Tell me the story of one of your scars
July 5, 2011
Blood tickles my neck like raindrops. The needle curves around the back of my ear, and I wonder what the hell I’m doing.
Alex pulled away from the chair and placed a mirror in my clammy hands, revealing a tiny 12 etched into the skin behind my ear. It’s hidden from my mom, who believes I’ll never marry because of it, and from my dad, who would shake with anger. My second secret tattoo. I loosen my hair from its ponytail and the ink is gone again.
March 12, 2011
I sat on the linoleum floor with a garbage can next to me. Everyone around me is crying. There are all kinds of crying, I noticed. There are silent, manly tears and girls in the corner, weeping together. The people outwardly sobbing are escorted outside and I’m glad. The tears make my stomach churn and I pull the garbage can closer. The florescent lighting is truly awful, and it burns through my eyelids like a bad migraine. Someone gave me gummy bears. Who brought gummy bears to the hospital? I put a red one on my tongue and taste the sweetness and I’m 10 years old again.
Minutes pass, and hours. And then I’m kneeling on the floor beside his bed in a room fit for a doll. I cursed the evil linoleum floor. The melody of the life support machine dings in my ears: Beep. Beep. Beep. It smells like stale blood and hand sanitizer. His family is standing outside the door looking oddly relaxed. I wonder if they’re on medication, or in shock. I hold his hand and it feels different than the last time. It’s swollen, at least twice its normal size. His face is puffy and I can’t see his intoxicating blue eyes. I want to see his eyes.
Yesterday, Kevin was being especially annoying. He copied my physics homework and stole my favorite mechanical blue pencil. While our teacher was talking, we drafted a countdown for the beginning of baseball season. He flexed his newly formed biceps and leaned over. “Look how huge I am,” he said, pulling my hand over his arm. He was captain and starting centerfield and I was the stat girl. Instead of Newton’s laws, I studied the boys’ numbers, matching them to the names. Kevin Gilbert: 12.
And the next morning, he was dead.
March 26, 2011
Dead. I played with the word in my mind, repeating it until it lost meaning. Dead. Dead. Dead. It didn’t fit. But Kevin’s jersey was hanging on the dugout wall and he was very much not in it. The cold metal bench numbed the skin on my legs through two layers of pants. My teeth were shattering, and I was nauseous again. I touched my emergency plastic bag in my jacket pocket but prayed I could make it to the bushes.
Before the game started, Josh reached for the jersey, jogging out to centerfield with the rest of the boys. Someone had embroidered their black baseball hats with a light number 12. Someone else made blue sweatbands. Ryan shaved 12 into his hair.
The boys knelt around centerfield, the jersey laying motionless in the middle. Someone was saying a prayer. Josh raised the jersey up and each player put a hand in the middle.
One.
Two.
Three.
Gilb.
I looked to third baseline. The other team was lined up, and as my boys jogged back, the other players each held out a hand. The opposing teams high-fived silently, carefully avoiding each others’ bloodshot eyes. As each player on the other team removed his hat, I noticed a flicker of blue. They were wearing light blue sweatbands, too. Both sets of boys held their hats over their hearts and looked up to centerfield and out into the sky.
June 24, 2011
I am melting under my bright red graduation gown. All 855 kids in my grade are sitting under the blazing sun, save for one empty chair. It is in the front row, placed in between his four best friends. A single light blue balloon was tied to the arm. The vice principal is speaking through messy tears, trying to put the impossible into words. For some reason, I’m bitter that she is even trying to make it comprehendible; if we can understand it, I thought, then we accept it. Tears ran a steady stream down her worn cheekbones as she began releasing the cage of white doves — 11 for the class of 2011, and one for good luck. 12 doves.
The stranger sitting next to me slid his hand into mine.
“You should say something to him,” the stranger said. “He can hear you.”
Only then did I realize tears were spilling down my face, uncontainable and undisguised. They dripped into my hair and onto my gown. The stranger next to me kept his hand in mine. He never looked up, but I could hear him crying too.
***
Kevin is alive in the light blue ribbons that line the street where he crashed. He’s alive in a newly groomed baseball field and songs by Weezer; in a terrible art class and blue mechanical pencils; in parties with bad music and in stories of fatal car accidents. He’s alive in the number 12 and a pair of soft blue eyes on a stranger. Kevin is gone. But in our scars, he is so wildly alive.
