the heel press

Red, Green, Black, Green, Blue, Yellow. One hundred of my classmates filled the room with color, sound, and life. In exactly five minutes I would get the wind knocked out of me by a girl, and leave in tears. The experience would change my life forever, but that was a long way off right then.

I was in sixth grade and it was lunchtime and that was all that mattered. I was being kept from my 45 minutes of freedom by this stupid meeting and I wanted to leave. I leaned back in my chair, raising the front two legs off of the ground and balancing precariously on the back two. I nonchalantly pulled at the gum that was clenched between my front teeth. My teacher, Ms. Needham yelled a hopeless "Keep your chair on the ground" in my direction. She hated me and I hated her, so I ignored her command. Hell, I was eleven years old. I didn't need that shit.

I snickered a smart-ass comment into the nearest available ear. I flashed a cold smile back in my teacher's direction. I hadn't looked up at her when she had told me to behave, and now that I did I noticed a decidedly strained expression on her weather beaten, makeup-caked face. Her relentlessly dyed, currently red, hair seemed out of place. Her eyes were red and glassy. Most disturbing to me, she didn't look pissed off. She looked like she had been crying.

I was shaken by her appearance, but I ignored it. I practiced shaking a pencil, making it look like rubber. I drummed on my knees. I cracked my knuckles. I smacked my gum. I counted the number of tiles on the ceiling. I tuned out the noise of 100 or so preadolescents talking and laughing and horsing around. I was in my own world until the small crowd spontaneously hushed. My attention turned to the door. The principle was here.

Mrs. Carson was a short, round, severe woman with an eerie, wrinkled, Cheshire cat grin; a mouth so large that it looked capable of swallowing a child whole. She was old. Her hair was bright white. I had been in her office more times than I care to mention, and she scared the shit out of me. Today she wasn't smiling, which scared me even more. Mrs. Carson had the same glazed eyes as my homeroom teacher.

We had done something really bad. My heart raced as I thought about everything bad I had done over the past few weeks; I wobbled on my precarious perch, then regained balance, arms outstretched. I had taken apart that chair during lunch so it fell apart when someone sat down, I had written assorted profanities in soap on the bathroom mirror, I had snuck off campus to Seven Eleven after school, I had changed the backgrounds on the computers in the library, I had dropped that mirror out of the bathroom window during woodshop. They knew. I was fucked. My parents would disown me or send me to boarding school or worse; tell me they were disappointed in me. My heart pounded like a bass drum in my chest.

Mrs. Carson started to say something but choked on her words. Wow. She was so pissed she couldn't speak. She swallowed hard and started over. "Kids," she began, "We called you in here today to talk about your classmate, Jasmine." Phew, I breathed a sigh, and felt a wave of relief wash over me. Thank GOD this wasn't about me. "You may have noticed that Jasmine hasn't been at school in a few days." I wasn't paying attention.

Mrs. Carson swallowed hard again, and wiped her eyes, first the right, then the left, before finishing. She cut right to the point. "Jasmine...passed away last night." She had been battling cancer since birth, we were told. She had been in and out of chemotherapy all year. She was dead. 100 hearts skipped a beat. A freight train hit me square in the stomach.

The impact knocked the wind out of me. I looked around in slow motion and blinked hard. I was underwater. I was in outer space. This couldn't be happening. Complete silence. Nothing but disbelief. 100 pairs of wide eyes stared unfocused at our principle, then filled with tears. Several girls started sobbing loudly. My mouth felt dry; my stomach felt empty; I was barely breathing.

My thoughts tried to keep pace with the gut wrenching emotional blow that I had just received. Dead. Gone forever. Not alive. No. Its not true. I saw her last week. She's fine. They're lying and this is a joke. Someone coughed. People were leaving; We were free to go. Someone nudged my shoulder.

I swallowed a lump in my throat as I remembered how happy I had been when the principle told us that the meeting was about Jasmine. I was a terrible person. It was my fault. I looked around at my classmates through a veil of mist. They were not the same. It was in the way they walked, it was in the way they carried themselves, it was in their eyes, something had broken in their hearts.

Red, Green, Black, Green, Blue, Yellow. The colored shirts didnt look so bright as my classmates filled out the door, much older than they were when they entered. There was a new darkness and a new depth in the eyes of one hundred children. One hundred children had just been handed a piece of adulthood a little bit too early. One hundred children had just taken a large step from the womb to the grave. Death was no longer just a word. In one moment we had found out that we were going to die.