In strained eye contact and my own two jelly-filled legs, I find myself in solitude as

acquaintances become only faces in Polaroid photos, and my glowing past fades to
a distant echo.
Morello sits against the milk-colored chorus room, with a face like thunder and kohl
rimming her eyes like war paint. Yet she sits delicately, pondering the music
pressing against her fingertips. The sight of her face is a shock to my cracked
interior and a rip in the faade I built especially for today. The last time I studied her
face in such detail, it was pressed against mine and reminiscent of cherry wine in its
forcefulness and slight sweetness. Now, that pretty visage is like hard liquor in this
sea of worn-out warriors. Morello and I have survived our first day, along with
everyone else in this freezing room of splintered wooden tiers. Yet still, she stares
ahead, and I join in. I cant let our history leak out through my ever-swelling tear
ducts.
I woke up this morning, and I felt stupidly proud for doing it. I lifted my head off my
grease-stained pillow and I shoved cereal into my face, trying to push the summer
away from me with the help of stale Cheerios. I patted gold dust onto my eyelids
and slipped mascara between my damp eyelashes, blurring my vision for the day
with elaborate makeup and dead contentedness.
I wore the black Florida dress with my maroon overcoat. My brittle hair is straight
today, breaking at the ends into pieces of brown, pink, white, blonde. All gone with
one stroke of a brush through it.
My bus was twenty minutes late today, frightening the freshmen. Their tiny bodies
quaked under the watch of the hulking seniors behind them. Me, I know better. Two
years later, Ive learned to jam headphones into my ears as quick as I can and tamp
them tight until the bus reaches school. I did that today, tuning out the tangible
exhaustion in the air.
My English teacher had a kind smile and short teeth, appreciating my weather copy
of Gatsby in the green-tipped hands. His laugh bounced off paper walls, and for a
while I forgot how wrong school felt with the absence of a hand to choke. The hour
went by swiftly and timidly, creeping up on the transition to my advanced French
class.
Madame Hitzig muttered French obscenities under her breath; a class of thirty five
children?! Ridiculous. I thought so too, but sat down quietly and without complaint.
A nagging feeling clawed within my tired brain. I miss Madame Waldman. She held
my battered head when things got too difficult to grasp, and spoke to me in French
when no one else could see how much I wanted to be fluent. Elle me manque
beaucoup. Madame Hitzig screamed above this pile of homesick toddlers, these
infantile puppies that could barely understand her salutations. The harsh
fluorescence lights made her look stern, like a thorn in the beauty of the French

language, stuck right in among the accent aigus and the conjugation of the verb to
miss.
Lunch came with whispered conversations in my direction. He left her, they said.
She kissed someone else, they screamed from within their guarded stares. Kira sat
next to me and we quietly talked, ignoring the pointed gazes in my direction. The
apple in my hand tasted of sawdust, and the cookies in my bag were smashed
anyways so I threw them into the festering garbage.
Last period, I dared not pay attention to the seat I picked. He sat here last year. I
would bid him goodbye at the T-junction of the hallway, and he would sit where I
was absentmindedly typing just an hour ago. He fled the state to seek his Great
Perhaps, prompted to do so by Francois Rabelais. I will go there too, to this
grandiose maybe that lurks in my future, but mine will be of stars and Europe. His
path to Pittsburgh wont be mimicked by mine. I honestly couldnt say what that
class was about. I thought deep and hard about the choices I had been forced into,
rather than the ones dictating my own future.
Yet here I am, slumping in my molded chorus chair. Morello has snuck in a stare at
me a few times, and Ive done the same. Her lips elude me as they did before,
before they drove him away to university and me to my own level of hell. I do not
and cannot miss the summer sun that kept me