Penpal (17 page)

It was my initials.

Josh kept talking, but I wasn’t really listening anymore – my eyes were stuck on the piece of paper. I had to continuously and actively refocus my vision, which would blur as my mind meandered trying to make sense of it. I put the drawing in my collection drawer, and Josh went home the next day.

I had always attributed the odd exchange with Mrs. Maggie to her being sick – the product of a mind too young to understand and a mind too old to remember. She was such a lonely woman, and although I was too young to appreciate that fully, there must have been some part of me that did, because I never went out of my way to correct her when she called me by the wrong name.

That night was the last time I saw Mrs. Maggie. It was the last time her yard would be transformed into an arctic kingdom by her poorly timed sprinklers. But, as a kid, you just accept that people come and people go. That’s just the way the world is – they have their own lives, and as they live them, sometimes that takes them out of yours. Only later do you look back and ask yourself: what happened? Where did they go?

I didn’t understand why Mrs. Maggie had left. I didn’t understand what I was watching weeks later when I saw men in strange, orange biohazard suits carry what I thought were black bags full of garbage out of her house, leaving the whole neighborhood blanketed in a faint but festering smell of decay. I still didn’t understand when they condemned the house and boarded it up.

But I understand now. I understand that I had simply gotten the warning wrong. I thought she had tried to alert me to go because my mom was home. But that was wasn’t it. I had heard what I’d been listening for, just as Mrs. Maggie had always seen what she was looking for. Had I been listening more attentively and less selfishly, had I had the capacity to recognize just how profound her confusion and loneliness really were, then maybe I would have heard the warning that she was really giving me – even though she didn’t realize that it
was
a warning. She never said “Mom’s home.” She had told me, with an explosion of misguided joy, what could only be meaningful to me now that I can’t do anything that would truly matter.

Those men weren’t carrying garbage in those bags. I am as certain of that as I am of what Mrs. Maggie said that night and who had really come home, regardless of what name she
called him.

That night, she told me, “Tom’s home.”

Screens

At the end of the summer between kindergarten and first grade, I caught the stomach flu. The sickest I had ever been up to that point was the week in kindergarten that I had been stricken with a sore throat, but the stomach flu was an entirely different challenge. It has all of the components of the regular flu; however, with the stomach flu, you throw up into a bucket and not the toilet because you are sitting on it – the sickness gets purged from both ends. I stayed in bed for almost ten days, and just as it seemed that my body had fought the plague into submission, it was granted an extension, albeit in a
different form.

One morning, just a day or two before school resumed, I woke up and began to panic, thinking for a moment that I had gone blind. My eyelids were so fused together by the dried mucus generated during the night that I couldn’t open them – I had to pry my eyelids apart with my fingers. I had pinkeye.

When I started first grade, it was with a kink in my neck,
caused by more than a week of bed-rest, and two swollen,
bloodshot eyes. Either of these things individually might have been manageable, but as I walked through the door and into the
school, there was a noticeable quieting in my peers’
chatter
as they looked at my infected eyes and awkward, hunched comportment.

Josh had been assigned to another Group, which I had known about for weeks, but eating schedules weren’t
determined
that far in advance. It wasn’t until my class was brought to the lunchroom that I discovered that Josh had also been assigned to a different eating period. So, due to my affliction and the absence of my tablemate, in a cafeteria bursting with two hundred kids, I still had a table all to myself.

It’s a bit poetic that it is so easy to take advantage of those who have no advantages to begin with. After the first several days of first grade, I started bringing spare food in my backpack that I would take into the bathroom to eat after lunch, since my school meals were usually confiscated by older kids who knew that I wouldn’t stand up to them since no one would stand
with me.

This dynamic persisted even after my condition cleared up since no one wants to be friends with the kid who gets bullied, lest they have some of that aggression directed toward themselves. There’s an expression that says “you have to have money to make money,” and while friendship itself is surely priceless, making friends seems to operate by the same rules. The fact that I was relatively personable in class did little to counter the fact that most of my classmates recognized me as the kid who sat alone at lunch. I was unable to make friends in class because I was unable to make friends at lunch, and the opposite held true as well; this loop fed itself for weeks.

In kindergarten, most of my peers had grouped-off with several friends, rather than pairing-off with only one, like I had. This meant that in first grade it would have been difficult to insert myself into their fold, even if I hadn’t been a leper. With no friends, my ability to make any was jeopardized, and as the bullying grew more frequent, potential acquaintances grew more distant.

I came to dread going to school in the morning, to the point that there was more than one occasion where I cried when my alarm clock signaled the start of my day. My only reprieve was waiting for the school bus with Josh in the afternoon so that we could discuss our continued navigation of the tributary, but this simply wasn’t enough to make the rest of the days bearable. Finally, and unexpectedly, my situation was improved by the intervention of a kid named Alex.

Alex was in the third grade, though he was bigger than most of the other kids in any grade at my school. His greater size wasn’t just vertical – Alex was fairly overweight. His parents had attempted to hide their son’s mass by outfitting him with oversized shirts that buttoned up the front and didn’t cling to his body so easily or so tightly. However, when he sat down, the fabric would be stressed, and the openings between some of the buttons would purse, which would reveal the fat on his stomach that the baggy shirt was meant to cover. Of course, no one ever pointed this out to Alex.

Despite his intimidating size, Alex always seemed nice enough. I never saw him pick on another kid, and he didn’t seem to be self-conscious about anything – one of the benefits of not having to worry about being bullied. About five minutes into lunch, sometime during the third week of school, he walked up to my table with his tray and sat down. There were several times when it looked as if he was about to say something, but they were always false starts. He left when lunch was over, and the process began anew the next day.

I was curious as to why he had suddenly decided to sit next to me, but I was hesitant to bring it up; his company had put an immediate end to the shortage of my food supply, and I would be a fool to do anything to jeopardize this new relationship. Ignoring my curiosity, I tried to strike up a conversation with him several times, but he would only ever respond with enough effort to close whatever subject I had broached. I had never spoken with him at length, and so I was having difficulty determining whether he was distracted by something in his thoughts or if he was simply slow. He wasn’t being rude in his curt replies, but they left no room for an actual dialog to develop.

Against my better judgment, I confronted him on the third day he sat across from me silently eating his lunch. He seemed at a loss initially, not because he didn’t know the answer, but because he knew I would ask but had not yet thought of how he would respond. After fumbling and stammering for a moment, he simply blurted it out.

He had a crush on Josh’s sister, Veronica.

Veronica was in fourth grade and was probably the prettiest girl in the school. Even as a six-year-old who fully endorsed the notion that girls were disgusting, I still knew how pretty Veronica was. When she was in third grade, Josh told me, two boys had actually gotten into a physical fight because of her; it erupted out of an argument concerning the significance of the messages she had written in their yearbooks. One of the boys eventually hit the other in the forehead with the corner of one of the yearbooks, and the wound required stitches to close. While not one of those two boys, Alex, too, wanted her to like him and
confessed that he knew that Josh and I
were best friends.

Although he had difficulty articulating it, probably because it was an embarrassing request, I gathered that he had hoped that I would convey his ostensibly philanthropic deed to Veronica, and that she would presumably be so moved by his selflessness, that she’d take an interest in him. If I talked him up to Veronica, he would continue to sit with me for as long as I needed him to.

Because this was during the time when Josh mostly stayed at my house navigating the tributary with me, I didn’t have the chance to bring it up to Veronica, because I simply didn’t see her. Even if I had, I’m not sure what I could have said that would have worked in his favor, aside from simply saying that he was a nice guy. But I needed to convey the message. It seemed like Alex had taken a liking to me and might continue to sit with me regardless of whether I held up my end of the agreement, but whether or not he realized it, he had done me a tremendous favor, and I wanted to return it.

I told Josh about the situation, but he just made fun of Alex. Part of me understood why Josh found it funny, but I insisted that he talk to Veronica since Alex had done a nice thing for me. He told me that he would tell his sister because I wanted him to, though I doubted that he would. Josh was annoyed that people seemed to be so taken with his sister. I remember him calling her an ugly crow. I never said anything to Josh, but I remember wanting to say, even then, that Veronica was pretty and would one day be beautiful.

I was right.

When I was fourteen, I was a freshman at a high school that was comprised of two distinct populations of students. The majority of the students lived in the district for that school, and they attended it as regular pupils, but there was a small percentage of the student body that commuted to the school to attend a completely separate program with a fundamentally different curriculum that was designed to prepare students for college. I was in this program.

The school was located in a predominantly poor area, and as is often the case for whatever reason, this poverty was coexistent with an underperformance of many of the school’s general population. Some of these students had full-time jobs by their junior year, while others simply elected not to come to class. As a result, the school, as a whole, was a failing one. Because the collective grade of the school was an
“F,” its funding from the state had been significantly reduced, which meant that it became more difficult to get the necessary resources to raise the grade of the school. As a last resort out of this true “catch-22,” my program was placed in the school to raise the overall grade without having to address any of the actual reasons why the school was failing to begin with.

I had hoped that the fact that my program attracted kids from all over the city would mean that Josh and I might finally attend the same school again, since it had been ten years since we were in the same class, not to mention the same school. But there was a good deal of stigma attached to attending a program like this, and so I understood why Josh apparently decided to attend his district school. Other kids from my first elementary school, however, had made different choices.

For the most part, this common origin didn’t translate into easier conversation like I had expected it might. But it did allow me to befriend someone from my elementary school that I hadn’t actually known that well when I was a kid, though I remembered him very distinctly.

When I saw him, I recognized him immediately; although his hair was longer than it had been back then, his face hadn’t changed that much, and I could still picture him crying and pouting after our kindergarten teacher scolded him for releasing his balloon too early.

It was Chris.

He had apparently forgotten about that episode, and when I brought it up, he attempted to deny it coolly, but laughed so hard that he completely confirmed it. The memory of him clutching the empty air with his tight fist held just out of the frame of the class photograph catalyzed a fit of laughter in the both of us. I got to know him and his friends Ryan and Adam fairly well. We didn’t have that much in common, in the end, but we had similar senses of humor, and we all liked movies – and that was enough.

As a result of our one common interest, we had taken to frequenting special screenings of old movies at a place we had come to call “The Dirt Theatre.” It was probably nice at some point, but time and neglect had weathered the place severely. I’m not sure if the building was built as a theatre or if it had been repurposed. The floors were level, and rather than rows of fixed seats, there were movable tables and chairs. This latter fact was actually the attempted selling point of the business – their portable furniture was featured in every commercial and advertisement.

The interior layout was so bad that when the theatre was even partially full, there were very few places you could sit and see the whole screen. In some of the theatres, there were actually support columns in the middle of the room that blocked entire portions of the screen if you were unlucky enough to sit anywhere behind them.