I took my usual seat next to Jake, and he grinned as I pulled a candy cane from my bag and handed it across the skinny row. He took it with a silent raise of his eyebrows before we both went to work lining up our stuff for class. My stuff: a pristine, barely-been-opened copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, a lip gloss, and a water bottle. Jake’s stuff: a battered copy of the same text, a notebook, two black pens, a highlighter, and a multi-pack of those organizational tabs. If a stranger looked at my desk, they’d think I was some sort of slacker who cared more about my appearance than class, but the truth was that my first copy of the book was so worn, this shelf-ready copy was the second one I’d bought. If the same stranger happened to glance at Jake’s desk, they’d either think something positive, like that he was a studious young man with a bright future, or that he was a nerd. Jake’s preparedness had way less to do with any kind of academic aspirations than it did with his borderline obsession with our petite, doe eyed English teacher, Ms. Preston.
He wasn’t alone in that: she’s about five foot even with a tiny frame and giant blue eyes—we are talking anime cartoon levels of big eyes—in her mid-twenties, and incredibly cool. Every single day of class, she rushes in with a minute to spare, holding on to her Starbucks cup like it contained the winning lottery numbers, her already big eyes as wide as Kim Kardashian’s hips. Even though she’s a frazzled mess, everyone likes her because she takes the subject seriously, but is laid back in her teaching style and when she describes something she’s passionate about, she talks a mile a minutes and totally geeks out.
Once we were settled in, I whispered over to Jake to ask if he had any plans for the break. With some serious side eye, he answered, “Going to Canaan with Mom and Derrick.”
It’s almost clichéd for teenagers to loathe their stepparents, but in Jake’s case, I understood his angst. Derrick wasn’t abusive or mean or anything, he was just a Mustang driving, Drake Stan who was like the man version of Amy Poehler’s Mean Girls’ character. Always asking Jake if he was “banging” anyone, always trying a little too hard to be one of the boys. The only upside was, like Jake, Derrick was an amazing skier, so ever since he married Jake’s mom, they hit the local ski resorts a lot more than they could afford when she was a single mom.
“You?” he replied.
I shifted in my seat with a sigh. “Nothing new,” I replied, and I opened my book to end the conversation before my melancholy spread to anyone else.
As I glanced down at the text, my eyes glazed over a bit as a fog passed across my brain. Not for the first time, I had the fleeting thought that something was wrong with me. Something deeper than being spoiled and bored, which was what I thought a lot of my gloom amounted to. I tried to shake that feeling off, but it kept fighting its way back through my brain haze. It was tiring. With a loud sigh, I put my book down and rested my chin on the cool surface of my desk. I tried to tell myself it was all normal. Life is boring sometimes. But then that voice was there again, poking and prodding: is life supposed to be this boring?
As soon as the bell rang to end the day, it was like I was stuck in slow motion; all I wanted was to get somewhere where I could be by myself. When the bus finally pulled up at the stop across from the park, I couldn’t get off fast enough. I walked across the playground, past the screaming, running throng of dirty children, and up the trail through the woods that would lead to my bridge. Mom didn't like it if I came in after dinnertime, but that left me with two full hours to read and unwind in what had become my sanctuary over the years.
The stone bridge had columns on either end and they were wide enough to prop my back against when I sat down on the bridge rail. I let my feet dangle off the edge and over the mulch below, enjoying the soft clunk noise of the soles as the hard rubber of my new combat boots hit up against the old stone. Like my mom told me she used to do the first time the nineties were cool (in the nineties), I smoked a clove cigarette as I thought up new ways to avoid my friends, my home, my little sister and everything that waited for me outside the edge of the woods. It suddenly struck me as funny for a minute; the only way onto the path that leads into the woods is through the rose garden, a place where people get married, have graduation parties, and take prom pictures, and yet I have to walk through it to escape my own beautiful, over-bright, sunshiny life.
Since I was nine, I would sneak down the trail to this bridge alone even though I knew my mom would have killed me. She said that there were vagrants on the hiking trails and that it was dangerous for me to go up there by myself. While my mom wasn’t really a very naïve person and usually her instincts were pretty on point, I think she missed the mark on the trails because I almost never ran into anyone down the valley in the middle of the park, let alone anyone up to no good. At most, there were people walking dogs or teenagers stealing kisses where they thought no one could see.
Even as a kid there was something that drew me to the little patch of woods behind the rose garden; it was quiet and separate from everything else in the park and, though that was a huge part of the appeal, it wasn’t all of it. The way the bridge seemed so out of place in the middle of the woods where there wasn’t really much for it to actually cross made it all the more interesting to my overly romantic brain. It just connected two sides of the hill, but with nothing underneath it, there wasn’t a need. Anyone could have just walked down one side and up the other. I’d always kind of liked bridges, in general; there was so much magic that surrounded the idea of a bridge. Tragic collapses, trolls, desperate people flinging themselves from the edge . . . there’s something about a space that exists separate from anything solid that has always spoken to me.
When you’re a kid, a bridge can be anything. Close your eyes and make up a little story and suddenly it’s not just a bridge, it could be a tower overlooking a chaotic sea, a jail cell, a train car. The fact that my bridge was so solid with its stone base and metal rail made it all the more irresistible. If my mom knew how many times I had walked over to the park with friends to spend hours on my bridge, she would’ve lost it, but she never found out somehow. She didn’t even know how much time I spent there as I got older when it wouldn’t have bothered her nearly as much.
I lifted my camera to my face and wished, again, that I could get something a little more antique, something with a big, wide lens that would better match my aesthetic but, I reminded myself, there was nothing wrong with the Fujifilm camera. It’s not like the pictures I was taking were serious photos; all I could see were the gray trunks of the fast asleep trees that surrounded me and those pictures would, at best, end up on Instagram. I wished for snow, picturing last year’s blanket of slush and the way it made the woods look even more like something from a fairytale. It had been a dry winter so far, and there didn’t seem to be much of a reason to believe that was going to change any time soon.
I took another hit of my cigarette, but this time something choked me up and I started to cough and gag like it was my first drag. I must have been making so much noise that everything else was washed out because I didn’t hear anyone come up behind me; I still thought I was alone until a low, raspy voice whispered in my ear: “One hit wonder?”
I turned which such jerky shock that I almost fell off the bridge, but the girl behind me grabbed my arm to steady me.