There are three girls I went to elementary school with who are now all dead. Sometimes I think of them and wonder if I’m the only one who does. Does anyone remember Dora Pagano with her short, curly, frizzy hair and equally frizzy voice? She always carried a small translucent plastic crossbody bag with a picture of her mom and a much loved stuffed puppy. Or Nicky Listor with her lanky knee-length raven hair, slow moving like a sloth? The way she seemed to glide through the gym as if suspended over its polished floorboards? Does anyone remember Brenda Trent, birdlike and frail, her voice a broken whistle, carrying around a waterlogged notebook full of musings she’d never get a chance to share?
None of them were murdered, as if the violence of their accidental deaths is somehow preferable.
Dora only made it to third grade. She was always a little abrasive, needing to have the last word in virtually every conversation, the best role in whatever game of pretend we were playing at recess, to sit at the right hand of everyone’s friend Remy Delaney in all classes, at all meals, in all specials. If she didn’t relentlessly tail Remy, did she even exist? Would anyone even think to include her if she wasn’t loudly bursting into the room announcing her presence and intentions (to sit by Remy, do whatever Remy wanted, be whoever Remy wanted her to be)? Her tenacity, as misplaced as it was, was something to be admired, really.
I sometimes wonder who she would’ve become if the asthmatic fit didn’t take her. Forced to sit in the back of the school bus with the troublemakers one cold Friday in March, no one noticed when the hypoxia overtook her as her airways closed. No one noticed her reaching for her empty and expired inhaler, like it would’ve helped her anyway. No one noticed as she coughed and gagged, ripping at her throat with ragged fingernails bitten to the quick until she went into cardiac arrest and just…stopped. No one noticed when she didn’t dance down the aisle shouting, “see ya tomorrow, losers!” at the other children who were most certainly not her friends when they reached her stop. No one noticed the way Bryan Richardson’s paper airplane landed in the crook of her arm, pointing down, calling to anyone to just pay attention to the lifeless body of a child developing livor mortis in her fingertips, hanging blue and cold over the edge of the grey cracked leather seat. It wasn’t until Old Mackey, the dimwitted but well-meaning bus driver, pulled into the depot at the end of his shift that she was found.
No one had reported her missing when she didn’t burst through the back door of her ramshackle house at 3:30pm because no one knew she was gone. She was a latchkey kid. Her parents wouldn’t be home until six at the earliest. Her older brother was illegally skateboarding in the high school parking lot when she took her last gasping breath. Her mother was working the line at the glass factory, her father was delivering mail on his usual route. When Old Mackey found her, he didn’t know what to do, who to call. He briefly contemplated just leaving her there, let the morning driver figure it out. He even went so far as to lock up, punch out, walk to his car before his conscience caught him, admonishing him for leaving her small body in the darkness of the garage. He locked his car, walked to the office, reported the body to Miss Marcia at the front desk. Police came, ambulances came, but they had a hard time identifying Dora. Not because her face was disfigured in any way; on the contrary, she looked like a porcelain doll in death. There just wasn’t any identification on her body or in her backpack. No one seemed to remember her name, her face, her stop. Old Mackey knew he’d seen this girl before, every day even, but just couldn’t for the life of him place her. So Dora Pagano sat on a slab in the morgue for three days before her grandma reported her missing. Three days that her parents thought she must be with her grandparents, three days where her grandparents simply thought she was going to school and going home as usual. It wasn’t until her brother asked where she was one night over semi-frozen chicken nuggets that anyone realized.
Nicky made it halfway through fifth grade. Her parents were heroin addicts—their home, littered with needles, old pizza boxes, and detritus, was not a warm and welcoming environment to grow up in. Nicky tried, though. In their little apartment above Brother Pepe’s Pizza, she tried to make her tiny bedroom nice. She kept it clean, neat. She proudly spread a pilled floral polyester comforter across her bed. All of her keepsakes—McDonald’s happy meal toys, prizes from the arcade, smooth rocks she found in the river—were arranged neatly on top of her second-hand dresser. Her walls were lined with novels from the used bookstore in the library’s basement. Novels that took her to far off places like Victorian England, Narnia, the Shire, and Oz for just five cents a piece. The bedroom’s solitary window had been painted over and nailed shut by the landlord before they moved in, though Nicky had spent hours trying to chip away at the paint in the summer months in an effort to throw it open to cool the room down. In a word, her bedroom was a matchbox.
A polar vortex blew in that January. Her father hadn’t paid the heating bill; instead, he spent that money on his latest fix. The apartment was so cold Nicky could see her breath. Her fingers ached when she tried to hold her pencil long enough to finish her homework. Piled under threadbare blankets, wearing all the shirts she owned, she was still cold. She pulled out an old space heater from the attic crawlspace and set it up in her bedroom. Eventually, the room got so toasty that she dozed off, dreaming of riding Aladdin’s magic carpet and experiencing a whole new world. She didn’t notice that she’d set up the space heater a little too close to a stack of novels on the floor by the window. She didn’t register the way the cheap curtain brushed against the metal grates. Asleep and dreaming of escape, she didn’t see the frayed power cord spark in the socket, didn’t see the flame climb up the curtains, blow through her novels. She awoke to a blaze, the air shimmering and warping her hands in front of her face. She threw off the blankets, her sweaters, her hat. She was left in leggings and a t-shirt, sweating and coughing and gagging. Her bedroom door was engulfed in flames. The window was nailed shut. There was no escape. By the time the teenagers at Brother Pepe’s called the fire department, it was too late. By the time her would-be rescuers shattered the glass, all they found was her little body curled up under the bed, clutching her favorite Raggedy Ann doll protectively.
Brenda made it to the day of sixth grade graduation. Her house down the street from mine. It looked like an Appalachian homestead, out of place in our small town. Set back from the street, its patchy, dirty lawn strewn with broken toys, cigarette butts, and a wheel-less bicycle stood in stark contrast to the lush green lawns all around it. I always thought the house could be cute if it was taken care of, but Brenda and her six brothers lived there with their mother who suffered a severe cognitive impairment, though no one ever asked what it was that was ‘wrong’ with her. It could be that she was simply a single mother with seven kids and no support system—that there actually wasn’t any cognitive decline but a very real, very true, very pronounced bone-deep exhaustion and weariness. We’ll never know. Brenda’s brothers were like a roving gang in the neighborhood, leaving nothing but destruction in their wake. Mailboxes, flags, and flowerbeds were never safe around the Trent boys. CPS had been called a number of times, but somehow the children never left their mother. Brenda, the only girl in a sea of boys, was tall and lanky. She looked like she’d snap in two if she bent at the waist. Her blond hair hung lifeless around her pinched face. She was always carrying a notebook, always jotting things down. I liked to think of her as our very own Harriet the Spy, but the one and only time I ever asked her about the young sleuth, she roared at me so viciously that it called the recess monitor’s attention.
In sixth grade she started growing into her womanly form. Her body bloomed, its shape expanding and curving in all the right places to draw the wrong kind of attention for a girl that young. She relished it. She liked when eyes were on her, though there were times where she shrunk from it, unused to being looked at or spoken to for any length of time. On the day of sixth grade graduation, when most of us dressed up in denim sundresses, flowers in our hair, childish platforms on our feet, were singing a poorly conducted rendition of Vitamin C’s “Graduation Song (Friends Forever)” to our politely wincing parents, Brenda was running away. She packed her waterlogged notebook, two broken pencils, three pairs of underwear, two pairs of her brother’s basketball shorts, and one baby tee in her tattered backpack and never looked back. The only indication that she was leaving forever was a note she left on her pillow that read “I have to go.”
She didn’t make it very far. She walked into the woods just beyond our neighborhood, decided to follow the river. Too close to the water’s edge, she slipped on a gnarled root and twisted her delicate ankle so badly she couldn’t bear weight to even walk back the short distance to her house. So she tried crawling, but she scratched her arms on the barbs of the mile-a-minute weed that grows along the Delaware’s banks and when she tried to contort her body away from its sharp thorns, she tumbled backward into the patch of rushing rapids below. The mid-June water had not yet been warmed by the summer sun; between the temperature and her twisted ankle and her fall, she was shocked, unable to move. The current threw her to and fro like a ragdoll, her long limbs flailing just below the surface. Eventually, the rapids threw her against a rock, shattering her skull. Like Dora, no one even knew she was missing. No one noticed when she didn’t attend the graduation. No one even expected her to show up at the ice cream social afterward. None of her brothers cared enough to register her presence on a good day, so they certainly didn’t notice her absence when the sun set and each took his TV dinner to separate corners of the house. Between shifts a day later, her mother walked through the house in a futile attempt to tidy up and finally found Brenda’s note. She didn’t know what to do, where to start, how or if she should even find her daughter, but she didn’t have much time to decide. An early morning jogger found Brenda’s lifeless, broken body. The police were at the Trent family doorstep within minutes of her mother finding her note.
There is a world beyond ours where these girls are still alive. Flip our little town upside down, turn it inside out, and there is a place that exists where Dora’s parents refilled her inhaler prescription, Remy was riding the bus with her that day and helped administer the life-saving bronchodilator just in time. The girls laughed through their panic, got off their stop, ran into Dora’s house and ate cookies and played hopscotch and danced to her Spice Girls cassette over and over until dinnertime. In this world, Dora graduated with the rest of us, went to college, made the normal amount of mistakes, found herself and is now raising two little kids with her very same frizzy voiced tenacity.
In this world, Nicky’s apartment never caught fire because Nicky’s parents sought help for their addiction, went to meetings, tried to better themselves if only for the sake of their child. They fostered Nicky’s creativity and fed into her dream life. They gave her pens and notebooks, encouraged her to imagine and grow and thrive. In this world, Nicky wins writing competitions in high school, a scholarship to Brown, becomes a middle-grade author creating universes where lonely little girls can find a safe place to land.
In this world, Brenda and her brothers and their mother get more support from their family, the county, the absent father. Brenda’s mother has the time and capacity to instill a sense of self-worth in her daughter, makes her feel valued and respected and seen. The notebooks she clutched so close to her chest were full of sketches, rudimentary and quite frankly bad in the beginning pages, beautiful and developed and striking in the latter. The sketches make it out of the notebook, an art teacher notices her promise, helps her develop her skills. She is commissioned to paint murals on storefronts, empty building facades in the town’s efforts for revitalization. She doesn’t make it out of our little town in this world, but she doesn’t want to. She likes where she is.
At least that’s what I like to imagine when I think of them. I hope I’m not the only one.
So well written
Powerful stuff!