USK | Prose | Alvary | See You, Jules

See You, Jules

We'd seen each other on student council and we'd talked at the first newspaper meeting when nothing got done. She was new in the eighth grade, from Washington, and I was a seventh grader. She was blond and fair like some of the German kids, sort of pale where they were pink, but they didn't hold it against her. She was tall and on the quiet side of being popular. I was sickly, verbal, lost somewhere near the tenth percentile of growth.

We had no articles or art, but lots of ideas. She had poems from before she moved, wanted new ones for the paper, and we went out into the semester looking for things to write about. She was at the last fall meeting when everything went together, and we read the copy first time through. Her poems were short, personal, and the only things it made sense to leave a name at the bottom of. I took a byline above an editorial urging sustainable energy consumption, (from before I needed gasoline,) and we got published.

Over the next semester, we were colleagues enough to acknowledge each other in the halls. She'd ask what was worth writing about lately, or tell me something there was a poem hidden inside of, and we'd laugh about stuff. She would move by with a couple of friends; but in the time we'd exchange two sentences, we were alone and she'd say "see you 'round," her fragile position maintained on the embarrassed grace with which she'd say, when it was safer, that they didn't know, didn't write, and didn't know good writing.

She used to walk home through what we now call prairie remnants, and stop on the way to draw in the tall grass. She said she didn't fit in where there weren't mountains, and I wished I lived in the mountains. I was racing go-carts and building rockets when the boys started liking her, but I noticed when she talked to them how she held her books to her chest, smiling and swaying in the time she wasn't going off alone to write. Her poems were the last beautiful moments of the little girl disappearing from her sight, the one I was friends with when no one was around. As the grasses bloomed, she got preoccupied and didn't want to talk about writing much anymore.

At the last newspaper meeting before summer she was glad to see me, and had poems folded among her drawings. She said people from here were harder to understand than she had poems for, and that I hadn't been writing enough. She was worried that her friends wouldn't read what she meant if she wrote about them, and decided to run a poem called The Things I Love instead. She told me nothing'd matter as much if she had to move again than the writing she'd kept from here, and ran across to the field for intramurals.

I heard about the accident on the police scanner at Schlofner's house. A county sheriff reported from the scene before anyone had called. A semi'd clipped a bicycle on 31 South of town. The girl fell under the trailer axle, crushed from the waist up; unrecognizable. The rescue scrambler didn't go off, the coroner's wagon met the county cruiser and a firetruck rolled up to wash the pavement down.

We all went to the wake on Saturday. I was amazed at how grown up she looked in the big black & white photo behind the casket. Her hair was blowing gently off her face in the kind of image that captures your soul, that you want to frame and see again to remind yourself how much each moment contains. I looked at the white metalflake casket for some sign of her, and I couldn't decide whether she was really inside, or which was worse.

Monday morning the casket boarded a plane for Seattle and the Cascades about the time I went to school. Copies of The Things I Love were everywhere. I'd forgotten what she was telling me about it only a week before, and I cried all morning trying to read what she meant. Nothing more came back than the shy breezy smile from her picture. See you, Jules.

Previous · Back to Tom Alvary · Next

Join the discussion at The Unofficial Digital Campfire...