IT’S FRIDAY AFTERNOON, 3:30 p.m., and sweltering hot in the basement of Eugene Field.
I was suspended for four days and now here I am, on a Friday afternoon, standing outside Room 322 for my first mandated Grief Group therapy session. I’ll have to go two times a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, for six sessions.
My sister is supposed to pick me up later. She was in a bad mood this morning, looking at the water bill while chewing her cuticles, ruining her pink polish. “It’s like your mom stopped paying everything,” she said.
I sipped my coffee slowly, thinking about what Cake’s dad had said about giving my mom money. I didn’t want to tell Shayna that.
I was waiting for her to notice, too, that there was a big manila envelope from the State of Arizona on the table by the door, addressed to “Shayna Lee Franklin, Guardian.” It had been there for a few days, gradually getting lost under circulars, bills, and flyers for yard landscaping.
She’d sighed and gulped her coffee, checked the temperature forecast on her phone.
“Ah, holy fuck, one hundred degrees and I’ll be out in that truck.” She looked like she might cry, and that scared me. I’d been out there all week with her on my suspension, making some money, but not as much as my mom and I had. She’d barely said anything to me when Thaddeus picked me up for school this morning. Her phone had buzzed and when she saw who it was, she dipped her head in her hands. Ray.
It wasn’t so bad, coming back. A couple of kids stared at me and whispered, but I ignored them. Ellen Untermeyer wasn’t in school, and Kai kept his distance, choosing a seat at the front of Bio again and sitting far across the cafeteria as Cake and I ate lunch silently, still in our weird fight.
And now I’m here.
Room 322. In the basement, by Betty Bales’s wood shop. Also known as the old detention room, before they decided detention didn’t work. Now they do something called “quiet reflection,” which involves yoga and soft music in a stifling trailer outside, behind the cafeteria.
It’s weird to walk through the school hallways with practically no one there. Empty lockers. Empty classrooms. I wonder how I’ll feel, coming back here next fall. Junior year. When all the smart kids with money will have to start thinking about college and “life after.” Like Cake.
Like her dad said, she’s going places, and I’ll just be holding her back.
I would say it’ll feel like losing an arm when Cake goes, but I already feel like I’ve lost most of my body anyway.
Walrus Jackson opens the door of 322, startling me. He’s not wearing his normal nice white shirt, dark pants, and nice tie today. School is out for the day and he’s changed into khaki shorts, a plaid short-sleeved shirt, and Birkenstocks.
“Hello, Tiger. I’m so glad you could come this afternoon.”
We look at each other like we both know what made me come here, but we aren’t going to talk about the Slap Heard Round the World.
“We’re waiting for just one more and then we’ll get started. Go on in, take a seat.”
Inside, there are three kids in chairs arranged in a circle. One girl is bent so far over her desk writing that her dark, straight hair obscures her face, so I can’t tell who she is, but when she looks up, I have to stifle my gasp.
Mae-Lynn Carpenter. She gives me a weird smile, like, I told you so.
And there is Taran Parker from Bio, the one who made fun of my boobs, with his brother, Alif, who has never made fun of my boobs, but has also never acknowledged my existence.
Taran looks almost ashamed when he sees me, but his brother barely flicks his eyes at me before going back to his phone.
That day, when I first came back, Taran said he was sorry about my mom and then he tried to tell me something but he stopped.
He must have been telling me this. That he comes here. That he and his brother are like me. Giant blobs of sadness walking around in the bodies of teenage kids.
They sit like most boys do, halfway down the chair with their legs spread and feet way out on the floor, giant sneakers blocking my way to the chairs; I have to step over their feet.
Mr. Jackson checks his watch. “Let’s get started. I’m not sure where our other member is. Do you all know Tiger?” He slides into his own chair.
Alif and Taran barely nod. Mae-Lynn gazes at me.
“I went to your mom’s viewing. Do you remember? It was nice. I liked the song, and the singing. Nice touch. Homey. My mom didn’t do anything for my dad.”
She’s keeping her face as stiff as possible, but I think I see her mouth tremble, ever so slightly.
She’s a girl-bug in a jar, too.
Mr. Jackson says, “Boys?”
“I know you,” says Taran. He gives me a small wave. “Bio lab, and you hang out with the rocker chick and in the back of cars with official state seals.” He grins.
Taran’s brother, Alif, grunts. “That girl, her friend, she blazes on the bass.” His eyes skim over me. “What’s up with the dress? Are you, like, Aimless or something?”
We all blink at him. “What?” I say.
“Aimless. You know, those people who don’t use electricity or drive cars. They wear old-timey clothes.”
Mae-Lynn says, “Amish, you dolt. You mean Amish. Not Aimless.”
I say, “Actually, I am a bit aimless, if you want to know the truth. And yes, that’s my friend Cake. And my mother bought this dress for me to wear to the Memorial Days dance, only she didn’t ask me first, and we had a fight, and then her brain exploded, and now she’s dead, and I slapped Ellen Untermeyer and that’s why I’m here.”
Weirdly, I feel relieved to say all that aloud. I mean, nobody here is going to look at me strangely, or walk on eggshells, if I say dead, because they have people who are dead, dead, dead, too, or they wouldn’t be here.
Alif says, “Ohhhhkaaaayyyy. That’s a lot to work with.”
Mae-Lynn purses her lips. “God, I hate Ellen Untermeyer. I bet it felt good.”
“It did,” I admit. “And now I kind of want to punch a lot of things, to tell you the truth.”
I look at Mr. Jackson. “Am I going to get in trouble for saying that?”
“No,” he says. “You can say whatever you want here. But there are better ways to express your anger.”
Mae-Lynn says, “When my dad finally died? He was sick for eight years? I took all his jars of medicines and pills and bandages and all of it and burned it in the backyard. It smelled horrible and made my mother cry and the neighbors called the fire department, but I didn’t care.”
Her eyes blaze.
“I’m not allowed to have matches or lighters anymore.”
Taran snickers.
Mr. Jackson clears his throat. “Enough. Tiger, it’s pretty loose here. We talk about what’s on our minds, whatever is weighing on us most heavily at present. What we try to remember, most of all, is that grief slips into every part of your life, every day, every minute. Is there anything you are struggling with right now that you’d like to talk about?”
We all stare at him.
Alif says, “There goes the Walrus again. Always with the giant questions right off the bat.” He turns to me. “Of course you’re fucked up, right? It’s been four years for us and every day still sucks ass.”
His brother nods his head. “Yep. It doesn’t go away.”
“Peachy,” I say softly. “Thanks for the heads-up.” But it feels good to hear them say it. Everyone else outside this room is telling me to be brave and go on, like what I’m feeling is something I’m just supposed to get over, like stepping over glass in a parking lot, or waiting for stitches to heal.
Mae-Lynn flicks her hair over her shoulder. “The way I like to think of it is, when my dad was sick? That was my Sick Life. I had eight years of Sick Life, which meant chemo and hospital beds in our living room and my mom turning into a walking ghost. Now that he’s gone, I have Grief Life, which is horrible in its own way. Sick Life lasted pretty much half my life, but it still ended when he died, you know?”
She sniffles but doesn’t cry. “But Grief Life? That’s forever. And it’s going to really suck. It does suck. That’s the Big Suck I was telling you about.”
Taran and Alif nod. Taran says, “Your mom, she died real sudden, right?”
I nod slowly.
“Yeah, that’s what I heard. Our dad, too. Truck flipped on the interstate. One day we got up and went to school and everything was fine and then we came home and our mom was on the kitchen floor, crying, and there were policemen making coffee in our kitchen.”
His voice gets scratchy. Alif reaches out and takes his brother’s hand.
Which makes me kind of want to start bawling, two brothers who act like dicks most of the time, holding each other’s hands.
“We take care of her now, it feels like. But it’s a lot. It’s a lot. Our grandma moved in. After, to help us. But now she’s sick, too. She’s got a bad back and a lot of pain. Takes a lot of pills.”
Alif wipes his eyes. Taran covers his.
Taran and Alif crying has freaked me out a little. They always walk the halls with a lot of swagger, flannel shirts untucked, those impossibly giant sneakers shuffling on the black-and-white floors, half sneers on their faces. That dumb comment about my boobs that Taran made in the seventh grade, the comment that made me start hunching my shoulders and carrying my books close to my chest.
I’ve always kind of hated them both, but I can’t now.
They’ve been carved out, too.
Mae-Lynn touches my shoulder and I jump. “They’re totally right. Sometimes it feels like I’m taking care of my mom now, instead of the other way around. How’s it going for you?”
I look around the room. It smells like chalk and dry-erase markers and rubber and sadness.
“I don’t…It was just me and my mom. My dad, I didn’t know him. I mean, I still don’t. He’s in prison. I have a half sister and she came out to take care of me.”
Taran says, “Dang, girl, that’s rough. Prison? Shit.”
Mr. Jackson clears his throat gently. “Mae-Lynn brings up an excellent point. We can’t forget that the surviving parent is grieving, too, and that’s hard, isn’t it? Because you are the child, and someone is supposed to take care of you. Are there things we can do in this situation? How can we tell our mom or our dad or our grandma, ‘I’m feeling overwhelmed in my sadness and I need you to help me, listen to me’?”
Alif snorts. “Shit, I tried that and Mom just started crying.”
Taran says, “She’s a mess. And you can’t tell Grandma anything. She’s all zonked out on her pills.”
Mae-Lynn says, “Maybe we should have business cards that say that, Mr. Jackson, and we can just hand one to our moms when stuff gets bad. How would that be?”
Mr. Jackson grimaces at her and looks at me. “You have some very hard things to deal with, Tiger, especially since you’re grieving and adjusting to a new family member in a caregiver situation. You have to process your grief and get to know someone at the same time. And that can be stressful, and cause things, like acting out, or panic attacks. A lot of survivors have post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“I thought that was just for veterans,” Alif says, picking at his nails.
Mr. Jackson shakes his head. “No, it’s for any life-altering traumatic event. You want to forget, but your mind won’t let you. The smell of a person’s clothes. Maybe seeing a car the same color as they had. Things can set you off, make you panic, disoriented.”
I think of my sister, that night she was late, how scared I got, like somebody else was going to disappear from my life, too.
Mae-Lynn nods. “I can’t even watch TV anymore because even seeing a hospital in a show makes me freak out.”
The door to 322 flies open, slamming against the wall.
I suck my breath in.
Lupe Hidalgo stands in the doorway, her girlfriend, Breisha Walters, by her side. Lupe’s wearing her glossy dark hair in two braids and is dressed in a sheepskin vest over a tie-dyed T-shirt even though it’s a billion degrees outside. My heart practically stops. She wasn’t in zero p this morning, so I thought I’d dodged a bullet on my first day back from suspension.
I was wrong, but also…Lupe Hidalgo is here. Lupe Hidalgo is in the Big Suck with us, but why? How?
We watch as she kisses Breisha goodbye. From the corner of my eye, I can see Taran and Alif nudging each other, because of course some guys have to be all weird if, like, girls are queer.
“Grow up,” Mae-Lynn tells them.
“Did ya miss me?” Lupe asks everyone, grinning wildly. Her eyes are wet and pink, but I don’t think it’s from what Mae-Lynn calls Grief Life. Maybe Pot Life.
Mr. Jackson says, “Lupe, we do have rules, like being on time. I’d like you to respect and follow them.”
She salutes him with two fingers. “Will do, Walrus. Now, where were we?” She gazes around the room. Her eyes land on me.
Her face falls. “Oh, right. Oh, hey. Yeah. That’s right. You’re in the shit now.” She looks over at Mae-Lynn. “Sorry. ‘Grief Life,’ tm.”
Mr. Jackson says, “I think this might be a good moment to do some reflection.”
He stands up, passing out single sheets of blank paper and black pens. “I’d like you to take five minutes or so to write down something you remember about your loved one that you miss the most. We don’t have to share. But the point is, you have a space to remember something, a moment.”
I look at the paper. I knew it. I just knew we were going to have to write something.
I can barely get a handle on everything I’ve just heard, from kids I barely know, about terrible things they feel, and he wants me to write about my mom. How am I supposed to pick just one single thing out of the millions of memories I have?
Next to me, Lupe hunches over her paper, covering it with her hand, like we’re working on tests and she doesn’t want anyone to cheat off her. I’m wracking my brain, trying to think of who her dead person might be, because I’ve seen her parents come to school on game days, but I can’t come up with anything.
Maybe I did know about Mae-Lynn’s dad, like maybe she was out of school for a couple of weeks, and when she came back, she was even more quiet than usual, and started sitting by herself in the cafeteria, instead of with her math-y friends. She’s always been on the outer edges, too. Taran and Alif are popular and not in my orbit, and also kind of mean, so I stay away from them.
Maybe I should have been better about seeing her. Seeing Mae-Lynn’s sadness.
But you don’t realize what it feels like, this hole, this missing, until it happens to you.
Everyone is writing away.
I’m just drawing empty squares on my sheet of paper, one after the other.
There are five of us, but how many more kids at Eugene Field are walking around every day carved out and hollow and I have no idea? How many of us are ghosts, going home to oatmeal soaps that will never be used again? Shirts that still hang in the closet after months and years?
I think of Thaddeus. How many kids here go home to parents who are fucked up and do bad stuff, like hit them? And then they come to school like nothing’s happened.
This whole place is swimming with pain.
I look at my sheet of paper, packed with empty squares. My head spins.
Write something you miss.
I can’t. There are too many, because I still miss all of her. She hasn’t been separated into parts, yet, into tiny pieces of memory. She’s still whole to me.
My tears make big wet spots on my blank paper. I put my pen down.
“It’s all right, Tiger. We’re friends here. Everything stays here,” Mr. Jackson says softly.
Mae-Lynn reaches out and pats my hand.
“Everything in good time,” she says. “Because this shit is going to last forever.”
I look over at her paper.
She’s written: making my toast with a pat of butter in the shape of a heart; reading Little Women to me over Christmas when I was nine even though it made him more tired; buying me my kitty; snoring during football games; being my goddamn dad.