An Incomplete Catalogue of Our Interactions

by Candace Jane Opper

You lean on two backrests and swing your legs into the bus aisle. Your left hand is inches from my face. I am fascinated with boys’ hands, their angles and bitten fingernails. I am thirteen and think of boys as wild, dangerous creatures that travel in packs like wolves.

When your feet land, you laugh at yourself, run your hands through your long blond hair and yell something that I either can’t hear or can’t remember to another boy sitting farther back. You are wearing a grey Champion T-shirt—a brand that signifies the comfort of the middle class; I am wearing an ensemble of secondhand clothes from the Salvation Army thrift store. 

The other boy later gets my attention and demands I touch your combat boot, because he claims it is “authentic.” I run my finger along the sole, oblivious to the social dynamics of middle school, as a backdrop of neatly trimmed lawns rolls by the bus window.

At the Memorial Day parade I march with the school band down the town’s main drag. I am fourteen and focused on trivial things: avoiding the trail of horseshit on the pavement, avoiding the humiliation of being hit with stray Tootsie Rolls. The mandatory yellow polyester blazer causes sweat to drip down my back. I’m jealous that you got out of this embarrassing ritual, then immediately guilty for that jealousy.

A man in an ice cream truck sells me a sno-cone that drips a rainbow of syrup down my hand. I eat it on the grass, watching the veterans shoot their rifles into the sky. When they disperse, I look for your grave, but you are not there, among the dead. I don’t know how to find you, whom to ask, and if I do, whether anyone will give me a straight answer.

You are asked during band practice to conduct a scale. We turn our heads to see your reaction because that is what we do in middle school when someone’s name is called. We hope to see them flounder, redden, stumble over themselves; we want their awkwardness to establish our momentary cool. 

To our disappointment, you navigate the orchestra risers with a subtle strut that suggests a sense of poise disproportionate to our age. Your jeans brush against the back of my seat and I feel a familiar tug in my core, as though my organs have stopped what they’re doing to turn and look at you.

When I am eighteen, I write your sister a long, somewhat fanatical letter, telling her I have not gotten over your suicide. She has never met me and I worry she will think I’m unhinged, so I list my return address as the cafe where I work making sandwiches for factory machinists. I believe writing this letter will help me get over you: a boy I barely knew whose death I have latched onto with a kind of zeal I cannot explain.

She agrees to meet and picks me up in the car your mom used to drive. When I get in I think: He’s been in this seat. Like sitting there was all I’d ever wanted.

After school one day, I circulate an illicit Xerox of French curse words that I have photocopied from a language dictionary. 

Where did you get this? you ask. 

From this weird French dictionary my mom took out of the library, I answer, wanting to hold my mother and the library and the country of France responsible for my sexual curiosity.

Faire ça à la grecque, you read out loud in an exaggerated French accent. Your pronunciation needs work. I imagine a scenario in which I am asked to tutor you, and we inevitably fall in love.

What’s that mean? another boy asks.

It means ‘to do it the Greek way,’ you read from the Xerox. What the hell is the Greek way?

We all laugh and lean in closer to the copy, ridiculing the transparent sexuality of the French, pretending it is not our own sexuality pushing against our insides that impels us to do so.

I wake up at dawn to the grunts of a garbage truck. It is Friday, the water bill is due, the seventeenth anniversary of your death, the sensation that, in some dimension, you have yet to happen to yourself.

I keep my eyes shut and let myself imagine you sitting at the foot of the bed, the rough of your jeans brushing against my shins through the sheet. Not a ghost, unless a ghost is nothing more than a sketching of someone into a timeline where they can’t belong.

Hello, I whisper, to no one, and you don’t answer. I see that you’re wearing the boots, but then, I guess I enabled you to do so. We sit in silence like two sandcastles watching the tide come in.

Why is this thirty-year-old woman fixated on a boy she barely knew? my graduate advisor asks me in her office, a cluttered desk between us. 

That’s part of what I’m trying to figure out with writing, I answer. 

What I want to say: This woman’s fixation could swallow you whole.

On the bus you snatch a note I am reading out of my hands and begin to read it aloud to a small circle of people. I do not care that your public reading of the note might unfairly incriminate the note’s author: a friend who will remain a friend for decades, unlike you. At this moment I will trade all my friendships for any opportunity to enmesh my universe with yours.

This letter is illiterate, you say finally, and toss the note back at me. I assume you meant to say illegible, but I do not correct you: the first in a long line of inaccuracies I will let boys get away with, so they feel smart.

At a suicide prevention conference, I listen while a psychologist describes working with a demographic he calls “Adult Children of Suicide”—those who experience suicide loss at a young developmental age and miss out on the benefits of grief support. He describes these patients as often exhibiting difficulty with interpersonal relationships, a foreshortened perspective of the future, and a propensity toward regressing to the initial age of the loss in the face of trauma, grief, or psychological distress. 

“Even a little trauma can block a huge grief,” he says. “Think about how you can hold your thumb in front of your eye and block out the whole sun.” He raises his thumb in front of his right eye and stares into the fluorescent light fixture. We follow, thumbs up, conceptualizing the thoughtful analogy of our emotional shortsightedness. 

I slip out of the conference session during a video screening and retreat to the bathroom, marbled and empty. A wall of windows reveals the choreography of city traffic three stories below, silent behind thick modern glass. I close myself into a stall and start to sob out of what feels like nowhere but of course is not nowhere. It is the delayed release of a sadness I’ve chosen to unleash slowly, sparingly, and alone.

I watch you eat from a pile of leftover Easter candy wrapped in cellophane: jelly beans, neon marshmallow chicks, Cadbury eggs packaged in metallic tinfoil. You slide the cellophane my way, with an offering. I want the sweet burn of a Cadbury egg but instead I take a pink jelly bean. Pink is what a girl would choose, I think, the color of femininity and also of tongues fumbling around each other. It is a strategic move on my part.

Do you always eat candy for lunch? I ask, and you shrug, drinking from a can of diet Snapple. I wonder if you come from one of those families that drinks only diet versions of everything. I know what bus you ride and who teaches your math class and that you wear glasses to read sheet music; later I will know the things a woman finds while tirelessly reconciling a boy’s self-directed violence: how many bullets remained in your pocket, the last thing you said to your best friend, that your mother had just bought you a new pair of sneakers. And yet, the diet Snapple remains a mystery.

You’ve been dead for twenty-two years when I request a copy of the police report. A kind police officer named Gary informs me that the document will cost $11.50 per xeroxed page. Twenty-two pages! I think, not knowing if that’s lengthy or brief. 

The report arrives in a manila envelope on a Monday afternoon. I carry it delicately into the house like I’m trying not to wake it up. I place the envelope on the coffee table and go to the kitchen, where I fix myself a whiskey. The report waits in the other room and I can feel it waiting, as though it is a man who has come to retrieve me for a blind date.

I am smiling, wildly. Stop smiling, I tell myself, but I cannot. I’m reacting as though the envelope contains you, and the smiling is some residual effect of a prematurely extinguished infatuation. I have always been able to do this—to tap back into the electricity of these fossilized emotions. It’s a vampiric kind of superpower that enables me to periodically drain the unadulterated fuel of adolescent lust.

The envelope, of course, does not contain you. Rather, it contains a version of you prostrate and two-dimensional enough to fit inside its manila walls. This version amounts to a stack of xeroxed papers that tell the story of your exit in the detached tones that distinguish law from sentimentality. When I enter these pages, I am immediately grateful for their frigidity: bleak and unyielding like a lake frozen solid under my feet.

On the morning of the day you shoot yourself, I call your house with one of those translucent touch-tone phones whose insides light up. As your line rings, I twist the cord around my pinky finger, cutting off my circulation in a way that is oddly pleasurable. 

Hello? you say. Hel-lo?

This is Candace, from band. That’s what I would have said, but I say nothing, like every other time. Maybe I listen for a moment before I hang up, or maybe I wait for you to hang up first. Either way, yours is a voice I cannot remember: a forgetting that begins here, as I stretch out on my twin mattress. It’s the first warm Saturday of the year, and the April sun spills through a break in my curtains, promising some kind of hollow shelter.

Published April 12th, 2020