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Whenever I write, she comes sneaking onto the page, hiding behind the curves in every letter, sitting and grinning between the spaces. I don't know why, exactly. It has something to do with how we drew comic parodies of Hamlet in high school, and how together we treated school-inflicted overdoses of iambic pentameter by prescribing clandestine readings of E. E. Cummings. She understood the way the words in a poem uncoil and unfurl like chimney-smoke, and she understood how stories grow, how words are alive, how characters are real. We made up tales about strangers, and on long bus-rides and car-rides, she would tell her secrets in that matter-of-fact tone of hers, like an encyclopedia article. It's all because of that day when the power went out and trees almost fell on teachers' cars and the hallways were dark, rain pounding the roof, when we decided to walk backwards and turn chalkboards into murals. It's all because I had never really had a friend like that before.
-- It was early June, my last week of high school. The place was mostly empty, all echoing hallways and final farewells, all lingering mischief, every moment amplified. I'd been carrying the video camera around all week, pointing it at friends up close and acquaintances from a distance. The camera's single red eye was a stand-in for her wide, sparrow-brown eyes. Jill was in the hospital again, and she was missing all of it.
I opened the auditorium door and lead Kent onto the stage. The cavernous space was completely empty, filled with dust, ghosts, and discarded sweatshirts so the thing to do was sneak in and videotape ourselves pretending to give speeches for Jill. (It would make her happy.) I let Kent go first I left him on the stage, at the podium, and tiptoed down into the audience. I found a seat with a good view and turned the video camera on; it beeped twice and the red eye focused. Kent started talking and when I laughed, the camera shook. That ended up in the video. He finished with, "Well, I love you Jill," and stood there for a second before he stepped down.
I passed the camera on to him and climbed onto the stage, up the stairs I'd tripped on countless times. It was strange it was magical. I'd performed (with Jill) on this stage in front of six hundred people, but there was something almost equally nerve-wracking about coming up with a speech for Jill (without her) in front of five hundred ninety nine empty seats, one boy, and one video camera. I started talking anyway, and reminded myself to be loud. I felt my voice try to fill the enormous empty space. Eyes locked on the dark, sleeping stage lights, I gripped the cold wood of the podium and babbled. I wished Jill were here, and I babbled some more, and then I was done and I took the camera back and, after a moment, we left the dusty-smelling, seat-creaking place alone.
-- Now, sitting here on the early edge of autumn, I remember her: quick eyes, pointed wit, a dusty stage and sunlight on the sea. I think that when she left she took some of my words, and now I have to fill the empty spaces with stories about her. This summer I wrote to her, again and again, and when I got nothing back I was scared and a quiet terror lurked around the edges of my heart for a few months. What if something awful had happened? Would her family tell me, from the wide miles stretching across the country, the widening span of time between then and now?
But then she came back, in a few words, like she always seems to do. "I miss you too. Now that I've moved to the city, I have all my old mail and my internet connection. I will write." Every day I check the mailbox for the letter, to see her small quirky handwriting and find another explanation, or a hint between the words that she is better. Maybe someday she will send another of her poems, whose rhythms still get stuck in my head at the most unexpected times.
-- Jill has always been happy in the spring, I think, most of all. She described the new spring as a green womb, and sometimes she slept outside in her backyard. Once, in spring, she wrote about how the wind in her hair made her feel better. The spring after that, she came to visit and she was worse than I had ever seen her. So thin. So broken.
She always comes back in the spring, with her demons chasing her.
Every season is different, and she is different every season. She may be vernal where I am autumnal, in love with red crunching leaves and days that feel like secrets written in smudged ink. (She always understood the smudged-ink secrets.) It was Halloween when she was rushed to the hospital that time, senior year. I didn't know what had happened right away just that Jill was missing her favorite holiday and the world was displaced a little.
(In the hospital she snuck into the children's common room where they were making Halloween crafts. She wasn't supposed to move, and the nurse wouldn't take her, so she wheeled herself in. I try to picture her, feeble and alone amidst black and orange crepe paper. Or maybe she made friends with all the children and made them happier, cut out construction-paper bats and pumpkins for them, and you could hardly tell that she was so sick. You can never really know what Jill will do.)
I didn't know until Kyle told me: "Do you know what happened to Jill? She's in the hospital. She did something stupid. I could just
" Then he trailed off, angry, scared. (He loved Jill, and I loved him. Together we formed a confederacy of loving the wrong people and worrying about Jill.) I didn't say much to him but I thought, What do you mean? You could just what? Hurt her? She's hurt herself so much already that all I can ever do is try to help her.
-- It was summer, the beginning point of summer, wind blowing across the pavement, sunlight glinting off of a caravan of teenagers' cars winding toward the beach. We opened the doors into a world of carnival-sound and sea-smell, racing down over the rocks and lining up on the sand. Kent held Jill's hand and I held Jill's hand, and we all screamed and plunged into the sea, the rush of waves breaking us apart, plunging us under and ruining us with salt and seaweed. I looked at Jill, smiling in the sun, looking healthy, looking whole. She was moving across the country in three weeks, but at least she was out of the hospital now, and I absurdly, desperately hoped for her to stay like this.
She didn't.
I saw her almost a year later, in March. She'd come here, come home, to check into another hospital but not yet. That night, we were celebrating Kyle's birthday. Jill was back and the night was made of a cake shaped like a dinosaur and a skating rink that played terrible music. We were on rollerskates and she was ragged, legs thinner than my arms, covered with thick tights and boys' shorts, a tie-dyed shirt. Her hair was shorn and scraggly, hidden by a bobby-pinned bandana. I felt so far away from her, even though she had inexplicably materialized once again, right when I thought I might never find her.
She was hiding much more, now.
But then, when we went out to a restaurant for dessert after the party, she asked for a cup of hot water and put in her own teabag and I felt like we were in high school again, safe again. We made the teakettles talk to each other and then we hugged goodbye in the sugary March snow. I haven't seen her since.
Well, I've seen parts of her since. Her words, jittery and small, slanting at the end. An envelope, the return address a hospital in Oregon, and inside a letter scrawled in a psychiatric ward. I know she has changed again, but I don't know how, or if she's better or worse, this season. I want to know. Sometimes, something that she would say pops into my head, or I think of a joke I would tell her if she were here. I wrote a lot more when she was here. We used to show each other new poems that we scribbled on scraps of paper torn from homework assignments. Now, I want to read a scrap of a poem by her, all clattering, sliding words, frayed edges and smoky shapes.
A few months ago, my dad said a letter from Oregon had come in the mail. I ran over and snatched the envelope, my heart pounding, anticipating that cramped slanty scrawl. But no it wasn't from Jill.
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