Page 5 of Traces of Her

The day passes in typical fashion. We go through the different subjects, all of which come easily to me. I’m supposed to be in seventh grade but am at a ninth grade level. I don’t know what their plans are after I graduate from high school. Janet goes into the kitchen to start dinner, while I clean up the school supplies. After I put them all away, I join her in the kitchen. Standing in the doorway, I watch as she methodically measures water to be boiled.

“Mom,” I say, startling her. She glances up at me and smiles. “After Rowena died, you never said anything about the Petrovs. What happened to them? I thought you all were friends.”

An unreadable expression takes over her face for a moment and then it disappears. Her mask of denial goes back in place. “I’m not sure if we were friends, but we were nice to them. You two were friends, so we had to be cordial,” she pauses. “And they stopped talking to us afterward. So, I’m not sure what happened to them. Perhaps they moved back to Russia where they belonged.”

It’s all a lie. Janet and Phil stopped talking to my parents. That’s why I took the flowers, to try and reach out to them. But they didn’t take just the flowers. And my parents probably never even knew.

The thought makes me nauseous.

My parents have no idea that I’m less than a minute away from them.

And there’s no way for them to know.