The Beginning of After

by Jennifer Castle

  Nana came out of the kitchen and beckoned us over to the table.

  “Is Masher here?” said David. “I came home for some clothes, and my grandfather said you’d taken him.”

  “Yeah. Mr. Mita wasn’t—”

  “Thank you,” David said, cutting me off. Hearing David’s voice in the house must have woken Masher up, because, on cue, he came bursting down the stairs.

  David fell to his knees to hug his dog, his face in the thick ring of fur around his neck, and they stayed that way for what seemed like minutes. I put two very large spoonfuls of sugar in my coffee, slowly.

  When he finally let go of Masher, he was fighting back tears. Nana handed him a box of Kleenex—she had installed one in every room—and he turned his back to us, cleaning himself up.

  “He seems happy. Thank you,” said David when he swiveled back around. “Do you mind watching him for a little while longer?”

  Something about David’s face right then, so fragile and temporary, felt familiar. Had I seen it before on him? Or maybe, on myself? My guard fell, and a voice inside me nudged, David is not his father. You don’t have to hate him, too.

  “No, I don’t mind,” I said. “He hogs the covers, but I can deal with that.”

  David burst out with a little laugh, just a snort really, and smiled a bit. He crawled back into the chair and took his first sip of coffee.

  “You’ve been home all this week? Out of school?” said David.

  “Yeah. I’m going back tomorrow.” Just saying it made me feel that much more like I would actually do it. “What about you?”

  “Nah, I’m failing two of my classes anyway. I’m done.”

  The nerd in me felt alarmed, and I couldn’t help saying, “Done? Like, dropping out?”

  David just shrugged and looked at me, like he was daring me to ask more, challenging me to try to talk him out of it.

  “Well, you’re lucky then,” was all I said, picking at a thumbnail. “Because you’ll miss that whole stupid senior talent show thing.”

  David snorted again and nodded, and then we went silent. But the air felt a little thinner, a little warmer now. After a few more moments, he slid back down to the floor, and Masher, who’d had his head resting in David’s lap, stretched out in front of him.

  “I’ve got some stuff to do, to get ready for tomorrow,” I said, getting up and taking two steps toward the stairs. He didn’t look up to say good-bye.

  “Stay as long as you want, David,” said Nana from the kitchen doorway. “Do you want a sandwich?”

  I didn’t wait to hear his answer, because suddenly being back in my room, without having to make conversation with David Kaufman, was all I wanted in life.

  There was a picture of the two of us, David and me, in a family photo album somewhere. We’re on my front lawn. It’s my first day of third grade and his first day of fourth grade. I’m grinning wide while holding a Snoopy lunch box, and he’s standing with his hands on his hips, so over the whole thing. I remember us walking to the bus stop and then him moving away from me to talk to Lydia Franco, who was ten and unimaginably streetwise. But on some weekends we went for walks in the woods, and he’d show me the old stone homestead walls that ran through the back of our neighborhood.

  We did this until the year David started middle school. Although we waited at the same stop, he took a different bus now, and he had simply stopped talking to me. I think I asked him a question once and he just looked at me, smiled, and turned away. That was it, like someone finally switching off a TV that’s been left on too long. If I felt hurt, I never admitted it. Soon, Meg moved to the neighborhood and I had someone, and that was all that mattered.

  When I got to my room, Elliot and Selina were both on the bed, giving me these looks.

  “Sorry, guys, the dog’s not leaving yet,” I said, and crawled under the covers.

  Chapter Six

  Mr. Churchwell got up from behind his desk to join me on the small, beat-up leather couch in his office, forcing me to inch a little farther toward my end. The cushion made a poosh sound as he settled in, smiling at me. It felt like being on a date with someone’s tragically dorky uncle.

  “So, you feel okay? Anything you want to talk to me about?” he said.

  I had made it here, to school, just like I said I would. Mr. Churchwell had asked me to come in a bit early, before homeroom if I could, to “check in” and “touch base.” It hadn’t even been two weeks since the accident, but it didn’t seem possible that I could be anywhere else.

  “I’m glad to be out of the house, actually,” I offered. It was true. I had been able to look at people’s faces when I walked into the school and down the main hallway toward my locker. Some had smiled at me, and I had smiled back.

  “Mmmm, yes. I don’t blame you. It’s important to resume your usual routine.”

  “Plus, I was starting to get a little too good at The Price Is Right. Do you believe what a good washer-dryer combo costs these days?”

  He donated a short, humoring chuckle. “Well, take it easy today. If you need some time out of the classroom, a break or anything, just let your teachers know. They’re ready to help.”

  “You talked to them about me?” I asked.

  “Just to tell them you were coming back. And I spoke with Emily Heinz about the Tutoring Club. She says she can take charge of things until you feel like getting involved again.”

  I’d started the Tutoring Club my freshman year because of Toby. He’d struggled all through elementary school until they figured out he had dyslexia, when he was eight and I was eleven. Somewhere along the line I’d started helping him read and do his homework. He wouldn’t let my parents do it; he’d get annoyed with them and they’d fight. But me, he liked working with me. Somehow I found ways to make things click for him, like using his plastic soldiers to form letters on the floor.

  Eventually my mom started paying me five bucks an hour to help him, although I would have done it for free. It was the only time we got along.

  In ninth grade I wrote a paper about this, and my English teacher asked if I was interested in helping her put together a group of students to tutor other students. It seemed like a golden opportunity to get involved in something I already knew how to do, and Toby would need the Tutoring Club when he got to high school. My dad fought hard to keep him in regular classes, even though Mom would have let him go into special ed. “He won’t get bullied so much in special ed,” she’d say, but my father wanted so badly for him to have the most normal experience possible.

  A clear vision of Toby, slowly sounding out words on a page with his brow furrowed in concentration, started to push me off a little cliff in my mind. What was the point of the Tutoring Club now if Toby would never be able to take advantage of it?

  “Laurel, are you okay?” said Mr. Churchwell. “Do you want to talk or stay here for a little while?”

  No, no, no, you don’t, I thought. We were not going to do this now, eight minutes before homeroom.

  “I should get going,” I said, standing up and slinging my backpack over my shoulder. Mr. Churchwell nodded but stayed where he was.

  “Have a great day, Laurel,” he said, and with that I was out the door toward homeroom.

  Somehow, I made it until the final bell. As I entered each classroom, the teacher took me aside and told me a version of the same thing: Don’t worry about taking notes, don’t worry about needing to excuse yourself for a break. Everybody wants to help. Everybody cares about you.

  Then I looked around at the other students filing in, glancing quickly at me and then away, almost embarrassed, like I was standing there naked, and I had a real hard time buying the “Everybody cares about you and wants to help” part. But I accepted the no-note-taking part, no problem. I’d always wondered what it would be like to be one of those kids who blatantly ignored the teacher and did their own thing in class. Now I could listen but doodle, knowing I’d get sent home with a copy of the teacher’s own notes for my binder.


  It was one period, then another, then another, then eating three bites of my turkey sandwich in the far corner of the cafeteria with Meg, then more periods just like the first ones. I listened, and I avoided people’s eyes, and I drew trees and flowers and hillside scenes across the straight lines of my notebook.

  I found French to be the toughest class. Looking at the textbook, I thought of my French homework that night and how I’d been reading through it in the kitchen, clueless about the accident. I couldn’t help wondering which page I was on at the moment of impact. Wondering what would have happened if Mrs. Messing hadn’t given us so much homework and if I’d decided to go to Freezy’s instead.

  Deep, deep breaths pushed the panic back down. I was not going to cry at school. It was not an option. I imagined my tear ducts filled with dry desert sand.

  Finally, at the end of it all, Meg found me at my locker.

  “Are you going to drama?” she asked, knowing I’d forgotten all about it. The spring production of The Crucible was only a week away. Meg had a small part as Mercy Lewis, one of the teenage girls who pretend to be possessed by witchcraft. I was not in the cast. I was a backstage scenery person, no matter how much Meg had begged me to try out this time.

  Mom was a painter too. She made money at it. Deborah Meisner Portraits had its own website and regular ads in the PennySaver. Two or three days a week, my mother spent the day at a studio she shared with another artist, and covered canvases with happy families, smiling kids, cuddly dogs, kissing couples in their wedding wear. Clients would give her photos and she’d take it from there, and now her work hung in houses all over town.

  She painted her own things when she had time, which wasn’t often. Sometimes I’d visit her studio and there would be an easel in the corner, tucked away like she was ashamed of it. A half-finished image of an old man on a park bench, or an abstract splatter of shapes that only suggested a face. Mom often talked about entering art shows or trying to arrange a gallery collection, but it never happened. The work that earned her a living took priority.

  In our own house, there were just two of her paintings. One of my dad that she painted shortly after they first met, when he was still writing for a newspaper in the city. He’s sitting in front of an open window with skyscrapers and looks so young, most people who saw it thought it was Toby. I always used to look at that painting and think about him giving up the newspaper job for one in advertising right after they got married and Mom got pregnant, because it offered a higher salary.

  They had each made their sacrifices, for our family.

  The other painting, hanging in our dining room, was one of my brother and me as little kids, leaning against a tree in our backyard. We have the same face, an eerie medley of our mother’s and father’s features; I’m just taller and have longer straight brown hair than he does. I’m holding a cat that I don’t remember us ever owning.

  “You have so much talent,” Mom had said to me the last time she saw one of my scenery flats. “But you never draw people.”

  “I can’t. I’ve tried. They come out looking really disturbing.” We’d had this conversation at least a dozen times by then.

  “Take a life drawing class. There’s a good one at the community arts center.”

  “I just don’t have time,” I’d said to her, but to myself: She’s so embarrassed. It must suck to be a portrait painter and have a daughter who can only draw scenery!

  She used to take me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art once a month. I loved those trips, even though she often borrowed my drawing pad to go sit on a bench somewhere, sketching other visitors, while I wandered the rooms alone.

  The sadness came into my chest again, so I pushed away the image of my mother sketching and thought of how much I loved taking a tall canvas and turning it into something with dimension and depth; a street that curves on forever or deep rows of green hills. Maybe the truth was, I just didn’t like painting people.

  “How are they doing with the flats?” I asked Meg.

  “They still need some work. That’s why it would be great for you to come and help. Even Sam said so.”

  “That’s just because of what’s happened. Do you remember how obnoxious he was a few weeks ago when I tried to start a house without him?” Samuel Ching was the stage manager in charge of the sets and generally a control freak. I was a better artist than he was, everyone knew it, but he never let me do anything without his approval. Once he painted over an Alp I did for The Sound of Music, which made me cry a little.

  “I remember,” said Meg, “but they really do need you.”

  I followed her into the auditorium, where most of the cast was goofing off in the seats and some of the finished scenery flats—a stone wall, a front door—were already onstage. She nodded me a little silent good-bye, and I headed for the backstage door. Inside, I found Samuel cleaning paintbrushes in front of a blank scenery flat.

  “Hi, Sam,” I said.

  He looked up at me and seemed surprised at first, but then his mouth settled into something practiced.

  “Laurel, I’m so glad to see you!”

  “Need help?” Now I felt we were reciting lines in a little play of our own.

  “Do we ever. Here,” he said, handing me a brush and nodding toward the tall canvas. “This is the town square wall you sketched out before”— he tripped up for a moment—“last time. Do you think you could tackle it?”

  Sam usually liked to be the one to paint on my sketches. It always felt like he was grabbing credit for the things I drew, but I couldn’t do anything about it because he was a senior and in charge and I didn’t want to be a whiny tattletale.

  Now I smiled and said, “Just leave it to me.”

  The next day, at my locker, taking too long to switch out my books because I knew I could be late for class and it wouldn’t matter, I overheard two seniors talking around the corner.

  “I can’t believe Laurel Meisner’s back already,” said one, whose voice I couldn’t identify. I froze when I heard my name.

  “Yeah, if it were me, I’d pull a David Kaufman and vanish,” said the other. “But she looks pretty good.”

  Flattering.

  “I heard the police found out there was another car involved, some kid from Rose Hills who was driving too fast.”

  “Really? That’s weird, because my mom said that Mr. Kaufman tested way over the limit for DWI and they’re going to arrest him.”

  “Jamie, he’s in a coma. How are they going to arrest him?”

  The voices moved away and I started to breathe again. I didn’t know which to feel weirder about, the fact that people were talking about me or that there were rumors like this floating around. At least, I hoped they were rumors.

  I called Nana, who said, “Laurel, do you really think the police would keep information like that from us? People like to gossip. It gets them attention.”

  At lunch I asked Meg, who rolled her eyes. “Those aren’t even the most creative ones I’ve heard,” she said. “My favorite is the one about someone leaving an anony-mous note at the scene of the accident saying sorry. I mean, people should get creative writing course credit for some of these whoppers.”

  Meg looked at me, and it must have shown that I didn’t find these as funny as she did.

  “You make it sound like there are a lot,” I said.

  “Not really.” She shrugged, then looked at me again. Something shadowy flickered across her face. “Okay, yeah,” she continued, her voice serious now. “There are a lot. This is a boring town. Rumors are, like, a specialty here.”

  “But you tell people when they’re not true, right?”

  “With some of them, of course.”

  “Like what?”

  Meg frowned. “Do you really want to know?”

  Did I? I wasn’t sure, but I said yes anyway, as firmly as I could.

  Meg sighed, like she was prepping herself. “Well, I’ve heard a few people say that the reason you and David weren’t in the car that
night was because you guys were, you know. Together somewhere.”

  I jerked my head back. The thought of David and me and the words together somewhere being linked in any way made me instantly nauseous.

  “Gross,” was all I could say. I tried to make it sound funny, but Meg knew better.

  “I always set them straight on that one,” she said, putting her hand on my back. “Always, Laurel. As soon as anyone brings it up.”

  So maybe that’s what some of those looks were. They thought I’d been fooling around with the Railroad Crowd’s biggest pothead while my family was burning to death.

  I felt the tears hot and sharp in the corners of my eyes, and the urge to bolt to the nearest bathroom to throw up. But that meant everyone in the cafeteria seeing me run out, and maybe someone in the bathroom hearing me puke. And that meant more gossip that I didn’t want to give them.

  So I swallowed hard and took a sip of water, and blinked until I could see again, then shrugged Meg’s hand off my back.

  On my third day back, our school principal, Mr. Duffy, called me into his office. He had a huge potbelly and a bright red face. Some students liked to mess with their little siblings and tell them he was really Santa.

  “Laurel, I didn’t get a chance to attend the funeral, so I wanted to tell you in person, privately, how very sorry I am. How are you holding up?”

  “I’m taking it day by day.” I liked saying this. It was honest, short, and seemed to satisfy people.

  “That’s all you can do. Are you . . . Do you have professional support?”

  For a second I thought he was talking about my bra.

  “You know,” he continued, “a doctor or counselor . . .”

  “There’s someone the police hooked me up with,” I said. “A crisis person.”

  “And what about David Kaufman? Have you seen him or talked to him?”

  “I saw him a few days ago.”