Simone

I think back to the summer I graduated middle school and moved to a new house. Every ending felt final and poignant, offering a starkly new beginning. There was something clean about those transitions. Something I miss now, about to graduate high school, and feeling nothing but annoyed.

In retrospect, much of the turmoil I experienced in these transitions was melodramatic—some effort to add excitement to an otherwise uneventful childhood. I curated my emotions theatrically because I understood it was necessary to feel them, and also, pity. (Being pitied was very in for 14 year old suburban girls.) I planned “last songs”—the last song I’d hear in my middle school hallway (“Gravity Rides Everything” by Modest Mouse), the last song I’d hear in my childhood home (“Ninna Nanna Per Adulteri” by Ennio Morricone), the last song I’d hear on my last dog walk in that neighborhood (“I Think Ur A Contra” by Vampire Weekend). I wanted to provoke a physical emotional reaction, as if the release of tears would singlehandedly manage my confusing feelings of excitement, anger, anxiety, and sadness. These songs just sounded like a cathartic ending would: soft and then loud, reserved but emotional, hard to forget.

On that aforementioned final dog walk, it rained. Of course it rained. Wet and miserable, I trekked on, trying to remember every detail of the previously mundane journey chores forced me to take each night. It was taken on the last evening I’d spend sleeping in my childhood home, though nothing there really looked familiar—my walls were bare, the sofa was gone, and not even a spatula remained unboxed in the kitchen.

At the first corner of my block, some woman drove by speeding—very typical of my old street. It was a thruway between two larger avenues, and my parents had spent much of my childhood fearing that I’d be struck. But I remained on the sidewalk, and this woman, speeding down the street, tore through a massive puddle gushing towards the gutter. The trajectory of her tire’s spray left the bottom half of my left side drenched—enough to be prove bothersome, but insignificant enough to resume my walk. I turned the corner, and then one more, reeling in more anger and sadness, newly founded by the driver’s misdoing, almost excited by her cruelty. How perfectly unfair that my family had to move because of something as stupid as taxes and how perfectly unfair that on this peaceful last walk, I be violated.

A corner or two later, I was stopped by the slowing of a luxury SUV beside me. Growing up, my most rational fear was being plucked by a stranger during a walk around the neighborhood. I slowed my pace with an apprehensive glare towards the driver’s seat, secretly deciding whether or not to start running. But my eyes my eyes met those of someone familiar, probably the mom of some younger kid I could never remember the name of. She looked relieved, and a little guilty.
She rolled down her window, admitting her identity as the splasher and profusely apologizing for what she’d done. She’d been looking for me for the past ten minutes and was so glad to have finally found me. It happened to her, she said, and it ruined her day. And then, because she felt so guilty, she settled things the upper middle class way—handing me money.

I denied her payment at first—not only did it feel extraneous, but the serendipitous misery of the incident was almost comedic. I needed to preserve its humor. But she refused my repeated denials. And also, ten dollars is ten dollars.

I don’t have the ten dollar bill anymore. I hid it safely in a piggy bank the second I got home and vowed to watch over it through my adult life, as if it were some token of luck and destiny, rather than than offering of civil damages. Of course, no amount of hidden money is ever truly hidden when you’re 15 or 16, and I probably spent it on food or clothes within the next year. ♦