

     “I don't understand what you mean by love,” he says. 

     “Don't worry. Neither do I.”

     I've gotten out of my chair and I'm walking to my bedroom. I turn off a light. I put a book back on the shelf. I walk by a line of photographs on the wall in the hallway. I see my parents on their wedding day. I see my grandparents. There's one of me shaking hands with a famous actor; I don't like this picture and I'm about to ask my wife why we still have it up when I see the photo taken at my thirtieth high school reunion. I'm wearing a blue suit that's too small for me. My wife insists it looks good, but I tell her I'm too old for tight fits like this. In the photo are three middle-aged women to my right, and one balding man to my left. 

     The blond woman in the photo says, “How’d I do?”

     “Beautifully,” I whisper. “Just like always."

     “Really?”

     “Yes, really.”

     “Aww, you're too cute.”

     “Thanks,” I say. We look at each other for the longest time. Then, with great reluctance, “You know, the play is over.”

     “Is it?” She doesn't want to hear this any more than I want to say it. 

     “Everyone is home watching television.”

     “Oh,” she says, sadness in her voice. “Did we ever? Did you and I ever?”

     “No,” I say. “We never.”

     “Oh,” she says again. “Why do you think that is?” 

     “Because you died,” I whisper, holding back the tidal wave of emotion at the back of my throat. 

     “Oh. That sucks.”

     “It does.”

     “How’d it happen?”

     I tell her. 

     “That's unbelievable,” she says. 

     “Yeah,” is all I can say. 

     “Thirty-eight dead, you say?”

     “Something like that.”

     “That's, that's unbelievable,” she says. 

     “I was there and I don't believe it.”

     “You sure it was me?”

     I pull out the cross necklace from my pocket and hand it to her. She puts it on around her neck and is frozen in time again. I stare. And I cry. When the tears have run out, I continue to stare at the photo. I feel my heart beating, I hear the hum of the furnace, and the sound of the clock tick-tick-ticking. 

     “Terry?” I call out. 

     “Yeah?” she says from our bedroom. 

     I wait too long to answer. I've forgotten what I was going to ask. So I say, “Is there any of that sandwich left?”

     “Oh I think so,” she says. 

     “Olives?” I say. 

     “Oh I buried it in olives.”

     I stick out my tongue. “Yeck,” I say. 

     “Manna from heaven, my love. Manna from heaven.” 

     I laugh as I wipe the tears from my face. I am looking down the hallway. I see the door to our bedroom is open and I think I catch a glimpse of her shadow. 

     I look back at the picture. I look toward our bedroom. I look at the picture. Bedroom. Picture. Bedroom. Picture. Bedroom. Picture. Bedroom. 

     “Love?” I say. “My love?”

     I wait. And I wait. And I wait. 

     “Love?” I say one last time. 

     I wait and I wait and I wait. 

     But she doesn't answer. 

​

To read the entire story, click here. 

 

August, 2022

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