Pure Light

All summer. I hadn't seen her all summer. When I saw her in school yesterday, I hardly knew who she was. She stops by my locker between classes and she hands me a note. She's like: "Don't say anything --just follow the directions in the note." Speechlessly, I stand there and she's gone when I blink again. She had colored her soft auburn hair navy blue. She still looked familiar, like I had known her long ago, the way I still knew her in fuzzy memories. I open the note quickly:

Anna, I had the greatest summer of my life! I can't wait to tell you all about it! Meet me at the Octopus at 8 tonight. Just like we used to!

-Joni

It was so good to see her again! She'd grown up ten blocks from my house, but we were never farther than adopted sisters. Last school year we'd fallen away from each other after her parents got divorced. Every time I tried to talk to her about it she closed up. She declared, "You don't know what it's like! You'll never understand because your parents still love each other and mine don't!" I didn't understand, but I wanted to be there for her. She gained some weight that year, too. Not all at once, of course, but by the end of the school year she couldn't wear the clothes her parents had bought for her in the fall and her mom had had to take her shopping for new clothes again in March.

I could hardly wait to talk to her again. I wondered if she had met any cute guys in her dad's town. He had moved to a suburb of Iowa called Quad Cities right away last spring. The cities were huge! They had every store anyone could ever want to shop at! They even had more than one mall! Our city wasn't big, but it was at least big enough to be called a city.

What was it about that note she'd written? It was her handwriting, but she didn't do the little hearts for the dots on her "i's" or the little starbursts on the dots of her exclamation points. She'd done those since fifth grade. Four years! She'd used them for four years! And then she just stops?

I couldn't wait to talk to her again so I went down to Parliament Park at 7:30 instead of eight. I couldn't keep my mind on anything else when I had that to look forward to, so here I sit in the chilly September evening. The Octopus. We'd called it that for so long. I think we started calling this picnic shelter the Octopus when my sister was in about fifth grade and she had intelligently informed us that it was "Octangular" because it had eight sides. We couldn't pronounce it so we just called it the Octopus.

The picnic tables were all messed up. There must have been some kind of gathering. There was a long row of picnic tables lined up end to end right down the center of the shelter. The rest of them were scattered around the edges. I lay on my back on the table in the very center of the shelter, right under the light at the center of the peaked roof. At first all I noticed was how hard it was. Then I stared up at the cracked plastic cover of the yellow bug light.

The bugs all wanted to touch the bulb itself. Small bugs swarmed around it, larger bugs made a tapping sound as they bounced against the plastic. Then a moth sneaked into the plastic cover through the crack. It bounced around wildly, making louder tapping sounds, until it realized it had access to pure light. It flew directly into the fluorescent bug bulb and with a "ZAP!" it tapped one last time as it lay in the bottom of the cover --a mass grave of bug bodies. The other bugs seemed to buzz more loudly now that the moth had died.

I heard her keys jingling from a distance. I raised my arm over my face to see the time on my watch. I'd been watching the bugs for fifteen minutes. I sat up and all the blood rushed from my head.

"Hey Anna!"

"Joni!" I sprang up to give her a big hug. She accepted it with open arms. We sat next to each other on the tabletop of the picnic table I'd been lying on before. She couldn't stop talking about this Tom she'd met while at her dad's. I had just worked at Cub Foods all summer. No cute guys there.

Tom had changed her life. He was a college student that was living in an apartment. He had shown her that she could be whatever she wanted to be. She even said twice that he constantly reminded her of how beautiful she was.

"I really felt beautiful! Anna, he's the best thing that's ever happened to me!" She sat staring at the bugs hitting the white plastic cover over the fluorescent bulb, but she wasn't really seeing them. "Anna, I can make you beautiful! You can feel this good, too! Totally free. It's the best feeling!"

"How?" Anna asked with disbelief.

"With this:" She reached into her jean jacket's inside pocket and pulled out a hand rolled cigarette of some type.

"Where'd you get those?"

"From Tom. He bought me enough to get me by until I go back to visit my dad in a couple of weeks."

"Does your dad know?"

"Of course not! He worked eighty hours a week! I never saw him!"

"Joni, I can't," my lips stumbled.

"Why not? It's so cool! You feel so free! It looks so cool, too! Here, I'll show you!" She reached her arm out to offer me the lit joint.

"Joni, no, I can't." I stepped back from her slowly and just kept walking backward. Gradually I found myself outside of the picnic shelter, looking in at Joni sitting right beneath the light. From the distance I had reached when I finally stopped, Joni looked like she could raise her arm and touch the light. The puffs of smoke from her mouth and nose rose toward it: climbing, striving, pulling her towards the light.