At first I tried not to cry, and tried to defend myself against their diatribe, tried to tell them when they asked. “But whatever possessed you to do such a terrible thing?” But whatever I said seemed to make them more angry and they became so soured by their own shame that they slapped my stinging buttocks for personal revenge as much as for any rehabilitative purposes. “I’ll never be able to lift my head on this street again!” my mother cried, and it struck me then, as it still does now, as a marvelous turn of phrase. I thought about her head on the street as she hit me, and wondered what Celia ‘s head looked like, and if I had dented it at all.
Celia hadn’t died, of course. She’d been half—dragged home by the heroic others, and given pills. And attention and love, and the doctor had come to look at her head but she didn’t have so much as a bruise. She had a dirty hat, and a bad case of hiccups all night, but she survived.
Celia forgave me, all too soon. Within weeks her mother allowed her to walk back and forth to school with me again. But, in all the years before she finally died at seventeen, I was never able to forgive her. She made me discover a darkness far more frightening than the echoing culvert, far more enduring than her smooth, pink face.
rockzyh~~~~