Penpal

by Dathan Auerbach

  I exploded. “Why did it take them so long to shut off her goddamned phone?!”

  Her crying broke enough to mutter, “The pictures …”

  My mother told me that Veronica’s parents had thought that her phone had been lost in the accident, despite the fact that I had put it in her purse the night she was brought to the hospital. When they retrieved her belongings, the phone was not among them, but they didn’t deactivate the line. I asked my mom why this was – why they had failed to close her account – but she said she didn’t know. But I think I know. I think they just couldn’t bear to do even one more thing that forced them to admit that she was gone. They probably would have kept that line active forever, but they received a call from their service provider informing them of a massive impending charge for hundreds of pictures that had been sent from her phone.

  Pictures.

  Pictures that were all sent to my phone. Pictures that I never got because my phone couldn’t receive them. They learned that they were all sent after the night Veronica died. They deactivated the phone immediately.

  I tried not to think about the contents of those pictures. But I remember wondering for some reason that I couldn’t place whether I would have been in any of them.

  My mouth went dry, and I felt the painful sting of despair as I thought of the last message I received from her phone …

  See you again. Soon.

  Friends

  On the first day of kindergarten, my mother had elected to drive me to school; we were both nervous, and she wanted to be there with me all the way up to the moment I walked into class. It took me a bit longer to get ready in the morning due to my still-mending arm. The cast came up a couple inches past my elbow, which meant that I had to cover the entire arm with a specially designed latex bag when I showered. The bag was built to pull tight around the opening in order to seal out any water that might otherwise destroy the cast. Since I still had use of my dominant hand, I had gotten really adept at cinching the bag myself; that morning, however, perhaps due to my excitement or nervousness, I hadn’t pulled the strap tight enough, and halfway through the shower, I could feel water pooling inside the bag around my fingers. I jumped out and tore the latex shield away, but could feel that the previously rigid plaster had become soft after absorbing the water.

  Because there is no way to effectively clean the area between your body and a cast, the dead skin that would normally have fallen away merely sits there. When stirred by moisture like sweat, it emits an odor, and apparently, this odor is proportionate to the amount of moisture introduced, because soon after I began attempting to dry it, I was struck by the powerful stench of rot. As I continued to rub it frantically with the towel, the cast began to disintegrate into thick white strips that rained down upon my feet while small white flakes wafted into the air and seemed to hover like snowflakes.

  I was growing increasingly distressed – I had put as much effort as a child could into his very first day of school. I had sat with my mom picking out my clothes the night before; I had spent a great deal of time picking out my backpack; and I had become exceedingly excited to show everyone my lunchbox that had the Ninja Turtles on it. I had fallen into my mom’s habit of calling these children I hadn’t yet met my “friends” already, but as the condition of my cast worsened, I became deeply upset at the thought that surely I wouldn’t be able to apply that label to anyone by the time this day was over.

  When I realized that attempting to wipe the cast dry was actually destroying it, I wrapped the towel around my arm and pressed it hard against my chest while leaning forcefully against the counter, in an effort to soak up the water without agitating the surface of the cast. But the wet plaster began to collapse under my weight, and the force transferred down to my weak and cracked bones. Pain arced through my arm, and I half-successfully stifled a scream. I couldn’t fix it myself. Defeated, I showed my mom.

  It took thirty minutes to get most of the moisture out while working to preserve the rest of the cast. The combination of placing restrained pressure on an absorbent cloth while running a hair dryer over the length of the cast was enough to solve the hydration issue. To address the problem of the smell, my mom cut slivers off a bar of soap and slid them down into the cast. She then rubbed the remainder of the soap on the outside in an attempt to cocoon the rancid smell inside of a more pleasant one. There was no repair work that could be done, but she had at least controlled the damage.

  By the time we arrived at the school, my classmates were already engaged in their second activity, and the teacher shoehorned me into one of the already-established groups. I’m sure that the teacher explained to me in great detail what the guidelines of the activity were, but I was so nervous and distracted that I must have misunderstood. Within about five minutes, I had violated the rules so badly that each member of the group complained to the teacher and asked why I had to be in their group. The teacher tried to make peace, but the damage was done; I sat at the table with my free hand in my pocket. I had brought a marker to school in hopes that I could collect some signatures or drawings on my cast next to my mother’s, and as I rolled the marker between my fingertips, I suddenly felt very foolish for having even put it in my pocket that morning.

  After the exercise was over, we watched as our teacher brought a large, rolled-up piece of paper out of the classroom’s closet. While it is generally difficult to maintain the attention of so many children, the size of the object held our interest. We watched as she tacked the top and bottom left-hand corners of the paper to the wall as she talked to us. When the corners were secure, she unrolled the large cylinder of paper from left to right, and we saw what it was.

  It was a map.

  The teacher had us line up to leave the classroom for lunch. When we filed into the lunchroom, the faculty members from each Group guided us to our cluster of tables and corrected students who tried to sit at restricted, yet unoccupied seats. There were no other students in there; kindergarteners had the lunchroom to themselves at my elementary school, and this meant that I wouldn’t have to sit by myself.

  In a year’s time, I would be all alone at a table about eight feet away, but despite the fact that I was surrounded by classmates, I think I felt lonelier right then than in all the initial weeks of first grade isolation combined.

  One of the faculty members was making an announcement that no one seemed to be listening to while most of the kids were chatting energetically. I was eavesdropping on their conversations while self-consciously picking at the fraying ends of my cast when a kid sat across from me.

  “I like your lunchbox,” he said.

  I could tell he was making fun of me, and I grew really angry; in my mind, that lunchbox was the last good thing about my day. I had used it every day at home since my mom had gotten it for me. She would make me sandwiches and put them in my lunchbox, and I would carry it to the white dining room table and eat them. It wasn’t for practice; I was just excited to use it. Lunch that day in school was the first time I had used my lunchbox out of the house, and despite everything that had happened with my cast and the group earlier that day, I was still excited to use it officially.

  I didn’t look up from my arm to face my classmate because I felt a burning in my eyes from the tears that I was holding back. As I struggled to maintain my composure, I looked up to tell the kid to leave me alone. But before I could get the words out, I saw something that made me pause.

  He had the exact same lunchbox.

  I laughed. “I like your lunchbox too!”

  “I think Michelangelo’s the coolest,” he said, while miming nun-chuck moves.

  This was the first conversation I had ever had with another kid my own age that wasn’t guided or chaperoned by my mother; while I had a lot of freedom in my neighborhood, there weren’t any other kids that were my age, so when I played, I played alone. Even though this new dynamic made me slightly nervous, it was a good kind of nervous. I was speaking up to rebut his preference by saying that Rapha
el was my favorite, when he knocked his open carton of milk off the table and onto his lap.

  “Aw. Crap!” he said, and immediately covered his mouth with both hands and reflexively shifted his eyes from side to side to see who might have heard it.

  I tried very hard to stifle my laughter since I didn’t know him at all, but the struggling look on my face must have struck him as funny because he started laughing first. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so bad about my cast and thought that this person would hardly notice now anyway. As we laughed with one another, I thought to try my luck.

  “Hey! Do you wanna sign my cast?”

  As I worked the marker out of my pocket, he asked me how I broke my arm. I told him that I fell out of the tallest tree in my neighborhood, and he seemed impressed. I watched him laboriously draw his name on my cast – pausing before each letter to draw it in the air to make sure that it felt right. When he was done, I asked him what it said.

  He told me it said “Josh.”

  Josh and I had lunch together every day, and whenever we could, we partnered up for projects. We became really close very quickly, to the point that if Josh was ever absent from school, I would feel a bit lost the entire day. We worked well together both within and outside of the curriculum of our grade. I helped him with his handwriting, and when I could, his spelling, and he took the blame when I wrote “Fart!” on the wall in permanent marker. I would come to know other kids, but I think I knew even then that Josh was my only real friend.

  Moving a friendship outside of school when you are five years old is actually more difficult than most remember. The Friday we launched our balloons, the atmosphere was so energetic and excited that, when I had finished transcribing my letter, I joined Josh at his desk and asked him if he wanted to come to my house after school to play and maybe even stay the night. He said he did and that he’d bring some of his toys. I said that we could also go exploring in the woods around my house.

  When I got home, I asked my mom if Josh could come to our house, and she said that would be fine. My enthusiasm was boundless until I realized that I had no way of contacting Josh to tell him. I spent the whole weekend worrying that our friendship would be dissolved by Monday.

  When I saw him after the weekend, I was relieved to find that he had run into the same obstacle and thought that it was funny. Later that week, we both remembered to write down our phone numbers at home and then exchange them at school. My mom spoke with Josh’s dad, and it was decided that she would pick up Josh and me from school that Friday. We alternated this basic structure nearly every weekend. If we managed to make plans far enough in advance, we would even secure permission slips from our parents so that we could just get off the bus with each other at either his or my house. The fact that we lived so close to one another made the arrangements much easier for our parents, who seemed to work constantly.

  As time moved along, I found it more difficult to imagine doing things without Josh. That’s not to say I actively tried to imagine such things, but as an only child, I had never had the disposition to picture myself with anyone else, except maybe my mother. As Josh and I grew closer, however, whenever I thought of a new place to go or a new activity to try, I always reflexively inserted Josh into the scenario. We had so many adventures when I lived in my old house that I find it difficult to remember them all. The actual nature of what we were doing never really seemed to have any impact on how fun the activity was for us. As long as we were together, we had a good time.

  When my mom and I moved across the city during the summer after first grade, I was sure that our friendship had seen its last day. As we drove away from the house that I had lived in my whole life, I felt a sadness that I knew wasn’t just about a house – I was saying goodbye to my friend forever.

  But, to my surprise and delight, Josh and I stayed close.

  Despite the fact that we spent the majority of our time apart and only saw one another on weekends, we remained remarkably similar as we grew. Our personalities coalesced, our senses of humor complimented each other’s, and we would often find that we had started liking new things independently. I would sometimes call Josh, or he would call me, to share information about some new TV show or toy, only to find that it was old news for the other. We even sounded enough alike that when I stayed with Josh he would sometimes call my mom pretending to be me; his success rate was impressive. My mom would sometimes joke that the only way she could tell us apart sometimes was by our hair – he had straight, dirty-blonde hair like his sister, while I had curly, dark brown hair like my mother.

  One would think that the thing most likely to drive two young friends apart would be what’s out of their control. I’m quite sure that many friendships have stagnated when one party is forced to move away – the parents thinking that their children will just make new friends. While I feared at the time that this would be the case for us, I think the catalyst of our gradual disengagement was my insistence that we sneak out to my old house to look for Boxes.

  That night, perhaps because we were old enough to reflect on it appropriately, seemed to cause a rift between us; not a striking and violent rift, but a gradual one – like two continents parting ways. The weekend after our excursion, I invited Josh over to my house, in keeping with our tradition of alternating houses, but he said that he wasn’t really feeling up to it. If I’m honest, neither was I, and so I didn’t protest. But maybe I should have.

  We began seeing progressively less of one another over the next year or so. Our time together had gone from once a week, to once a month, to once every couple of months. Unlike when we were kids, we seemed to struggle to find things to do or talk about. But it was all gradual enough that perhaps we didn’t notice it, even if we might have felt it.

  For my twelfth birthday, my mom threw a party for me. I hadn’t made that many friends since we’d moved, so it wasn’t a surprise party since my mom didn’t know who to invite. I told the handful of kids with whom I had become acquainted, but I was fine with a smaller party; I didn’t want to invite a person just because I recognized him in the hallway.

  About a week before the party, I called Josh to see if he wanted to come. He said that he didn’t think he could make it. My mom had planned a lot of games and activities – there would be a piñata, “pin the tail on the donkey,” and she even convinced a coworker to come perform a part of his amateur magic show. It occurred to me as we sat on the phone in silence that Josh might think he was too old for these activities, and I tried to reassure him that he didn’t have to play any of the games or watch the magician, but he said that he just didn’t feel up to a party. He said, “Maybe some other time,” and we hung up.

  After the phone call, I told my mom that I didn’t want to have a party. I told her that I was too old for those games and that magicians were for kids. I told her that the whole thing was a dumb idea that she never should have had. The conversation with Josh had hurt me tremendously, and, senselessly, the only thing that I could think to do was to try to hurt her. It didn’t work, and she just smiled and put her arm on my shoulder and said, “It’ll be fine, sweetheart.” And, inexplicably, I felt better.

  The day before the party, Josh called me in better spirits to say that he would be there. It had been several months since I had seen him, and I was excited that we would get to spend time together and not have to worry about what to do or what to talk about, since there would be activities. I wasn’t sure why he had changed his mind, but it didn’t really matter to me. He was coming.

  The party went pretty well. My biggest concern was that Josh and the other kids wouldn’t get along, but they seemed to like each other well enough. Josh was quieter than I hoped he’d be. He hadn’t brought me a gift, and he apologized for that, but I told him that it wasn’t a big deal – I was just glad that he was able to make it. I tried to start several conversations with him, but they seemed to keep reaching dead ends. I didn’t know what else to do; I had acclimated to the timid disposition that he had developed ove
r the last couple years, but I had hoped that things might be different that day.

  I asked him what was wrong; I told him that I didn’t get why things had become so awkward between us – they were never like that before. We used to hang out almost every weekend and talk on the phone every couple of days. I suspected that it all really was because of the night we snuck back to my old house, and even though I couldn’t know for certain, my voice trembled and quaked as I told him that Boxes was my cat and that it wasn’t fair for him to hold that night against me for so long. But he didn’t say anything. At a loss, I asked him what happened to us. He looked up from staring at his shoes and just said,

  “You left.”

  I was about to ask Josh what he meant by that when my mom yelled in from the other room that it was time to open presents. I forced a smile and walked into the dining room as they sang “Happy Birthday.” There were a couple of wrapped boxes and a pile of cards, most of which were from my extended family, since they lived out of state. Most of the gifts were silly and forgettable, but I remember that a kid named Brian gave me a Mighty Max toy shaped like a snake that I kept for years afterwards.

  My mom was insistent that I open all the cards and thank each person who had given one, because several years before on Christmas, I had torn through the wrapping paper and envelopes with such fervor that I had destroyed any possibility of discerning who had sent which gift or what amount of money. We separated the ones that had been sent by mail and the ones that had been brought that day so that my friends wouldn’t have to sit through me opening cards from people that they had never met. Most of the cards from my friends had a few dollars in them.

  One envelope didn’t have my name written on it, but it was in the pile so I opened it. The card had some birthday balloons on its face and seemed to be a card that had been received by someone else who was now recycling it for my birthday, because it was a little dingy. I actually appreciated the idea that it was a reused card since I’d always thought that cards were silly. I angled it so that the money wouldn’t fall to the floor when I opened it, but the only thing inside was the message that had come printed in the card.