Everyone in school had to attend. It wasn’t required by law, but absences would be noted. Not by the authorities necessarily, but by the kids who were quick to label their peers misogynistic assholes or heartless bitches. I know because I was one of those label-happy kids. Again, I’m not necessarily proud of that fact, but I certainly can’t deny it.
The memorial service was quite a production, considering that it was put together in only a few days. Katelyn’s friend Skye Sanchez projected a slideshow whose sole purpose was to remind us how ridiculously effervescent Katelyn was. There was a loving eulogy delivered by a choked-up aunt. A choir sang Katelyn’s favorite song, which is a gorgeous song. The lyrics were a bit sexy for the occasion, but who cares, right? It was her favorite and if they can’t play your favorite song at your memorial service then when the hell can they play it? Plus, it was all about saying good-bye at the wrong moment, and at least that was appropriate for the occasion.
There’s a line in it that goes, “your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm …” Katelyn’s hair was short and dark, the furthest thing from sleepy and golden, but that didn’t matter to Jed Hayes, who had a crush on her going all the way back to middle school. That hair-upon-the-pillow line made him blubber so loud that everyone in the balcony felt obligated to nod condolences at the poor guy. His empathy seemed off the charts, but if we’re being honest with ourselves—and we really should be—then we have to accept that Jed wasn’t crying because he truly loved Katelyn. It was because her storm of hair never hit his pillow. Sure, it’s a selfish thing to cry about, but we all cry about selfish things at funerals. We all cry about “if only.”
• If only Katelyn had made it through to next year, then she would have gone to Brown. She was going to apply early decision and was guaranteed to get in. No question that’s partly why her SAT tutor, Mrs. Carbone, was sobbing. All those hours, all those vocab flash cards, and for what? Mrs. Carbone still couldn’t claim an Ivy Leaguer as a past student.
• If only Katelyn had scammed a bit more cash off her parents, then she would have bought more weed. It was well-known among us seniors that Katelyn usually had a few joints hidden in emptied-out mascara tubes that she stashed in the glove box of her Volvo. It was also well-known that she was quickly becoming the drug-dealing Dalton twins’ best customer. Such a loss was surely why the Daltons were a bit weepy. Capitalism isn’t an emotionless endeavor.
• If only Katelyn had the chance to accept his invitation to the prom, then she would have ended up with her hair upon Jed Hayes’s pillow. It was within the realm of possibility. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy and she was open-minded. You couldn’t begrudge the kid his tears.
That’s merely the beginning of the list. The theater was jam-packed with selfish people wallowing in “if only.” Meanwhile, outside the theater, other selfish people had moved on and were already wallowing in “but why?”
As you might guess, when a girl blows up in pre-calc and that girl is Turkish, “but why?” is fraught with certain preconceived notions. It can’t be “just one of those things.” It has to be a “terrorist thing.” That was what the cable-news folks were harrumphing, and the long-fingernailed women working the checkout at Target were gabbing, and the potbellied picketers standing outside the theater were hollering.
Never mind the fact that no one else was hurt when Katelyn exploded. We were all examined. Blood was taken. Questions were asked. Mr. Mellick’s class was considered healthy, if not in mind, then in body. We were considered innocent.
Never mind the fact that there wasn’t a trace of anything remotely explosive found in the classroom. The police did a full sweep of it, the school, Katelyn’s house, the nearest park, and a halal restaurant two towns over. They didn’t find a thing. FBI was there too, swabbing everything with Q-tips. Collective shrugs all around.
Never mind “if only.” A girl with so much potential doesn’t suicide-bomb it all away. She just doesn’t. Sure, she smoked weed, and if the rumors were true, she was slacking off in pre-calc and fighting with her mom, but that’s not because senior year was her year to blow things up. It was her year to blow things off, perhaps her last chance in life to say fuck it.
It was a lot of people’s last chance to say fuck it, as it turned out.
how you feel
To describe how you feel after a girl explodes in your pre-calc class is a tad tricky. I imagine it’s similar to how you feel when any tragedy comes hurtling into your life. You’re scared. You’re fragile. You flinch. All the time. You may have never even thought about what holds life together. Until, of course, it comes apart.
Same with our bodies. You can imagine cancer and other horrible things wreaking havoc on our doughy shells, but you don’t ever expect our doughy shells to, quite literally, disintegrate. So when the unimaginable happens, when the cosmos tears into your very notion of what’s possible, it’s not that you become jaded; it’s that you become unsure. Unsure that you’ll ever be sure about anything ever again.
You get what I’m saying, right? No? Well, you will.
For now, maybe it’s easier to speak about practicalities, to describe what exactly happens after a girl explodes in your pre-calc class. You get the rest of the day off from school, and the rest of the week too. You talk to the cops on three separate occasions, and Sheriff Tibble looks at you weird when you don’t whimper as much as the guy they interviewed before you. You are asked to attend private therapy sessions with a velvet-voiced woman named Linda and, if you want, group therapy sessions with a leather-voiced man named Vince and some of the other kids who witnessed the spontaneous combustion.
That’s what they were calling it in the first few weeks: spontaneous combustion. I had never heard of such a thing, but there was a precedent for it—for people catching fire, or exploding, with little-to-no explanation. Now, unless you’ve been living in the jungles of New Guinea for the last year, you already know all this, but if you want a refresher on the history of spontaneous combustion, head on over to Wikipedia. Skip the section on “The Covington Curse” if you want the rest of this story to be spoiler-free.
From Linda, I learned that it was normal to feel completely lost when a girl spontaneously combusts in your pre-calc class. Because in those first few weeks I’d find myself crying all of sudden, and then making really inappropriate jokes the next moment, and then going about the rest of the day like it was all no big deal.
“When something traumatic happens, you fire your entire emotional arsenal,” Linda told me. “A war is going on inside of you, and I’m here to help you reload and make more targeted attacks. I’m here to help the good guys win.”
At the group sessions, Vince didn’t peddle battlefront metaphors. He hardly spoke at all. He simply repeated his mantra: “Talk it out, kids. Talk it out.”
So that’s what we did. Half of us “kids” from third period pre-calc met in the media room every Tuesday and Thursday at four, and we shared our stories of insomnia and chasing away bloody visions with food and booze and all sorts of stuff that therapists can’t say shit about to your parents because they have a legal obligation to keep secrets.
Nutty as she was, Linda helped. So did Vince. So did the rest of my blood-obsessed peers, even the ones who occasionally called me insensitive on account of my sense of humor.
“Sorry, but my cell is blowing . . . spontaneously combusting,” I announced during a Thursday session when my phone kept vibrating with texts. It had been only six weeks since we’d all worn Katelyn on our lapels. In other words, too soon.
“I realize that jokes are a form of coping,” Claire Hanlon
