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It's A Life
Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: John Barker
ISBN-10: 1450554768
Type: Fiction
Pages: 227
ISBN-13: 9781450554763
April Warren is sixteen-years-old. She's just lost her beloved father in an automobile accident. She's left with a mother that drinks, an older sister she despises, and a chestful of heartache. Impoverished and exasperated, she's coming to grips with her new actuality, when it changes, irrevocably, again.
Literary fiction for Young Adults set in Ionia, Michigan. The scholastic tilt and momentous characters set this book apart.
Excerpt
At approximately 8:30 last night a fatal car accident on Route 57 in Amsden left one man – James Warren, fifty-two, of Belding – dead, and another – David Stewart, thirty-one, of Shiloh – in fair and stable condition at Ionia County Memorial Hospital. Mr. Warren died at the scene of trauma sustained to his head and neck. He is survived by two daughters, a son, and a wife. At the time of printing, toxicology tests were pending.
It is the rather innocuous text that filled a small box on the front page of the Ionia Sentinel-Standard three weeks ago today.
The pending tests, part of a larger first page headline two days henceforth, revealed that Mr. Stewart – husband, and father to a daughter, six – had a blood alcohol content of 2.4 grams per one-thousand, or 0.24%, or thrice the state of Michigan’s legal limit. Death, grief, graduated in grams.
Now, this information at their callous disposal, most of the kids leaning unflinchingly against the orange lockers are gaping at April as surely as if she’d been the one who murdered him; a coldly disparaging and plainly unsympathetic sideways sort of sneer. With thumbs hooked into the shoulder straps of their knapsacks and shorts down past their knees and skirts not half as long, they stand. With ankles edged to the side and shoelaces untied and hats on backward, they lean. With undeserved knowledge and wolfish sneers, they stand and lean and she hates them for it.
In a movie they might be whispering and pointing, nodding and elbowing each other in the ribs, but there is none of that. They just stare, sneer, wonder how she has the gall to show herself. The first floor hallway of her high school has become a tortuous funhouse in which walls of tangerine metal and summer-browned flesh collapse on her. A hallway where it becomes presently clear that she will never again be anyone other than that girl whose father was killed in that terrible accident. You remember the one, out on Route 57? Yeah, well that was her father. In the same way that it has overwhelmed her cogitation for three weeks, the incident will now define her perception. You sleepwalk through life thinking about next weekend, what you’ll eat for lunch tomorrow, wishing you had whiter teeth, and then this happens and nothing else matters. Your grief has become a disease that infects and kills and you are reduced to being the girl with a dead father and it is a terrible thing.
Every twenty feet she hits an ancillary corridor where there’s a gap in the lockers – Welcome Freshman! signs prepared by the Ionia High Welcoming Committee, whoever the hell they are, are taped in every nook and cranny like a frantic ten-year-old’s Lost Dog announcements (His name is Jackson and he’s a three-year-old Boxer with white paws and a green collar and please join me in making him feel right at home on his first day of high school) – and it quits for a moment like a lull in a storm, then starts right back, eyes popping up as though a one-hundred and fourteen pound magnet is wading through a legion of steel-eyed androids.
She creates a mental checklist of names and faces on which to exact revenge: Jessica Stanton, Daryl Williams, Michael O’Leary, and Susan Fogler. Don’t think she is going to forget the hand they have in all this. If it takes her a thousand lifetimes, they will each pay dearly, each in their own turn and with escalating malice, culminating in something so hateful it might take those thousand lifetimes just to hatch the intricate plan. But oh yes, vengeance will be hers! Then, like any coward worth their salt, she stares at the ground and forgets who she even put on that old hit list (Jessica Williams?).
Gray speckled tiles float under her brown mules like skinned water. Her clogs should be galumphing along with rubber heeled thumps, but under her lightfooted lope they are mute. Her legs, solely an instrument for salvation, work to double and redouble the haste of the emancipation that lies in wait, the promising and hopeful serenity of homeroom…
Room 116 is bright and airy and chock-full of fidgety first day of school banter. She snatches a seat at the nearest available desk. Balls of sweat crawl down her spine like carpenter ants, breaths erupting from her nose. Almost, a panic attack. The nearly unanimous consensus of her classmates fills her ears: “I can’t believe we’re back here. This…sucks.” It is reiterated a dozen times in only slight variation of tone or language, and yet under a veneer of insouciance their spirited eyes look content – even, it could be said, delighted – to be sitting here. Spontaneously smiling girls brush imaginary lint from their skirts and rollicking boys vigilantly adjust the brims of their ball caps, all hoping to receive an endorsement of their carefully planned opening day outfits. To all of them save one, a day like any other.
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