Thus begins a section of my website in which I will feature the writing of my friends. Over the years, I have befriended many amazing writers who I am lucky to call my friends…so this is just the first installment, and there will be many to follow (hear that Jon, Steve, Matt? you guys are next!)
But I will start with someone who hasn’t been doing it that long, because she reminds me what I love about writing, and how it has nothing to do with reviews or Amazon book ratings or MFA programs or disgustingly self-promotional writers websites (buy my book, High Before Homeroom, Simon & Schuster 2010)
Sara’s only sixteen, and already blows me away with her talent… and when she grows up to be a famous author, I wanna brag I was the first to feature her!
Splinter Girl
by Sara Karabashlieva
There are sixty-two definitions for the word “end” in the dictionary.
Not one of them mentions Oliver.
I am at the wake. There is no coffin, just an urn with his ashes in it. I go outside. He was twenty-three—only a year older than me. I sit on the front steps and light a cigarette and let the cold cement soak into my nostalgic bloodstream as I wait for his mother, Marcy, to drive me to the airport. A winter wind circles the house, rustling the stripped tree branches and swirling my scarf into the air. I tap my ash into the snow lining the concrete and it is engulfed by flecks of white. I draw a circle in the snow with my finger. It could be an “O.” I stub out my cigarette in the center. I lift my camera to my eye and snap a picture of the naked trees, of the gray streets, of the bitter snow. A woman in a white suit ignores me as she walks up the stairs and into the house. Doesn’t she know that this is my closest friend? Doesn’t she know to wear black at funerals?
I remember when they built the playground. I lived in Ohio then. The city decided to advertise abstinence and the dangers of drugs; Above the Influence campaigns ran everywhere, but they didn’t help because this was Ohio and there was nothing else to do except fuck and get high. So the city built playgrounds. By the time they realized they were appealing to the wrong age group, it was too late and they were in the middle of construction. They couldn’t leave a playground half-constructed. That would just give all the junkies another place to shoot up and do drugs.
It was March when they finished. It was too cold to go to the pool and too warm to go to the ice rink, so we turned to the playground as our only source of entertainment. It was all made of wood, except for the metal slides. Nothing was childproofed plastic then—especially not playgrounds—because we were tough enough to handle a splinter or two back in ’95. That’s how I met Oliver. It was six o’clock, but I was still out playing because my mom was at work. She was a bartender (hence my name—Lorraine), and worked late. She was never home, so I had learned to cook and clean and do everything by myself. Somehow, I had wound up with a splinter under my nail that day. I could make a meal and dust the entire apartment, but I couldn’t take out my own splinter.
I was sitting on the swings, contemplating how to take out the tiny piece of wood when Oliver came along. He had brown hair and green eyes and a bit of freckles. He was carrying a bright blue umbrella because it had rained earlier.
“Hi,” he had said, sitting down on the swing next to mine. “I’m Oliver. I like your boots,” he said, pointing to my yellow rain boots.
“Thanks. I’m Lori,” I said, and then we were friends. It’s that easy when you’re eight.
“Do you want to play something?” He asked.
“I have a splinter.” He wondered why I didn’t take it out and I told him I didn’t know how.
“My mom can do it. Come on,” he said and pulled me off the swing. He was good like that. He took me home to his mother and she pulled it out with tweezers and gave me a Popsicle because I was a “brave little girl” for not crying about it.
I push the sling-backs off my feet and settle into the passenger seat of his old car, but he’s not driving. Someone else is driving.
Marcy is driving.
She turns off the mellow radio and the silence seeps in between the seats. It inhabits the space where splinter stories and fortress fairytales should be. Why should be talking.
After that, Oliver and I hung out all the time. Wherever I went, he went. He introduced me to video games. I showed him how to turn his room into a fortress using blankets. He trained me to arm wrestle. I taught him how to climb to the top of trees. We slept over at each other’s houses because we were eight and it didn’t matter that he was a boy. He was in the grade above me, but he always ate lunch with me. At recess, we played tetherball together and after school, he would always wait for me. He always hung out with me instead of playing football and soccer with the boys. Our age and gender difference was never a problem. Until middle school.
They had just renovated the playground—the wood was polished, the metal was shined, the broken swings were replaced—when Oliver entered Worthington Middle, leaving me at Salem Elementary. I saw him once in a while on his way back from school, black backpack slung across his shoulder, hanging near the studded belt holding up his jeans. But most of the time, his schedule was full, bursting with English essays and history projects. He didn’t have time for me anymore. He could only spare a few seconds to give me the upward nod/hair flip. So I braved my fifth grade year alone, because Oliver was my only real friend. I tried to integrate myself into a group of skirt-wearing, ponytail-sporting blondes, but I was always the odd one out. My brown hair and tan skin made me stick out like a sore thumb in their fair, golden group. I counted down every single day out of the one hundred and eighty that school year.
When, finally, I graduated into middle school, I couldn’t wait to see Oliver. The first day of class, he waved me over to his group of friends at lunch. They were seated around a wooden picnic table, with bags of chips and cookies spread out before them. “Is that your girlfriend, Ollie-poo?” The apparent leader of the group teased, making the rest of his flannel-wearing friends chortle with laughter, sending coke spurting out from their noses. Two of the skater boys high fived as Oliver flushed a deep red, embarrassed by the joke, but I smiled inside. I liked that they thought I was his girlfriend. Oliver, however did not. After slapping him on the back, the rest of the boys resumed their talk of parties and hook-ups, but he and I stayed silent. I picked at my turkey sandwich for a few minutes then threw it away into the trash can before heading to the library.
We emerge onto the main street and it’s raining. The rain pounds into the white snow settled on the sidewalks and it turns gray gray gray like the street, like the sky, like his ashes. We drive by a couple walking on the sidewalk, holding hands and laughing as their sopping shirts plaster to their bodies. The girl turns and looks at the car, the remnants of a smile dissipating from her lips, as they dissolve into rivulets of rain on the windshield. Why do they waste so much time?
The playground was deserted for that period of time. There were no seven and eight year olds in the neighborhood. There must have been a dry spell sometime in the nineties. We were too old for puerile play structures and too young for liquor lies in the basement bedroom of that weekend’s kickback. The swings creaked in their autumn solitude and the pavilion was deserted of snowmen in the winter. There was no puddle-jumping in the spring and no mud fights in the summer. For two years, the playground was silent.
Like the playground, Oliver was quiet; he didn’t talk to me after the occurrence at lunch. He avoided making eye contact in the halls. He ate at the quad. I ate near the garden. It was a mutual sort of reticence. He wanted nothing to do with me. I wanted nothing to do with someone so easily manipulated by the masses. So the silence and discretion built up between us, a synthetic mass of disparity. Eventually, so much time passed that I didn’t really recognize him. I didn’t even notice when he entered high school. I was an eighth grader then, top of the food chain, without a care in the world except for falling into the right social circle. All my time was devoted to this desire to be accepted. All I wanted to do was fit in, and fit in I did.
Marcy makes a right onto Walnut Drive and I see the brick façade of Worthington Middle School. It is 3:35. I hear a bell ring, muffled through the rain, and watch as students cascade out of the halls. They huddle under the building’s overhang and crowd together on the snow-sloshed steps, clutching see-through umbrellas and mustard raincoats. I see a boy slip on the watery snow and tumble down. A group of girls points and laughs at him as he gets up and rushes down the stairs, disappearing behind the closed doors of a silver sedan. I see a girl walk down the stairs, heading home. She jumps from puddle to puddle and rain splashes into her yellow boots. She steps only on the sidewalk cracks. It’s a game and only she is playing. Why does she waste so much time?
The summer before I entered high school was the first time anyone desecrated the playground. One day, the town woke up to see that their iconic playground was covered in graffiti. Evidently, some teenagers had discovered the power of permanent pens and obscene illustrations. The wooden exterior of the playground became increasingly filthier, both in color and content. It was engulfed in large drawings of detailed anatomical structures and crude, belittling sayings. Since the economy was in a downward spiral and the state couldn’t pay for renovation, the graffiti remained, ever a symbol for my generation’s degradation.
I braved my eighth grade graduation in a dress and heels along with the rest of my eager class and managed to enter high school without any sort of legacy or label. Oliver was in my French class. He sat in front of me and his mohawk blocked my view of the board. My verbs remained half-conjugated and I had to look them up when I got home, all because of the newfound punk image he was rocking. He had shed his plaid button ups and sailor shoes for band tees and converse. He had snake bites and wore baggy black pants embedded with studs and drooping with chains. He nodded at me in the hallways, but never said a word. I began to thrive on my own in the high school hierarchy. Without trying, I managed to climb my way up the volatile pyramid and find a niche for myself. I fit into the artists’ alcove perfectly, and they made room for me. I joined the drama club and wrote plays for them. I joined the Key Club and went to feed the homeless every Saturday morning. I had found my place, my balance in the precarious, perpetually fluctuating scales of high school. Oliver, on the other hand, had no place. If I was a stone in the social pyramid, he was the fleck of sand a mile away, and he was happy in his seclusion. He never talked to anyone. His headphones were permanently plugged into his ears, looping Dark Side of the Moon and Hail to the Thief.
Marcy asks me when my flight is. I tell her it’s in two hours, but it’s not. I don’t want to share my silence with her anymore. I want her to leave me at the airport, where I can wait for my red eye in my own sort of quiet. I want to sit at the airport bar and order martini martini martini. I want my head to pound vodka and tooth-picked olives when I board the plane and find my seat. I want to feel every single second of those five hours and I know that the bartender will help me achieve this. Why do I waste so much time?
She keeps driving.
Two years later, the city paid to have all of the playgrounds in residential neighborhoods modernized and revamped. That summer, our playground was closed as they scrubbed away the black residue and painted the wood blue. The metal was replaced with yellow plastic because it didn’t absorb as much heat. At the end of the summer, we were gifted with an entirely new jungle gym. We were the only neighborhood with a colorful playground. It glimmered in the last glimpses of summer sun at our annual Labor Day barbeque. I remember I was getting a burger from the picnic table and talking to one of the soccer moms in the neighborhood when Oliver came up to me.
“Hey,” he had said. “Can I get one of those?”
“Hi,” I replied, handing him a bun. “How have you been?”
“Good,” he replied, slapping a patty between the bread. “You?”
“Good.” We sat together and talked away the dwindling hours of summer as if nothing had ever happened, as if fifth grade was yesterday.
When we returned to school, Oliver had shed his goth get up and was wearing skinny jeans, button downs, vests, and blazers. His hair had grown out and he had removed all his menacing piercings. He joined student government, got his act together, and started talking to me again. It was probably because we were both upperclassmen now. Or because he was a senior and didn’t care what people thought anymore.
We became better friends than we ever had been before. Occasional meetings gradually turned into weekly coffee. We were in the same French class and in the same social circle. He merged into my group of artists. All of my friends admired his paintings. He shared all of his artwork with me and taught me how to take pictures. Before he left for college, he gave me a camera. It was a Nikon F90.
“It was my father’s,” he said. “I’m buying a new one.” I was awestruck by his kindness and generosity and found myself holding the Nikon up to my eye.
“Oliver,” I called and he turned around and I snapped the portrait. Two days later, after I had developed it, he smiled at my black and white photograph and promised it would be the first thing he’d unpack in New York. When he went off to NYU, we kept in touch and he came to visit me every once in a while. I learned to keep my holidays open because Oliver would come back to town to see me.
Finally, I graduated high school, grabbed my diploma, and ran off the stage to UCLA. I didn’t see Oliver for a long time after that. We were on opposite sides of the world, making the same sort of history. He was in New York, allowing turpentine dreams and canvas hopes to disappear into empty cigarette boxes. I was in Los Angeles, with type-written pages piling into every corner and publisher’s rejections held down by empty coffee cups. We talked every once in a while, when I wasn’t busy tracking down agents and he wasn’t looking for gallery space. We would both sit on our balconies and chain-smoke Camels and look out over our crazy cities and pretend we were together. One morning, I received a call from his mother.
“Hello?”
“Hey darlin’, may I speak to Lorraine?”
“Speaking,” I had replied.
“This is Marcy, Oliver’s mother. I don’ know if you remember me, honey.”
“Of course I do. You pulled out my splinter,” I paused. “A really long while ago.” I felt a smile creeping between the seams of my lips, curling them upwards as I recalled how I met him.
“Ah, yes. Splinter girl.” She laughed a dry, brittle cackle, like the sound of an old, old book when you first open it and all the pages come apart with a whisper. “I just wanted to tell you, honey,” she began. “Oliver is…” A buzzing had filled the receiver and I didn’t hear her forlorn words. But I knew what was coming.
“I’m sorry?” I asked, not sure if I wanted her to repeat it.
“Oliver was in an accident, darlin’. I just wanted to tell you myself, you two were so close.” She paused and I let the New York static fill my ears, drowning out the white noise of the city, covering the clamor of LA traffic, masking the mellifluous piano sound from inside. Her words pulled at me and I felt like I was held together by spider-web sutures that someone was slowly stringing out of my skin.“You there, sweetie?” And I nodded frantically, thinking she could see me, could somehow feel my unperceivable nod through the airwaves. I must have muttered yes because she continued to speak. She told me that the wake would be in three days. She told me that he had been killed instantly in a drunk-driving accident. She told me he had been coming home for Christmas. She told me it wasn’t his fault. I instantly bought a plane ticket and let the in-flight radio carry me to Colombus the next day.
It wasn’t his fault, Marcy tells me. Green means go, doesn’t it? It’s that other drunken kid, she says. It’s all his damn fault. Ollie was only comin’ home for Christmas.
She runs a red light. She doesn’t notice. I say nothing.
Why is there so much time to waste?
Now, I look out the window, past the blur of red and white headlights, past the flickering signs, past the green traffic lights, and catch a glimpse of the gray apartments where I used to live. I ask her to stop the car. She pulls over and I step outside. I wind through the neighborhood, with Marcy’s footsteps tailing me, and find the pavilion where the playground stands. It is dark out, but I snap a photograph of the playground that I know will not develop. Marcy winds her hand into mine and it’s warm against my cold cold fingers. We look at the wintry playground, covered by a thin layer of rain-beaten snow. I draw a circle in the slosh with my foot. I know it will be gone by the time I return to the car, dissolved into crystal snow hydration, twisted against other droplets of hydrogen-oxygen, melted unto itself, until it is just a memory of what once was.
South Philly is so cool…it has a real sense of community and neighborhood….old Italian couples scream at each other, and people park illegally in the middle of the street (as they have been doing for generations – the parking spots go back that far – don’t try it if you aren’t a native, though). Not to mention, the Italian food and the best espresso in the world.
