Free Backwards by Todd Mitchell Page B

Cat huddled on the floor, looking through old photo albums. Seeing that she wasn’t naked, I stuck my arm through the wall and signaled for TR to come in. It meant a lot to me that he’d waited.
    TR drifted around the room, then knelt by Cat to see what she was doing. Every now and then, she pulled a photo out of the album and set it in a stack. She had a metal bowl in front of her full of ripped-up photos.
    “Dude,” said TR. “She’s destroying her kiddie pictures. That’s messed up.”
    “Not all of them,” I said, looking closely at the pictures she’d chosen. “Just the ones that show her scar.”
    TR leaned closer and studied the torn photos in the bowl. “That scar on her lip? What’s the big deal?”
    Cat-Lip,
I thought, recalling the crude drawing of her as the bride of Frankenstein on the sign-in sheet. I wondered if kids had always teased her for this one small flaw. Then again, it had probably never seemed small to her.
    “If I had an album like that, I sure as hell wouldn’t destroy it,” TR said.
    A few of the photos she pulled out looked like they’d been taken in a hospital. She seemed maybe nine or ten in the pictures, although it was hard to tell because there were bandages on her face. In one, she was giving the camera a thumbs-up, probably because she couldn’t smile.
    “Maybe she wants to forget,” I said.
    “Forget what?”
    “Her past. The way people used to treat her.”
    “If you forget your past, then who are you?”
    “We don’t have a past,” I pointed out. “At least not one we remember.”
    “Whatever, dude. This is depressing.” TR backed away. “I’m going to wait outside.”
    “You don’t have to wait for me.”
    “What else am I going to do? Get smashed by a truck?” He shrugged. “I’ll wait.”
    After TR left, I watched Cat tear some pictures out of her yearbooks. She started with middle school. She wasn’t smiling in any of these. Instead, she kept her mouth as flat and ordinary as possible. When she got to her freshman-year photo, she looked different again. She must have had another surgery, and her scar was like it was now — a small, jagged line above her top lip. She smiled in this photo, only it wasn’t the wide, unself-conscious smile she’d had as a child.
    Cat held up one last photo of herself as a seven- or eight-year-old kid, dressed as a clown for Halloween. A woman knelt next to her. They were hugging and making goofy faces. The woman’s eyes reminded me of Cat’s. She’d appeared in a few earlier pictures, yet not any later ones. It could have been her mom. I remembered what Dan had said the other day about how he and Cat used to go to group counseling sessions years ago, and she was the only one who got what he was going through. So maybe her mom had done something similar to Dan’s dad and left to start a new family.
    In the picture, Cat looked happy. She was holding a bright-orange plastic jack-o’-lantern. Her cheeks were painted white, and her mouth had been outlined in red. Her mom wore red clown makeup, too, and both of them were scrunching their noses and sticking out their tongues as they smiled.
    Cat took a candle from her desk and set it on the floor by the bowl of torn photos. Then she held the Halloween photo up by the flame, studying it.
    No. Keep this one,
I told her.
    My words made no difference. Cat moved the picture over the candle until the corner caught fire. She turned it, letting the flames creep up the side and singe her fingers before she dropped it into the bowl with the others. The photos curled and smoked, then turned black. Orange light reflected off her eyes, same as when she’d stared at the burning house. She carried the bowl to the window, switched on her fan, and blew the smoke outside.
    I hated seeing her destroy her past. More than anything, I think she wanted to be accepted. Not to conform, like everyone else, but to be herself and not be rejected. So I stayed with her and whispered to her. Even