“That’s where you want to go?” she asked, her eyes hovering over the loud letters on my sweatshirt.
I nodded. “I’ve always wanted to act in its theater program.”
Her eyes blurred then, drifting somewhere far away from the eighth grade art room.
I could feel memories, warm and bright, melting from her smile.
“You’ve matured, Katherine,” she said.
“You’ve really matured.”
My art teacher didn’t come to school the next day. The sub told us she was sick with a mild cough, and we believed him until the cough kept Ms. Cellini out of class for a few more days. A week. Two weeks.
And then the phone call came. I remember taking it, then wishing I hadn’t. After I hung up, I stepped into the shower and let the diamond-cold water pierce the spaces between my toes. Time passed. My back began to tickle, to steam. Some lingering part of me found the sense to switch the nozzle off, but the rest of me hung suspended. My eyes wouldn’t close.
Back at school, the administration made everyone in Ms. Cellini’s class go through a one-on-one session with a counselor. Mine told me to write a goodbye letter to her, so I did, inventing feelings I knew would get me out of his office.
I remember starting to take one, two, three showers a day. There was something about the jet cold, the smoldering heat, something glorious about the way my tears became numbed, lost. A few days into this routine, I began re-writing goodbyes, quiet words in the fog that spread like butter over the fiberglass walls. I miss your words. I miss your smile. I miss the way you looked into my dreams.
And sometimes, when I hugged those words on the walls, it felt like I could see her, like I could taste the fire dancing off her smile again.