The Beginning of After

Tutoring Club my freshman year because of Toby. He’d struggled all through elementary school until they figured out he had dyslexia, when he was eight and I was eleven. Somewhere along the line I’d started helping him read and do his homework. He wouldn’t let my parents do it; he’d get annoyed with them and they’d fight. But me, he liked working with me. Somehow I found ways to make things click for him, like using his plastic soldiers to form letters on the floor.
    Eventually my mom started paying me five bucks an hour to help him, although I would have done it for free. It was the only time we got along.
    In ninth grade I wrote a paper about this, and my English teacher asked if I was interested in helping her put together a group of students to tutor other students. It seemed like a golden opportunity to get involved in something I already knew how to do, and Toby would need the Tutoring Club when he got to high school. My dad fought hard to keep him in regular classes, even though Mom would have let him go into special ed. “He won’t get bullied so much in special ed,” she’d say, but my father wanted so badly for him to have the most normal experience possible.
    A clear vision of Toby, slowly sounding out words on a page with his brow furrowed in concentration, started to push me off a little cliff in my mind. What was the point of the Tutoring Club now if Toby would never be able to take advantage of it?
    “Laurel, are you okay?” said Mr. Churchwell. “Do you want to talk or stay here for a little while?”
    No, no, no, you don’t , I thought. We were not going to do this now, eight minutes before homeroom.
    “I should get going,” I said, standing up and slinging my backpack over my shoulder. Mr. Churchwell nodded but stayed where he was.
    “Have a great day, Laurel,” he said, and with that I was out the door toward homeroom.
    Somehow, I made it until the final bell. As I entered each classroom, the teacher took me aside and told me a version of the same thing: Don’t worry about taking notes, don’t worry about needing to excuse yourself for a break. Everybody wants to help. Everybody cares about you.
    Then I looked around at the other students filing in, glancing quickly at me and then away, almost embarrassed, like I was standing there naked, and I had a real hard time buying the “Everybody cares about you and wants to help” part. But I accepted the no-note-taking part, no problem. I’d always wondered what it would be like to be one of those kids who blatantly ignored the teacher and did their own thing in class. Now I could listen but doodle, knowing I’d get sent home with a copy of the teacher’s own notes for my binder.
    It was one period, then another, then another, then eating three bites of my turkey sandwich in the far corner of the cafeteria with Meg, then more periods just like the first ones. I listened, and I avoided people’s eyes, and I drew trees and flowers and hillside scenes across the straight lines of my notebook.
    I found French to be the toughest class. Looking at the textbook, I thought of my French homework that night and how I’d been reading through it in the kitchen, clueless about the accident. I couldn’t help wondering which page I was on at the moment of impact. Wondering what would have happened if Mrs. Messing hadn’t given us so much homework and if I’d decided to go to Freezy’s instead.
    Deep, deep breaths pushed the panic back down. I was not going to cry at school. It was not an option. I imagined my tear ducts filled with dry desert sand.
    Finally, at the end of it all, Meg found me at my locker.
    “Are you going to drama?” she asked, knowing I’d forgotten all about it. The spring production of The Crucible was only a week away. Meg had a small part as Mercy Lewis, one of the teenage girls who pretend to be possessed by witchcraft. I was not in the cast. I was a backstage scenery person, no matter how much Meg had begged me to try out this time.
    Mom was a painter too. She made money at it. Deborah Meisner Portraits had its own website and regular ads in the PennySaver . Two or three days a week, my mother spent the day at a studio she shared with another artist, and covered canvases with happy families, smiling kids, cuddly dogs, kissing couples in their wedding wear. Clients would give her photos and she’d take it from there, and now her work hung in houses all over town.
    She painted her own things when she had time,