Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 8

I was being such a manipulative jerk, but I had no choice. It was highly unlikely that Cheryl would refuse to meet me, and I felt kind of awful about that. I texted Mischa and informed her that I was on my way to the high school to look into Nurse Lindvall's files, just as we had discussed on Christmas Eve. Mischa lived across town in the other direction in a subdivision, so it was unfair to ask her to ask her to join us. It was only as I rounded the corner from Martha Road to the rural highway that I realized how bitterly cold it was. Powdery snow shook down upon me from tree branches overhead. The wind sliced right through my heavy winter jacket. It was so cold that my eyes hurt in their sockets. I pulled my scarf up higher over my face, feeling that my breath was dampening it where it covered my mouth.

MISCHA 10:26 AM

How are you getting there? Roads are closed. Be careful!

By the time I reached Hennessy's, there was already snow in my boots and my socks were damp. The shopping center looked other-worldly with snow blanketing the parking lot, covering up almost half of every store's front windows. Mr. Hennessy, the pharmacist, who, probably at sixty years old was still a lot younger than Dr. Waldbaum, was waiting for me inside the pharmacy as he had said he would be.  He had marched through the heavy snow in the lot just as I had, and I could see the deep trail of his footprints in the snow trailing back across the street in the direction of the Hennessys' house.

Inside the pharmacy, I stood uncomfortably, looking around in wonderment even though I had just been at that store a day earlier. Snow must have shifted from the lot into the store when Mr. Hennessy had unlocked the front door and opened it wide enough to enter, because a small mountain of it had gathered just inside the threshold. The store was unheated, which was logical but surprising anyway, and I shivered as I waited for Mr. Hennessy to prepare the prescriptions for me in the back. "Dr. Waldbaum wanted me to remind you about the water pills," I called out over the aisles of greeting cards, diapers, vitamins, and foot powder.

"I won't forget the water pills," Mr. Hennessy said, and muttered something else under his breath, probably about how he was a professional and didn't need to be reminded by an eighty-year-old retired oncologist about how to refill multiple prescriptions.

I remembered the five dollar bill in my coat pocket from my mom and walked carefully down the aisle of household goods to retrieve a 4-pack of toilet paper from the shelf. Meeting Mr. Hennessy back at the front of the store, I handed him the five dollars and he shooed it away.

"One good deed inspires another," he said.

Once back outside the pharmacy, standing hip-deep in snow, my heart began beating a little faster. I checked my phone, and Cheryl had indeed agreed to meet me at the high school.

CHERYL 10:52 AM

OK but I don't want to get in trouble.

Knowing now that the morning held the promise of more danger, I paused to slowly put the toilet paper into my backpack, wanting very much for Mr. Hennessy to lock up the store and leave before he saw where I was going next. I heard his keys jingling behind me, and watched him walk back toward his house over my shoulder before I quickened my pace toward the high school. I didn't need Mr. Hennessy to find it odd that my footprints departing from his store veered off in another direction instead of directly back toward Dr. Waldbaum's house.

The high school appeared around the corner of Tallmadge Road and filled me with a strange combination of dread, wistfulness, and rage. As an eighth grader, I had ridden my bike past the high school often, eager to leave junior high and walk the halls of the enormous brick building. I had been suppressing my anger over my expulsion for weeks, reassuring myself that it was a small price to pay for Mischa's life. But my banishment from the high school hadn't been a guarantee that Mischa would live, it was simply a punishment for having been outsmarted by Violet. Seeing the building before me, flanked by its snow covered parking lots and pristine football field, I felt the full intensity of my anger over having lost out on my high school experience because of Violet. It was my junior year. It was supposed to have been the best year of my life.