Alone.

I didn’t see Ann for the rest of the summer. Maybe because I had no cell phone, or even a home phone for that matter. Or maybe because I didn’t deserve a friend. Especially her. She was popular.

Me? Well as far as anyone knows, I’m a shy nobody that has bad taste in clothing and doesn’t care about school. Well, who could blame me…My taste didn’t go as far as other people’s went. I was happy enough with at least some clothes. And with school. I cared. I cared enough to pass and graduate. Enough to get out of school altogether and never go back. Yes I was shy, and yes, I was a nobody. So they got it half right.

Anyway, I went to a few clubs and bars. I snuck in and went on unnoticed. Maybe because I abnormally tall for my age, who knows. But I had fun to say the least. I tried not going to any parties, in fear of bumping into Dylan, or even Kile for that matter, who I haven’t given a thought about until now. Maybe I didn’t care about him anymore. I didn’t care about a lot of things lately.

Back when me and Kile used to be friends, he used to say that a poor person who gave a dime to charity was more generous than a rich one who gave hundreds of dollars. In this example, he would be Bill Gates. Only richer.

He was pretty clever then too. For a ten year old saying things like that, I would be amazed.

But none of this is important anymore. It really wasn’t and if I believed one second that it was. I would be lying and delusional.

Tonight, as I sat on the park bench waiting for my head to explode. I had one moment of clarity in which I learned something.

There’s one thing I want more than anything else, and I know I can never have it. I don’t mean Dylan, or Kile. I don’t mean a boyfriend, or finding someone who at least understands me. I’m talking about something inside myself. I want to be brave. And I’m not brave, in case you’re wondering. Maybe I could have been brave, but I guess I’ll never know.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot. The people with the most fear have the greatest opportunity to be brave. A woman who is terrified of water would be braver sticking her big toe I the swimming pool than I would be surfing a thirty-foot breaker in the Pacific Ocean. She would be overcoming. She would be challenging herself. She would experience the pleasure of expanding her world, the freedom of exercising her will.

And then I had a thought. When I was eleven, right before I cut ties with Kile, and what lead me to do my secret that I’ve kept for so long, there was this story going around town. I didn’t know if it was real or not, but it inspired me enough to do something stupid and bad. There was this girl, I didn’t know her name. But years before, in that very town, she committed suicide. She was young, a little older than me, and very alone. It was said, that her alcoholic father beat her for years, as her sister called her names.

When I think of that, I’m filled with horrible, wrenching, miserable guilt. I wish so much I could have helped her. But I couldn’t. So instead, I wish that for one single moment in my life, I could be brave like her. The girl who killed herself.

I don’t know why some women were talking about it, when I eavesdropped on their conversation, but they said it was eleven years ago. Around the time I was born. Which I guess makes it fourteen years ago now. But nonetheless it was tragic and made me realize more that the world isn’t as it seems. I knew my father died, that I didn’t know why.

But hearing a little girl, no older than fifteen or sixteen had died because of herself, brought me to tears. Made me realize that the world was awful. Which then soon after, brought me to the situation that I am in now. My secret. So secret that I cant even bring myself to reveal, let alone let it bounce around in my head, realizing what I’ve done.

Did I hurt my loved ones doing so? Did they even care? Did they notice? Did Kile care about me…the same way I did? But most of all, did I make a mistake?

I hoped I didn’t hurt him when I told him I hated him. I knew we were friends and all, but he had many of those. So I doubted he missed me. And even if he did miss and remember me, he would take one look at me and run screaming in the opposite direction. Either that or laugh uncontrollably.

Why was I torturing myself this way? In my ordinary life I managed to pull off the functional style of a person who didn’t care. But now that I actually cared, I had turned myself into a neurotic, insecure freak show.

I got up from my seat on the bench and left the park not wanting to stay any longer. Besides I wanted doughnuts. I found some money earlier walking around town and finally decided what to do with it.

I hurried past the picture-perfect row of houses that I wished I lived in. Lurid red geraniums still exploded in the window boxes. Decorative little front fences cast long shadows in the late day sun, putting my shadow in an attenuated, demented-looking prison.

After a few blocks, I suddenly paused as the sound of heavy guitar music blared through an open basement window, followed by a raspy tenor voice.



It was a band. For a fleeting movement I wanted to look through the window and listen to more, but just then my stomach rumbled and I decided I wanted doughnuts more instead and kept moving.

I walked past the plastic-wrapped fruit laid out on the beds of melting ice and into the deli, where the extravagant salad bar at it center emitted a strong, oily aroma. It called a salad bar, but it was filled with the least healthful stuff I could imagine. Apart from doughnuts anyway.

A trough of deep-fried egg rolls, chicken blobs floating in a sea of pink grease, and some slop vaguely resembling potato salad if you quintupled the mayonnaise. Who ever ate that stuff? I didn’t know for sure.

I made a beeline for the doughnut shelf. Crullers? Cinnamon cakey ones? Powdered sugar? Glazed? Chocolate?

Oh, who was I kidding? I’d been craving for a sticky sprinkled doughnut for as long as I could remember. If I had money, it went towards something else. But now I needed one. Why pretend any other kind came close? My mouth was watering as I laid the crumpled five on the counter. The pretty young Korean woman took the bill and gave me my change without really looking up.

I said no thank you to the plastic bag and carried my box of doughnuts in my scrawny little hands out of the store, along the side of the street.

I figured if you weren’t woman enough to carry your doughnuts with pride, you shouldn’t be eating them.

My feet went into auto-walk. They knew their way to the park by now. That was my favourite place to eat doughnuts or do just about anything. I chose the perfect park bench, clean and quiet, and sat under a canopy of red-turning leaves that carved the glowing night sky into lace. Hungrily I tore open the box.

Yum.

This moment suddenly contained the entire universe. Hell was eating nothing. This doughnut, this bench, and this sky, on the other hand, were heaven.