Jo Treggiari - Ashes, Ashes

Lucy flipped the pages with difficulty. They’d swollen from the damp and stuck together, and the red cover was warped. Past the graduating seniors’ portraits, where everyone was posed like they were selling wristwatches; carefully avoiding the formal photo of Maggie, who was smiling so widely, happy and secure in the knowledge that she had her pick of Ivy League schools; past Rob and the rest of the ninth graders who looked like little kids and always would be. She got to her class picture. Ran her eyes over the list of names: Julie, Scott, Chad, Angie—people who’d barely noticed she was alive even though they’d known one another since kindergarten. In the class roster she’d been marked absent, but she’d been there. It was like a bad joke that even her teachers seemed unaware of her existence. She stood at the end of the row toward the back, shoulders hunched and hair pulled forward across her pale face, which appeared to float like the moon above the unrelenting black of her combat boots, jeans, T-shirt, and zippered hoodie.

Chad was standing next to her, but he’d squeezed over so that there were at least a couple of feet between them. God, she had hated him! He’d always acted as if she were diseased or something.

Lucy chewed her thumbnail, remembering how strange life had been that spring. The flyers with the lists of symptoms had appeared, plastered all over school, and it seemed as if everyone visited the nurse’s office complaining of headaches and muscle cramping and fever. A few girls had fainted in class. Lucy had felt perfectly fine. She turned the pages of the yearbook slowly, flicking past photos of football teams and teachers and school staff. She paused at the picture of the nurse, Mrs. Reynolds, looking so neat and trim and motherly in her white outfit.

But she hadn’t been so calm the last time Lucy had seen her, when she was called into the health office for yet another blood test. Mrs. Reynolds had seemed distracted. Even her smooth blond hair, normally pinned in a neat bun, was messily tucked behind her ears, and she’d had dark circles under her eyes. There’d been none of the usual chatter, the casual questions about Lucy’s health or how the school year was going. She’d been nervous, preoccupied. And she’d flubbed the test somehow. Instead of blood squirting into the needle, it had dribbled all over Lucy’s arm and the black-and-white tiled linoleum floor, and quite a lot of it had spattered onto the woman’s white brogues. And although Lucy knew from sex ed class the previous year that the nurse could field the most embarrassing questions lobbed at her by Chad and his idiot posse, she had mumbled when Lucy asked her how many kids were sick and if it was contagious.

“What is it?” Lucy had said. “Strep? Or is it mono?” For some reason there was a coolness factor associated with mono. It meant you’d been kissing someone. Julie Reininger’s rep had been cemented by having mono and being out of school for a whole month last winter.

“Maybe that bird flu they were talking about on the news?” Lucy had continued, and she’d been almost mesmerized by the weird spasm that quivered across Mrs. Reynolds’s fingers and the way her eyes skittered away. And then she’d bitten her lip, as the nurse jabbed the needle into her arm again. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Reynolds had left the room, clasping the full tube of blood and closing the door firmly behind her. Lucy had heard the sound of the lock clicking shut. She had waited, until her sweaty thighs had stuck to the paper covering the gurney and she realized that she had to go to the bathroom. Finally, after looking at the closed door and the frosted glass window, she got up and walked around the small room, sliding drawers open and checking out the plastic-wrapped syringes, the tongue depressors flavored with cinnamon, the model of the female reproductive system all shiny purple and pink plastic—she’d wondered if the colors were anatomically accurate—and blowing balloons with a couple of powdery surgical gloves. She tried not to think about how full her bladder was. One of the bottom drawers held a thick stack of folders. Lucy was about to close it when she noticed Chad Grey’s name and casually flipped the cover open. Chad had been absent for the last few days, and Lucy couldn’t say she missed him. He always had some lame comment to make when she walked past his locker in the hallway, and he liked coming up with stupid words to rhyme with her name. Being called “Goosey” or “Moosey” might not have been exactly insulting, but it was almost impossible to walk to your desk with any kind of poise when a crew of boys was hissing it under their breaths. Maybe he had an STD or something….

A wallet-sized student photo was clipped to the top of the page. A black bar was slashed across his eyes in marker, and the letter D was carefully marked next to his name. Lucy would have liked to believe that it stood for dumb but even then she was afraid it meant something much more terminal. She read: “Student complains of abdominal pain, fever, headache, backache, nausea. No lesions. Subconjunctival bleeding, subcutaneous bleeding. Hemorrhagic variant suspected. Sent to Dr. Lessing/R. Island for confirmation.”

And there was a folder for Hilly Taylor and one for Samantha Barnes and that massive jerk AJ Picard, and, come to think of it, she hadn’t seen any of them around for a while. She had trained herself to ignore them for so long, but now it seemed crazy that she could go from class to class and sit there doodling in the margins of her notebooks without noticing the empty desks. And each photo had been altered in the same way, black bars slashed across their eyes, the letter D written in thick, black lines, and the same listing of symptoms.

Suddenly she had to pee so badly, she squeezed her legs together like a toddler. She kept rifling through the papers and there, almost at the bottom of the pile, was one marked “Lucy Holloway.” It was thicker than the rest. Seeing it made the latest needle hole in her arm twinge. They’d turned her into a pincushion these last few weeks. And there’d been no explanation. Just more tests following the first physical exam, when Mrs. Reynolds had run her fingers over the smooth skin of Lucy’s upper arms, looking for the puckered scar of a vaccination that wasn’t there.

“My parents didn’t believe in them,” Lucy had whispered when the nurse had finally thought to ask her and she’d begun to feel afraid that there was something really wrong with her. It was one of the only ways her straight parents deviated from the norm. She remembered when Maggie had told her, in a hushed voice, about their older brother, who’d died when he was barely two years old from an allergic reaction to a shot. “That’s when Mom and Dad moved out of New York to Sparta, here in New Jersey,” Maggie had said breathlessly, her eyes round with delicious horror. “Because it’s less crowded and people are healthier, so it doesn’t matter.” Then she’d added, “Alex’s face swelled up like a pumpkin, and his hands looked like shiny pink balloons, and then his tongue turned black.” And even though there was no way Maggie could have known all that, the image had given Lucy nightmares for years.

Now she opened the folder slowly, half-afraid she’d see the black bar and the D, but then thinking that if she did then that would indicate it meant something other than deceased . And that would be good, right? Her startled face looked back at her from the photo. It was a copy of the picture on the student ID she was supposed to wear clipped to her backpack but never did. Her thick, curly bangs obscured her left eye completely, and her mouth was pressed into a thin line that almost made her lips disappear, but there was no black bar, no letter D .