English 10CP, Period 3

Last Name 1

Student Name

Ms. Jones

English 10CP, Period 3

November 12, 2013

The Art of Falling

I. Welcome, ghosts

Mom and I had just taken our seats at the dinner table. We mulled over what my plans were for the weekend while daylight flickered and faded outside. Warm air bled into the kitchen through an open window: an awkward introduction to the month of December.

The phone rang, breaking our conversation. I motioned to Mom to sit.

“Hello?”

“Lindsay. It’s Tracy, Sarah’s mom.” I recognized her voice. She had spent the last two years shuttling her daughter and I back and forth to junior high on Monday’s and Wednesday’s. We were in 9th grade now, and my older brother drove me to school. I hadn’t seen her since she waved goodbye from the seat of her green minivan at the start of last summer.

“Have you heard?” she asked.

“About what?”

“Sit down.” My legs stalled beneath me. “Jen was running with her dad on Santa Rosa Road late this afternoon. She was hit by a car.”

“What do you mean she was hit by a car?”

“I mean, she’s dead, Lindsay. She was just hurt…too much.” Tracy’s voice could hardly project the last word. She began to sob. I was quiet, running over her sentence in my head, waiting for it to slap the skin on my face. I pushed the off button on the phone. It was like a reflex.

Mom was scraping the food on her plate into a neat pile, letting the fork drag softly against the porcelain. She looked up at me with a raised eyebrow when I fixed the phone back into the receiver.

“Jen’s gone,” I said.

“Gone where?”

Before I could utter anything else, I shattered into pieces on the kitchen tile, taking a glass of water from the counter down with me.

II. Our last days as children

Jen and I wobbled down a dirt path leading to her neighbor’s house in the Santa Rosa Valley. We carried bulky English saddles in our tiny arms. I had put my riding helmet on backwards to make her laugh. The sun would be setting soon, but we figured we would risk riding in the dark as long as that meant we could ride at all.

We had met in second grade and I wasn’t sure I liked her at first. Jen was always the first one to raise her hand when our teacher asked a question, or wanted a volunteer to do a homework check. But when I had left my math worksheet in Mom’s car one morning, Jen put a star next to my name anyway. I remember the way we smiled at each other during recess, and how the blonde hair that hung down to her waist gently rippled back and forth as she ran around the playground, pretending to gallop like a horse. We soon bonded over our love of the animal, and spent hours huddled together in the classroom drawing our best interpretations of the Black Stallion. She always liked the way I made the mane look like waves in the ocean.

Three years later, we couldn’t stand to be apart for more than a day. We borrowed her neighbor’s horses every weekend and rode down to the community arena, excited to show each other how we had improved since the last ride. On this Saturday, Jen wanted to try riding the bigger of the two horses—the one that I always rode since I was a few inches taller and could wrap my legs around his wide belly more convincingly. She had been on him once before, but persuaded me to trade because she said that his massive gait made her too afraid to fall.

When we reached the barn, we quickly threw saddles and bridles on our respective animals and buckled the straps of our helmets under our chins. We pretended not to notice the flakey mud caked on the horses’ hooves. I stood in Jen’s shadow as she led her horse to the three-rail fence that surrounded the stalls. She hopped up onto the middle rail and positioned one foot in the stirrup, tightly gripping the reins and preparing to throw her other leg over the horse’s back. I watched as she gathered confidence by opening and closing her fingers around the leather in her hands. When she swung her leg, she had almost touched the cold iron of the other stirrup when the horse sneezed, shaking his entire body and thrusting his nose all the way down to the dirt. In one swift movement, Jen tumbled head first off the horse, and fell for what must have seemed like miles to her tiny frame. Her head smacked hard against the ground. Her body followed limply behind.

I dropped the reins of the horse that I had been holding and bolted toward her, hoping that the helmets we always hated riding in would be good for something. I reached a hand out to touch her shoulder. She turned her freckled, dusty face toward mine and let out a billowing laugh. Birds fluttered off the fence.

“I knew I would fall,” she said while spitting dirt from her lips.

“Yeah, and you hadn’t even moved yet!”

She got up and pushed the dirt off the top of her helmet; she couldn’t stop laughing. I could tell she was nervous to get back on—she kept glancing back at me, maybe searching in my eyes for comfort, or a reason to quit.

“Here,” I said as I motioned toward her leg. She placed it in the basket that I made with my hands. On the count of three, I helped to push her up onto the saddle.

Her leg slid effortlessly over the horse’s back, and she nudged him forward.

The pink and orange in the sky was becoming more obscure. I could barely make out the trees ahead of us as I followed her down the trail and into the dark.

III. Look into the air

We started to grow apart when the awkwardness of junior high nipped annoyingly at our heels. Our personalities were reshaping as much as our bodies. Her parents bought her a horse to keep at their house, and I had traded in riding for boys and tagging along with my brother to Hollywood on weekends. I found myself not dialing her phone number as often. But she invited me over during our 7th grade winter break, and we went ice-skating.

I tried to imagine that nothing had changed since the last time we had been riding when we clasped our hands together in the middle of the rink and spun in a clumsy circle. The blades of our skates made slick grooves in the ice. We couldn’t stop spinning.

“Remember how we used to hang out everyday?” she asked while trying to focus on me. “I miss that.” I gripped my mitten-clad fingers a little more tightly into hers, trying not to let her go.

Jen’s dad picked us up from the ice rink once our feet were sore and blistered. When he pulled up in his truck, she slid in next to her father and I followed, closing the door behind us. She turned the radio on to her favorite country station, and we spent the ride back to the Santa Rosa Valley bobbing our heads to the twang of guitars.

The air was thick and heavy with fog when we finally reached her neighborhood. The streetlights were dull, almost insignificant. I wanted to tell Jen that I was sorry for how we had drifted apart. Sorry that I was tired of riding. Sorry that I didn’t get her a present for her last birthday because I had forgotten. While I was piecing the words together, she let out a scream that could have shattered the windshield. Her father pushed the break down to the floor and swerved impulsively. The tires screeched beneath us and there was an eruption of smoke and the smell of burnt rubber.

Jen was the only one that had seen the coyote run across the road. The headlights of the car, now pointing into the roadside trees, illuminated the terror in the coyote’s eyes when he timidly glanced back in our direction. Her father got out of the truck to make sure nothing had been damaged, and we followed behind, relieved to touch our feet to the asphalt. The black spiral that the tires had made looked like the circle in the ice. But we didn’t want to spin anymore.

IV. Greet death

After Mom helped pick me up off the floor and collect the glass that had broken around me, I sat in my room for hours, letting the carpet make spotty patterns on my bare legs. When I felt like I could form words in my mouth, I tried to call Tracy back. But I instinctively dialed Jen’s number, regurgitating the combination of buttons like I was calling her on a Saturday to go riding. The phone was back in the receiver before the ringing ever started.

Her funeral took place a few days later at a Catholic church. No one wore black. The casket was open and her family stood around it while others waited in line to pay their respects. I couldn’t look. But from my seat in the church, I noticed that her mother wouldn’t stop putting her hands inside that ivory coffin. I imagined that she was rearranging Jen’s hair, or straightening the varsity track jacket that I had heard she was going to be buried in.

A friend from elementary school, Renee, stood in line. Her lips parted and trembled when she reached the casket, and I felt like I needed to instantly close it up. After she took the seat next to me, I wanted to know what Jen looked like. She told me that her head was swollen, her face a little black and blue, but masked with thick make-up—something Jen never wore. Even though she was a month shy of her fifteenth birthday when she died, I couldn’t picture her lying there looking any different or older than when we had smiled at each other on the playground for the first time. I wanted her to be wearing her riding helmet—still a little dusty from her fall years before. I wanted her hair to still be perfect and long and wavy. I wanted her to tell me that she was afraid to fall but not afraid to get back on again. I wanted her to have seen the car before she stepped out into traffic.

No one should have seen her like that. It was so unlike how she really was, so far from the life that she lived. Hundreds of people would now walk around with a distorted, horrific portrait—the wrong colors, the wrong interpretation—of the beauty that she oozed from every corner of her body, every inch of her being. It wasn’t fair.

Renee looked at me with tears running down her cheeks and asked if I remembered the last time I spoke to Jen. I forced my head to search and was disappointed when I realized that she was blurry in my memory. I couldn’t make out if her eyes were blue or grey.

I had been standing by my locker after class and she walked up behind me, putting her hand on my shoulder.

“Your birthday is next week, isn’t it?” I remember her asking. We smiled at each other and I was surprised that she hadn’t forgotten. We hadn’t hung out since the trip to the ice rink two years prior. “I always remember that,” she said and she seemed to dissolve in front of me.

V. Remember me as a time of day

When Jen’s father spoke at his daughter’s funeral, he knew that all of us there were desperate to grip comfort in our hands. He adjusted the microphone on the podium that he stood at and took a deep breath in, letting his chest slowly rise, then fall. In a clear but quiet voice, he said that before she tried to run across the street and was hit, she turned to him. She told her dad that they should slow down just enough to watch the sun fade away behind the mountains.