Dead To You

45. spirit week

Sunlight filtered in through the fluttering amber leaves outside of my opened window and stretched out and fragmented across the carpet in my bedroom, warm underneath my sock clad feet while I lifted my hair out from underneath my school blazer and reached for the tinted lip gloss on my nightside table, reapplying it one last time before dropping it into my mother's old picnic basket and triple checking that, yes, I did still have all the necessary textbooks inside. It had been a little over two weeks since the funeral, and now it was the last day of spirit week, which concluded with Anything but a Backpack Day and the homecoming football game later that night.

I remembered how much I liked spirit week freshman year, the one week in the school year that we weren't mandated to wear our uniforms with themes like Pajama Day and Throwback Thursday everyday until homecoming, and I tried to recapture that same excitement while I planned my outfits, the makeup looks I wanted to replicate, searched through our closets for something to carry around my books between classes, but all my smiles in the mirror felt forced each morning before I left for school.

Her body still hadn't been found.

The search parties had dwindled down to a couple of officers occasionally strolling through the woods. They just kept saying that Lake Ontario was too big. We're not giving up hope on recovering her body and giving her family that opportunity to properly lay her to rest, one of the policemen had said on the evening news earlier that week, but at this point, it's a very real possibility that we might not ever be able to find her.

Sighing, I opened my picnic basket and counted my textbooks again.

The funeral almost seemed like permission for the rest of the town to go back to normal, the missing person fliers that used to cover each one of the telephone poles and wallpaper all the storefront windows in town seemed to disappear overnight just like Bridgette had, the teachers at Chanler stopped using her death as a preface to each assignment doled out in class and the sentiments about understanding what an emotional, difficult time this was were exchanged for concrete deadlines.

In the hallways, the whispers had shifted to other things, that one debate team co-captain who argued with the substitute or the rumors that the planning committee for the homecoming dance secretly went underbudget to pocket the remaining funds for vodka to spike the punch, dumb stuff I tried to be more interested in, but I kept waiting for someone to mention her name.

It used to be that every time I went on Instagram, her face plastered all the Instastories I swiped through on my feed, emojis like doves and angels and broken hearts beneath a revolving series of the same black and white photos, occasionally captioned with a I still can't believe it text, but I guessed now they could, because those profiles shared pictures of their to-go coffees that morning, their outfit for Throwback Thursday yesterday, the apples they picked over the weekend.

Everything was returning back to normal, and I was afraid of getting left behind, so I liked those posts, walked down the coffee shop most mornings, and celebrated spirit week, pretended like I was normal too and trusted that if I did it long enough, normal would feel like normal again. 

Russet leaves scattered across the pavement in front of the school crunched beneath my footsteps fifteen minutes later, the handle of the picnic basket already beginning to restrict the blood flow to my fingertips from the awkward weight of all my textbooks inside while I darted up the front steps, hurrying after I saw that one of the football players was holding it open for me. I thanked him as I squeezed in between him and the doorframe, noticing that in lieu of a backpack, he was using a laundry basket with a crack on the side, and nearly stumbled into another guy from the football team who somehow managed to procure a small Wegman's shopping cart.