That Kind of Funny

The funny thing about the story is she got a flat tire on the way to school that morning, thought could my day get any worse?;

That the bus he was riding passed and he didn’t see her with her tire iron and jack, hands clenching tight what he held in his bag;

That, later, they found photographs of her on his phone, physical copies in a box under his bed, too; the clerk at the drugstore remembered he would come in and print them out every couple of days, always paying with a handful of coins. The clerk remembered how the coins were always warm and slightly damp, like he’d been clutching them;

That there were things like love letters too, and poems, comparing her face to the faithless moon — he called it faithless — waxing on about the thorns on roses and the barbs on the fences. Spill it all was written by hand on a printout copy on his desk, I’ll spill it all;

That she was worried about a calculus test that day, that calculus was her hardest class, that the teacher wrote in tiny print on the whiteboard and erased it all at the sound of the bell;

That she remembers all their names;

That people still ask her, even now, why she didn’t just go out with him;

That he never even asked, but if he had, she would have said no, something in the way he looked at her, something heavy and sharp, full of stinging things;

That a week’s worth of her gym socks went missing once, that six pairs of women’s athletic socks were found in that box under his bed and one of her hairties too, that she hadn’t even realized was gone, strands of her hair caught and dangling from it;

That she doesn’t know what became of the seventh pair of socks;

That the emergency alert siren didn’t begin its wailing till she had already pulled into the parking lot, still wiping her greasy hands on spare napkins from her glove box;

That her best friend had gone ahead without her — if I get another tardy, I’m grounded — and waved from the window of her brother’s car when she passed, I’ll see you later;

That witnesses said he was shouting her name over and over again. That he said other things too, but that was what they remembered the most: her name, her name, her name;

That the school security guard stopped her from going in, hands on her shoulders, gun on his hip;

That they were still standing together on the sidewalk when her classmates finally started running out.

Not funny haha, she says. Not that kind of funny.

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You can learn more about Cathy by clicking on her bio: https://thievingmagpie.org/cathy-ulrich-bio/