The 5 minutes bell rang. I crossed my fingers and opened the bathroom door, just a few inches. The halls were filling up with people. I closed the door and looked at the mirror to work on the front of my shirt.
Some one was feeling very generous today and decided to share their lunch on me. As soon as I sat down, a huge smashed potato cannon ball came shooting and hit me in the chest. I didn’t mind that much. I counted myself lucky because they forgot the egg salad.
I couldn’t do rest of school. Not today. There were only two classes left, and one of them was music. Not many people were in that class, most students were employed in the drama club, the gym, cheerleading, arts, or nothing at all. The school didn’t have any problems with students not taking extra curriculum subjects; it just increased my chances of getting caught ditching.
There were guards blocking the exit and the entrance doors. The only way out was the halls, but teachers patrolled the halls very often. I held the pendant Mark gave me in my fist and prayed to God, before slipping out the ladies’ room and in to the empty hallway.
Throwing constant looks over my shoulder, I went inside the music room. This room had a window over looking the football field. The door was half-open and I slid in noiselessly. Our music teacher retired last Friday, but right now, there was a group of senior boys bent over something.
Quietly, I made my way to the window hiding behind the large instruments. I looked out. It was a risky jump; the gravelled ground was three stories below. Lucky for me, there was a tree near the window that looked strong enough to hold my weight. I climbed down the tree and ran off as fast as I could.
* * *
Ian watched as the girl walked swiftly through the shadows, as stealthy as a cat and as elegant as a ballerina.
He had pretended not to notice when she slipped through the door and hid behind the first set of drums. He had kept his mouth shut as she tiptoed around the room to the big window with amazing grace. He didn’t even allow himself to react in any way—he didn’t want to embarrass the pretty little girl who obviously didn’t want to be noticed.
But he was almost about to scream, or worse, when he saw the girl put one foot on the window sill. Before he even had the time to gasp, the girl disappeared out the window. He waited, straining his ears to listen for a bad landing or may be even a scream….she just jumped from the third floor for heaven’s sake! What was her age, 13? She was just a kid!
But he did not even hear a soft thud.
“What’s wrong mate?” some one asked. Ian just shook his head.
“Nothing man,” he muttered and then smiled as he said; “I think I just saw Cat Woman jumping out the window.”
His friends stared at him but Ian didn’t care. He was waist-deep in thought about the little girl who apparently had more guts that smarts.
* * *
I stopped for breath when I reached the wired fence at the boundary of the school. Then I started climbing and jumped to the other side. As far as I was concerned, no one had noticed me.
I start walking down the street to my way home. It didn’t take long. Once inside I took off my shirt and threw it in the washing machine. Then I took a long shower, listening to “Hey Soul sister” by Train. I put on my favorite black tracksuit bottoms and a gray oversized T-shirt. After grabbing some chocolates from the freezer,
I went to the basement to say hi to Pico.
The basement was my favorite place, because it was filled with sweet memories instead of dusty, old junk. Mom and I had spent hours painting the walls a deep red and the floor a warm mahogany. One of the walls was full of pictures. Mom and I called it “MEMORY LANE”. There was a sexy white couch and a flat screen. Pico stood in a raised proportion. Near Pico there was a huge trunk that I had painted antique gold last summer to make it look like a treasure chest. My mom had brought it here. I didn’t know what was inside, but I guessed it had something to do with dad or Mark, because they were the two things Mom never considered appropriate for dinner-time conversation.
The other walls had many things going on. Bookcases, shelves full of awards and certificates of the competitions I took part in—racing, writing, swimming, gymnastics, karate, and of course music. There were framed pictures of stray animals that I had brought home and treated. But the most interesting item hanging was a huge blackboard that we called “The Performance Board”. It held pictures of men mom had dated over the years after the divorce, the most impressive and long lasting at the top, and the least impressive and short-timers at the bottom.
The last one on the chart was a freak name Jamal Khurana, who talked about how healthy beans were although they made you fart the entire time during their date until mom finally got up and pulled the good old “I need to go to the ladies’ room” trick.
The best was and still is Nathan Hale. Mom had been dating him for over a month now. He’ll be coming to our home soon, I think.
I really didn’t know what sort of a father Nathan would prove, if he lasted that long. How was I supposed to know what an ideal father was like? I hardly remembered my own.
I walked over to Memory Lane. My fingers traced a photo of the four of us together, a memory that would never be in reality again. I looked a lot like my father. We had the same heart-shaped face, the same delicate nose, the same hair—his hair was straight with little waves at the front while mine was straight but curling to the ends. We had the same dimpled chin, the same smile—a single dimple showing in the right cheek when we smiled, and even the same mouth—the upper lip a bit too full to match the lower. The only thing different was our skin and our eyes. His were a deep blue and small, his face was pale. I inherited my mother’s skin, which was just a shade lighter than tan, and my mother’s eyes, wide, almond-shaped and emerald green.
Some thing twisted inside me. I took several deep breaths, trying to fight against the moisture filling my eyes. If only Mark was here. He was the only part of childhood that I remembered; the way he laughed when I would trip down the stairs, the way his eyebrows furrowed in worry when I would be playing with animals that could bite……the way he looked in his coffin, with marks on his wrists……..
I was never told why he committed suicide. But it didn’t matter, because I had his pendant with me. I was clutching the pendant now, trying to hold on. I heard a sound like pages tearing, and then realized it was coming from me. I kept holding on, until the shudders stopped and the sobs quieted.
I went to Pico, my faithful friend now and forever. My fingers pressed softly on his keys, slowly waking him up to the day.
Then we both broke down.
I was screaming but there was no sound, so Pico screamed for me. I was crying but there was no sound, so Pico cried for me. I was in pain but no one felt it, so Pico gave his voice an emotion, a haunting grief that you could not run away from.
This voice—the melody of all things wonderful as well as the silent sufferer of all things tragic—was not my way of expressing who I was and what I was going through. It was more than that. It was so much more than that. This composition of notes and silent words was a can opener of feelings that I had kept bottled up inside. Now the bottle was opened and the emotions were being poured into a fancy martini glass with an olive at the bottom. Pico handed me the glass and I drank from it, taking in the essence of what it was to feel, because numbness was my personal brand of painkiller. Numbness was my own imaginary creation of Aspirin that I take a dose of daily, just to forget what it was like to be invisible and unwanted.
