The First Time She Drowned by Kerry Kletter

Author:Kerry Kletter
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2016-02-17T17:21:00+00:00

twenty-six

AS I CONSIDER the details of my emergency plan to stay at Dunton, I can’t help but recognize the irony of my situation. There was a time in my life when I was a perfect student, would never have dreamed of cutting class or skipping an assignment or, as I’m doing now, failing out. The world of school was one of consistency, a place where the rules were clear-cut and easy to follow. Despite the isolation I felt from other students, school was the only place where it seemed like I had any control, where all I had to do to earn my coveted A for Adult Approval was study hard and pay attention.

But after my mother threatened suicide, all of that changed. She was always with me after that. Even when I was away from her at school, she was there in my mind. In dark daydreams I’d imagine myself finding her on the kitchen floor, wonder what her dead body would look like, whom I would call. I spent my classroom hours rehearsing her death in my mind as if I could prepare myself for it, steeling against a future I felt no control over. I never considered telling anyone else what she told me. It did not even occur to me that I had a choice.

Sometimes I would actually wish for it to happen, imagining the compassion and pity I would receive as the “girl with the dead mother.” Then, as self-punishment, I would force myself to picture her corpse in the coffin until the image was so upsetting, and the grief so real, that when the school bell rang, I came up from the story slightly dazed as if woken by an alarm clock in the middle of the night. It was because of this, because of my head being elsewhere, that I ended up being late to English class one day during freshman year and was issued my very first detention. At the time, it seemed like the world had ended. My last refuge, the last place where I was considered good, had been contaminated.

I walked into the detention hall like I was heading to the gallows. Only one other student was in the room, a boy named Wade Mattell. Wade was one of the popular kids, tall with a long face and eyes so pale they looked like rain. He was slouched at a desk in the back, spinning a basketball on his fingertip.

At the front was Mr. Dobbs, a gym teacher with two bucked front teeth that jutted out in opposite directions from beneath his thatchlike mustache. The entire school called him The Walrus, though not actually to his face. From where I stood, The Walrus appeared to be sleeping. I walked over and cleared my throat.

“Hi,” I said tentatively. “I’ve never had detention before. It was just an accident that I was late. I’m usually always on time. And, um . . . I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Dobbs didn’t even open his eyes.

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