I remember it well, the neighbor girl who lived in the apartment building next to mine. We went to the same elementary school that was five minutes walking away from our neighborhood. Even though we attended the same classes together in kindergarten, her grade was lower than mine.
Her name was Chelsea. I did not realize that we went to the same elementary school until I flipped through the photos that my mom took with a film camera. It was a photo taken when I was in third grade and she was in second. The picture that I found was us lying beside each other on the maroon vintage coach at her house, which her dad got it from the flea market that was three blocks away. We were both laughing. My face did not change as much as hers since the photo was taken. From the instant that I saw her face in the picture, I realized that she was the girl who showed up in my mind numerous times when I was trying to piece the fragments of my younger childhood. We used to visit each other’s apartment after school when we were still in kindergarten; we were having lots of fun doodling with her colorful marker sets. I took the photograph out from the album and brought it to the outside of her classroom to show her.
From then on, we went on adventures around our school every Friday. We got snacks from the grocery store that every kid went to after school. We ate them and climbed up to the hill in the neighborhood park or sit on the floor of the closed down bookstore with nothing in it and the door unlocked. This went on every Friday for months; we both got excited on Thursday night for the journey next day.
It was freezing during the December when I was in fifth grade. I was heading school after lunch break from home on Friday but I was a bit late on that day. There was an intersection with vehicles coming from three different directions that we needed to cross every day. There was lot more pedestrians stopped by the intersection on that day. It was not as usual. The melody of the bell rang while I was still at the gate of our campus that is next to the intersection. The bell ring joint together with the hubbub in my brain turned into black curvy lines and form a chaotic image in my mind. I took a peek and tried to see the center of the crowd but the pedestrians stopped by block everything from the angle that I was viewing from. It was strange, and unusual. My mind flashes back to the phone call that Chelsea and I had during lunch. She told me about how she was going to stay at her classmate’s house to watch cartoon, which means that we would not be walking to school together as how we normally did.
The last class of Friday was always taking place at the computer lab. We got free time to play video games for a little while after we finished early in class. Most of the class stayed longer in school than go home. The announcement was asking all the students to go back to their classroom immediately after the class ends on that day. Few classmates and I were caught up in the game; we were the last one that the whole class was waiting for. The room was quiet without whisper, the teacher in the front stared at us until all of us were seated. The announcer started to speak in an extraordinary low voice and an extremely slow pace, which was absolutely different from the energetic daily announcement in the morning. The announcer spoke, and paused inconsistently in the middle of the sentences and words. All he was informing us about was once again the safety rules we heard over and over that we were supposed to obey. The school repeated the safety rules in such a strange way were because someone from our school died in the car accident today. It was the scene that I saw on my way to school. Unexpectedly, it was a fourth grade student, and her name was Chelsea.
I went down the staircases after I blanked out alone in the classroom when everybody else left once the announcement was over. As how Chelsea and I had promised, I waited outside of her classroom after class on Fridays, I waited for her to go on adventures, I waited for her, but she was never going to show up any more.
I asked the teacher where did Chelsea go, she exhaled deeply:
“She went to sleep.”
“I thought she would be watching cartoon as how she told me earlier today.”
