Wrath White - Scabs

She broke down in tears the first day I walked by without speaking. All day I’d been avoiding her, ducking past and pretending I didn’t see her when I would spot her waiting for me between classes. Finally, after the last class of the day, she worked up the nerve to step right up to me and say “Hi!” All my friends were watching and I didn’t know what to do. I rolled my eyes, shook my head in exasperation, and walked right around her.

“Damnit, why does she keep following me?” I yelled, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Fuckin’ crack whore!”

Her strangled sobs were the only reply to my insensitivity. The agony of that heart, shattered, stomped, and immolated by my harsh words, echoed from deep within her. It was the sound of torture. The sound of utter hopelessness and despair. My own heart broke under the weight of that painful dirge but I still did not return to apologize or comfort her. I kept walking, silent in my shame and self-loathing.

What had I done?

It felt like I had just awaken from a dream to find that in my sleep I had drowned an infant or bashed open the head of a baby seal. But I had no such excuse. I had exercised my cruelty while fully conscious and awake.

“Who knows, maybe she is a crack whore? Maybe she did catch AIDS from a trick or something? I mean, she does look half dead.” I told myself, but it was no excuse. My cruelty, just like everyone else’s, was born of cowardice.

I wanted to run; flee from the human wreckage crying out in agony behind me. I felt wretched. Tears welled up in my eyes and I fought them back, steeled my expression and continued walking off down the hall. I could just barely hear my friends laughing beneath the sound of Sarah’s tears. I sat in my next class, staring at but not truly seeing the blackboard ahead, with the hollow eyed expression of the forever damned.

I saw Sarah less and less after that. She would disappear for weeks on end and no one ever thought to ask for her or inquire about her health or well being. It was as if she had never existed. After a particularly long absence it was announced in class that Sarah was in the hospital dying of cancer and that she’d been fighting it all year long. Enduring painful chemotherapy sessions and surgeries to attempt to excise the cancer from her uterus. She’d already suffered through one radical hysterectomy. There was nothing more the doctors could do.

I remember thinking how she’d been fine just weeks before. How she even appeared to be gaining weight and growing back some of her hair right before I had stopped talking to her.

“I just wanted her to leave me alone.”

And she did. Sarah died at the end of senior year, right before graduation. I never went to visit her in the hospital but I did go to her funeral. Her mother recognized me right away. She told me how much my friendship had meant to Sarah. How she’d considered me her best friend.

“She would always tell me how nice you were to her. How you were the only one who didn’t tease her. I think she had a bit of a crush on you. Thank you for being so kind. I know it meant a lot.”

I didn’t say a word. Sarah obviously hadn’t told her how horrible I’d been to her at the end. But I hardly knew the girl. She was just some weird chick who followed me around the school. But apparently the little attention I had given her was more than anyone else had. Enough to make me her closest friend. I held Mrs. Michelle’s hand and we wept together over Sarah’s grave.

Now Sarah’s following me again.

I first spotted her the morning after the funeral. I came down for breakfast and she was standing in my kitchen with the morning light shining right through her, encountering no resistance from her flesh. Sarah looked over at me when I entered the room then smiled and turned quickly away, blushing. I froze, my muscles and tendons locked in fear, staring at her with my jaw hanging slack and my tongue like a dead weight lolling stupidly in my open mouth.

Sarah looked terrible. She looked as if she’d just climbed off of the autopsy table. But then again she’d always looked like that. Her sunken cheeks and thin lips were drawn tight around a tremulous smile. Her eyes were sunken deep into her skull and seemed to be little more than holes cored into her face. I could almost smell the formaldehyde wafting from her pores. At first I thought she was some type of zombie until I saw that she was the only thing in the room not casting a shadow. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there staring at her with all my nerves jangling as if electrified. When I didn’t smile back, her face cracked with a wounded sadness. Sarah turned and bolted from the room, letting out a mournful wail like the sound she’d made the day I’d shunned her in the hallway at school.

She wrenched open the backdoor and slammed it with a loud bang. I was less than a second behind her when she ran out into the yard. Still, when I opened the door, the yard was empty. Sarah was gone.

I didn’t tell my mom about it or any of my friends at school. That would have meant admitting to my mother how cruel I’d been and admitting to my friends that I felt guilty about it. So I kept quiet. And Sarah kept following me.

Next I saw her at school. Waiting for me in the halls as she always had. She smiled that same tepid grin that looked now like a rictus of death and I quickly turned around and stalked off in the other direction, ignoring the questions from my friends who obviously couldn’t see her and could not understand why I was retreating from them. Of course they couldn’t see her. They hadn’t been able to see her when she was alive. Besides, I was the one she was haunting. I was the one who’d killed her.

I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Everywhere I looked Sarah would be there.

She was waiting for me in the bathrooms. I nearly killed myself one morning reaching for a towel as I spotted her staring at herself in the vanity mirror, picking the scabs on her bald head. She turned to me and flashed me that lip-less grin that made her look even more like a skeleton. Her arms and legs held no fat at all and very little muscle and every blue vein stood out prominently through her translucent skin. Sometimes she would be naked with her shriveled breasts partially concealed by one arm coyly draped across her chest. Her stomach completely concave and her ribs pressed tight against her skin. These weren’t the ravages of death I was seeing in her emaciated body. I knew that this was exactly how she had looked in life. I soon avoided taking showers.

I stared across the kitchen table at her every morning as I choked down oatmeal and stirred the runny eggs on my plate with a fork, swallowing hard and trying not to regurgitate. She would smile at me so that her red bleeding gums would show and her eyes would water up as if she really wanted to cry, but was only forcing that ghastly grin onto her face in an attempt to appear friendly, for my sake. Her cheeks were sunken so deep that it looked like she was trying to suck a lemon through a straw and her cheekbones appeared ready to rip through her skin. Her eyes were huge in her shrunken head and stared back at me looking wounded and expectant. I didn’t know what to say to her. I had no idea what she wanted. I wanted to implore her to eat something but then I would remember that it was far too late for that. She began showing up at every meal. I quickly lost my appetite.

The first night she appeared in my bedroom I had tried apologizing for not being nicer to her while she was alive. I told her I was sorry for not being a better friend. She smiled that same nervous unenthusiastic grimace and reached out and stroked my face with her fingertips. I leaped back about ten feet when those icy appendages raked my flesh. I kept forgetting she was dead. By then she had been following me for so many weeks that I had almost gotten used to her.