ONE
DENVER, COLORADO
APRIL 1985
If there was an award for the biggest Neo-Maxi-Zoom-Dweebie alive, I would win. They would put the crown on my head.
Just call me Queen Dweebie 1985.
I hitch my backpack higher on my right shoulder, because even I’m not enough of a dork to wear it with both straps. And I try to pretend that my best friend since the beginning of time isn’t trying to pretend that she’s not really with me.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t blame Megan for walking a few steps ahead and not talking to me on the street. I mean, I am that kid who carries her milk carton from lunch around with her all afternoon in the same purple backpack that she’s had since the fifth grade.
And I have been that kid every day for the last three months, two weeks, and four days.
I can’t throw my empty milk cartons away.
I can’t leave them in my locker after lunch, either.
The idea of putting them (or, more specifically, the missing kids printed on the backs of them) in a metal coffin that smells like thirty years’ worth of gym suits and bologna sandwiches makes me sick.
So I just stick them in my backpack, in the little outside mesh pocket. If I put them inside, where at least no one would see, my books will squish them.
I learned that the hard way.
So from fifth period through the bus ride home, an old, empty milk carton is just there for every kid at Pine View Middle School to see. Once wouldn’t have mattered. But every day for three months, two weeks, and four days, when I’m already the kid with a dead mom and the same backpack since fifth grade?
Yeah. It matters.
It makes me a Neo-Maxi-Zoom-Dweebie.
“Want to hang out?” I ask Megan when we get to our street.
“Oh.” She tips her head so her hair hides her face. Megan has the most perfect hair of all time. My mom called it honey blond. It’s thick and shiny and cut so it’s long on one side and short on the other. Not a frizzy, mousy-brown, shoulder-length mess like mine. The only thing dweebie about Megan is me. “Denny’s coming over.”
Her earlobe, on the exposed side, has two stud earrings through it. One is a real ruby chip her grandma gave her for her birthday last year. It’s Megan’s birthstone. The other is a gold heart. Everything about Megan is cooler than me.
Denny is her older brother. For the past six months, he’s lived in an apartment with three of his friends. He’s studying at CU Denver, to be an engineer. Until the last couple of weeks, Denny coming home meant that Megan and I would be in their basement begging him to play one more game of foosball with us.
Not anymore. Apparently.
I smile like I’m not upset. Like I believe her. “I have homework anyway.”
She stops when we get to her house. Her eyes move to my backpack, then up to my face. “I’ll call after dinner.”
I shift a little, trying to hide my milk carton from her. “All right.”
I watch her walk away and wish that I could just throw the stupid thing into the trash can on the side of our house. After I grind it into the front lawn with the sole of my left Ked.
Except when I think about doing that, I think about the face of the kid that’s printed on the back of the carton. A boy today. His name is Christopher Thorpe.
He’s been living inside my brain since just after fourth period, when I took a milk carton from the big silver cooler in the cafeteria. I can’t imagine ruining his face with my sneaker.
I swear, I used to be solidly normal. Not popular, but I blended in. I was just like Megan. Or at least a slightly less cool version of her.
I was just like pretty much everyone.
It isn’t that my best friend is moving away from me. She’s staying where we’ve always been, and I’m the one who’s changing.
Yeah. Just call me Half-Orphan Girl with the Milk Cartons. Unfortunately, the title does not come with any superpowers. Just a rotating selection of “missing and exploited” sidekicks.
* * *
In my house, I turn on the kitchen faucet. While the water warms up, I carefully open the carton’s top seam, then use a steak knife from the wooden block on the counter to cut out the bottom and the top flaps and slice open one side so I have a flat rectangle of waxed cardboard.
First a rinse to get rid of the milk residue that’s gone a little sour. I never clean them at school. Not since Hillary MacLean caught me that one time in the bathroom by the gym.
She still calls me Cinderella, trying to make it stick. It hasn’t, so far, but I’m not going to give her any more glue.
After the rinse, I squirt one drop of green dish soap onto the wet carton. Mom used it because of the commercials with the lady who says it’s good for her hands.
Mom had nurse hands, dried out from being washed so many times every day. I can still feel their rough texture against my skin, if I close my eyes. The way her fingertips would catch in my hair as she brushed it off my forehead when she came in to turn out my light at night.
Sometimes we’d sit together at the kitchen table and soak our nails in little bowls of soapy green water, just like in the commercials.
Dad has not stopped buying Mom’s soap. Using it to clean my milk cartons is a little like sharing my mom with these lost kids and that makes me feel a little bit like a hero. Like she was.
Mom was an army nurse during the Vietnam War. Before I was born. She worked at the VA hospital, until she got sick, helping soldiers learn to walk again after they’d been injured.
When the carton squeaks under my fingers, it’s clean enough. I’m careful not to soak the cardboard too much. It’s a balance between sanitized and falling apart. I carefully pat it as dry as I can with a paper towel.
In my bedroom, inside the ballerina jewelry box that Aunt Louisa gave me when I turned six, there’s a pair of scissors.
They’re small and sharp, shaped like a golden bird with a long neck. Mom used them to snip threads when she sewed. I use them to carefully trim around the picture on the back of the milk carton.
When I push my finger and thumb into the holes to work the scissors, I imagine how often my mom’s fingers were there. It’s almost like we’re holding hands. For a minute, I miss her a little less.
I collect a different picture most school days. That’s important. There are no repeats. A boy. A girl. Brown hair, blond, red, black. One kid is bald. I think he might have cancer. Blue eyes, brown, hazel, green. White skin. Black. Brown. Freckled. Babies. Toddlers. Little kids. Kids my age. Teenagers. Some snapshots. A lot of school pictures.
Today’s picture is a school portrait of a kid who is twelve, like me. A little alligator perches on the left side of his polo shirt and his wavy brown hair is long enough to brush the collar.
He looks like some of the boys in my class.
While I trim, I say his name exactly three times.
Christopher Thorpe.
Christopher Thorpe.
Christopher Thorpe.
I wonder if his friends call him Chris.
Then I say his birthday. He’s only two weeks older than I am. He’s probably finishing up sixth grade like I am.
And the place where he lives. Cincinnati, Ohio.
And the color of his hair and eyes. Brown and brown.
And his height and weight. Five four, 130 pounds.
I don’t memorize his stats. Not yet. But I will. Eventually, I will. For now, my ritual is over, and I exhale as I pull a shoebox from under my bed and add Christopher Thorpe to my collection, alphabetically.
He is number thirty-nine and goes between Allora Simmons and Lisa Turner. And I say out loud, “You are the last one.”
I’ve said that to myself for the last eight school days, and also when I added Juanito Diaz from our quart of milk at home over the weekend. So far, it hasn’t worked. Maybe today it will.
At least now I can pull out my notebook and start on math homework. I’ve been thinking about Christopher Thorpe since 12:38 p.m., when I chose him after turning over four cartons. It’s been worse. There are days I spend long, horrible minutes, turning every carton until I reach the last one and I’m sure there isn’t a kid in the case that I don’t already have.
Making sure there isn’t a new kid is the only way I can skip carrying a milk carton around in my backpack all day. So, either way, I’ve gone from perfectly normal to that kid with the milk cartons.
The night before last I was up past midnight staring at the ceiling with my heart pounding. There was no new kid that day. At least not in the milk cooler. It occurred to me for the first time that someone else might have had a boy or girl on their milk carton that I didn’t have in my collection.
What if I’d missed a new kid because I took too much time getting into the cafeteria?
Today, I’d hurried in as fast as I could, pushing my way to the front of the line. And now I’m afraid that the next time I don’t find a new kid in the cooler, I’ll have to go look at the cartons sitting on tables. Or dig through the trash.
So now I’m that kid who insists on being first in line, turns over all the milk cartons in the cooler, and then carries her garbage—or maybe yours—home with her.
Fantastic. Thanks a lot, brain. It’s not like I needed any help in the not-normal department.
I’ve stood in the cafeteria turning over milk cartons until kids notice. Until the lunch lady says Just take one, they’re all the same. Until the school counselor calls me out of fifth period to talk to me about grief and healing. Until my dad says something vague about therapy.
It’s a relief for Christopher Thorpe to let go of my brain.
Copyright © 2020 by Shaunta Grimes
