Just what I could finish tonight.

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I was just a teenage kid sitting in the back room of a restaurant-bar watching an adult show that passed for appropriate only because its means of communication involved mostly spoken-word performance, which was literary.  A handful of teachers from my school were scattered around the place, boozing up and mingling and acting in general like normal social beings, which you might expect.  

But I didn’t expect that, not then.  Not at that age.  I was at a table with other teenagers, hardly friends of mine but close enough associates that I could jump into their cars every now and then without feeling too weird or thankful.  To be honest, I’ve remembered this scene so many times now, my brain doesn’t even need to pan across all the nooks and crannies of that place to pick up on the important details.  

The blond girl who had driven me was reading every word off the menu, even though she had already decided on the fries.  A dark brunette on the opposite side of her was pulling out money to split the bill, as was I.  And an unexplained older male friend of the blond girl was working his way down a long list of beer-menu options.  The only difference in the memory today, as opposed to all the other times I’ve recalled this scene, is an unsettling feeling I get when I realize the blond girl is dead now.  

She’ll be hard to forget.  She creeps into existence sometimes by entering my memories, frankly more often than keeps me peaceful.  Her sudden appearance always makes me want to whimper.  Or maybe what makes me want to whimper is the new unreal presence she takes on in my memories.  Her behavior, anyhow, alive had always been good-natured.  She had been totally aware, of course — perhaps precociously and certainly personally so — of all the debauchery in which people of the world engage.  But she herself had remained always good-natured, tolerant of others and aware that to bring them out of the filth, she would have to mire herself deeply among theirs.

She didn’t look much different when she died, I suppose, than how she looked that night scanning over the menu.  Except I’ll grant she was a good deal flatter, on account of the tremendous weight of the bus that squashed her.  On some level I can’t identify the morbidity of that image, even though I’m sharing it.  I’m frightened by its gore.  But I’m also blinded, scientifically, by its reality.  She really was squashed.

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