"There is no grief like the grief that does not speak." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

           She always had tangled hair and grape jelly skids on her shirt. Her knees were always covered with Ninja Turtle band aids, because those were the only kind she liked.

She picked at her scabs, feeling deliciously horrified at the oozing slime under the body’s latticework. It was a challenge to peel an entire scab off in one piece. Pearly red beads made strings down her shin, the only jewellery she wore, and she traipsed with her freshly uncovered testament of a bicycle stunt gone wrong. The wooden ramps on the gravel driveway ensured that there would always be a scab of some sort to pick at.

He only noticed her when she tagged along. He didn’t want her around. She was only his friend’s little sister, anyway. One day, he tramped off in the woods with her brother. She struggled to keep up. He told her to get lost. She was just a little punky girl, after all. That made her more upset than being little. She was not the kind of girl he noticed.

The leaves were wet and her trainers were rubbed smooth from dragging her feet on the pavement when she rode her bicycle. She slipped down a shallow bank sprouting naked bush and roots. She scraped clods of mud from her knees and dared to look up. Their eyes met. She wiped her palms on her yellow jumper. Muddy paw prints stained her ribs.  She didn’t cry and her face throbbed with the redness.

“Tough girl,” he grinned, making her feel strangely taller.

Her hand ached. A thorn was deeply embedded in her fleshy part of the thumb near her palm. It was so long she could see the pink prick where it just came through the other side. She wanted it out of her, this foreign horrid thing, but there was nothing to pick at. It festered out just before Christmas. She gave him the thorn and he put it in his pocket. After that, she didn’t have to struggle to keep up.

 The years marched by and they remained friends. It never became anything more than that to him. She positively ached to hold his hand, but her fear of losing him was too strong. She couldn’t bear to risk their friendship.

Sometimes, when he tried some dangerous bicycle stunt or skid his skateboard down a staircase railing, she felt smothered by a shapeless fear. She pulled at its darkness, trying to shape it. She wondered what premonitions looked like. She couldn’t pick the thought out.

Two days ago, he had tossed that roguish grin of his at her from over his shoulder as he walked away. She had just beaten him at chess for the very first time. She could still hear his teasing tone. His chuckle. The thick, tousled curls caressing his forehead. The flecks of gold in his eyes.

“That’s the first and the last time you’ll beat me at chess” was what he said.

She had woken up the next day with the hope that he would come over for his rematch. When her mother handed her the yellow phone, the voice on the other end seemed to speak another language. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Something inside her droned that banal rhyme over and over until her quaking stopped.

Her mom drove her there. The school billboard was filled with the details of the memorial service. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. The sidewalk was there when she opened the door and the car door slammed with a squeak like it always did.

She was late. She was never late to anything, but she had to use the bathroom like she always did before class. Just in case. Her flip flops slapped against the silence. The keening in the bathroom was just the hand-dryer.

She was wearing the intricately braided necklace she bought in Hawaii from the carefully saved babysitting funds. The sharp shark’s tooth dangling from the end of the necklace rested on her breast bone, just beneath her clavicle. Sometimes she would touch it, the sharpest tip, to make sure it was there. She was there.

After the service, when they would come, one by one, to embrace her, she could feel them press against her necklace. It was a sharp pinch of tooth biting flesh. Maybe those embraces would blunt the sharpness and file away the bone. But it didn’t.

She tucked it in her shirt. The tooth was cold. She wanted it close, nestled where no one could see or feel it. That was the last day she ever wore that necklace. She buried it beneath some worthless used stamps in a black shoe box under her bed.