– Chapter 3 –
The fleeting days of September passed painstakingly slowly, as Malia Sanders faced her senior year at James Madison High School flustered and abandoned. Nonetheless, as with all traumatic experiences, she gradually healed and discovered that she would eventually return to her more carefree, youthful self with time.
After snatching a cereal bar, Malia scanned the morning newspaper for the latest headlines. Printed in block letters on its front was the President’s declaration of war against Afghanistan in response to the attacks Osama Bin Laden spearheaded against the United States one month prior. She felt a bolt of electricity blaze up her arms. Finally, Malia thought. Maybe now Beth’s mom can rest in peace.
After skimming the lengthy article analyzing the historical event, Malia crammed the newspaper into her shoulder bag and drove peacefully to James Madison High, somewhat at ease.
“Mr. Matthews!” she dashed into her guidance councilor’s office with a chunky pamphlet of stamped and addressed envelopes. “Here are those teacher recommendations you asked about last week.” She slapped them onto his desk.
He analyzed them briefly, grinning and nodding in approval. “Thank you, Malia. You know,” he rose from his seat, “You’ve come a long way. I am so glad you’ve decided to apply to college.” His brows furrowed, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what is it that persuaded you to change your mind so quickly?”
She bit her lip, contemplating the past month. “I guess you could say I was… inspired.” She thought about Beth and her strength in the face of such a massive loss.
After muttering a brief farewell, Malia stumbled to homeroom in search of a familiar face. Her brother was standing idly by his seat in the back row listening to music and rhythmically snapping his fingers against the hardwood desk.
“Sam, guess who just handed in their recommendations for college?”
“Huh?” He squinted, recognized someone was speaking to him, and swiftly removed his ear buds. “Oh,” his lips curved upward in a brief grin before he immediately returned to his hard metal tunes. “I’m glad,” he robotically uttered.
“Speaking of college, where are you thinking of going next year?” Though she adored her twin brother, she privately yearned that they would attend separate universities the following year. Essentially inseparable for seventeen years from her brother, three minutes her elder, she needed to find her own identity. She no longer wished to wear the label of Sam’s little twin sister.
He flipped off his portable music device and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans. “Oh, well,” his eyes perused the classroom, as if desperately searching for something. “Malia, you know I’ve never been the best of students.”
She eyed him concernedly. “There are plenty of schools out there. I’m sure you can find something that’s right for you.”
He sunk his fist into the tabletop in frustration. “That’s just it, Malia. I’m not so sure that college is right for me. At least not yet.” She waited, certain that an explanation would follow.
He stumbled on his words. A sharp pang of fear reached his eyes, and he swiped the sweat from his face. He hastily removed his bulky denim jacket. “I think that I need to do something different. Something I’m better at. I’m thinking of joining the army, Malia.”
She stared. “Please, don’t tell Mom and Dad. I’ll tell them when I’m ready. We both know how they’ll react when they find out their oldest son doesn’t want to win the next Nobel Peace Prize.”
She continued to stare. “Malia, can you please say something?”
“I… I don’t,” she started just as Danny miraculously appeared.
“Morning everyone.” Neither Malia nor Danny acknowledged his presence. “Did I interrupt something?”
“I’m sorry. I have to go,” she slid past Danny.
The mundane halls painted in shades of creamy ivory and iron grey swirled dizzyingly before her eyes. She leaned heavily against the wall and sunk to the ground, swimming in colors of confusion. A teacher, possibly Mr. Foreman, inquired of her wellbeing and then, struck by her lack of response, scurried to the nurse’s office. The reverberation of the morning bell chimed piercingly in her ears, yet all she heard was a deafening silence.
“Mr. Matthews is looking for you,” she saw Danny striding towards her. His form was hazy, almost ghost-like. “Class just started.” She looked at his feet. Brown leather with laces. Mesh holes dotted either of their sides. “Malia, did you hear what I said?”
“I heard you, Danny.” Her eyes fixated on the opposite wall. The crusty, lead-infested paint was already starting to chip. Small brown gaps stained the previously hospital white hallway. And yet, despite all of the wall’s insufficiencies, Malia continued to stare.
“Sam told me about the whole army thing,” he confessed. “Is that what’s bothering you?”
Her trance was suddenly broken. “The whole army thing?” she mimicked. “He’s been your best friend since kindergarten. You played little league together, you learned how to throw a fast pitch together, you…. Danny, how can you let him risk his life?” she challenged.
“For his country,” he intercepted. “For something admirable.” He sat beside her, breaking his speech for several minutes, simply contemplating. “I might go with him, Malia.”
She looked at him, his face nearly an inch from hers. “I guess you’ve made your choice then.”
He leaped bitterly from the ground in irritation. “Why does this have to be a bad thing?”
“Because it is,” she retorted, “Why can’t you see that?”
“You’ve suffered so much because of terrorism. I thought you’d want me and your brother to fight it.”
Her breathe quickened, and she shrunk deeper into the ground. Her heart pounded, nearly escaping her chest. Eventually, she steadily lifted herself from the checkered linoleum floor. “I’m afraid,” she admitted.
His muscles grew tense. He fixed his gaze on a copper penny lying flatly by Malia’s loafers. “So am I.” He wrapped his fingers around her snowy hand and steered them towards homeroom. In spite of everything, he worried that Mr. Matthews might condemn them both to a week’s detention upon their arrival.
The remainder of the afternoon was a blur. In chemistry, Malia’s professor rebuked her for improperly extracting DNA from a strawberry. In calculus, she plainly forgot the formula for the derivative of the cosine function. In history, she delivered an oral presentation in which she unintentionally mistook the Jim Crow legislation for the black codes. Between classes, she bundled herself in a quilted winter jacket, dragging herself through the school’s maze-like hallways. Her bag sturdily strapped around her shoulders, she tried to minimize speculation from her curious classmates.
After finishing her two-hour shift at Pete’s Pizzas later that evening, Malia slouched on the staircase leading to her house’s family room. The scent of Swiss cheese and tomato sauce lingered on her skin. She draped a furry blanket around her arms to mask the odor, and began to pry into the conversation taking place between her brother and her parents in the adjacent room. Her brother, slouching casually on the sofa bed with a backward baseball cap lying flimsily on his head, looked at both of his parents expectantly. Malia’s mother and father sat tensely opposite their son, their hands fidgeting wildly in their laps.
“Sam,” her mother began, breaking the painfully tangible silence. “Your father and I think that this is just another one of your attempts to slack from your studies.” She glanced at her husband for some inkling of support. He returned her glance with an uncomfortable stare. With his silence, she continued. “You cannot join the army just to evade college, Samuel.”
“Mom, this isn’t about my relaxed attitude towards school and… and my unwillingness to wake up at seven in the morning on weekdays. This is something more,” he pressed. He swiped the cap from his head and fiddled it in his hands. After s
traightening out his muffled head of hair, he seated himself upright.
“Joining the army is an incredibly serious thing. I don’t think you are prepared to make that kind of commitment,” his mother persisted.
“Well I do.” Malia stepped from the staircase and stood boldly before her family. Rolling the sleeves of her thick cotton sweater to her elbows, she defended her brother’s maturity before her skeptical parents.
Confusion marked her brother’s face. “Malia? But, I thought….”
“Sam, I’ve never seen you so determined.” She seated herself beside him and sank into the cushion with ease. Noticing a cluster of dust lying by her hands, she softly brushed it to the side. She eyed her chipped fingernail polish with disdain and, suddenly swept with a rush of cold, enclosed her hands in the sleeves of her sweater.
“If this is what you really want,” she started. She met her brother’s eyes. Snippets of memories from their childhood – running madly through the snow without a care in the world, riding the merry-go-round at the state fair until they both went sickeningly dizzy, and competing against each other to see who could snatch the most leaves falling rapidly from the oak in their backyard – flashed fleetingly in her mind. “Then,” she continued, “then, I have to support you. And Mom and Dad,” she rotated to face her parents, “I think you should, too.” She brushed the bangs from her eyes. After giving her brother a meaningful smile, she mouthed I’m sorry in earnest sentiment and exited the room.
Though terrified for her brother’s fate, Malia could not protect him from the world. She could no longer shield herself from the outside to prevent loss and heartbreak. Her brother was undertaking an admirable responsibility, she realized, and he would need her support to succeed. They had been sheltered in the realm of high school and luxury for far too long, she thought. She only wondered how she would find her own identity, and she secretly coveted her brother for his strong resolve in becoming a soldier.
A yellowed copy of Crime and Punishment was lying meekly on her empty bookshelf when she reached her room. With a sigh, she slid it from the shelf and perused its lengthy pages – nearly six-hundred of them – in search for guidance from the great Dostoyevsky. She recalled writing a report on the classic Russian novel in the ninth grade; she had been partnered with Chelsea Donnohu, and the paper received a B-. For weeks she had contemplated her teacher’s criticism that the paper lacked dimension and profound thought. Now, however, she finally understood.
The true theme of the novel was healing and self-discovery and about the immeasurable value of life both at its worst and at its best. That sometimes, to experience true joy, you must first experience great grief and suffering. Finally, she located the passage she had tirelessly been searching for:
Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that… if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life… [for] eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
“Life whatever it may be,” she whispered. These words had always been a graceful river to Malia – admirable from a distance and superficially spectacular. Nonetheless, Malia had never read beyond the surface. With life’s sudden waves slowly sinking her to the depths of the ocean, she now clutched to them dearly.
Snatching her cell phone from its place in the left-hand pocket of her olive khaki pants, she urgently dialed Danny’s number.
“Hey, this is Danny.”
“Danny, I’m so glad I….”
“You’ve reached me at 765-845-9966. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you when I can.”
“I talked to Beth today,” she began after the beep sounded. Tears cascaded down her cheeks, and her uneven voice cracked. “She said she’s really proud of you guys for what you’re doing.” She breathed heavily and wiped her cheeks with a Kleenex. “She said that it’s because of people like you and Sam that… that.” She paused. She did not foresee this much difficulty in delivering a simple message. “That we can bring her mom justice. And bring justice to every other innocent person who died that day.” She finally regained her composure, muttered a goodbye, and returned the phone to her left-hand pocket.
The remaining months of Malia’s senior year of high school passed abnormally quickly. Before she knew it, high school had ended. Graduation had passed, and Malia, along with the seventy-four other members of the James Madison senior class were no longer simply high school students but adult members of society.
The beams of sunshine that had blinded Malia from the world had inevitably evaporated. In their place, grew a dark abyss of confusion and emptiness – a typical post-graduate’s despair intermingled with the pain of the times.
At graduation, Malia nonetheless recalled Dostoyevsky and his wise words, and through Beth’s strength, she found her own. Every eye in the oversized auditorium gazed intently upon her as she approached the podium attired in her navy blue gown and graduation cap, her golden tassel casually swung to the side. Her eyes scanned the room – her parents who had sacrificed so much to ensure her success and happiness and her teachers who had shared their invaluable guidance with her. She smiled at Mr. Matthews and began.
“We are here today to celebrate,” she began. “Today, we celebrate us, our teachers, and all of those who have helped to reach this point in our lives. For twelve long years we have fought all the odds against us and approached all of our obstacles with courage. We have worked tirelessly so we can come here today, on this blazing June afternoon, and receive a little, folded up piece of paper with our names on it.
“But this is not just any piece of paper. This is our key to the future, our key to the rest of our lives.” She looked at her parents. Her mother, of course, had a digital camera in one hand and a Kleenex in the other, most likely anticipating an emotional conclusion to Malia’s speech. “But, in truth, it is not the key or the piece of paper that matters. What matters is what we choose to do with our diplomas, how we use what we learned here at James Madison High to better the world and to follow our dreams.
“Some of us may dream to play professional basketball and become role models for young children all around the world,” she glanced at Jake and Jordan. “Some of us my dream to save a life someday.” She looked at Chelsea and grinned. “And some of us,” she continued, “may dream to save the world.” She looked at Sam and Danny. “To serve our country. No matter how unrealistic your aspirations may seem, always treasure what you learned here in high school. In a high school where the highest goals any of us have ever set were… were to become popular or to get into an Ivy League college. Out there,” she pointed to the window, “we can truly reach for anything.
“So, take this diploma,” she held hers high in her hand for the audience to see, “and carry it with you as a reminder of what you can accomplish. But, more importantly, always carry with you courage and determination.
“Recently, someone very close to me taught me an important lesson,” she looked at Sam. “He taught me that the most important goals in life are those that seem the most daunting. The most impractical. But, I’ve learned that no obstacle, no fear is ever too great to overcome. The only thing that can possibly hold you back is yourself.
“My fellow seniors,” she looked at her classmates, “This past year has been one of the most trying years of our entire lives. We are watching as our country and the rest of the world is slowly falling apart. But we are the future. We grew up together, we laughed together, and we cried together. And now, on our own, but together in spirit, we’ll change the world together.”
A thunderous applause roared in Malia’s ears, and she clung to it desperately. She clung to the sound of her peers and to the reassurance of the crowd that almost made her words believable, established them as truths.
“Malia!” Danny called. “I wanted to say goodbye,” he appeared from
behind, as crowds of people thrust through the swarming halls and shoved her from side to side. Proud parents took photographs of their beaming children. Graduates smiled in various poses with various relatives as Malia stood with Danny, saying their farewells, in the center of the uproar.
“When?” she shouted above the deafening tumult.
“Tomorrow.” There was pain in his eyes. She didn’t want to believe it. She just wanted to get it over with, to make it end, to make the pain end. She couldn’t take any more goodbyes.
“Danny, promise me something.” Her brother would come later. Now, she just needed to tell him. To make sure. “Promise me you’ll be careful out there. Promise me you’ll come back, and promise me that you’ll make sure my brother comes back too.” His promises were no guarantee, she realized, but she desperately needed to hear his reassurance. She knew that it was his reassurance that would get her through the coming months.
He strained to hear her words. He strained with astonishing intensity, holding on to each word as if they were here last.
“I promise,” he vowed with incredible sincerity. His face was somber. They swiftly said their goodbyes, and in seconds he was gone.
Minutes later, the crowd consumed Malia, and she disappeared.
She watched Danny fade into the hurried swarm of parents, siblings, and graduates. Sam was by his side. Two children, she thought, two children off to fight a battle as men.
In the coming months, Malia would frantically piece together the memories of her last day of high school in her mind. But, mostly, she would cling to the notion that after the storm always appears a rainbow. So she patiently waited for her rainbow with faith and with hope.
June, 2002
Malia stumbled to the rear of the local library and huddled in the dusty corner with a weighty book on the history of the United States. She trembled at the photographs of soldiers. Some in lively poses with a burning vivacity visible in their pink cheeks and some fallen. Intermingled with the yellow grass and muddy water. Fallen heroes.
July, 2002
Two months from now Malia’s parents would place all of her beloved possessions in a brown suitcase and haul the heavy load to the St. Louis campus where she would inevitably spend the next four years of her life. Four years. An eternity. Her mind turned numb at the mere thought of it. How could she spend four years at college when one day in Indiana lasted decades?
August, 2002
The grey sky and four white walls of her bedroom felt like a prison. Malia needed to escape, she knew. She needed to breathe, to once again inhale the sweet scent of oxygen and to live unshackled by the chains of her agony. It had been two endless months since her brother and his best friend had departed for the war. And, somehow, Malia was ready to accept it. Don’t waste time, Malia. Her brother had warned several days before he packed his bags and boarded the local shuttle. Don’t dwell in the past. And, please, whatever you do, don’t kill yourself over this. Don’t kill yourself over me. I’m not worth it. He smiled, trying to alleviate the anxiety of the moment with levity. Everything that’s happened this year… with Beth… that should have taught you at least that. Taking one last look at her neighborhood – at her home for the past seventeen years – she breathed heavily, lifted her luggage with both fists, and entered the passenger seat of her father’s Toyota.