by Luke Loaghan
Juan threw his glass to the floor, shattering it, and then overturned a table with engraved champagne glass party favors. Broken glass covered the dance floor. Juan yelled and screamed at me and Delancey. Sam stood by his side.
“So let me get this right! I chase after Delancey for a year; she agrees to go the prom with me, I buy her ticket, get a limo, get us into the after party, and you marry her? Are you trying to make me look like a fool?” Juan had lost all self control. He took a swing at me, missing. He was so drunk he slipped and fell to the ground, which only made him angrier.
“Mr. Zoose isn’t here to save you this time!” Juan shouted. My suspicions had been correct. Juan was a Deceptor.
Juan, drunk, angry, and jealous, pulled a gun out of his pocket, a jeweled handgun. Delancey’s gun. Sam had sold the gun to Juan the Deceptor.
The gun shimmered in the light. The senior class cleared out of the way trying not to be in the cross fire. He aimed it directly at me with a sinister look filling his eyes.
The music stopped. Everything went silent. I could only hear my heavy breathing and Juan’s rapid heartbeat. “You have ruined everything!” shouted Juan. I was standing about ten feet away from him; Delancey was behind me. The pain medication was making me delirious and I laughed.
“What is so funny!” yelled Juan.
“You are. You have money, a family, Harvard, you’re even the class president. You get to take the girl of my dreams to the prom, and now you want to shoot me. I have nothing. No mother. No money. Nothing, except for Delancey. You want to shoot me, go ahead.”
I calmly walked up to Juan. My chest was inches away from the barrel of the gun; my heart pounded like a drum. I was close enough to feel Juan’s panting, and could see the beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. Delancey pleaded with Juan not to shoot.
Juan pulled the trigger, as I knew that he would.
Nothing happened. The gun still did not have bullets.
Security immediately leaped on top of him and threw him out of the party.
I walked over to the far corner, and stood in the shadows, away from the crowd of seniors. I wiped the sweat from my face. I was drained and relieved.
Christine was in a corner talking to a well dressed young man. She was flirting with him. My medication was probably too strong, and I must have been delusional, because I thought the guy bore a strong resemblance to Eddie Lo. On further inspection, I saw it was Wing King.
Delancey was yelling at Sam. Sam furiously shouted back at her. Sam pushed her out of the way, and came charging towards me. I was focused on Sam, who held one of the iron table settings in his left hand, and barely saw Delancey falling on the floor, on the broken glass. I darted over to pick her up. Sam hit me on the head with the heavy metallic table setting, and I fell unconscious.
Several minutes later, Christine and Carlos were helping me up. I could barely walk. My legs and knees were stiff.
Maurice asked if I knew about Delancey. He reminded me that Delancey had fallen on broken glass and described how she was cut all over. “She was bleeding profusely. An ambulance took her to the hospital.”
“Glass had entered deep into her heel, and torso,” John said, “She was
bleeding pints of blood.”
Carlos said, “Large shards of glass went into her foot, maybe four or five inches. She’s at Downtown New York Hospital.”
I had a sick feeling in my stomach. I needed to go to the hospital. I could barely walk.
“Where’s Sam?” I asked.
“Sam was thrown out by Mr. Mash. He was gone before the police came. You were out a long time,” John said.
Carlos agreed to take Christine home, and then meet me at the hospital. John also insisted on going to the hospital.
“Fine, let’s go,” I said.
“Count me in,” said Helen.
This was so unbelievable. Worst case scenarios played through my head. Of all nights for this to happen, it happened the night of the prom, and the day we got married. As we headed toward the exit sign, I was handed a party favor. It was a tall champagne glass, one of the few that were unbroken, engraved with the words “Stanton Serpents.” I was furious with Sam.
The five of us tried to hail a cab, but the entire senior class was doing the same thing. Cab after cab filled up with kids from the prom, all headed to an after party at the Limelight Club. We finally found a cab about a half hour later. “Downtown New York Hospital,” I said to the cabdriver.
“Strange place for an after party,” the driver said. I could only blame myself. I should’ve stopped Sam before he pushed Delancey. The entire evening was being second guessed in my head.
We arrived at the hospital nearly twenty minutes later, after midnight. We went to the emergency room and asked for Delancey. They didn’t know who she was.
“A girl came in here from the prom, bleeding? With broken glass in her foot? She was probably dressed like she was at her prom,” I said. “Like us.” The person behind the desk finally found a record of her, and said she was having surgery in the emergency operating room downstairs.
When we exited the elevator, there was no one to point us in the right direction. We roamed the empty hallways for fifteen minutes. Finally, I saw a sign for “Emergency Operating Room.”
Medical professionals wearing scrubs told us to wait until the surgery was complete. An hour passed. Helen had to go home, and John, being a gentleman, decided to take her back to Queens.
Carlos had arrived from dropping off Christine. He stayed, and waited with me for Delancey to come out of surgery. Another hour passed. A nurse commented that it had been nearly three hours. “It’s pretty serious. Several veins and arteries in the foot were severed,” the nurse said.
Another hour passed, and then Carlos left to go home. It was after three in the morning. A doctor came out of the operating room.
“How is she?” I asked. I could barely see out of my swollen eyes. Everything was blurry and dim. All I saw was a tall, shadowy figure in scrubs.
“Not good. Her main foot artery was severed, and so was her dorsalis pedis. She came by ambulance, but they could not treat the severed artery on the way here. I’m afraid she lost a lot of blood, and by the time we operated on the foot…well, I’m not sure we were successful. She fell on a lot of broken glass. We managed to pull all of the glass out of her body, including one that pierced into her stomach, but there was a lot of damage. I’m not sure she will make it. She’s awake. You can talk to her for a few minutes.”
That was as morbid a discussion as I’d ever had. I put on a set of scrubs, and a surgical mask, and went into the operating room. Delancey was barely lucid. She seemed ethereal.
“Hey, Delancey,” I said. Her face was pale, tubes were in her arms and she could barely breathe. I now realized the severity of the situation. It was much worse than I had thought. She was barely in the room with me, her consciousness fading, hardly able to speak. I had hoped this was caused by the anesthesia. I started to cry, unable to find the words I wanted to say to her. I held her hand, and she tried to squeeze it.
“We didn’t get to finish our dance,” she said. Her voice was faint. She was speaking below a whisper. “I’m so glad we were married, if only for a few hours. I’ll always love you, David. What was the surprise for me at graduation?”
“I’m doing a song, Separate Ways…”
“My favorite…you’ll be great.”
I told her she looked beautiful. She said she was embarrassed to be seen like that. A white sheet covered her legs. The heart monitor was beating slowly, with beats every other second. She turned her head and motioned for a nearby glass of water. The nurse placed a spoonful of water into her mouth.
“Don’t remember me this way,” she whispered.
“What? No honeymoon?” I mumbled. She coughed until she coughed up blood. I grew more fearful.
“You’ve never looked better,” she said as she tried to smile.
“You’re a sight f
or sore eyes.”
“Very funny.” She smiled.
“You’re going to be fine,” I pleaded as best as I could. “We’ll walk out of this horrid place together. I’ll gladly lead the way.” She started to cry. Something was wrong, but I did not know what it was. The nurse told me that Delancey’s right foot had been amputated.
Devastated, I tried to put a positive look on my face. Delancey sobbed uncontrollably. Her brown hair seemed darker, and tears trickled down her pale face. I didn’t know what to say or what to do. My hand was still holding hers. I squeezed a little tighter.
I glanced at her feet, covered by the white sheet, and she winced. “I don’t want you to see me this way,” she said.
“It’s okay…you’re the most beautiful girl ever.” I really meant it. I leaned over and kissed her purple lips.
The doctors came back into the room. They had to do one more surgery and demanded that I leave. The nurse explained that Delancey had glass in her kidneys. The doctor said Delancey needed more blood. The nurse explained that she had a rare blood type, and the hospital did not have enough of this blood.
“Just go and don’t look back at me,” Delancey said. “Promise that you won’t look back and see me like this.”
“I promise,” I said.
“I wouldn’t want you to remember me this way, with an amputated foot, and barely alive. Tell my parents I love them.” I released her hand. As I left the room, they moved her onto the operating table. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sheet that was covering her fall to the floor.
I didn’t want to look back, but she screamed in pain when they moved her. I tried my best not to glance back, not to break my promise to her, not to look at her amputated foot. But there was a round mirror in the corner ceiling of the operating room, and I saw her in the mirror. She knew that I had seen her amputated foot. She sobbed loudly, and my head turned. I saw her on the operating table. She cried louder.
The moment I walked out of the operating room, her heart monitor went flat. The doctors tried to revive her. I stood and watched as they used the defibrillator several times. In the end, nothing could be done.
The surgeon walked out, and said, “Sorry. She lost too much blood. There was really nothing more we could’ve done. ”
The earth went silent. I could still feel her hand in mine. I heard them say, “time of death 5 a.m.” It echoed in my head. Devastated and destroyed, I thought I was in a bad dream.
I sat on the steps outside the hospital in shock and disbelief. The sun started to rise. My vision was still blurred. A man was walking his dog. I was so disoriented that it appeared the dog had three heads.
Delancey’s mother arrived, and so did Bruce. They asked how she was, and I couldn’t answer. Bruce picked me up off the ground and shook me.
“She wanted you to know that she loved you.” Her mother, decimated by my cruel words, fell to the ground. Delancey was the ninth student death that year.
My body ached, my lip was scabbed, my eyes bruised, and I could barely walk to the subway. But my physical pain did not compare to the depth of my strife and the torment of my grief.
I wondered if that night had just been a nightmare. But I knew it was real. How could this have happened? How could Death have cheated me yet again in my life? Every time an ounce of happiness came my way, any kind of love that entered my life, like with my mother, and grandfather, Death stole it away. I wished that there was a way to get her back. I had already lost so much in my life. Choking back more tears, I decided that I could not lose her.
The sunlight became brighter, and a thought entered my head. In the basement, was the bag from Sal’s house. His books and equipment were still in the bag. Sal said he would be at graduation. He might be my only hope. What if everything Sal said was true? What if he wasn’t completely crazy? I had to find him.
I needed to go to Stanton and bring everything he would need, the entire bag to graduation.
I was still a bloody mess, now wearing a destroyed tuxedo. but there was no time to change. John and Carlos arrived at my house just as I was walking out. They were on their way to graduation. I informed them of Delancey’s passing. Grief stricken, they would come with me to graduation.
The news of Delancey’s death had not reached the school. The graduating class was in the auditorium, cheering, smiling, and celebrating. No one knew. I walked in at the end of Doreen’s valedictory speech, still in my bloodstained tuxedo.
Doreen ended her speech stating how we were all about to embark on a new journey. Not Delancey though.
John informed me that Sam was nowhere to be found because he was not allowed to graduate due to his inability to pass the swim test.
Carlos said Sam was probably distraught over the incident at the prom, not being named valedictorian, and not graduating, but was unsure of the order of his emotions. Harvard would consequently have to rescind its offer to Sam. Everything was moving in slow motion.
John stood next to me during the graduation march. He was not going to go to college in the fall. His father would not allow it that year. John deferred his college acceptance for another year. He was clearly disappointed, but had chosen to obey his father.
Mr. Mash called out the names, one after another. Delancey’s name was called out. The audience applauded, whistled, and cheered on her behalf. No one knew that she had passed away. When she did not approach the stage, Mash skipped over her and called out the next student’s name.
Painfully distracted, I could not remember why I was even there. And then I saw the bag in my hand, Sal’s bag. I desperately needed him to help me. Mr. Mash continued calling the names of the graduates. I was inadvertently doing the graduation march and heading up to the stage, to shake Mr. Mash’s hand, to get my sheepskin.
John accepted his diploma and shook hands with Mr. Mash. Carlos did the same. Sal sat on the stage, separated from the rest of the senior class. Sal looked lost in thought, his body slouching off the chair. He was my only hope, no matter his mental state.
Would the circumstances of Delancey’s death have changed if I had asked her to be my date to the prom? If I’d had enough courage, and less insecurity, would she still be alive? I wondered if Sam was capable of feeling guilty.
“David Orpheus” called out Mr. Mash. I didn’t really hear him, as I was deep in thought. “David Orpheus – class of 1989.” Someone shook me by the shoulder and I started walking toward Mr. Mash. “Congratulations, young man,” he said. He handed me my sheepskin, and I thanked him.
I stood staring at the audience. No one else understood my grief. Hardly anyone knew that we were married, that we were in love, and that everything was lost. I had not only received a diploma from high school, but also an education in death, pain, and grief.
Mash was distracted by my blood stained tuxedo. I looked like a complete disaster.
Mr. Mash spoke into the microphone. “And now, we are going to spice things up a little. Don’t ever say your high school graduation was boring. With a very special performance of Separate Ways…also known as Worlds Apart…. here is David and the Stanton Serpents Band.”
The curtains behind me rose high into the ceiling. The band assembled, and Ms. Virgil placed a guitar in my hand. I walked over to my microphone, stopping off and giving Sal his bag.
The intro started, heavy drums, just like we had practiced. Like a zombie, as if I was in a trance, I sang Separate Ways. I sang every word, with all the haunting pain that filled my heart. My vocals ricocheted of the walls of the auditorium. I wept as I sang; my fingers burned as I strummed and played every chord.
I felt lost when it was over. The audience, students, parents, and teachers alike, stood and cheered. The song was only a blur. I had almost no memory of performing. Everyone was patting me on the back and congratulating me. I spoke into the microphone. “That was for Delancey; it was her favorite song. She passed away a few hours ago.”
The audience gasped. My announcement created havoc and commotion. T
he senior class was in grief. I walked down the stage, and Sal was waiting for me.
“Now I know why you brought the bag. Are you ready to do this?” he asked.
I could not answer. I could barely understand what he was saying. Every sound was muffled.
“There’s no turning back, David, whatever happens. There is no turning back. If
you go down this path, I really don’t know.” Sal was genuinely concerned. “You could end up like me.”
Amidst the confusion, Sal and I walked out of the auditorium. He led me through
a dark hallway in the basement. We went to a sublevel, and then through the boiler room and main plumbing room. We made several turns. I kept walking, unable to comprehend how my feet were moving. Sal led the way, talking fast, all kinds of nonsensical explanations coming out of his mouth. He talked about being homeless, living in the basement of the school, building the Leviathon with parts from the school’s labs. Sal kept babbling on and on.
Minutes later we entered the school’s electrical room. There was small door with a combination lock to the far left. I had no idea where I was anymore. Sal knew the combination, and opened the lock. We crawled through the small doorway into another dark room. Then Sal turned on the lights.
In the middle of the room was the design I had seen in Sal’s book. It was the Leviathon, a monstrous set of copper wires coiled about six feet high. There were wires connected to electrical outlets, and a large looming structure at the top. It seemed different from the sketch in Sal’s book, and I did not know why.
Sal lifted a series of switches on a panel, placing them in the upright position. The Leviathion lit up, and sparks flew from different sections. I didn’t know how it worked, but I did know that it was using a lot of electricity. Sal was like a mad scientist from an old black and white science fiction movie. And so was the machine.
He opened the bag, pulled out all the missing parts, all the things he needed to make it function. At the very end, Sal removed a copper helmet from the bag, and using a stepping stool, connected it to the large looming contraption at the top of the machine. Now it looked exactly as it had in his sketch.
