Free Life Will Have Its Way by Angie Myers Lewtschuk Page A

misspelled. There was something about a swim meet. My coach, my teammates, they were all listed. There was an entry for every dance I’d attended in high school, the name of my date, the type of car I’d been picked up in, the color of my dress. I flipped through several more pages. Near the back of the file the information on the pages was more recent, college, employment, professional associations. The newer pages weren’t as organized and appeared to be mostly handwritten, page after page filled with clumsy, masculine handwriting.
    I felt so exposed, so violated. How could they know some of this stuff? I wandered through my past, speculating about all the people I might blame for passing on my private information. For half of a split second I thought of Anja. No, no, stop. Not Anja. Why did I even have to think of her? Why did she even come to mind? I knew she would never tell anyone anything about me, I knew I could trust her more than practically anyone I knew. I felt horrible for even having let the idea pop into my head. I tried to stop thinking of her, I tried to stop imagining her relaying my every detail to the police. Why was I even able to create this image when I knew it wasn’t real? I shook my head. Stop! Maybe there wasn’t anyone that had given up my information, maybe someone had just followed me around, day after day, year after year, transcribing everything they saw. I couldn’t decide which made me feel worse. Either. Both. Who cared about what I did. My life was so boring, so trivial. I couldn’t understand why anyone would care that I had gone to some stupid dance ten years earlier.
    And then it hit me. Dance, dance, winter dance… the winter formal. I’m standing in a noisy, crowded hallway, the white-grey from the overhead fixtures reflects off the tile and paints everyone with cold, unflattering light. The walls are covered with row above row of battered blue lockers. Talking, laughing, squealing, cursing, the cold echo of thin metal doors being slammed again and again. A group of my closest friends surround me, a circle of about five or six girls. I can see over the shoulder of one of them. It’s Friedrich. There stands Friedrich, young, awkward, nervous Friedrich. He’s fidgeting. He looks even more uncomfortable than normal. I swap out my notebook and grab a fresh pencil. As we pass him, his hand grasps onto and slips off of my sleeve, “Excuse me,” he says in a small, barely audible voice.
    My friends stop along with me.
    Without looking up, he mutters quietly, “I was wondering if you would… like to… maybe like to… go with me to the dance?”
    I don’t have a chance to answer, one of my friends grabs me and pulls me away. Another confronts Friedrich, she stands face to face with him, she mocks him for having had the nerve to ask someone from our group to the dance.
    “Who do you think you are?” she asks blankly.
    His lower lip folds into a frown and his chin becomes wrinkled as he fights the urge to breakdown. My friends all laugh as they huddle around me and push toward the other end of the hall.
    “Oh my God, I didn’t even know trolls could talk,” one of them calls in his direction.
    More laughter. Everyone in the hallway is laughing. Laughing at Friedrich. His sad face reminds me of my little brother and I don’t look back. I can’t bring myself to look back.
    I was brought back to the moment with the sharp click of shoes in the hall outside the door. I knew it was Friedrich. I was sure he’d had a metal tap attached to the bottom of his heel. He’d say it was an effort to extend the life of his soles, but in reality, he did it for the attention. He wanted people to notice him, to hear him as he approached, to look up as he passed, to feel fear when they heard him coming down the corridor to the interrogation room. I froze. Instead of replacing the folder I gripped it tighter. This was my life. This was my folder. For a second I felt like the one with the