“if you ever
want to see me again leave $20 in Peter Pan in the library by end of lunch
today”
the sheet of paper wedged into her locker removed and unfolded by ache1
before she became ache1, senses already fragile and wrung out from
her day-long Sunday hangover now assaulted by this ammoniac reek of rubber
adhesive used here to glue the tabloid-excised letters beneath a magazine
photograph of E.T., upon whose face two parallel rows of tears had been crudely
inked.
She had arrived at school affecting whatever she could muster of that
maturity in thrall of which she now assumed herself, a sad masking of her
nauseated state and the residual vulnerability of that assumed lost as its
onset, this ransom note however inducing a level of distress so seemingly
disproportionate the doll was returned her within an hour.
Following and compounding this, her ongoing anxiety amidst the piling
up of days absent the expected and longed-for purge of menstruation, the last
dream she remembered one in which an exact same scene played out over and
again, like a scratched record each subsequent go-round of which might
establish momentum enough to carry on through whatever impediment, only to
understand herself awake before the dream could fully occur itself.
Weeks hence, those classmates responsible could not help wonder at
their own complicity in her subsequent disappearance, and that degree of
trouble which might be visited upon them assuming her eventual return to
school. That they would never again see either her or the doll (itself mere
weeks from its own dismemberment) formed not any of their initial
consideration, though the situation’s gravity became understandably manifest in
the accumulating days and weeks.
Eventually the two events became conflated, their guilt perhaps editing
out any actual historical time between the party and her absence, so that in
this new narrative she never returned to school at all, disappeared forever
directly from the party itself, conveniently too allowing them to forget the
doll had ever in fact been ransomed at all, yet with the film’s every
inescapable tv re-run, girl and doll both would remain twinned as ever
unforgotten ghosts by which those more sensitive would in perpetuity find their
lives haunted.
Too throughout, the national and even local media’s uncharacteristic
lack of interest in a missing schoolgirl, herself finally regaining
consciousness in a distant country, a new world from which her dreams had been
completely extinguished.
