<\/p>\n
I was sitting in a verdant hotel One of them eventually bummed a cigarette off of me (“No menthols?”) and rested “Where are you from?” I asked.<\/p>\n “Virginia<\/span>,” she said in our familiar accent.<\/span><\/p>\n “Yeah? Me too.”<\/p>\n “Where at?”<\/p>\n “Uh, Solstice, it’s this little\u2014”<\/p>\n “No way!” she said. “Us, too.” She gestured at her friend who was looking out “I can’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t recognize you.”<\/p>\n “Well, how old are you?”<\/p>\n “Twenty-three.”<\/p>\n “Well, we are sophomores<\/em>,” she said. “You wouldn’t have ever seen me. “Marlin?”<\/p>\n “Yeah. I’m\u2014”<\/p>\n “Brandy? Good lord,” I said, remembering building tree forts and water balloon “Yeah, that’s right. You remember me?”<\/p>\n “Now I do. I shouldn’t have given you that cigarette. Huck wouldn’t like that.”<\/p>\n She coughed quietly and looked down.<\/p>\n “You didn’t hear?” she asked.<\/p>\n Your body flares at such a question, ready for a physical attack with words.<\/p>\n “No…?”<\/p>\n “Huck died last year.”<\/p>\n I choked. “What? What happened?”<\/p>\n “He met some woman while he was at Tech. He thought she was young, but she was, “I’m so sorry.”<\/p>\n “Yeah.”<\/p>\n I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I sat thinking. Huck was the third It could only continue now; the dark timeline was just getting underway. There The horrible thought was that the bell curve demanded some die young, some Eventually Brandy moved away from me, perhaps sensing that a silent ache was I didn’t tell Ernest when he came over a quarter hour later. It made me scared
\nbar waiting for Ernest to check in. We were both getting away for the weekend
\nin <\/span>Savannah<\/span>, running from pressures unnamed. The barman, bored but
\nhappy in his bowtie and vest, mixed up a gin and tonic for me, and I squeezed
\nthe lime and looked around. A few people were milling around; most of the
\nweekend visitors had already checked out, the others were either shopping
\ndowntown or being massaged in the spa. One half of a couple was sitting at the
\nbar stirring his drink absent-mindedly, and the two underage daughters of the
\nSomeones had apparently just come from the pool and were dressed in bathrobes
\nand sitting in the deep, red chairs behind me, wishing they were old enough to
\nbuy a drink. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nher chest against the bar. She smoked indulgently and stared at the bottles of
\nliquor on the far wall. She messed with her hair, combing it again and again
\nwith her fingers behind her twice-pierced ears. I could smell the cool, wet
\nscent that evaporated off of her skin, and suddenly I was talking to her.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nthe window and rubbing her foot.<\/p>\n
\nMaybe you knew my brother. Huck.”<\/p>\n
\nwars. Huck was an old middle school friend, but we separated in tenth due to my
\ndesire to be out of the mainstream. Brandy was always present back then, but
\ntoo young to efficiently pester for entertainment.<\/p>\n
\nlike, twenty-seven or something, and already married. She led him on, but her
\nhusband found out, some brute or something, and he started following Huck and
\nthreatening him. Huck tried to break it off, but the woman was…I don’t know.
\nCrazy. The guy ran him down one night…found him and ran him down with his car.”<\/p>\n
\nperson from my class who had died since graduation that I’d heard of, and for
\nme the news brought an end to the reactionary idea that it was some fluke, some
\nodd cycle that had finished in the Atlantic<\/span> with Laura Gaynor the summer right after graduation. Now
\nthe reality sat in my gut. After leaving the protective gates of high school,
\nany of us were as susceptible to death as anyone else. Death in school is a
\ntragedy, a presence lost, but after someone’s release into a greater community,
\na less self-reflective population, it loses its horror and becomes expected.
\nSpace and time unwind the bonds formed in a class with nimble fingers; two rows
\naway becomes two states away, and a person’s absence turns them into an
\nimmobile figure in a painting, an impressionist face forever poised between
\nhomeroom and civics class, eyes looking out, waiting for an observer. Then,
\nlater, whether you pretended to hate someone or loved them intensely or just
\npassed them twice in a day, the words that bear their removal from real life
\ntouch the world of the past in your mind like a knife swinging too close to
\nyour own memory of yourself and make you doubt the distance you have crossed,
\nthe seasons you have spent. You are relinquished to the nameless fears of a
\nchild. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nwere ninety-six other classmates awaiting ninety-six other deaths, each one
\nplaced farther and farther away from the point at which we were released,
\nmarching in time away from the crudely decorated stage in the gymnasium
\nclutching the rolled up papers that seemed to guarantee some sort of
\ncontinuation of life…farther and farther away from each other, faces blurring,
\nmoments juxtaposed with others, hearsay become fact, fearfully improving the
\nmyth of our youth, anything to create a better past for those now without any
\nchance of a future. There would be deaths unheard of, deaths unreported, and
\ndeaths assumed. Maybe even mine. It was a sickening feeling, and I pushed my
\ndrink away.<\/p>\n
\nclaimed just for the sake of statistics. People my age were found dead before
\nthey could even land, those shot down in mid-flight from branch to branch or
\nnest to nest and those who sought to just soar and soar and never land, falling
\nfast and hard, abandoning a half-completed dream, a half-realized thought, or
\neven a half-colored emotion for one bad choice or one bad chance. All he did
\nwas touch an unsatisfied woman…<\/p>\n
\nall I was good for now, a feeling she had already overcome during a mild
\nSolstice winter. “Good luck,” I attempted to say, but my dry mouth and throat
\nmade sticky sounds instead of words.<\/p>\n
\nto even consider talking about it. I let the conversations around the corner
\nand against the far wall speak glibly for me, let the distracting chatter in a
\nstill moment take the place of thoughts in my dulled mind. So the early evening
\npassed, light fading through the warm windows and the rocks set into the wall
\ngrowing colder and colder as night crept up the drive, reached the front steps,
\nand stroked the outer walls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,352],"tags":[68,353],"class_list":["post-2502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cass","category-gsarchive","tag-cassander","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2502"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2768,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502\/revisions\/2768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}