Authors: Carmen Rodrigues
We stop in front of the art room, and she says, “I’ve been spending a lot of time in here lately.” She leads me to a small table. “This one’s mine. I mean, I have to share it with a few others, but, you know, it’s still kind of mine.” She pulls out the chair, and I sit. She reaches into a bin below the table and pulls out a scrapbook. “I was working on this right before you came.”
Inside are photos of her and Ellie. Them at fourteen, their legs too skinny to properly fill in a pair of jeans. At sixteen, experimental streaks of red lightening Sarah’s brown hair, and Ellie, looking bored, standing behind her, smoking a cigarette.
“These are from the box I sent you?” I ask, and she nods.
A few pages later I find one of me and Ellie, taken the day before I left. Ellie’s cringing because I’m drunk and holding her too tight. I’m telling her the story of when she was seven and I was eight and I jumped out at her from behind a basement wall, scaring her so bad she peed her pants.
On the opposite page is Ellie’s reaction. She’s laughing so hard her eyes are watering. She was about to wipe away her tears when the photograph was snapped, permanently suspending her somewhere in between.
“It’s not done yet,” Sarah says. “But it’s . . . I don’t know. It helps. Somehow.”
A woman’s voice calls her name. Sarah turns and waves at a
young nurse with blond hair standing in the hallway. “Oh, wait. Do you mind hanging here for a sec? I want you to meet my favorite nurse. I know it’s stupid to have a favorite nurse. But I told her all about you. So . . .” She walks toward the nurse. I watch them chat for a few seconds, and then I turn back to the album. I stare at Ellie’s face, at her blue eyes that are the same as mine. I place my hand on the photograph and feel that familiar tear of heartbreak. I say her name aloud. I say, “Ellie.” And then, because I want to remember how the word sounds coming from my mouth, I say it again. “Ellie.”
And inside, I say,
I miss you, Ellie.
I think about you every day.
I’m sorry I didn’t get home in time.
I hope you’ll forgive me.
And I ask her if Sarah is right, if it
is
time to say good-bye. But I don’t get an answer. All I hear is the sound of Sarah, her laughter stretched out behind me. And I think that maybe it isn’t time, not yet. Not for me. But I can see that one day it will be.
Y
o
u want me t
o
have w
o
rds.
B
ut I have cigarettes. I have gin. Can’t y
o
u tell h
o
w I feel
b
y the way I t
o
uch y
o
u?
AFTER. APRIL.
The Monday after we take Sarah to Mount Holy Oak, Mom forces me to go back to school. I’m pretty miserable by first period. That’s because everyone is talking about me—even Lola, who has changed the location of her locker so it’s no longer next to mine.
Maybe Mrs. Medina senses my dread. Because as soon as we settle down, she writes an essay prompt on the board:
What was the one moment that changed your life forever?
That means today will be a silent day. Thank God.
I pull out pen and paper from my bag and set it on my desk. Then I stare at the board, thinking of the last year and all the moments that have changed me: Ellie kissing me, the stolen
sketch pad, standing up to Lola, losing Ellie and then finding her box, and Sarah . . .
But even with these larger-than-life moments before me, I start writing about something safer—our move to Smith.
“This assignment totally bites ass,” Lola whispers loudly behind me. A few girls snicker. I glance back and see her pass a note to Bianca. She laughs, adds something to the note, and tosses it to Melissa, who reads the note, makes a face, adds something else to it, and passes it up to Kelly. Mrs. Medina starts discussing the parameters of our essay, and I turn my attention back to the front of the classroom.
“You’ve got until the bell rings to complete this assignment, so that’s exactly forty-five minutes. It should be roughly four pages.”
“Can we skip lines?” Bobby yells from the back of the room.
Mrs. Medina gives him a tolerant look. “No, Bobby, and no cursive or excessively large letters. I want each essay to be written in your neatest print. If I can’t read it, you fail. Period.”
There are groans throughout the room. I notice the note is making its way toward me. Lola giggles, and I turn to look at her. She shrugs and rolls her eyes. Then she begins to write her essay.
Now the note is at my right. Clara reads it, but she doesn’t laugh. She puts it in her notebook and returns to her work.
Lola whispers, “Hey, Clara, pass that on.” But Clara ignores
her. “
Psst
, Clara, what’s your deal? Pass it on.” Clara’s pen freezes, but her eyes stay on her paper. “Hey, just pass the freaking note already.”
Clara gives Lola a dirty look. Then she glances at me, her eyes full of sympathy. I decide to go back to my essay, but I can no longer focus. I want to know what that note says. I want to know if it’s about me. Finally, I set my pen down and whisper, “It’s okay, Clara. Let me see.”
Clara shakes her head, crumples the note into the ball of her right hand. She opens her mouth to speak, but Lola interrupts her. “Let her see it, Clara.”
Several people behind us laugh. Mrs. Medina puts aside a paper she’s grading and surveys the class. “If I continue to hear this nonsense, I will cut your time.”
There are more groans and the sounds of papers being shuffled as the class get back to work. Mrs. Medina returns to her grading. Clara smiles at me stiffly and whispers, “Jessie, it’s so not important.”
“If it’s not important,” Lola hisses, “then pass it.”
Clara’s face turns bright red, and in her outside voice she says, “You’re a bitch, Lola.”
From the back of the classroom, Bobby yells, “T-and-A fight!” This is followed by hoots and hollers from several guys.
Mrs. Medina snaps her grade book shut and stands up. “Class—”
“What? What did you say?” Lola asks Clara. Her voice cracks at the end.
Bobby yells, “She called you a bitch!” And this makes most of the class laugh.
The lights flick off and on. “I said”—Mrs. Medina’s voice is filled with authority—“settle down.” The class is immediately silent. Mrs. Medina stares at Clara, a perplexed expression on her face. She’s probably trying to understand how one of her favorite students—this bubbly, confident class president who geeks, freaks, goths, and jocks all find legitimately nice—had an outburst in her class.
“I’ve had enough already!” Mrs. Medina shouts, even though the room is already silent. “Bobby, language like that will get you sent to the principal’s office. And you know how your father is when I call home!” She walks toward Clara’s desk, her palm out. Clara hands her the note. She reads it silently, her face solemn. She looks from me to Lola, takes a huge breath, and says, “Lola, I’ll see you after class.”
“Mrs. Medina, that’s not mine—”
“Stop,” Mrs. Medina snaps. “Just stop. We’ll discuss this after class when we can call your parents.”
“What?” Lola’s eyes are watery, and the cockiness slips from her face. “But what about Clara? Are you going to call her parents?”
Mrs. Medina shakes her head. “I suggest you worry about the consequences of your own actions and leave Clara to me.”
A few kids gasp. Mrs. Medina is never this tough. Need a bathroom pass? No problem. Have to run to your locker? No problem. An extension on your homework assignment? Sure. Mrs. Medina always gives the benefit of the doubt.
“Class!” Mrs. Medina’s voice moves our attention from Lola to her. “You have exactly thirty-five minutes to complete your essay. I suggest you start now.”
The class protests. Mrs. Medina raises her hand, and again there is silence. “If you have an issue with the grade you receive on this essay, I suggest you find the time to take it up with Lola
after class
.”
There is another collective groan. Several people from the upper rows turn to glare at Lola.
Everyone can hear Lola crying. I don’t turn around, but I imagine her face looks the same as it did the afternoon we spied on Tommy.
I feel strange. I look at Clara. She’s busy working on her essay. I glance back at Lola. Her head is on her desk, her legs curled up onto her seat, like she’s trying to disappear.
I take out a clean sheet of paper and start writing—not about my move to Ohio, but about my first kiss with Ellie. My hand moves swiftly across the page, the first of many secrets escaping.
* * *
After class, I head for the school’s double doors. I’m expecting security to pounce on me or an alarm to sound, but there is nothing. Just concrete steps, the flagpole, a whole lot of brown grass, and me, breathing in the icy air.
It’s supposed to snow today. A spring snowstorm that doesn’t seem so freakish now that it’s happened several times in the last few years.
The world is changing. Nothing fits where it’s supposed to. Even the snow is confused,
Mom said yesterday. We were sitting on the couch, everyone except Sarah, and I could tell from the way she kept looking around, she missed her. I missed her too.
The night before Sarah left for Mount Holy Oak, Mom called Sarah and me into the kitchen and said, “Sometimes you want to save someone, but you can’t. Some people—like Ellie—want to stay lost, and if someone wants to stay lost, there’s nothing you can do to help them. You just pray that one day they’ll find their way.” She grabbed our hands and pulled them close to her heart. “But you never blame yourself for what anyone else does, the choices they make.” She looked at me, her eyes wet.
“There’s been too much bad stuff. And I couldn’t take losing either of you, okay?”
Afterward, I decided it was time to show Ellie’s box to Sarah.
“What is it?” she asked when I set it between us on my bed.
“It belonged to Ellie.”
“Is it about you?” She looked away, cleared her throat, and then turned back to me, her brown eyes serious. “Is it about you and Ellie? You know . . . being together.”
I stared at her, slightly stunned.
“I found this . . .” She stood and went to her closet. She took out a slightly larger box and set it on the bed beside the shoe box. She slid off the lid and reached inside, past dozens of photos of Ellie, and pulled out a notebook. From the pages of the notebook she removed a single Polaroid of me sleeping peacefully on Ellie’s freckled shoulder. Ellie must have taken it the night of our last fight.
I didn’t know what to say. And maybe I didn’t need to; maybe the tears streaming down my face said it all.
Sarah pulled me close and held me for a while. When I moved away, she nodded toward the shoe box. “What’s in it?”
“I guess,” I said, my voice rough, “I guess it’s also about all of us—you, me, Jake, Tommy, Ellie’s mom. It’s what Ellie felt about all of us.”
I read the hesitancy in her face. She said, “I can’t . . . Not yet.”
“When you’re ready . . . ,” I said, and then I set the box on the top shelf of my closet, and asked her if she would tell me about Ellie’s final hours.
And so she began to talk about that night, how Ellie didn’t seem like herself, how she seemed incredibly sad but also determined to pretend she was happy. “If I’d known everything, I’d have never let her near those pills. But I didn’t know, you know? I just . . .” Her voice faded. She was crying, but she continued on, and near the end she told me about the hot-pink fishnet stockings Ellie had worn that night.
The stockings were my only gift to Ellie, and I remembered how surprised she’d been when I’d handed her the small box with its purple ribbon, and how she’d put them on immediately and in a matter of minutes picked them apart, exposing both her knees.
And the crazy thing is, out of everything Sarah told me, Ellie dying in something as outrageous as those stockings made the most sense. I don’t know why, but it did.
“Do you think,” Sarah said, looking out the window toward Ellie’s house, “that she did it . . .” She stalled, but I knew that she wanted to ask the questions I had been asking since Ellie died. Did she have a plan to end it that night? Or was it just a hasty decision made in a moment of extreme sadness and pain? Or
maybe it was as my mom had said that morning—an accident?
I stared out the window too, thinking about all the times I had seen Ellie walking in and out of her house. It was hard to believe I’d never see her again. That she’d never tell me if she ever really loved me. “I guess we’ll never know,” I finally said.
I continue to think about Ellie now, as I walk these long blocks from school. And I find myself somewhere I never intended—at Falling Creek, standing in front of the tree that bears her name. I drop my bag and kneel at its base, running my fingers over the plaque’s deeply cut letters. I lay my head against the bark, pressing my cheek to its fractured skin. I tell myself that somewhere above, Ellie watches. I tell myself she is no longer alone.
An hour later, snow begins to fall, coating the tree’s stark branches, resting in clumps along the joints. My face is cold, but I’m not worn down by the chill. I am something else entirely.