Free Swansong by Rose Christo Page A

as physics indicates could very well happen, then there’ll be universes after this one.  We’re not even a blip on the radar of the collective spacetime manifold.”  Kory stops walking.  “Can you imagine how many billions of people might have lived before us?  And we can’t possibly cull any quantitative data on them?”
    “I…”
    I’ve never been very smart.  I’ve said it before:  Painting is my only talent.  So maybe it’s Kory’s grand scope of matters that’s left me flummoxed.  I don’t know what it is.  Whatever it is—there’s a ferocious headache building in the back of my skull.
    Kory’s face slackens.  “Wendy?”
    I grip the base of my skull in both hands.  I mutter an apology.
    Kory digs around in his camouflage jacket.  “I’ve got fioricet.”
    “No,” I tell him.  I can feel the perspiration on my hairline.  “I can’t take aspirin.”  Something about blood thinners.  Something about statins.
    I feel sorry for Kory.  He looks so shocked, so guilty, like he’s killed me with his words.  Maybe that’s why he reaches around me and helps massage the back of my head.  I try not to stiffen when his fingers pass over my scars.
    “We could talk about something else,” Kory suggests nervously.  “Uh…”  Poor guy.  “We could talk about Wooper Looper?”
    If he starts to talk about Wooper Looper, I think he really will kill me.
     
    * * * * *
     
    The morning passes without event.  On occasion I keep a lookout for Azel; but even between classes, I don’t see him.  In a school as big as Cavalieri, I guess that’s to be expected.
    Kory and I get separated two periods before lunch.  Around lunchtime I take the elevator to the ground floor and follow the tunnel to the canteen.  We made plans to eat together.  Kory should be coming out of AP Physics right now, on the third floor.  In all likelihood, he’ll make it to the canteen before I do.
    I step into the canteen.  I blink rapidly against the bauble lights glimmering on the creamy beige walls.  The service counter is so clean, it practically shines.  Warmth from the unseen kitchens suffuses the air.  It’s much more like stepping into a four-star restaurant than visiting a high school cafeteria.
    Most students leave the campus at lunchtime, I guess because they can afford it; but even so, the checkered brown tables are filled to capacity.  I skim the hall twice for a sign of tawny hair.  The sea of heads dizzies me.  Question-filled glances flicker my way.  My stomach vaults.  I’m still the girl from the car wreck whose whole family, whose best friend died.  I don’t know how I let myself forget that.  I don’t know how, the little gilded swan dangling from my very not-scarred wrist.
    Thud , goes my head, disciplinary in its discourse.  Thud.
    I bolt through the canteen’s back door.  The door bangs shut behind me.  I emerge in the school’s courtyard, pavement under my feet, lawn benches scattered across the fresh grass.  I breathe in cool, sweet air and pretend it isn’t coming from vents in the towering glass walls.
    It’s bright out here.  In here.  I don’t know what you’re supposed to call it when the outside is technically inside.  I crane my head back and drink in the sunlight refracted through the bulbous clerestory ceiling, panes of glazed glass overlapping like the sloped, ambivalent faces of a tired diamond.  It’s a gray sunlight, isn’t it?  Out here in The Spit, a blue sky’s as rare as a blue moon.  You want the blue sky, you go to Tillamook Bay.
    I lived on Tillamook Bay.  I’ll never go back again.
    I sit down on a plastic white bench.  A rusted little water fountain bubbles amid a tepid bed of Black-Eyed Susans.  A girl kneels among the flowers, watering them.
    A pair of shadows falls over me.
    Sarah Ayello and Monica Tandy are as thick as thieves.  I guess they have to be:  No one else really talks to them.  I’ve tried, before, but Monica’s