Absent Leaf.

I am fourteen, and my head aches and I can’t see. I push my glasses up on my nose and blink hard, trying to clear my blurred vision. The frames are always sliding down so that I see clearly with the bottom half of my eyes and the top half is a sandy blur of light and movement. I stand in line in the congested school hallway, voices bouncing off walls and closing in around my head, too loud for the confined space. Smells of thanksgiving dinner waft from around the corner: it is a half day of school before thanksgiving break begins, and the student body officers are making everyone lunch. On the wall next to me is a picture of a tree; seventy construction paper leaves are thumb-tacked on, one for each student, names written on the fronts in crayon. On the backs are written notes of encouragement, little ways in which the student body officers are thankful for us.

I do not have a leaf. I hunt through the tree a million times, the process growing easier each time as hands unpin their leaves. I am the only one with my first name in the school, and my first name is nowhere to be found. Around me the crowds are buzzing, comparing leaves, laughing. I feel as if I’m sinking. My sides are dull and empty.

The line inches along. I sit with my group of friends in the dreary lunchroom, silent as they chatter about their leaves. I have nothing to say. No one notices or asks about my leaf–which is just fine with me. I’m embarrassed that I don’t have one. I tell myself that it was an accident–I’m at the end of the alphabet in the freshman class, and the leaf-makers were probably tired and unobservant after creating their abundant paper foliage. This doesn’t make me feel any less rejected and the rest of lunch is a miserable blur.

Soon the building empties, and there is nothing left except the faint clinking of dishes as students clean up in the kitchen. I sit down at the piano and play while I wait for my mom to come. A friend comes up behind me and asks about the song–it is a mix of a classical piece and a Christmas carol. She cares, but she has to disappear back into the kitchen. I push up my glasses up my nose, again. My head still aches, and I look forward to getting home and clearing it while running through frigid, fogged-in fields.

This is my last year of school before I take to studying at home, leaving behind the clogged school building with the boisterous people I want so badly to belong to.

I never do quite grow used to the unnerving aloneness.