Just One Wisp

Just One Frustration

I blame my mom for inflating my hopes about being eighteen. She filled me with stories about leaping from rope swings into muddy lakes. Late nights sipping thick milkshakes with friends and harmonizing with car stereos that blasted One Direction music. Teenage hands hugging teenage hips in decorated gymnasiums, at least until the beat dropped, and the crowd roared.

Long before I was ever a thought in Mom's mind. Long before the air stank of odorless poison.

"Those were the days," Derek chortles, scooping some risotto into his mouth. The large cafeteria bustles underneath bright lighting. What little was left of Mom's beloved childhood town was reduced to a couple hundred people in a high school. The rest of the world gutted like roadkill. "My buddies and I used to cliff jump near Serenity Falls."

I sip from my water glass. Outside the cafeteria windows, the sun still shines, and the trees still waver in the summer breeze. I bet Serenity Falls still looks as gorgeous and blue as Derek remembers. Nature found harmony with the airborne metal particles, but we humans didn't, hence locking ourselves in the high school.

Just one wisp of unfiltered air can kill.You can't see the metals or smell them or feel them in your lungs, but they're everywhere. Lurking among the evergreens and the redwoods, the nickel dares to damage your lungs, the chromium to choke your breath, and the lead to tear your airways to shreds. A million little stab wounds that suffocate you from the inside out.

"Cliff jumping? How brave!" my mom laughs. "My friends and I would swim near there but never jump. Kids used to break their arms!"

I stifle a scoff. My mom, a self-proclaimed wild child, declaring Derek to be brave? I lick my plate clean and rise to my feet. Not on my watch.

"Millie!" Mom tucks her knees around her chair and scolds me with a wrinkled forehead and a fiery gaze. "I didn't excuse you from the table. We have a guest here."

"I have a math test on Monday," I say. "I have to go study."

"Alright, then. Go study," Mom says. She unscrews her coiled posture and offers Derek her signature little smile. It's the one where she apologizes to others about my unruly behavior. How I dare to step out of line.

"Good luck, Millie," Derek nods, "and don't forget, one plus one is two."

My mom offers a laugh. I don't even know what to say, so I just blink. Derek's smile widens, so I evacuate the scene as quickly as I can. My lunch tray returns itself to the cafeteria kitchen, and I hurry out of the bright area into the dim hallway. It takes a while to reach my cot in room 211.

The door slams shut behind me. Out of breath, I screech through growled teeth and throw myself on my bed. Why didn't I spit something clever at Derek? Maybe that the square-root of negative-one is his imaginary, one-sided relationship with my mom?

The remark makes me smile until a frown sinks the corners of my mouth. I grab my headphones and shove them over my ears.