by Rena Rocford
Something about this room did not bode well. Death walked the halls here, mere feet from where they wanted us to wait, hoping for a miracle. Its chill breath reached down through me, and I took Rochan’s hand, needing something warm and alive against this horrible place.
“Do you think…?” his voice croaked.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back, my voice husky from the crying. But the words were enough to dispel the macabre feeling of the room. I gave his hand a squeeze. Rochan returned the squeeze before letting go, and then we sat in separate chairs.
Time stretched, and each minute spanned a slice of forever, a new hell. We waited. I watched the clock on the wall slowly turn from four-thirty to five. Mr. Neuve burst through the door, head swiveling until he spotted us. “How is she?”
Rochan stood, shaking his head. “We don’t know.” His voice cracked.
Mr. Neuve met my eyes. His face was set like the time he’d asked me if I could really get Christine to pass two English classes at once. I’d looked at him with confidence and named a competitive price. He’d seen something he liked that day and nodded at me.
Today, I couldn’t bear his truth-seeking gaze and broke the contact first. He slipped into a nearby chair, and the world slowly descended into a cold numb place. I texted my mother, not trusting my own voice. I told her that I needed a ride from the hospital off nineteenth, but that I was okay. For some definitions of the word “okay.”
At half past six, a doctor came in to tell the other group waiting that their loved one had made it through surgery like a champ. They took so much time because they needed to make sure that every stitch was tied properly, given the tricky nature of the injury. They’d had to change tactics half way through the surgery because things were more advanced, the doctor said.
My mind instantly painted a similar picture in my head. The doctor would come back, and he would tell us that they’d worked on Christine. Her blood pressure had just been low this whole time, and that’s why there wasn’t a pulse. They were concerned because she’d hit her head on the pavement, and they wanted to make certain of her condition before they came to tell us the news. If we’d just wait for another hour, we could see her, but only briefly.
I clung to that fantasy, but that wasn’t what my fingers had felt at the scene. Maybe I was reading too much into the moment, my melodrama finally getting the best of me.
Surely they wouldn’t spend so much time on a completely lost cause. It would be inefficient, right? They wouldn’t lead us on like this? Whatever it was, this length of time had to mean something. It had to mean there was a chance. Mr. Neuve’s deep frown started to ease. If she were dead, we would have heard in minutes.
At seven, a somber faced doctor came in. A nurse and the chaplain were with him. I caught his eye, my question on my face, and he gave me a short shake of the head. That tiny gesture hit me like a rockslide, slamming into my chest and leaving me breathless.
The fragile hope living in my heart collapsed.
Like a giant reached in and squeezed my chest, every movement ached. Each beat of my heart ricocheted through my chest, driving a clenching pain behind it. The first sob wracked through me. My knees hit the linoleum floor, but the sharp shock didn’t even register. Inside, something took a blender to my insides.
Forever suddenly got longer than I’d realized.
My mother came in at that moment. She knelt beside me and wrapped her arms around me. I cried harder, being relieved of the need to be a responsible person by her presence.
“Do you want to leave?” she asked quietly.
Until she’d asked the question, I’d had no interest, but once the option existed, I wanted—needed—it. I had to leave this place.
I hated hospitals.
She helped me off the floor. “Rochan? Would you like a ride home?”
His eyes, hollow in shock, searched for the source of the question. He blinked, then silently nodded. Never having left his hand, the last letter waited, crumpled and blood stained.
y eyes ran out of tears, and still there was more to cry. I didn’t go to school the first two days, but on the third, I got up in the morning and wished I could just go back to the way things were before. The truth was that my art project couldn’t wait another day. The material would be cured by now, and leaving it in the mold would ruin it.
I considered going in, breaking into the art room, and finishing the project before anyone got there.
No, only cowards hid, and I was no coward.
When I got to campus—my mom had to drop me off because we hadn’t gone back for my car yet—everyone avoided me.
No one spoke to me, like death was something contagious. The ballet bots weren’t at school, but Sara had made a point of showing up dressed all in black with tissues at the ready for every step of the way. She looked the part of a perfect best friend, puffy red eyes, but somehow, she still managed to have perfect makeup. The crying just brought out the rose in her cheeks.
When the first person offered her their condolences, I looked on shocked. She accepted it gracefully, but with a secret little smile underneath. With the death of Christine, Sara was back to the top of the ballet food chain.
Without checking in with my brain, my fingers curled into a fist, and I stalked toward Sara. Let’s see how she does her victory lap with a black eye.
“Cyra!” Mr. Connor called across the quad.
Like a fish on the hook, I whipped around to see what he wanted. His eyes darted to Mr. Bartlionus and back to me. I did a quick scan of the quad and spotted two other teachers and Vice Principle Laird. No campus cops, but teachers.
The rage evaporated. They were watching me. They saw what she was doing. I scanned the crowd for Rochan, but she wasn’t exposing him to this debacle. I escaped to the library.
Inside, Mrs. McGallen looked up from her desk and nodded at me. She put her tissue box on the counter. “Do you want me to pull some books for you? I have a quiet room back here.” She pointed to the re-shelving area.
When I nodded, she guided me into the room and settled me at the seat. In one of the stacks of books waiting to be resorted before being put back on the shelf was Harry Potter. I hadn’t read them in ages, but I pulled out the book like an old friend. I read through the rest of lunch, crying more than usual. I checked out the book and made my way to art. It was the reason I’d come.
Putting my stuff into my locker and pulling out the project, I started to have that excited feeling. I had never made anything like this, and this material was like glass, only lighter. When we’d poured it a lifetime ago, I’d asked Mr. Connor where he bought it, but apparently it wasn’t on the market yet. The only problem was that it “shattered like soda glass, but was half the weight.”
The clay form, made from a cement casting of my carved hand, had a heft. I had another mold if I needed it, but the hope was to get it right. I could go to the office after this class and just go home. I’d have to decide if I wanted to risk bringing the hand home. It was delicate and worth a lot of points in class. I really needed a full A.
An A plus would be better.
Christine would have called me a coward.
Christine.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to focus.
I set the mold down on a bench and inspected the seal.
Rochan breezed in. In one hand, he held a large manila envelope, and in the other, a soda. He slurped the drink. He looked odd, almost waxy. His eyes were blood shot like he hadn’t slept in days, and his hair, usually a polite tumble of waves hinting at curls, had grown to an unruly puff.
He acknowledged me with a dip of his chin before sitting down at a table halfway across the room. Of course, what would we say to each other today? “I cried last night.” “Yeah? Me, too”?
I bent over and slipped the razor blade through the seal in the mold. If I was careful enough, I could use this mold again and not have to make another from the cement cast. The edges stuck, and I twisted harder. With a squelch, t
he two halves came apart, and I barely caught the one before it tipped over onto the floor.
“How’s it coming along, Cyra?” Mr. Connor asked.
Uncovering a treasure, we turned over the mold still holding the cast hand. It was perfect. The details I’d spent hours laboring over showed perfectly in the glass. I found myself smiling. I hadn’t smiled in days. I’d grimaced at jokes, but not a genuine smile. In the depth of my chest, something terrible, tangled like a snake, began to unwind. The glass winked back up at me, graceful, frozen mid motion. Like a dancer frozen at the peak of a maneuver.
It hit me again. Christine would never invite me over. We would never practice in her ballroom together, trading observations and technique. She would never be here again, smiling at Sara’s antics, or putting the perfect curve to her lipstick to make her face more graceful while she concentrated on dancing.
She would never dance again.
Guilt at having a moment of pleasure, of joy, when I should still be sad coursed through me. The two warred inside me, and even if I loved something so ridiculous, I missed her so much. I choked back a sob.
My glass hand seemed so worthless in the light of that loss. How could I laugh again? How could we continue trying to do things like school and art and fencing, when Christine was gone?
It rocked through me, and Mr. Connor put his hand on my shoulder, a tissue suddenly offered. I took it and blew my nose. The whole class held their breath and looked at Rochan.
Sara came in. She worked at the front office during the period we took art. She collected roll sheets, but today, she had something else in the stack. The letter she’d stolen from Christine sat between her folders.
Her eyes met mine and widened in challenge. She walked up to Mr. Connor’s desk where he sometimes left the roll sheet. Rochan was one row of tables away from her, and Mr. Connor had already moved on. He wasn’t even looking at the front of the room.
The glint in her eye told me everything I needed to know. In this moment, in the height of his pain, she was going to unveil who had really written the letter. I bet he still had it on his person somewhere. He probably had it memorized.
It was his last comfort.
She moved to show the letter, and I jumped from my chair. The force knocked over the stool. The stool wobbled back and forth. I reached out to grab the chair, but it slid through my fingers. It bounced into my table. I changed direction and reached for the wobbling cast. My finger tipped it, sending it over the edge of the table.
It fell in a perfect arc, tumbling through the air. The world slowed, and I willed it to stop in mid air. The glass hand exploded on impact. The pieces sprayed away, raining down on the floor, tinkling with each shard, the ruin complete.
Sara looked up at me, her eyes like searchlights. The other students in the class moved to laugh nervously, relieved that the noise wasn’t their projects.
Rochan stood up, turning his back on Sara, rushing toward me.
Stunned, I just watched as people moved around me. The shards of glass sparkled, strangely pretty, like stained glass. Except it was destroyed, beautiful in its ruin, chaos with a hint of magnificence. A finger, mostly intact, still bent with a perfect nail and wrinkles at the joints, a copy of a thing that didn’t exist. The ghost of what it could have been stole through me, cold and hard.
There was no rewind.
The wreckage had no feelings, and as the gravity of the incident sunk in, people started to look away, hiding from what they worried might come next. “What happened, Cyra?” Mr. Connor asked.
Rochan’s hand squeezed my shoulder. “Oh, Cyra, I’m so sorry.”
People had been saying that for days. The doctors, the nurses, my teachers, people my mother knew, friends, family, everyone. I hated the words. They were so incapable of encompassing the pain.
But they were the only words we had.
Then I realized that he was saying sorry about my art project. I hiccupped.
Eyes like cameras, Sara took in every detail of our awkward exchange. She gathered up the roll sheets and fled, Christine’s letter still in the stack of papers.
My mood instantly swept aside in the wake of raging anger. She would use that letter to torture and torment Rochan for weeks, if not months and years.
Unless I got the letter.
I kept the sharpness out of my smile as I squeezed Rochan’s hand and gave chase. I hit the door by the time Mr. Connor realized I was in motion.
A flash of Sara’s clothes disappeared around the corner, and I sprinted to catch up. Zooming past locker bays and class doors, I hit the corner, skidded, and took off toward Sara. She saw me and started running, but I practiced explosive speed while she practiced perfect lines. That wouldn’t help her in a foot race.
Rage burned through me, driving my feet harder.
I reached her at the locker bays. Twisting her shirt, I dragged her into an alcove.
“Cyra! Don’t you dare!”
I pushed her back against the locker with my right arm. With my hand, I took her pile of roll sheets.
“Cyra, what are you doing? That’s school business.”
“Where’s the letter?” I flung roll sheets to the ground around us. “Where is that damned letter? If it hadn’t been for you, none of this would ever have happened.” I pointed at her chest, roll sheets held between the crook of my arm and the other fingers. “If you hadn’t threatened to tell him, she would still be here.”
“Oh get real, Cyra. This isn’t my fault. You, on the other hand, you were right there, weren’t you. What, they don’t teach you how to do CPR at those fencing classes? And this was always your fault. You gave her the letters. You turned Rochan against me. None of this would have happened if the two of you had left well enough alone. But no, you had to take everything that was mine. First my ballet and then Rochan! Just wait until I’m through with you.”
I dropped another roll sheet onto the ground, and the letter fluttered down. Sara lunged against my arm, wild. She shrieked. I dropped everything and picked up the letter.
“Give it back, Cyra! Give it back.”
“It was never yours!”
“Ladies! What is going on here?” Mr. Bartlionus asked.
“She stole my letter!” Sara said.
“I wrote it.”
He held out his hand, and reluctantly, I passed the letter over to Mr. Bartlionus. My lips pressed against my teeth, and I tried not to look guilty. I’d finally gotten the letter back, and now Mr. Bartlionus had it.
He looked over the envelope, pulling out the letter. He unfolded it with the finality of a strict school mistress, and Sara gathered her papers, scowling. If there was one teacher in the whole school who would know the difference between something written by me and something written by Sara, it was Mr. Bartlionus.
He read the first few lines. “I have to admit, Sara, this doesn’t look good.” He turned the letter around so she could see something. He was pointing at a line. “You have never once used the word ‘whom’ properly in my class, so I doubt the skill has suddenly penetrated.”
Then he turned to me, a very serious look on his face. “Though, Cyra, I have to admit, your timing is terrible. Rochan just lost his girlfriend. I doubt that he’s in the place to think about entertaining a new relationship.”
Sara huffed. “Don’t worry, Mr. Bartlionus. She’s too chicken. She just likes to write letters to him, pretending!”
Mr. Bartlionus looked at me. “Is this true?” He found the date. “Cyra, I can’t say that it’s a very healthy hobby.”
I flushed. “I assure you, it is not what it looks like.”
Sara snorted. “You bet it isn’t. You’d never have the nerve. Because he’d never see you as anything more than his—”
“Sara!” Mr. Bartlionus interrupted.
“What were you going to say, Sara? His fat friend? Is that what you were going to call me? You think that the greatest curse on this planet is not having a thigh gap? Well, you may have a decent body
, but you’re dumber than your point shoes.”
“Cyra, that is enough! Both of you ladies. Come with me now.”
He pushed the letter back to me and marched us to the office.
made it to fencing practice the next day late because I had a sparkly new set of detentions to serve after school. The salle in The City was uncomfortably close to The Academy. It wasn’t just down the street, but I was relieved when I turned off of Nineteenth Ave., as if that avenue led to death.
Maybe a ghost rode in the car with me.
I expunged the thought from my mind. If there was something after death, please, don’t let it be me following around people with boring lives waiting for that perfect moment to haunt them. That would be lame.
The stairs creaked in all the familiar places, and I tried not to think about the time I came here with Christine. Everything was like that now. Her face as she looked back toward us, head perfectly haloed by the headlights bouncing off her hair: that image was imprinted over everything else.
I got dressed as fast as I could, trying not to be really, really late, but there was no hope of that. Classes had already started, and by the time I slapped the Velcro down across my shoes, Ferrero scowled in my general direction.
Without talking to anyone or asking permission, I hopped into the line of fencers all lunging. We all tromped out the pattern called by the leader. Footwork had a universal rhythm to it. The advance, retreat, lunge swallowed the world as I focused on form. Before long, my thighs started to feel fatigued. I hadn’t been working out. I needed to get back into the game.
My throat closed.
Getting back into the game was a betrayal. Christine was dead, but I got to go back to fencing? It was so unfair. Unfair to her father, to Rochan, to the world. The world had lost a beautiful artist and all that was left was me?
“Cyra, get your head in it or don’t bother showing up!” Ferrero’s call pierced the spiral of despair, and I reined in my thoughts, gulping in deep breaths.
I’d been down that road. It didn’t help. That road had nothing I needed, but it was the most inevitable place.