SURVIVAL KIT

by Donna Freitas

  She checked her reflection in the mirror. “Anything for you, my dear,” she said, distracted, patting her hair, trying to flatten it. She made a pout and began to apply lip gloss.

  “Do you have any plans right now—I mean, other than chemistry?” I asked.

  “Not if you need me for something.” Krupa looked at me. “Don’t worry, there isn’t a test today or anything. Tell me what you want to do—ooh wait! Does it have to do with Will?” she asked.

  I blushed. “No, not at all.”

  “Oh well, I figured I’d ask anyway. So what is it?”

  I fiddled with the crystal heart at my neck, hidden from view just beneath the opening in my shirt. Playing with it had become a near constant habit, as if it were my own heart and I needed to keep checking that it was still there. “I want to walk over to the elementary school.”

  “Oh.” She was quiet a moment. “Today is February 4.”

  I nodded. “Eight months.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to wait for Will?”

  “Yes. This is something I want to do with just you,” I said.

  “Okay, let’s go right now. I’m ready.” Krupa shoved one arm, then the other into the sleeves of her puffy red down jacket. She grabbed my stuff from the second hook and pushed it toward me. My heart expanded with gratitude for my best friend. “Come on,” she said, and headed toward the school exit. I followed, pulling on my coat and wrapping a scarf around my neck on the way. Once outside, our breath puffed little white clouds into the cold air and we did our best to navigate the slippery walks, our footsteps crunching on the thin layer of snow that the shovels hadn’t removed. On either side of us were steep drifts.

  “So why today?” she asked. “Is it because of the anniversary?”

  I thought about her question. “That’s part of it,” I said. “But it’s more that I know exactly what Mom would be doing right now with her kids if she was still teaching. I want to see if they kept the tradition.”

  Krupa nodded, looping her arm through mine like we were two rings on a paper chain, and we turned down the path between the high school and the elementary school. I hadn’t been here since the day of my mother’s memorial, but it was time to let myself remember, to go back through one of the saddest memories, so maybe one day I’d be able to go forward again and maybe even move on. When the playground came into view, though, my breath caught in my throat.

  My mother’s death wasn’t a shock only to us, it stunned the entire town. Everyone, her fellow teachers, her kids, their parents, her former parents, all of them expected her to make a full recovery from cancer. She’d done it once, when I was in eighth grade, so why not a second time? Back then she went through the surgery and chemo and the sickness with a smile on her face and cheerfulness in her voice. One day I even returned home to find my mother waiting for me in the kitchen after some of her friends had taken her shopping. “I’ve always wanted to fit into a size two,” she exclaimed. She’d lost so much weight that her clothes were big and loose and she was eager to show off her new look.

  My mother never lost sight of the silver lining in her situation. She read books she’d always wanted to read, watched movies, and let us wait on her for once. She missed a full year of school, but her colleagues pooled their sick days so she didn’t run out—they were as determined as Mom that she would be teaching at the beginning of the next school year. And she was, like she’d never been sick.

  The doctors called Mom a miracle.

  But they warned us, too. I’d never forget that part. Dad, Jim, and I were talking to her oncologist after her very last treatment—I was about to start as a freshman at the high school. We were eager to hear her say the cancer was gone, every last bit. “So she’s totally better, right? You got it all out?” I asked her.

  Dad and Jim nodded, as if this would help make it true.

  Dr. Stellar sighed and leaned forward in her chair. “There is no cure for cancer,” she told us, emphasizing no and cure. “Your wife,” she said to Dad, then turned to Jim and me, “your mother will always have cancer.”

  This wasn’t exactly new information. Everyone knows there isn’t a cure—your brain absorbs this unconsciously from ads you see on television and all those races for the cure that people sponsor. But when someone you love is diagnosed, all rationality disappears. You think there has to be exceptions to this rule, and I wanted Dr. Stellar to tell us that Mom was one of these.

  “The good news is that your mother is in remission, and hopefully she will be in remission for years. So no more treatments for now,” she said with a smile, but she wasn’t finished yet. “You should know, though, that when the cancer comes back, and chances are it will come back”—Dr. Stellar paused to let this sink in, preparing us—“the kind of cancer she has is virulent. It’s aggressive. When it comes back, it’s very likely that this will be it.” She stopped, looking at each of us, one by one, straight in the eyes. She wanted us to understand the full meaning of her words.

  We didn’t say anything. We were so happy about Mom’s recovery that we didn’t let ourselves truly hear this last part. We convinced ourselves that Mom was too full of life to ever let cancer win. But Dr. Stellar was right in the end, and when it happened we weren’t prepared.

  When my mother got sick again last April everyone assumed she would be okay. The teachers were ready to donate their sick days again, and the kids at school made get well cards and art to decorate her hospital room. Mobiles hung from the ceiling and bright construction-paper flowers lined the walls around all those blinking and beeping machines. It was a rainbow everywhere you looked.

  But the beginning of June, just before the school year ended, Mom died.

  Having a teacher die was complicated, we found out, especially for kids as young as my mother’s students. They were confused about where she went and why she didn’t come back, so the elementary school was left with a dilemma: how to help Mom’s kids cope, even as they tried to process this unexpected loss themselves. They decided to hold a memorial service a few days after Mom’s funeral. They invited my family and we went, of course—we felt we had to even though the last thing we wanted was to go to another event centered around Mom’s death.

  It was gorgeous that day, the sun high in the sky. “Just drive around back,” one of the administrators told Dad as she directed cars to the parking lot next to the nursery school playground. Children were everywhere, milling around with their parents and other teachers, everyone with markers and pens and crayons and little scraps of paper—they were so busy drawing and scribbling. One of Mom’s colleagues asked if we wanted to join in and I just shook my head no and stood there frozen.

  They’d brought in a tree—a birch, Mom’s favorite—and planted it on the playground. Kids were patting the dirt around the bottom like this was a game or just another one of Mom’s projects. Then, Mrs. Delaney, my third-grade teacher, gathered everyone in a circle around the tree and led them in a song.

  My father, brother, and I hung back, watching from afar.

  When I heard the children’s voices, so high and sweet, I just about lost it. I held my breath, pressed my palms against my cheeks, telling myself it would be over soon, the song and the memorial, too. These were three- and four-year-olds after all and their attention spans almost didn’t exist. When the singing came to an end, I got ready to leave—I thought it was over and we could finally, thankfully, go home again.

  But there was one more thing on their agenda and we found out what everyone had been writing earlier on: notes to my mother, colorful letters of goodbye and best wishes and we miss you. With the help of the parents, her kids began attaching these to kites, of all things.

  Kites. Real ones.

  My chest tightened and I twisted my body away, pushing my fist against my mouth, elbows digging into my sides. Did they really expect my family to endure this? Kites were suddenly everywhere I turned, beautiful, colorful ones, the simple diamond-shaped kind, striped, polka-dotted, rainbow, a
ll of them grasped in the children’s hands with their parents helping to hold on.

  When the children were ready, they let them up.

  The blue sky filled with bright swaths of color, the letters to Mom on lined notebook paper and stationery flapping in the wind. It was a perfect day for this. Mothers and fathers ran with their kids across the playground, helping them let the string out and pull it back to keep the kites high and dancing in the wind.

  She would have loved it—I could almost hear Mom’s voice, filled with joy at the sight and clapping her hands, staring up at the spectacle of it all.

  “Wave goodbye to Miss Ellie,” Mrs. Delaney called out, as we stood there, our eyes turned toward the heavens watching those kites, listening as the kids chorused their loud farewells to my mother, waving their hands above their heads as if they could really see her floating up there, somewhere.

  I rushed inside the school, seeking relief in the darkened hallways, only to find that entire walls were packed with finger paintings my mother’s kids had made of her. I sank to the floor and curled into a ball, my head tucked into my knees. I would never come back here again. Ever.

  I hadn’t stepped foot near the elementary school since.

  “I don’t want to go in,” I explained when Krupa headed for the entrance.

  “No? But I thought—”

  “Let’s go around back.”

  “Okay.”

  We turned down a path, and when we reached the end of the brick building and rounded the corner, we stopped. “Here, right?” She looked at me, her eyes asking for permission to go farther.

  I nodded.

  The nursery school playground showed signs of kids recently playing in the snow. Three short snowmen rose up like thick, rounded stumps, and a snow fort, maybe an igloo, was apparent from the big mound in the corner. My eyes landed on my mother’s birch tree along the back edge of the fence, its bark peeled white and rippled with brown, its branches edged in ice as if it was covered in crystal, just like the heart Mom gave me.

  Krupa walked straight up to the tree. “It’s so pretty in the snow.” With a mittened hand she ran her fingers along the smooth, glassy surface on the lowest branch. “Rose.” She beckoned.

  I shook my head, and instead I walked toward the window to my mother’s classroom, my feet sinking into the snow, the drifts that became deeper with each step.

  Please don’t let it all be gone.

  When I reached the window I stopped and closed my eyes, preparing myself. “Oh,” I hiccuped as I peered through the glass. Krupa’s footsteps crunched up behind me and together we stared inside. The kids were already gone, but hanging from the ceiling, from all different heights, were hundreds of snowflakes, the kind you make by folding a piece of paper again and again, using scissors to cut out tiny triangles and squares, or, if you feel ambitious, stars and hearts and other shapes, too. You might cover them in glitter or sparkles or sequins, or maybe leave them plain and beautiful all on their own. Every year, Mom’s kids began making snowflakes on the day of the first snow and from then on throughout winter so that eventually the classroom’s ceiling would look like a perpetual snowfall. Some were sparkly, others gigantic, and still others miniature, like tiny masterpieces.

  “Rose,” Krupa said, putting both hands on the brick ledge along the bottom of the window, standing on her toes for a better view. “They didn’t forget.”

  I nodded because I couldn’t quite speak. It felt as though my mother was still here, still a part of this place.

  “Look at that one,” Krupa said, and laughed, pointing at a snowflake so big and heavy with decorations it crinkled from the glue and swayed heavily on its string. “And that glittery one over there,” she said, about another, and then another, until eventually I joined her.

  I thought about love as we stood there, the day turning to dusk and the temperature dropping, and my heart, the one inside of me, became fuller.

  Silently Krupa and I made our way back through the snow on the playground and down the path across the school grounds. It started to flurry, soft snowflakes falling from the sky onto our cheeks and noses. They swirled around us like magic.

  “Thank you,” I whispered to Krupa when we were ready to say our goodbyes.

  “Of course,” she said, and turned one way, toward her house, as I turned the other, toward mine, slowly moving forward, one foot in front of the other.

  28

  ARE YOU GONNA BE MY GIRL

  Valentine’s Day arrived and by late morning I was carrying a dozen red roses. Well, almost���there were eleven so far. As I came down the corridor toward our locker, Krupa eyed the bouquet with suspicion. “I know those aren’t from Will—he’s not the showy type.”

  I shook my head.

  “Please tell me they aren’t from Chris. Tell me that he’s not still trying to get back together with you after that mistletoe debacle.”

  “I’m as surprised as you and a bit overwhelmed. I thought he’d given up.”

  A worried look came over her face. “You’re not going to consider—”

  “Definitely not.”

  “So it’s settled: you will give them back.”

  The fragrance of the flowers was almost overpowering. “Krupa, I’m not going to be mean about it, and besides, I haven’t even seen him yet.”

  She slid one rose from the bunch and mashed the crimson petals against her nose so hard a few fell onto the carpet. She made a face. “Then how did you get these?”

  “You don’t even want to know,” I said.

  Krupa began to pluck the petals on the rose she held. “You love him, you love him not, you love him …” she said, watching them fall softly to the ground. She plucked the last. “You love him not.” She rolled her fingers across its velvety red surface and smiled. “I guess that decision’s made.”

  “Hilarious.”

  She slumped against the wall and sighed. “All right, tell me how he did it.”

  “He orchestrated some crazy, football-style ‘Rose and Roses’ blitz—that’s what Tony told me when I demanded an explanation. Eleven different football players have walked up to me today, one after the other, each one handing me a single rose.” I gestured toward the little white tags around the stems. “Take a look.”

  She grabbed the paper and read. “Oh my god, you are kidding me: ‘For my one and only Rose.’ How cheesy!”

  I dropped my arm so the bouquet swished toward the floor, the petals rustling in the air. “I know, but that’s Chris.”

  “Just promise me you won’t fall under his spell again.”

  “We’re over, okay?”

  “Good,” she said.

  I offered her the bouquet. “Please take them.”

  She made a face. “I don’t want them.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Why don’t I toss them?” Krupa suggested with a grin.

  “You never liked him, did you?”

  She just shrugged.

  “How about this? You give them to a freshman who looks forlorn and lonely today. Or eleven different freshmen. You decide.”

  Krupa’s eyes lit up and she grabbed the bunch from me. “Ooh, I like the idea of playing Cupid. And, Rose, make sure you look inside our locker before you go to class. There’s something there for you and it’s way better than these,” she said, shaking the bouquet so hard that dark red petals rained onto the floor. “Anyway!” She skipped off leaving a trail behind her.

  “Remember to take the tags off first,” I called after her, and dropped my bag to the ground. When I unlocked the door and saw what was there, I gasped.

  A single red gerbera daisy was on the very top shelf.

  Its black center was surrounded by row upon row of red, radiating outward. The petals were long and thin, the color vibrant. I brought it close to my face and smiled, the silky feel of the flower tickling my chin. My heart beat so quick and hard I thought my pendant must be pulsing against my chest. I thought back to that morning in Septem
ber and the flower I’d picked, remembering how Will had been there in the yard, working. Spinning the stem in my hand like a pinwheel, I watched the blur of the red twirl.

  What a sweet gesture. So thoughtful, so special.

  So Will.

  I had to find him.

  Before I could go anywhere, before I could even get away from my locker, Chris found me. I saw him turn the corner and come down the hall, smiling. His blond hair looking like he’d just gotten it cut, wearing a tight short-sleeved T-shirt that made him seem even more imposing than usual. He carried a single red rose in his hand to complete the dozen. When he saw that I didn’t have any roses, but instead a single daisy, his smile twisted in confusion. He stopped short and waited for me to explain.

  I didn’t, though. I just turned and walked the other way, certain that Chris and I were truly and finally over. Maybe someday in the future we could find a way to be friends.

  That weekend, Kecia had a party and I was excited to go. Instead of the prepackaged fantasy high school life I’d had with Chris, I was beginning to have one of my own making. When Kecia opened the front door, Krupa and I found ourselves looking up into three stories of airy, open space with only a sparkling crystal chandelier to fill it.

  “So, your house is kind of nice,” I said.

  Kecia laughed. “Ostentatious, you mean.” She beckoned us to follow her upstairs. “I love your outfit,” she said to Krupa, whose shirt, made from sari material, was a burst of swirling pink and silver threads.

  “My mother made it.”

  Kecia seemed surprised to hear this. “I wish my mom was that talented.”

  Tamika appeared, leaning over the banister. The top of her cheeks shimmered, iridescent blush giving her skin a subtle shine, and she’d twisted her long, thick, nearly permanent braids away from her face into an updo. “Hi, guys!”

  “You look amazing,” I said.

  “Thanks! Hurry up. People are going to start arriving.” She turned and stalked off, the sound of her four-inch heels muffled by the thick carpet.