Haunting by Sydney Chaffee

Your mother still comes to the soccer game every spring, the one we started in your honor the year you died, sits alone at the end of the bleachers and doesn’t talk to anyone. No one knows who she is anymore except me and I am scared to talk to her because what if she turns to me and says, You were his teacher and you were supposed to protect him. This year they tried to change the game to football instead of soccer because they knew you wouldn’t notice, but I noticed and said it had to be soccer because that’s what you would have wanted, frozen at sixteen and selfish. Everyone sixteen is selfish but not everyone skips class to lock themselves in the bathroom and die and so I remember even though no one else knows your name anymore.

I like to imagine that you suit up for the game every year. If they change it to football you will not know where to go and neither will I.

Talk about selfish, me taking up your time like this, but all you’ve got is time. I think you believed in heaven, so maybe you are there, wherever there is, and maybe you play soccer all the time, eternally, and maybe you are so good at it that your ancestors come to cheer, maybe they tailgate before every game and you drop in, goofy grin, skinny swagger, and everyone gathers around for high fives and make us proud and don’t worry he always does. You like the attention, of course you do, it’s what you always wanted and we failed down here, we failed we failed.

I have so many questions, and that’s the shitty thing — sorry, the sucky thing, you’re still a kid — because you’re gone and we’re left to make things up that make us feel better. Like the counselor who brought all of us teachers into an empty classroom and told us that you must have felt safe at school because that’s where you chose to die, and people nodded, but I still wonder if it was spite, if you wanted us to know that we did this to you, we broke you. Maybe you wanted to protect your mom from being the one who found you, but one of your friends walked by when they finally forced the bathroom door open, and he saw you there and it ruined him pretty good, so not even that worked out.

The counselor said it wasn’t our fault, but he didn’t know it was my class you skipped to do it, you left lunch and went to the bathroom and locked the door. It was my class where your chair was empty and I didn’t ask if you were absent or if you were hiding in a bathroom waiting — I bet — waiting for someone to knock and interrupt you, and I still wonder how long you waited before you decided no one was coming. And that could be a coincidence, Mr. Grief Counselor would say, but he doesn’t know that the day before you died we had our last conversation, and I was frustrated, and whatever I said was harsh enough to knock your smile right off your face, and then you never came to class again because you decided you would rather die.

Your buddy mentioned you recently, said, That’s my best friend, like maybe you were coming back soon, and I wish you were coming back soon, because they tried to slip a football game past us, and I told them no, it has to be soccer because that’s the only way I know how to apologize, is not let people forget that there was a sixteen-year-old boy who sat at that desk over there and he died, and we play soccer every spring in his honor, and his mother still comes and sits on the bleachers and I’m sorry, I’m so fucking — frigging — sorry, it’s been over ten years and I’m sorry. Some years a new kid walks in who reminds me of you and I am extra nice to him, I try, hoping you will understand that everything is more complicated than you thought and I am sorry. I wish you were coming back soon so I could see you as an adult, working in IT or fixing up motorcycles or planning for a baby, and I wish your cousin had never yelled, Why didn’t you take attendance sooner? because I’ll never have an answer. Now I’m here on the bleachers and a ghost of you flies past, holding up one finger, We’re number one!, and grinning. No one remembered to tell your mom to come this year. People keep their distance. I am my own kind of ghost.

Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Orin Zebest