Wellcourt was the type of high-school where someone was always offing themselves and no one really knew why. It was a real type of not knowing unlike the “I don’t know” we all gave to our parents after the O’Harry Scandal hit the papers. “Was that old woman really sleeping with all those students?” my mother had asked me.
I gave her the response that we all gave in regards to any such incident. But I knew. Of course I knew. Even if I hadn’t been propositioned by O’Harry myself, I would have still known.
But the death thing was different. When people were asked, year after year, about the most recent death, the answer was always quite authentically, “really couldn’t tell you. It’s always the good ones, isn’t it?”
When I was a freshman, a girl named Cindy Patton was supposed to be studying abroad in France for the semester but got kicked out of the program for having sex with one of her teachers. When she returned to America, I heard she was on anti-depressants. Next thing I knew her picture was set up on an easel in the main lobby with “Rest In Peace” above it and “4.5.89- 10.8.05” underneath.
This was my first Wellcourt death. I remember standing in front of the poster, wondering about Cindy, when a couple of kids walked by and one of them said, “there might as well be a section in the Washington Post called Wellcourt obituary.”
I had my theories on it. You see, most Wellcourt kids didn’t have to worry about much. They just had to get decent enough grades to make the library their parents donated not look suspicious. Hunger was foreign to them. Choosing sleep instead of being forced to acknowledge an empty stomach? They had never heard of it. They wanted death, because really it was one of the few things they didn't have. They had not earned death through a life of hard living. I knew they hadn't because I hadn't and my life was much harder than theirs. But no one could hand it to them or purchased it for Hanukah. They could not obtain it. That was why they wanted it.
That was what I had been sure of before my visit from Lorna, anyway. Now, on the other side of it all, I don’t know.
#
I hadn’t known Lorna when she was alive. I knew who she was, of course, but we weren’t friends. She was a year older than me and we ran in different circles. She was part of that popular group of spoiled girls who kept flatirons in their lockers and always pretended to be drunker than they were at parties. She wore shirts that showed off her belly button piercing and pink Timberland boots. I was part of the soccer team and the winter and spring track teams. I spent most of the time trying to prove to Wellcourt that I was worthy of my athletic scholarship while struggling to live up to the academic expectations of my immigrant parents.
We did have one interaction however, which I had always assumed meant more to me than it did to her.
It was during my sophomore year. During February the school always started buzzing with noise over the Valentine’s Day Dance. The tradition was that upperclassmen asked underclassmen, which theoretically held the most promise for upperclassmen boys than anyone else.
The previous year a senior named Carly Rollowitz had asked me. I told her that my religion did not allow me to celebrate pagan holidays and so I could not go. Carly had a mass of curly blonde hair that looked like it had never been introduced to a comb and a face spotted and pocked with acne. But these two traits were not what made me claim a false religion. There was a rumor that Carly collected used tampons and pads out of the girl’s bathroom. It sounded a bit ridiculous and I didn’t really think it could be true, but it was a well-known rumor and Carly had never denied it.
My sophomore year was much better because I was asked by Lorna, who was a junior at the time.
One day, about three weeks before the dance, she was waiting for me outside of the locker room at 3:30. I had just finished changing into my track uniform (Wellcourt was hosting a meet that day) and was walking out with Andrew Marks and Peter Weinstein.
“You.” Her arms were crossed over a brown leather jacket. It was zipped up halfway and from the way her breasts were putting pressures on it, that seemed to be as far as it would go. Her straight black hair hung down her back, away from her wide, angular face.
“Me?’ Weinstein’s face lit up like he had won the lottery.
“Yeah. Right.” Lorna rolled her large grey eyes. “You.” She pointed directly at me.
“Him?” Weinstien and Marks said, which in all honesty, was basically what I had been thinking myself. But Lorna just sighed before addressing them like a step-mother that regretted the marriage. “Please, can I speak to him? Alone.”
They shuffled away, Weinstein reminding me that coach was expecting all of us to be on the track in fifteen.
“If anyone else asks you to be their date to Valentines, tell them you already have one.”
She then took my phone number and told me she would call with details for the night.
When I made it to the track, Weinstein and Marks were grinning.
“You’re a lucky fuck, man,” Marks told me. “She just broke up with her boyfriend. You’ll be the first to hit it and the kid is in Michigan so he can’t even kick your ass.”