DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
May and Kylie
May went for a walk along the path around her neighborhood of Deerfield, a suburb of Chicago. She was with Kylie, her best friend. They had known each other since kindergarten and were like sisters. May was short, with wavy brown hair that she always wore down, except on windy and hot days. That day she wore it up, along with her boyfriend’s letterman jacket, that was too big on her, but she wore it anyway because she wanted her boyfriend, Jake, to know she loved him. Jake and the Deerfield High basketball team were out of town, playing in a tournament. Kylie was of average height, and had long blonde hair that she always wore up, in a braid or a bun. She had grey eyes but she wore colored green colored contacts. May liked to write, Kylie was flunking English. May would tutor Kylie, and in return Kylie would put up May’s hair beautifully before they went out on Saturday nights. People at their school knew them as average kids, kids that hung out at the mall on Saturday and went to church on Sundays. Sometimes, like on that Friday, after school, the averageness of the town would get to them, and they would take the train to downtown Chicago, where empty juice bottles littered the streets, and people would park along the streets with the hoods of their cars open.
“I’m so glad we live in a place where we don’t have to deal with that stuff,” Kylie said, nodding her head towards the garbage littering the streets.
“I think it’s cool,” May said, looking into the hood of a car, its metal parts shining in the afternoon sunlight. “This will give me something to write about tonight.”
May wanted to go to college to learn to write. She had the interest and the skill, she just needed the direction. Sometimes, when she would become bored in class, she would scribble out emulations of Poe and Dickerson over her Algebra notes. During freshman and sophom*ore year, on the bus rides to and from school, she would collaborate miniature poetry slams and read out loud her untimely works to her friends. Kylie was her biggest fan. She never said her work was good or bad, she just sat and listened, but it wasn’t like May was talking to the wall, because she could see the light in Kylie’s eyes when May would reach her favorite parts. May had dreams of becoming a journalist and writing for the Chicago Tribune. She wanted to inform people of the truth, of her truth, of what she thought the world was, and the best way she knew how to do this was through writing.
The friends sat on the curb of a street a block and a half away from the train station. This was the third time that they had made the journey to downtown Chicago, just for the hell of it, just for kicks, just to see what it was like outside of Deerfield. Two people with holes in their shoes and baggy clothes strolled by, dragging with them shopping carts filled with plastic bags. A woman in a business suit with her cell phone clutched to her ear paced pass the girls without looking at them. The rush of the train passed them four or five times before the glow of the sky turned from yellow to orange.
“Shall we?” May asked Kylie. May clutched the gritty curb in her effort to stand. They walked up the stairs and boarded the train, and when they reached Deerfield they were home. They went their separate ways, and May arrived home and barricaded herself in her room for two hours, and wrote.
A few days later, May tucked her hair behind her hair as she walked up to Kylie’s house. Kylie’s blonde hair was up in a French braid, and she wore a headband with a shamrock pattern on it.
“Where do you want to go?” May asked Kylie.
“Let’s go downtown,” Kylie said, her eyes lit up.
“Ok,” May said, “I have something new to read to you.”
May and Kylie road the Metra trains in silence. The conductor paced down the aisle, tall and decked out in traditional conductor attire. May and Kylie fished through their purses and forked over the $3.25 each. They sat in seats across from each other, and stared out the window at the tree tops and roofs of houses that sped by like rockets, and in thirty-seven minutes, they were in the midst of downtown Chicago, away from Deerfield, away from everything of middle-class suburbaninity that they knew. This being their best method of having fun, of finding a thrill, in the middle of the week, after swim practice, before a babysitting job. Some kids went to parties, got into trouble, did what they needed to avoid the boredom that came with the type of life that originated from Deerfield. May and Kylie had found their own originality here: they traveled miles from home and May read her poetry to Kylie.
They hustled down the steps of the train and walked two or three blocks through the city. May noticed the smell of fresh baked bread waft through the air. To their left was a Greek bakery. Illegible Greek words were sprawled out above the entrance. Across the street there was a Mexican restaurant, with the menu displayed in the front window. The side street was desolate, there were no passerby’s, and hardly any cars were driving through. They were alone with the city.
“Right here,” May said, sitting down on the disintegrated curb. Kylie sat next to her, facing her, with her purse in her lap. She ran her hand over the small pieces of cement that filled the cracks of the sidewalk. May rummaged through her book bag and pulled out a notebook with a yellow butterfly sketched on the cover.
“Ok,” Kylie said, settling into her place, sizing May up with her eyes, “What have you got?”
“I wrote this the other day, this poem, the last time we came down here,” May said. She took a deep breath and began to read the words off of the page,
“The orange depth which can be seen here
Lasts in my memory for nothing more than years
And the pace of the city keeps its step
With more of heart and even more of the depth
That I feel when I sit here, at one with it all
It’s peace in yourself, it’s the light in it all
That I feel within myself when I’m away from home
But even more myself when I show you this poem.”
Kylie smiled and clasped her hands together. May smiled sheepishly, closed her journal, and put it back in her backpack.
“Beautiful, darling,” Kylie said. “We should go home, I’m tired, and it’s getting dark.”
May clutched the curb in an effort to stabilize herself. Kylie did the same, and the girls walked down the street. The train station was across another busy street. May’s attention was distracted as she was walking while she tried to zipper her backpack. She intuitively stopped at the busy intersection, without looking up, assuming that Kylie had done the same. A second later, the sound of screeching tires and blaring horns filled the air. May looked up to see Kylie sprawled in the middle of the street, lifeless, a white convertible to her side. In just a few moments, a mob of people were circled around Kylie, silent, taken aback, as May sat by her side, sobbing hysterically. The ambulance arrived in fourteen minutes. Kylie died in fifteen.
The funeral was four days later. The flowers were green and magenta. The front row was filled with family members, Kylie’s Aunt Jane, her Great Uncle Greg, along with a few select friends from school. All of the other students from school had paid their respects at the wake, which May had skipped because she couldn’t face everyone, and their questions about what had happened, why they were there, the looks that she had already gotten at school, that read, how could you let that happen to your best friend. She knew deep down that wasn’t the truth, but she felt so guilty, she couldn’t stand it. Kylie’s parents’ had asked her to give the eulogy. She knew she could write it, but she wasn’t sure if she could face the crowd. She knew she would have to try, because she knew Kylie best, and she felt she could best tell everyone that mattered to her what a good friend she was. She sat up all night writing the eulogy, writing, deleting, rewriting words and phrases.
When the priest motioned, May sat up from the pew and straightened her skirt. She walked up to the podium at the front of the church, hearing the clicking of her shoes echo throughout the church. She walked up the steps, stood behind the podium, placed the crumpled papers in front of her, and took a deep breath.
“Kylie was my best friend,” May said, her voice trembling. “I knew her best, throughout Deerfield, throughout school. She was a good person, and a free spirit. Many of you knew her has a family member, or a friend, but I knew her as a sister. She was always there for me. She died when we were together, and my last memory I have of her is her listening to me tell her a poem that I wrote. That’s why I like to think that right now she is listening to me give this eulogy….” May blinked back the tears. She tried to get through the speech, so that she could go home, and write, and be alone with her thoughts, and cry. The words tumbled from her mouth. She looked to the back of the church, avoiding eye contact with the crowd, and finished. The only person she really wanted to read her writing to was Kylie.
The night of the funeral, she had stayed up the whole night writing, about Kylie, and how she would never let her memory fade away from her, from anywhere: from her mind, from Deerfield, from the universe. She felt a heavy load lift off of her shoulders, with each word, image, description, and tear that fell to the paper of her journal. A few days later, May took the train to downtown Chicago. She found her seat, paid the conductor $3.25, and watched the tree tops and roofs of houses flurry by like snowflakes. When the train arrived at her stop, she hustled down the steps and walked to the exact spot where she and Kylie had last sat, where May had last read Kylie her poetry. She pulled a marker out of her book bag and wrote Soul Sisters on the curb, turned around, and boarded the train to go home.
I chose to emulate an aspect of the plot from The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, where something terrible happens to one of the main characters, one of the worst things that could happen to the character: someone (in the book, two people) who they love dies. In The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Hattie’s first two children, Philadelphia and Jubilee, die of pneumonia, so I wrote a story where the main character, May, has a best friend, Kylie, who dies in a car accident. Like Hatti, May feels intense grief, because of the death of her friend.
