Sunshine and Cadavers

When someone dies, everyone suddenly knows them. All the strangers in the world are suddenly your closest friends. Everyone knows everything about you and cares about your well-being. Going to school suddenly became an episode of Cheers only there was no liquor. God knows I was desperate for some. All the popular girls ran up to me in the hallways and squeezed me until I practically felt the Chanel perfume seep into my Black Flag t-shirt. The boys stood by their girls with an uneasy reverence as if I were the cadaver on the table. And maybe I was.

I hated when people acted all bull shit like they didn’t have friends. I had friends. We just weren’t close. I liked to go out on the weekends and have people wonder who I was. They knew me, but not me. People always looked at me as if I were a zombie. If zombies slept with their boyfriends and dealt drugs to their little brothers.

Megan Freeman became a human shield to me. She trailed me between classes and if people approached me to ask about my mom, I would basically throw her in front of me and run. People liked to talk about how fine and upstanding my mom was. She was hardly fine or upstanding. Most people barely knew her except once she won half-a-million dollars in a national slogan competition. She donated half of that to the high school and became a local hero. The rest went to her downward spiral into drugs. She got fired and couldn’t pay the bills. My dad divorced her. But when people are dead, do we ever even pretend to remember what they did wrong?

“They’re staring at you again,” Megan said.

I glanced up at a group of boys watching me like porn. “They always do.”

“It’s because you wear low-cut tank tops,” she divulged.

“Hardly.” Megan was a junior. She was incredibly intelligent, so she took senior classes. I kept her around because her innocence amused me. She was one of the few people I humored with trust.

“It’s true. They talk about your boobs all the time,” she explained.

“And you know because…?” I copied some answers off her paper while she blushed.

“We hang out sometimes.”

“Quit being a liar.”

She giggled nervously. “Their lockers are across the hall from mine. They were talking about them. Loudly, too.”

“Well, they’re note-worthy. What can I say?” I set my pencil down and winked emotionlessly at one of the timid ones in the front. His friends laughed and jostled him, but he gulped like I was a serial killer. But I wasn’t.

The ring of the bell sent me to English where Lori Martin spent the entire period watching me paint my nails the color of darkness. I was the cadaver. Cold and unresponsive. They watched me like I didn’t belong. And that was the only thing they got right about me.