Pop Tarts and Codeine

Pop-Tarts and Codeine
By Josh Simon

My first story from vthe first class. Finallly


With impatience and relief, we sat shoulder to shoulder on Graduation day. Across the crowd tight wing tips and itchy leggings shuffled beneath smelly brass fold-out chairs. Hands were all over the place throughout the auditorium. Under skirts. Beneath pants. Calmly laid across laps. Jay Feingersh sat in front of me with his greasy rattail he’d sported since the 7th grade; Angelie Felton sat behind me wearing the usual gesture on one’s face when not wearing underwear. We were the class of 1995 at Walt Whitman high school and the year had come rolling to a bittersweet end. While looking around the audience at my fellow peers, I glanced from face to face recollecting some type of embarrassing memory. But every head or so, I saw a vacant space between chairs. Chairs that would’ve been filled by Thomas Peterson, Sara Malsheski, and Peter. I never knew his last name. Just that he was known as Pete.
When the papers first spoke of this disease that swept across my town and the entire country two summers ago, it was hailed as “suicide sickness”. Now “suicide sickness” wasn’t just depression. It wasn’t bi-polar disorder. And it wasn’t anxiety. “Suicide sickness” or Bacterium perillius sententious as they later described it was an actual bacterium that invaded the central nervous system cutting through sinew and nerve to attack brain cells. Anti-biotics did little to fight the caustic plague that erupted in my community the summer of 93.
I had known Sara Malsheki very well. Tom and Peter had been peers but never more then friends. Sara on the other hand had been somewhat of a muse to me my sophomore year. When the curfew finally became instated due to such high suicide rates in the area, Sara spent the night secretly in my closet. We made love for the last time that night.
When they found Sara, her body was stiff and bruised as she lay crumpled like a sack of dirt in the corner of her dark room. Crimson incisions covered her sternum like fine Chinese calligraphy. Her stomach contents were later screened during her autopsy and the results revealed high amounts of Bleach, Codeine, and pop-tarts.
I stepped up to the stage as my name was called. Hollow echoes bounced from the floor to my brain and ruminated around my cerebellum. I took my diploma and held it gentle beneath the slope of my armpit. My armpit was cold yet clammy as sweat soaked into the fake papyrus diploma. I was depressed, and needed to go home.