It was quite sudden, really.
     One second I am sitting in Spanish class, trying to conjugate ‘conocer’ and doodling a sun on the corner of my paper, and the next thing I know there is an announcement on, you know, ‘please excuse the interruption’ about five times, when they could be done with the whole thing by the time they actually start announcing things, and it is for me. As if they have no phone and cannot just discreetly call instead of announcing to the whole school.
     So I go to the office, wondering what on Earth is happening, and then my principal pops up, all smiles and sympathy and confusion.
     I am doing my mind game where I try to guess what the other person is thinking, and I’ve just decided that he’s probably thinking about what gourmet snack food he is going to select from his ‘secret’ junk drawer as soon as I go away again,
and then I realize that he is still talking.
     He has this face on that grown-ups wear when they’re speaking to kids, even though I’m fourteen and perfectly functionable, thank you, although I’m not so sure about sane.
     Then again, I doubt he is, either.
     The principal is patting my shoulder and looking sorry, so I tune into the world long enough to catch the end of a sentence: “-and your mom is on the way, but it’ll be a few minutes.”
     This is the point where I start to suspect. I have mentally recorded everything this pseudo-sympathetic windbag has said in the last, oh, three minutes or so, and now I start to rewind. Some words catch my attention.
Hospital.
Yakima.
track bus…
crash.
brother… did I hear that right?
No.
I’m telling myself no, but I know that is not true.
Then, worst of all, the confirmation.
Leo.
Not a word I want to hear anywhere NEAR those other words…
Because they had a meet today, I know.
     No one knows how my twin brother made the team and I did not, but there it stands.
     Myself in Spanish class, mentally cursing every second imbecile in the row across from me (I save the rest for Tuesdays), him in a honey-colored hunk of metal, with no seatbelts in sight, falling at sixty-plus miles per hour down the freeway.
     I think it may have had something to do with that fact that I did not even try out for track. Running is Leo’s activity, one of the few things either of us actually has to ourselves. It is not that we mind doing everything together, but I felt as though I should give him this one activity, a few hours after school three days a week, a chance to be a puzzle instead of just a piece.
That rhymed.
Sorry.
     They had a magazine in the waiting room outside the ICU, just one of those things for kids where all of the stories are about lost puppies and the average word length is four letters. I was sort of leafing through it, making a sad attempt to distract myself from the fact that everything around me seemed to be made of glass and would shatter if I looked at it.
     Then, something caught my eye. It was a sun, or a crude representation of such, like a child who had not yet developed fine motor control might draw, scrawled in yellow crayon over the text. Some child, maybe a few days ago, maybe years, had sat in this same uncomfortable plastic chair, waiting here under the expectation of patience for some news that they won’t understand, waiting here unaware that soon they will be crying, if only because everyone around them is.
     But, for a short time that seems eternal, the seconds contorting themselves into minutes and the minutes into hours, this child was content to draw a brilliantly yellow sun in a waiting room magazine.
     They say ignorance is bliss, and right then, I agreed.