Aftermath(5)

Talking to Gran isn’t a two-way conversation – the stroke affected her vocal cords – but she listens. She always listens.

“Mae’s new condo is worse than the last one,” I say. “All steel and glass, and I swear she sets the temperature at sixty. It’s like a walk-in freezer.”

Gran makes this noise that I know is a laugh.

“My bedroom is white,” I say. “White with more steel and more glass. I’m telling myself it’s good practice for when I’m an astronaut.”

I’m not really going to be an astronaut. I said that when I was five, and Gran never forgot. For years, I thought it was an actual possibility, well past the stage where most kids realize it’s like saying you want to become a rock star.

I keep the joke with Gran, though I’m not sure she realizes it’s a joke. Like Mae, Gran’s one of those “you can do anything you put your mind to” people. I used to believe that. Now, when people ask what I want to be when I grow up, I want to say that just growing up seems like an accomplishment. Not everyone gets that far.

“I see the school,” I say. “I’ll let you go and call Mom before dinner.”

I put my cell phone into my backpack. There’s no reason to keep it handy. The friends I left behind were “school pals,” and I doubt I’ll hear from them again.

Sometimes I’d see kids in the corners of school cafeterias, perfectly content with their own company, and I’d wish I could be like that. For me, my own company can be noisier than a table full of football players.

I’m walking up to the school. It is not North Hampton High. NHH had already been slated to close, so after the shooting, they shut it down early. This is Riverside Collegiate, one of the two places the NHH kids ended up. One of the two places my old classmates ended up.

I wanted to go to another school, whatever the travel time. Mae thought RivCol was best – face my fears. I understand her reasoning, but there’s a point where her encouragement starts to feel like a punishment.

I have to meet my vice-principal – Mr. Vaughn – before class. I follow a few other early birds, and right inside the doors, there’s a metal detector. My heart starts thudding, and all I can think is that there were never metal detectors at schools in Riverside before. Now there is one, and it might as well have a plaque on the side: BROUGHT TO YOU BY ISAAC WICKHAM, HARLEY STEWART AND LUKA GILCHRIST.

When I stop at the detector, a girl behind me says, “What? Never seen one of those before, Skye?”

It takes a moment to recognize her. Lana Brighton. We’d been classmates since kindergarten. Lana was the kind of girl you know well enough to invite to your birthday when your mom says you can have twelve kids and you really only count eight, maybe nine, as good friends, but you want your full allotment, so you add kids who don’t get asked that often. It’s the right thing to do. I’d invited Lana to a few of those parties, and she used to sit with us sometimes at lunch.

“Lana,” I say, hoping my voice isn’t shaking. “Good to see —”

“Just walk through the damned metal detector, Skye,” she says. “In fact, I think you should walk through it twice, to be sure we’re all safe.” She turns to the kids waiting. “For those who don’t know, this is Skye Gilchrist. Luka Gilchrist’s sister.”

Blood pounds in my ears and my vision clouds, and I stand there, unable to move, until Lana gives me a push, saying, “Go or get out of the way.”

I’m turning to walk through, and I catch a glimpse of a boy rounding the corner. For a split second, my brain sees Jesse and screams no, it can’t be, that Mae swore he went to Southfield.

The last time I saw Jesse was the night after the shooting. I’d been in my room, sitting on the floor, shaking so hard, unable to cry. I heard stones at my window and looked down to see Jesse below.

I still remember the relief I felt seeing him – the one person I could talk to, maybe even cry with. Then I saw his face, the anger, the rage, and I remembered what had happened, that his brother was dead and mine was to blame. One look at his face, and I shut that blind as fast as I could and curled up on the floor, and cried, finally cried.

Now, as I catch a glimpse of this boy, I think it’s Jesse. But then he’s gone, and I realize I was mistaken. This boy is tall; Jesse was an inch shorter than me. This boy has wild, curly dark hair; Jesse always kept his short and neat. Even the face isn’t right, too angular, too hard for the boy I knew. I’m left with the feeling that the only reason I even jumped to that conclusion was that the boy has brown skin and Jesse’s grandparents came from Bangladesh, and that just makes me feel worse, that I jumped to such a stereotyped conclusion.

I push through the metal detector and hurry to find the office.

Jesse

Skye Gilchrist.

Jesse leans against the wall, out of sight of the school doors. When he spotted her, he backpedaled so fast he nearly fell on his ass.

It isn’t Skye. Cannot be Skye. She left three years ago and never looked back. Never reached out. Never contacted him. Never even said goodbye.

The last time he saw her, he was standing under her window. He escaped the hell of that day and went to the only person he could talk to. He ran all the way to Skye’s house and stood under her window, seeing the light on, knowing she was in there, tossing pebbles at her window, getting no response, and growing more and more frustrated, the stones getting larger until finally she looked down. Looked down… and shut the blind.