Heartstrings

1. Three Months Later

“Are you sure you can carry that by yourself, Lia?”

“I’m fine, Dad,” I assure him as I lift my backpack from the back of his old station wagon. He shuts the trunk carefully and helps me shift the black backpack onto my shoulders. It only contains one two-inch binder and a water bottle, but he acts as if I’m the Greek Titan Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.

“Let’s go, we don’t want to be too late on your first day back to school,” he says jokingly, and his gray eyes crinkle slightly beneath his square-rimmed glasses when he smiles. A vague memory of my childhood resurfaces and the knot in my stomach untangles a little from the comforting recollection of simpler days. Taking nearly two strides for every one of his, I follow my dad’s tall, wiry figure as we trek toward the red-brick building smothered in vines of ivy.

I rub my upper right arm gently, suddenly conscious of my appearance even though it’s already second period and the parking lot of teenagers has cleared by now. My right arm hangs limply by my side, hidden in the loose-fitting black sweatshirt I chose this morning for that exact purpose. After three months of healing and therapy, my arm no longer resembles the hideous appendage it had been in the week following the accident, but it still feels like a foreign attachment to my body. Out of the seven bones that broke in my body, five were in my right arm. I was lucky, I remind myself, not to have been paralyzed.

The familiar building in front of me seems like a reminder of a past life—one that I’m not entirely sure will be the same upon my return. I take the concrete steps slowly even though my legs are perfectly capable of climbing stairs, but my dad interprets my reluctance as careful avoidance of pain and he quickly moves to hold the office door open for me.

As we approach the front desk, Mrs. Posey, whose name I only remember because I notice the silver name placard on her desk, looks up from her computer to greet us with an overly ecstatic smile. Her pointed teeth remind me of the Cheshire cat, and I wonder how many poor freshmen she has already pounced on today. “Good morning, Mr. Collins!” she titters, donning a syrupy tone of geniality for my father. “It’s good to see you back again, Aurelia. I hope you enjoyed the gift basket the staff put together for you.” She pretends not to notice my arm, but I know her eyes are itching to take a good look at the thin figure hidden under my sleeve.

“I did, thank you,” I say with a meager attempt at sincerity. The flowers did help brighten up the dull room, but the gift only reminded me that I would eventually have to go back to school, which is not a heartwarming thought even when you are stuck inside a hospital. “Do I pick up my schedule here?”

 “Actually, Principal Mallory would like to see you first. She’s waiting in her office.”

I turn to my dad, but he shrugs, apparently as unaware as I am of what was about to come. “We’d better go then,” he says simply. He politely thanks Mrs. Ledger, but I get the feeling that he likes her about as much as I do.

The stringent smell of citrus air freshener assails my nose as we walk down the hall leading to Ms. Mallory’s office. The principal is the kind of happy-go-lucky woman in her forties that an advertising company would cast for a pet food commercial – short, brunette, and perky, with a few strands of ginger cat hair splayed across her burgundy cardigan.

“Aurelia! It’s so good to see you back!”

Again, I am reminded of how little she actually knows me because everyone I am close to calls me Lia. But I actually like Ms. Mallory because she comes off as a genuinely kind person.

The principal motions for me to sit down on the sofa across from her. Her office is far from formal and reminds me more of a hotel lounge than a room where rebellious students are sent to receive their sentence of doom. I have never been in her office in the past three years of my high school career, and it feels strange to be sitting here so close to her now. Calmly, I remind myself that I’m not in trouble, but the unawareness of what I was doing in here made me uneasy.