Charlotte
“Charlotte and Chase Drexel please report to the office immediately. Thank you.” The announcement came on in the middle of the day, April of my Freshman year.
Almost in unison, everyone in the classroom where I was turned around to look at me. I always sat at the very back of the room.
“Charlotte,” Ms. Keyes said. I could feel her eyeing me curiously from behind her tiny patterned square-frame glasses. Slowly, I looked up to meet her gaze. She was standing at the front of the classroom, but she could’ve been a million miles away. It wouldn’t have made a difference. “I suppose you should…”
I nodded, getting to my feet, wishing that this didn’t have to happen. On any other day I would’ve been more than grateful to escape the hell hole the government trapped me in 30 hours a week. Any day except that day, because there were only two situations where I would be called down to the office in the middle of a class. Both involved worst case scenarios. Both involved my mother.
I could feel the eyes of all the people in the classroom follow me as I walked to the door at the front of the room, pushing it open. Quietly, I stepped out into the hallway. I was almost free. Almost, but not really.
Inside the office, it was completely silent. There were two people there, both of whom seemed like they didn’t really want anything to do with the other. The first, I was surprised to see. She was the girl who lived in the house next door to mine, the one who’s dad was a doctor. Her name was Jasmine, she was in my grade. I didn’t see her that often around school. Usually when I did see her, she was walking around our neighborhood with her friend Hayden.
The second person in the office, I was not surprised to see. Ms. Rae, the school’s secretary, was sitting at her desk towards the back of the room, reviewing some paperwork. She looked up as the door slammed behind me.
“I’m Charlotte Drexel,” I told her.
Ms. Rae looked shocked for a minute, and I wondered if she thought I was lying. She didn’t know me, of course. If she had, she would know that no one wanted to be me—no one would even want to pretend they were me.
After a few seconds, she pushed her chair back on its wheels, standing up. “Yes, Charlotte Drexel. Of course.”
She motioned for me to follow her. I stepped closer to her desk, watching as she turned around and disappeared behind a door. I knew I needed to follow her, but suddenly I couldn’t move.
I was praying that I was wrong. I would’ve taken a detention, a suspension, an expulsion for God’s sake. But I hadn’t done anything wrong, at least not that I could remember. Truthfully, I hadn’t really done anything at all, besides breathe and sit, in a while.
“Charlotte?” Ms. Rae was standing in the doorway of the room she had disappeared into again. Faintly, I could hear the voices of three other people come from the room, their conversation hushed.
I bit my lip against whatever it was that I always felt when something bad happened, or someone made fun of me. Then, just barely, I heard my mother’s voice.
“Charlotte?”
“Mom? What’s wrong? Mom?” I rushed towards the door, shoving it open. I could feel my heart beating like it was trying to escape from my chest through my wind pipe. It didn’t help that a lump about the size of my heart had formed in the back of my throat, as well.
“Daddy’s gone.” I looked down by my mother’s feet at my sister, her usually tan complexion pallid, sitting with her legs crossed, leaning against the wall. She was eleven, then.
Looking up from Adrienne to my mother, I could feel 8 pints of complex fear flowing through my veins where my blood should’ve been. My mother wouldn’t even look me in the eye.
There was only one other place I could look. My brother, Chase, had obviously arrived in a much more timely manner than I had. He was sitting in a plastic chair across the cubicle sized room from my mother and Adrienne. I could see his fists clenched so hard, it was cutting off the circulation in his fingers.
“Chase,” I said, meaning to be loud but coming up with a sound only barely audible. My brother looked up at me. I saw two things.
First, a small gash just above his eyebrow, the dried blood seeming to have been taken care of hastily. Daddy did that, I remember thinking to myself, Daddy left.
Then, behind the physical gash, I could see another injury. I could see it in Chase’s eyes, blankly staring at the wall behind my mother. I could see it in the way his mouth was set, it wasn’t the same as it always was. I could see it in everything, everyone—my mother, my sister, my brother, even Ms. Rae—the loss. I could feel it, the room itself almost filled with the kind of air, the kind of smell, that makes you want to break down and cry.
The loss was everywhere, trapping me in, trapping us in—my family. My worn, broken family.
“He left us.” That was all my brother said, all he could say. I thought of all the things that had ever been said to me: all the teasing, mocking, insults. I thought of all the times people had laughed at me, spread rumors about me, backstabbed me. I thought of how I used to cry, when I was really little, but mostly all the times I should’ve cried, and didn’t. I thought about everything that had ever seemed bad to me, all the times I wondered if it was really worth living. But it was these words from my brother, the only person who I could trust, the only person who never judged me, that shot down every one of my carefully constructed emotional barriers. It was these words that left me feeling so empty inside, a big hole left where my organs were, only to be filled with the loss.
I started to cry, after so long, I finally did. But it wasn’t being teased or backstabbed to laughed at that made me cry. It was because I had thought, at one time, my dad loved me.
