They’re dead.
I gasp, loud and long and Finn’s hands yank me away from the edge.
“What’s wrong with you, Calla?” he demands in agitation. “You could’ve fallen over the side. You know not to mess around with these cliffs.”
I can’t answer. I’m so completely shocked and appalled as I point with a shaky mitten-clad finger.
That couldn’t be what I thought it was. Who I thought it was.
But it is. I lean forward and look again and I see that I wasn’t wrong.
I also see that no matter how much death a person is exposed to, nothing prepares you for the dead and unexpected face of someone you know.
Finn peers around my shoulder, and I feel him startle as he recognizes the body on the rocks below.
“Is that Mr. Elliott?” he asks in shock. I nod dumbly, unable to make my lips move.
Mr. Elliott is one of the few teachers who has ever been nice to me, although he never really liked Finn. Apparently, skinny underdeveloped boys don’t impress him much, and so he never stepped in when the football guys stuffed Finn into trashcans in the locker room.
I hated that. But I can’t deny that I still liked him…for how he treated me.
Specifically, he never made me participate in dodge ball.
He knew I’d be pummeled into a bloody pulp, so he always let me sit it out. And he never acknowledged that he knew why. He never said the humiliating words, I know everyone hates you so I won’t make you a target. I always appreciated that.
But now, he’s dressed in jogging clothes and lying in a broken heap at the bottom of the cliffs. One of his knees is bent, and his foot is cocked at an unnatural angle, pointed up at the sky.
As Finn pulls out his phone and calls the police, all I can focus on are Mr. Elliot’s socks. They’re the old-school kind, the gym socks that you pull up to the knee…the ones with the stripes. His stripes are bright blue.
A man is dead, and all I can think about are his socks.
Maybe everyone is right and there really is something wrong with me.
Two hours later, my mother rushes to assure me that there isn’t.
“It was shock, honey,” she tells me, stroking my hair slowly away from my face. “Most people don’t get upset right away. It’s a delayed reaction.”
She wipes my face with a cloth, and makes chocolate chip cookies, and everything is fine until two days later, when it’s my turn to help my father.
I stare at my father’s perfectly manicured hands, the fingernails that are cut into perfect squares, as he pulls the crisp sheet back up over Mr. Elliott’s body.
“I wonder if he had a heart attack and fell from the cliffs?” My dad muses calmly. “Or if he slipped? Poor guy.”
My dad is unflappable, his voice matter-of-fact and speculative.
He doesn’t ask me if I’m okay, because it doesn’t occur to him that I might not be. Death is his business and he deals with it on a daily basis. Nothing bothers him anymore, and he forgets that it might be unnerving for someone else.
I swallow.
“Is the M.E. coming?” I ask, and my voice sounds tremulous in this large sterile room. It’s cold in here because it has to be, and I rub the goose-bumps off my arms. My dad glances at me as he wheels the metal gurney into a cooler.
“Of course,” he nods. “The medical examiner always has to come and sign the death certificate. You know that.”
I do. But somehow, staring at the familiar and dead face of my gym teacher causes the things I know to fly right out of my head.
I nod back.
“Are you hungry?” I ask him, wanting an excuse to leave this room. “I can make you a sandwich.”