The Way I Used to Be

AFTER SCHOOL THE NEXT day the halls are flooded with people trying to get the hell out. I was on my way to band practice, Mara walking alongside me, talking enough for the both of us—filling in the spaces I was leaving empty. I feel like I’ve gone off somewhere else, like I’ve just sort of slipped into this other realm. A world that’s a lot like the real world, except slightly slower. This alternate reality where I’m not quite in my body, not quite in my mind, either—it’s this place where all I do is think about one thing and one thing only.

“Black,” Mara declares with finality. “No, red. I don’t know. What do you think?” she asks, holding a strand of brunette hair up in front of her face. “I think black. Definitely,” she answers. “I know my mom will flip out,” she says, as if I had brought it up. “Well, I don’t care. I just need a change.”

“Another change?” I ask, but she doesn’t hear me over the lockers clanging and the voices shouting, or maybe it’s just that I’m not talking loud enough.

“Oh—did I tell you my dad wants me to meet his new girlfriend this weekend?” She says it as if she just remembered, as if she hadn’t told me twenty times already. “Can you believe that?” She says “girlfriend” like it’s this impossibility, like a unicorn or a dragon or something.

I know she’s been having a hard time with it all—her parents getting divorced, her dad moving out, her mom getting crazier, and now this alleged girlfriend. I know I need to at least make an attempt to be the best friend I was only a month ago. I shake my head in what I hope looks like disbelief.

“Edy,” she says. “You can come over after school today, if you want.”

I manage a smile. But that’s about all I can manage.

“You can help me pick a color. We could do your hair too!” she shouts.

I shrug. I try to stay close to the wall as we walk. Lately it feels like my skin, just like my mind, has been turned inside out. Like I’m raw and exposed, and it almost hurts to even be brushed up against. I hug my clarinet case to my chest to make myself smaller, to be my armor.

That’s when I see him, this guy running down the hall, toward us. Number 12, it says on his stupid, pretentious varsity jacket. I have a distinct sinking feeling in my stomach as I watch him gaining speed, weaving between bodies like he’s on the basketball court and not in the hallway. I hear someone shout his name and something about being late and how the coach will make him do laps. He turns his head and looks behind him, laughing as he starts to yell something back. I see that he’s not looking ahead, that he’s about to collide into me. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

I could see it happening before it happened.

And then it does. Crassshhh: him into me, my shoulder into the wall, clarinet case into my stomach so hard my body keels over involuntarily. It jolts me back into reality. Time rushes ahead, my brain and body overloaded in only an instant. Hunched forward, my abdomen aching like I’d just been stabbed, I stare at my dirty no-name Kmart sneakers. Number 12 grabs my forearm. It feels like his fingers are burning holes through my shirt. I hear his voice, muffled, in the background of my mind, saying “Oh shit—shit, I’m sorry—are you okay?”

But I can’t listen all the way because I seem to have only one thought. Just this: Fucking die fucking asshole fucking kill you fucking die, die, die.

I don’t quite know what to do with this thought. Surely it can’t be mine. But how can I explain those words? They’re on my tongue, about to spill right out into the open air. And I’ve never said such words out loud, to or about another human being, yet there they are. In fact, I can’t think of any other words in the entire English language; my complete vocabulary is suddenly composed of nothing more than an endless string of obscenities punctuated with expletives.

As he stands there in front of me and I stand in front of him clutching my stomach, he looks at my outfit and my glasses and my stupid hair, but not at me. “Sorry,” he repeats, and when I still don’t respond, he adds, “I didn’t see you.” He enunciates his words precisely, as if he truly believes I might be deaf.

He repeats them, those four words: “I. Didn’t. See. You.” Each word like a match striking against that thin, sandpapery strip on the back of a matchbook, failing one, two, three, four times.

Let him say just one more word.

“Ohh-kaay?” he says slowly.

Lit. On fire. My God, I burn.

It’s something new, this feeling. Not anger, not sadness, not embarrassment. It burns up everything inside of me, every thought, every memory, every feeling I ever had, and fills itself in the space left vacant.

Rage. In this moment, I am nothing but pure rage.

I watch him pick my clarinet case up off the floor. He holds it out to me. My hands shake as I take it from him. Carefully, I hug it against my torso again, this time for a very different reason. Because everything in my brain and body is telling me to beat him with it, to hit him repeatedly with the hard black plastic case.

I hear Mara saying, “I think she’s hurt. You should watch where you’re going!” And then to me, “Are you all right, Edy?”

Only, I can’t answer her, either, because the gory scene of this basketball player’s death is reeling through my mind, and it is truly terrifying. Because I’m not supposed to be capable of thoughts like that, I’m not built that way. But I feel it tingling in my bones and skin and blood—something barbaric, something animal.

I force my feet to start walking. If I don’t move, I’m afraid I might do something crazy, something really bad, and if I open my mouth, I’ll say those horrible words. After a second I hear his feet running again, away from me. He should be running; in fact, they should all be running. I’m dangerous, criminally dangerous.

Mara catches up with me and speaks the one word that says it all: “Asshole.” Then she looks over her shoulder and adds, “Although, I wouldn’t mind if he crashed into me a little. Just sayin’. ”

I look at her and feel the corners of my mouth pull upward, and it almost hurts, but in a different way than my stomach. It hurts like it’s the first time I’ve smiled in my whole life. She laughs, and then touches my shoulder gently. “Are you really okay?” I nod, even though I’m not sure if I am—if I ever will be.