Checkered

by Diana Christine Caporaso

She fell as if she wasn’t afraid, as if she was expecting someone to catch her.

I never knew someone could commit suicide so gracefully and calmly, but I heard the sound her body made when she hit the ground. It was the type of noise that cannot be explained in words- the sound of life breaking.

The weatherman had said it was going to be a beautiful day. He lied. Still, I had planned to go for a hike on Mohonk to distract myself from the fact that I was most definitely going to fail my pre-calculus final. A whole two and a half months and I still didn’t know anything about pre-calc whatsoever. You would think that twelve weeks is a considerable amount of time and that my brain would have absorbed something of the subject matter. I should probably stop daydreaming so much.

I hadn’t even bothered to apply sunscreen because it was so cloudy that the rays couldn’t get through to burn my Irish skin. It was my third attempt climbing the rock scramble on Mohonk Mountain and my first time doing it alone. It’s probably not safest hike to do one one’s own, but then again, I’m the girl who’s failing math, so how smart can I possibly be?

It was so quiet away from the constant hum of the college town of New Paltz. I savored the silence, a rare treat for someone living in an eight-person suite in one of the biggest party dorms on campus. Then I saw the flicker of a shadow and my heart started to race a bit, not knowing who my company was.

And that’s when I saw her- the dying girl. She was just standing on top of one of the rocks with her arms wide open as if she was embracing the air. There was a good thirty foot fall beneath her, and before I breathe out, she just dropped. By my next inhale, she was gone. Then came the sound I will never forget.

I stood, frozen in shock for a second, not knowing what to do. When my feet started functioning again, I ran to look over the ledge to see where she and landed. I wondered if my cell phone got reception up here in the mountains and what I would say to whoever answered when I dialed 911. Would they suspect that I was somehow involved with this girls’ death? But I hadn’t even known her, hadn’t gotten a chance to get a good look at her face…

Turned out that I didn’t even need to worry. There was no body there on the ground. I even climbed down a bit, as far down as I could go without succumbing to the same fate that this mystery girl supposedly had. But I couldn’t find her anywhere, and I couldn’t figure out where a body could have disappeared to so quickly.

Slowly, I hiked back down the mountain, trying not to freak out over what I had just seen, or thought I had seen. It wouldn’t be the last time that I thought I was crazy.

xxx

In the car on the way home I heard a news report on the radio about a plane crashing into the Atlantic Ocean. Over two hundred people assumed dead. Man, this weatherman was really off the mark about the beautiful day thing. I don’t like to think about stuff like planes crashing- it seems like one of the worst ways to die, knowing that death is imminent and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. What must be going through a person’s mind just moments before death? Disbelief, probably. Regret. Sadness…

By the time I finally found a parking spot in lot 32, I was pretty damned depressed. So much for distracting myself from upcoming failures.

I swiped my student ID card to let myself into Dubois Hall. They’re really big on calling them residence halls here- and not dorms- trying to create a more pleasant sounding living experience, I guess. Well, living in a building with maybe a hundred other young adults is certainly something, but I don’t know if it’s pleasant. Especially when the guy you can’t stop thinking about (but refuses to think about you) lives exactly two floors above and is completely unavoidable.

Another one of my favorite things about college (besides the inability to take a shower without wearing flipflops) is when you walk into your suite, wanting nothing more than to flop down on your bed and close out the world, but you find a pink scrunchie on your doorknob. That damn pink scrunchie- informing me without words that my roommate was currently inside getting it on with the Boy of the Week, so I had better steer clear for my own good.

I sighed and flopped down on the ugly, ratty suite couch that my suitemate Adrienne had gotten for free off of Criagslist. It’s not fair- it’s MY room too- it even still has my name on the door, written in script inside a construction paper cutout of an octopus. That was the RA’s theme for our section of the building this semester- school of fish. I got the big fat octopus, and my roommate got a starfish. The irony.

I don’t know. On a whole, I really like my roommate Kaitlyn- we get along really well and I know I could have fared a lot worse in the whole roommate department. Kaitlyn’s sweet and will always be up for a girl’s night when you need one. She’s smart too- a biology major who believes there’s a scientific explanation for everything, even God. I sighed again.

“Chels?” I heard Adrienne’s voice from inside her room. “Is that you?”

“The one and only,” I replied, feeling defeated.

“Sexiled again?” she figured, peeking her head out to look at me.

“Only for the third time this week. How the hell does she do it? I can’t even get one guy to stick with me.”

“Don’t worry about Brendan. He’ll come around. I’m sure of it.” Adrienne is one of those hopeless romantic types, always certain that true love will win out in the end.

“Adrienne, there’s, what, two weeks left until graduation? There’s not enough time for him to come around. Then I’m moving back to Long Island and he’s moving back upstate and it’s never going to work.” I could almost recite it asleep, from all the times he’s explained it to me. “I know he’s right…”

“Hey, come on. You never know what could happen. Jeez, I’m a theater major, I definitely don’t know what the future is going to bring for me. Working in a Laundromat, maybe?”

“I just don’t get why he keeps pretending like last weekend never happened,” I said, hating to bring it up again.

“Because he’s a boy and he’s stupid and he thinks he made a mistake and that if he ignores his feelings for you they might go away,” Adrienne said simply.

I pushed her theories out of my mind for a moment- or tried to, anyway- by changing they subject. “Hey, did you hear about that plane crash this morning? Hundreds of people dead. Sad, isn’t it?”

Adrienne shook her head. “No, I didn’t hear about that. Where was it?”

“Over the Atlantic Ocean… you really didn’t hear? It’s all over the news.”

She shrugged. “Guess I must have missed it.”

That’s college students for you. If it’s not on their mini-feed on Facebook, they don’t want to know about it.