I remember walking with my friends to go into the meet with Isaac. On the way I saw this dark haired girl with innocent cheeks, and for a second I thought she was Dre. She was staring at me too, but when Dre’s face faded it was replaced by the wide eyed look of another girl. One I was pretty sure had been on the sharp end of a Preppy/Bear fuck session a time or two.
The reality of my own death was a searing pain ripping through my gut, followed by a sense of doom as I bled out onto the concrete.
I didn’t fade away, I dropped out of consciousness with lightening speed. I barely had time to register the horror on my friends’ faces, who all seemed to be floating around above me like they were above the surface, while I was being dragged down to the dark depths below.
I reached out, wanting to grab them, wanting to hold on to this life.
But it was too fucking late.
For most people death was the end.
For me, it was only the beginning.
CHAPTER FORTY
DRE
Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap…
Mindlessly, I bounced my pen on top of my open text book in such quick succession the pages vibrated, lifting at the corners. I shuffled my feet, crossing and uncrossing my ankles, wishing away the constant feeling of restlessness that only seemed to intensify with each passing day.
My desk was pushed up sideways against the only window in the classroom, although there was no view to speak of. Nothing but a brick wall. The small space between buildings was just large enough to allow in the rain that had just started to fall, beading up and sliding down the thick glass. The clouds overhead shifted, casting the already muted light of the room in a wash of gray. With the new lighting the image in the window shifted, and suddenly I was no longer staring at the brick wall but at the reflection of a girl.
A girl whose hair had begun to shine again, although her ponytail could’ve used a smoothing, the humidity of the day sending every little hair not long enough to be tied in the elastic standing on their tiny curly ends. She wore glasses, simple dark-blue frames. Her complexion was pale, but not sallow. Her eyes tired, but not lost.
I knew the girl was me, but beyond the clean clothes and classroom setting I saw another girl, just beyond her shoulders. One who was slumped against a wall with a needle in her arm and cum in her hair.
A girl who was trapped both physically and mentally.
I shook my head, willing away the image of someone I never wanted to see again. I closed my eyes tightly and when I opened them again, both girls were gone. The clouds cleared and soon my reflection was gone as well, and I was again staring at nothing but an empty brick wall.
Without thinking, I raised my hand to scratch at an itch that didn’t really exist, with fingernails that weren’t long enough yet to actually do any real scratching. The scabs and pock marks were all gone, but in their place were the raised red scars just starting to take on their shapes, some of them were already turning their permanent shade of white, others lingering at bright red.
The teacher was a man in his sixties. He stood with his back straight and his head down at the podium. His voice was monotone, with zero inflection, as he read off his lesson plan.
I took a deep breath and tried paying attention but everything he was covering, about the founding of our country and the Declaration of Independence, I’d learned in the fifth grade. Leaning back in the chair I cross my arms over my chest and since my feet didn’t touch the floor I swung my legs back and forth, accidentally kicking the chair of the boy in front of me.
“I’m…” I started, but then the kid turned around and the wind was knocked out of my chest when my eyes landed on the familiar, beautiful big smile and the tattoos covering his neck. I gasped, covering my mouth with my hand.
Impossible.
“Hey, watch it,” he said, his unfamiliar high-pitched voice bringing me back to reality, where he was just a dark-haired boy with olive skin who didn’t look anything at all like the man I mistook him for.
“Sorry,” I whispered. The boy turned back around to face the teacher who’d turned off the lights so we could follow his slides on the overhead projector, which was blurry at best. The Sons of Liberty’s heads were all large and skewed, distorted pictures of a probably already distorted tale of American history.
It wasn’t the first time his face appeared on someone else’s, just like it wasn’t the first time my stomach dropped with my disappointment when I realized it wasn’t him.
It would never be him.
Later on that day, I sat in the small cramped office space of Edna Elinberry, my counselor who my dad insisted I see three times a week. One of the many terms of my return home, and one I didn’t really mind all that much. Edna was quirky and kind of funny. Being a recovering addict herself, she could relate to me in a way not a lot of other mental heath professionals could.
“I saw him again today,” I told her, staring at the books and other knick-knacks on the overstuffed bookcase in the corner. Lord of the Flies was on the top shelf dangling over the edge, one heavy footed passer-by could send it crashing to the floor.
“Brandon?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. Brandon was someone who’d recently started working with my dad. He’d asked me out a few times and, even though he was good looking and seemed nice enough, I just wasn’t ready to complicate my life in a way it didn’t need to be complicated. “Not Brandon. HIM,” I said, still finding it hard to utter his name without feeling a sense of sickness wash over me.
“That happens when we lose somebody we cared about,” Edna said, watering each of the thirty some odd plants in her little windowsill. She wore loose, light-faded jeans with a long, white, ribbed sweater. Her bright red hair was something from the eighties, permed in tight curls and cut longer in the back and short on the top. She had pink lipstick on her teeth at all times. “Especially, one who’d had such a huge impact on your life. It will fade with time.”
“But…but what if I don’t want it to fade?” I asked, realizing by asking the question it meant that I wasn’t entirely sure that moving on was what I really wanted.
Edna put down her watering can on the floor and side stepped one of the seven coffee tables in the cramped space, plopping down on the denim sofa and motioning for me to do the same on the one across from her. We both kicked off our shoes and sat Indian style across. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and I copied. When she opened her eyes she asked, “You cared for him a great deal, right?”