Ghost

My spine was still numb from where I sat the previous hour; his phantom was still curdling my tired veins, and the sweet caress of his cheap cologne trickled into my nose like smoke as I hid in my chorus seat.

Mr. Richards welcomed us into chorus, his last class of the first day of school. The crow’s feet near his eyes crinkled as he pretended to smile, all white teeth and a quick hello. His back then turned away from us, scribbling key signatures and quarter notes on the sweating dry-erase board.

Meanwhile, Morello sat against the milk-colored walls, with a face like thunder and kohl rimming her eyes like war paint. Yet she still managed to sit delicately, pondering the music pressing against her fingertips. The sight of her face was a shock to my cracked interior and a rip in the façade I had built especially for today.

The last time I had 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 was like hard liquor in this sea of worn-out warriors. Morello and I had survived our first day, along with everyone else in this freezing room of splintered wooden choir tiers.  She stared ahead, and I joined right in. I couldn’t let our history leak out through my ever-swelling tear ducts yet. It was too possible that someone would see me crack. So I thought about the day in an attempt to stay in one piece.

I woke up that morning, and I had felt stupidly proud of myself for managing to do it. I lifted my head off my grease-stained pillow and I shoved cereal between my teeth, as if I was trying to push the remnants of summer vacation 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 was straight that day, breaking at the ends into pieces of brown, pink, white, blonde. All gone with one stroke of a brush through it, and still warm from the heat of my chipping flat iron.

My bus was twenty minutes late that day, frightening the freshmen with its cargo. Their tiny bodies quaked under the eyes of the hulking seniors behind them. Me, I knew better. Two years after my first day of high school, I had learned to jam headphones into my ears as quick as I could and tamp them tight until the bus reaches school. I did that on this day, this wretched first day, tuning out the tangible exhaustion in the air. The new freshmen scurried off the bus when we reached the jail cell, its brick exterior promising a four year sentence to whoever crossed its crumbling threshold.

My English teacher had a kind smile and short teeth, appreciating the weathered copy of Gatsby in my green-tipped hands. His laugh bounced off the paper walls, and for a while I forgot how wrong school felt with the absence of a hand to choke within my own. The hour went by swiftly and timidly, creeping up on the transition to my advanced French class.

Madame Hitzig, the brand-new French teacher, muttered French obscenities under her breath as we entered her classroom. A class of thirty five children?! Ridiculous. I thought so too, but I sat down quietly and without complaint.

But a nagging feeling clawed within my tired brain. I missed Madame Waldman. I ached for her advice when my mother couldn’t listen. 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. She spoke in a rough accent unlike any that we’d heard before. The harsh fluorescence of the overhead lights made her look stern, like a thorn in the beauty of the French language, stuck right in among the accent aigus and the conjugations 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. Kalen sat next to me and we quietly talked, ignoring the gazes pointed in my direction. The apple in my hand tasted of sawdust, and the cookies in my bag were smashed so I threw them into the festering garbage. I caught Morello’s eye once during lunch, only to be forced to run from her implied hatred.

I walked the halls to the library. It was a journey I remembered all too well from last year. He would fling a pale arm around my shoulders as he travelled to where I was going now. Sometimes he’d depart with a peck on my chapped smile, and sometimes he’d leave with a lighthearted insult. There was no departure that first day of junior year, no fork in the well-trodden road beneath my scuffed sneakers.

He had left me because of everything that happened that summer. He packed his bags and fled to college. He went to seek his Great Perhaps, inspired to do so by Francois Rabelais. This grandiose maybe couldn’t be achieved in Baltimore, the town where girlfriends were kissed by former allies. He couldn’t stand the chandelier of uncertainty flooding his mouse-brown hair every day; he fled to find his future, and I stayed to grasp my undeserved guilt within my quaking sense of self.

So third period, in a fit of frustration, I sat in his seat. I took the computer into which he poured his life the previous year. This class had held his hand through high school, taking into its arms his life, his loves, and even me. The air felt charged with his essence as I listened to a lecture about creative writing; I couldn’t bear how this molded plastic chair squeezed me shut and cut off the people around me. The minute that obnoxious electronic buzzer sounded, I fled the library to my last class, my final class. Chorus.

So here I was, as far away from Morello as I really could be. She resided in the bottom right corner of the soprano section, leading them in some sort of vocal exercise. I was assigned top left corner of the alto section, and I waited and I waited and I waited. We sang a few melodies, and I let myself quietly cry until the final bell rang. I ignored his faint taps on my shoulder, the way his ghost haunted my own decimated skin. No one noticed me as they slung their bags over their own decimated shoulders, and we herded ourselves into buses and used minivans, pretending to be ready to come back and do it all again the next day.