Penn, Class of 2012 Corrie By Alexandra Levine Rectangle glasses. Her graceful, ballerina body lays in the grass with her thick-rimmed, black rectangular glasses. Eyes closed, pink lips parted just enough to convince me that she’s trying to say something. I can’t move my eyes away from her. But the image of Corrie there on the side of the road, so small, on her back looking up to a sky so big, becomes fuzzy and blurred as my eyes fill with water. The bushes and mulch and grass and dirt – they swallow her up and I can’t understand why she doesn’t seem to be fighting it. But she sure as Hell is going to wake up. In my peripheral vision Joseph Rouleau rolls out of his car. The engine drips with exhaust fumes and the tires are petrified to stone in a hot suffocating blanket of air. Glass shards are sprinkled in a mosaic all around the cold, angry curve where Rouleau flipped his pickup truck. Now the gravel is tattooed with Rouleau’s presence, sick and animalistic, eerie and selfish. He rolls out of that topsy-turvy all-American Chevy, flopping and flailing on the road. But Rouleau meets no terrible fate. Like a marionette doll, his limbs jerk this way and that until he can stand, although the liquor makes balancing on two feet no easy feat. His arms wave as if he’s trying to flag down a helicopter. “What the fuck is this all about, my fucking car! What the fuck, my fucking car! Jesus fucking Christ, oh man, my car.” I see Rouleau through a funhouse mirror, deformed and terrifying. His body disproportioned, beer belly hanging out of a ripped white T-shirt and swollen face waxing and waning underneath a tornado of shaggy brown hair. Five feet away from him I taste his breath. Breath of alcohol from three nights ago, mouth-washed with Budweiser. Crust around his lips, the residue of dried rum or gin or whiskey – perhaps a combination of the three. And out of the vile taste and smell of his filthy mouth come filthy words. No apologies or concerns, just word vomit. The police sirens crescendo. Blue and red lights, the fire trucks, the ambulances. I can’t seem to understand why all the fuss, because Corrie is going to wake up. She will be fine, and I know it. Lloyd is an EMT and he’s here with us and he’s doing CPR because Corrie’s going to be fine. Certainly she will be, because it’s Corrie. The parade of police cars is really just unnecessary. They’re just making everyone anxious. Enough with this scene from a tacky action movie. My fingers are covered in marshmallow fluff and chocolate from the S’mores. I wipe them on my Camp Laurel staff shirt so I don’t dirty Corrie’s clothes or hair with my late night snack. Besides, she just ate four S’mores – Little Corrie, the tiny girl, boy can she eat! The odor of burnt rubber mixed with gasoline and fuel exhaust mixed with the smokey S’mores is becoming borderline nauseating. I tuck Corrie’s soft, black hair behind her fragile face. Her skin is cool and smooth, aside from the occasional mosquito bite. Her face is still white and her lips still pink, and just as before they’re parted as if she’s about to speak. In flesh and bones she is so delicate that I could imagine her dancing inside a music box. Her body is so pristine and white, except for the spots of blood. They’re like beauty marks. Two large hands scoop me up under the armpits. My bones crunch a bit as the hands jerk me off the ground. “This is a crime scene, Miss,” says the officer in the navy blue Augusta Police Department uniform. My feet are tangled in each other, tangled in the grass, tangled in a moment, and I resist the officer’s grip. “Miss,” he repeats, this time with more phlegm, urgency and aggravation in his voice, “This is a crime scene.” I open my mouth to respond as he continues to jiggle my body – limp but resistant, weak but unusually tranquil. He jiggles and jiggles. His strong hands feel like sand paper against my skin, and my knees burn as he drags me across the mulch, away from Corrie. I say nothing. Screw you, Officer. I’m just trying to help Corrie back onto her feet so we can make curfew back at camp. It’s always an ordeal when we don’t make curfew, you know. I’m just trying to help Corrie make it back, because she’s graduating Northwestern next year, okay? And she needs to get back because summer’s almost over and her senior year in arctic Evanston will be here before she knows it. She needs to be back for all that, and then for law school, you know. And, I mean, what will my campers say tomorrow if Corrie isn’t at the Arts and Crafts shack to help them make glittery masks for Halloween in July? How can I communicate this? I am frozen, and the officer continues dragging me away. I have never been so eager to stay. So eager that my chest hurts, my face is hot. Dirt gathers underneath my nails as I dig my fingers into the mulch, grasping the grass and dirt with all my strength so as to stay in place, stay by Corrie. The grass detaches from the ground and my hands are left dirtied and filled with earth. I gulp the air – still shrouded in a cloud of dust, car exhaust fumes, and the smell of S’mores. I gulp and gulp the air, as if to keep my head above water in a drowning fit. My head bobs over the surface, under the surface, over and then under. I gasp for air, gulp it down, and then suffer short of breath again. My pupils are trapped, locked, fixated on Corrie’s bloody beauty marks. There are so many. A crowd of paramedics forms a bubble around her petite body, and the black of their jackets morphs into a wall my eyes cannot penetrate. I reluctantly hop into the cop car for a thirty-second voyage back to the campgrounds – a journey so silent that it’s deafening. I sign in just before curfew, and as I hand the crinkled sign-in sheet back to Brandon, who works at the camp office, I notice his hand shaking. My eyes trace their way from his hand, up the zipper of his Patagonia jacket, over the bump of his chin and the crease between his lips, along the jagged line of his crooked nose, and then straight into his eyes. He’s crying, and his forehead is twisted into swirls of small wrinkles and knots. Brandon is a frat boy from Ohio State University. I’ve seen him emphatically chug beers at the Weather Vane, the local roadside bar. I’ve seen Brandon – with hard, clenched fists – bang on his chest like King Kong to fire up his little campers at their football tournaments. But now Brandon’s crying. With overwhelming effort, I push words up from my stomach, through my throat and off my lips: “She’s going to be okay,” I whisper. “No, Al,” he exhales. “No, she’s not.” He wipes his freckled face and runny nose with the sleeve of his coat and turns away from me. When school started in autumn, I stood on the corner of 38th and Walnut. I rocked back and forth in my black suede boots: my toes kissed the front of the shoes, and next gravity rolled me onto my heels. There I rocked, debating whether to cross the street. Class was starting in five minutes, and the white stick figure was illuminated, telling me to walk. I longed for the lively stick figure to hold my hand and whisk me across the street, but he never did. The stick figure changed to the orange hand, I cursed a little under my anxious breath, and I wiggled my toes in preparation for the next opportunity to conquer the crosswalk. Orange “stop” hand to white “walk” man, and back and forth and back and forth. Each time came a rush of adrenaline followed by a sense of defeat – a failed attempt to parade in front of the stopped traffic. Short of breath, with sweaty palms and heart racing, I surrendered to the steps of the TEF house and began to sob. I missed my lecture that day. At night, my doors were locked, my bed was warm, my friends were close – everyone would tell me I was perfectly safe. But I never was. Car noises from the streets below plagued the moments just before sleep – those half-conscious, half unconscious moments when we hover in a gray space between reality and dreams. I would attempt to blend in with my throw pillows, lying there so still, as if playing hide and seek. Each time the silence was broken with the screech of tires against pavement or the revving of an engine, a tsunami of fear would drown me in my sheets, suffocate me under my blanket, swallow my body whole. The soundtrack would send jolts of electricity through my veins, throwing my muscles into frightening spasms and contractions until I was completely depleted of breath and sanity. The car noises outside on Spruce would abduct me from my mountain of pillows and strap me down to the middle of the road in front of Joseph Rouleau’s Chevy. The noise would crescendo, the headlights would brighten as they approached me – helpless in the middle of the quiet Maine road – and I would begin to scream.