She looked confused, and I could read on her face that she was trying to tell if my mind had simply broken. There was intense compassion in her eyes that lingered for as long as she thought that my hold on reality had slipped. When she saw that it hadn’t, this compassion dissolved into defeated tears, and she pulled me toward her to embrace me. She was beginning to sob, but it seemed too intense of a reaction to my problem, and I had no reason to think that she particularly cared for Veronica — quite the opposite seemed true. She drew in a shuddering breath, and then said something that still makes me nauseous, even now.
“Veronica’s dead, sweetheart. Oh God, I thought you knew…”
I pulled away aggressively. “What? What are you talking about? She said she was doing better… She said she was feeling better, mom!”
There was a long pause.
“What happened to Veronica?!”
“She’s dead, sweetie. She died on the last day you visited her. Oh honey, she died weeks ago.”
She had completely broken down, but I knew it wasn’t because of Veronica. I staggered backwards. This wasn’t possible. I had just exchanged messages with her yesterday. I could only think to ask one question, and it was probably the most trivial one I could ask.
“Then why was her phone still on?”
She continued sobbing. She didn’t answer.
I exploded. “Why did it take them so long to shut off her goddamned phone?!”
Her crying broke enough to mutter, “The pictures…”
My mother told me that Veronica’s parents had thought that her phone had been lost in the accident, despite the fact that I had put it in her purse the night she was brought to the hospital. When they retrieved her belongings, the phone was not among them, but they didn’t deactivate the line. I asked my mom why this was — why they had failed to close her account — but she said she didn’t know. But I think I know. I think they just couldn’t bear to do even one more thing that forced them to admit that she was gone. They probably would have kept that line active forever, but they received a call from their service provider informing them of a massive impending charge for hundreds of pictures that had been sent from her phone.
Pictures.
Pictures that were all sent to my phone. Pictures that I never got because my phone couldn’t receive them. They learned that they were all sent after the night Veronica died. They deactivated the phone immediately.
I tried not to think about the contents of those pictures. But I remember wondering for some reason that I couldn’t place whether I would have been in any of them.
My mouth went dry, and I felt the painful sting of despair as I thought of the last message I received from her phone…
See you again. Soon.
Friends
On the first day of kindergarten, my mother had elected to drive me to school; we were both nervous, and she wanted to be there with me all the way up to the moment I walked into class. It took me a bit longer to get ready in the morning due to my still-mending arm. The cast came up a couple inches past my elbow, which meant that I had to cover the entire arm with a specially designed latex bag when I showered. The bag was built to pull tight around the opening in order to seal out any water that might otherwise destroy the cast. Since I still had use of my dominant hand, I had gotten really adept at cinching the bag myself; that morning, however, perhaps due to my excitement or nervousness, I hadn’t pulled the strap tight enough, and halfway through the shower, I could feel water pooling inside the bag around my fingers. I jumped out and tore the latex shield away, but could feel that the previously rigid plaster had become soft after absorbing the water.
Because there is no way to effectively clean the area between your body and a cast, the dead skin that would normally have fallen away merely sits there. When stirred by moisture like sweat, it emits an odor, and apparently, this odor is proportionate to the amount of moisture introduced, because soon after I began attempting to dry it, I was struck by the powerful stench of rot. As I continued to rub it frantically with the towel, the cast began to disintegrate into thick white strips that rained down upon my feet while small white flakes wafted into the air and seemed to hover like snowflakes.
I was growing increasingly distressed — I had put as much effort as a child could into his very first day of school. I had sat with my mom picking out my clothes the night before; I had spent a great deal of time picking out my backpack; and I had become exceedingly excited to show everyone my lunchbox that had the Ninja Turtles on it. I had fallen into my mom’s habit of calling these children I hadn’t yet met my “friends” already, but as the condition of my cast worsened, I became deeply upset at the thought that surely I wouldn’t be able to apply that label to anyone by the time this day was over.
When I realized that attempting to wipe the cast dry was actually destroying it, I wrapped the towel around my arm and pressed it hard against my chest while leaning forcefully against the counter, in an effort to soak up the water without agitating the surface of the cast. But the wet plaster began to collapse under my weight, and the force transferred down to my weak and cracked bones. Pain arced through my arm, and I half-successfully stifled a scream. I couldn’t fix it myself. Defeated, I showed my mom.
It took thirty minutes to get most of the moisture out while working to preserve the rest of the cast. The combination of placing restrained pressure on an absorbent cloth while running a hair dryer over the length of the cast was enough to solve the hydration issue. To address the problem of the smell, my mom cut slivers off a bar of soap and slid them down into the cast. She then rubbed the remainder of the soap on the outside in an attempt to cocoon the rancid smell inside of a more pleasant one. There was no repair work that could be done, but she had at least controlled the damage.
By the time we arrived at the school, my classmates were already engaged in their second activity, and the teacher shoehorned me into one of the already-established groups. I’m sure that the teacher explained to me in great detail what the guidelines of the activity were, but I was so nervous and distracted that I must have misunderstood. Within about five minutes, I had violated the rules so badly that each member of the group complained to the teacher and asked why I had to be in their group. The teacher tried to make peace, but the damage was done; I sat at the table with my free hand in my pocket. I had brought a marker to school in hopes that I could collect some signatures or drawings on my cast next to my mother’s, and as I rolled the marker between my fingertips, I suddenly felt very foolish for having even put it in my pocket that morning.
After the exercise was over, we watched as our teacher brought a large, rolled-up piece of paper out of the classroom’s closet. While it is generally difficult to maintain the attention of so many children, the size of the object held our interest. We watched as she tacked the top and bottom left-hand corners of the paper to the wall as she talked to us. When the corners were secure, she unrolled the large cylinder of paper from left to right, and we saw what it was.
It was a map.
The teacher had us line up to leave the classroom for lunch. When we filed into the lunchroom, the faculty members from each Group guided us to our cluster of tables and corrected students who tried to sit at restricted, yet unoccupied seats. There were no other students in there; kindergarteners had the lunchroom to themselves at my elementary school, and this meant that I wouldn’t have to sit by myself.
In a year’s time, I would be all alone at a table about eight feet away, but despite the fact that I was surrounded by classmates, I think I felt lonelier right then than in all the initial weeks of first grade isolation combined.