Ten days after my 16th birthday. Fresh snow in the night and I am late for school, my bus was stuck in traffic and I missed the tram. When I sneak into the classroom all eyes are on me. The seat next to me is empty, M must be late, too. I know she went away for the weekend with her family. Maybe they didn't make it back in time with all that snow.

A in front of me turns around, beckoning me to move one row up. I sneak next to him and he takes both of my hands and I notice he is crying, that almost everybody is crying and staring at me. 

She is dead, he says, in the car, no, no accident, her neck it sort of snapped when they hit the brakes.

I see M's neck, her blond hair touching the collar of her favourite blue shirt, like the one I am wearing myself. We bought them last week on a mad shopping spree, giggling and running through town. 

Mustn't go into details of the day, no. Nothing about the teachers turning their eyes away, about a bunch of crying teenagers sitting on the stairs, about her big brother, the one I had a serious crush on, hugging me. Her big brother, who drove the car, who hit the brakes. The one who killed himself a couple of years later.

In the end I just walked out of school and sat at my bus stop staring into the dirty snow. A woman living on our street picked me up thinking I was drunk or had fainted. She held my hand on the bus and walked me to our door.

When I let myself in, my mother

my mother

my mother

she was mad because I was early and I must have upset her careful morning schedule of resting in her hazy valium world and doing nothing. Oh, I don't know. I have come up with too many versions of my happy childhood, imagining emotional scenarios, excuses, trying to accomodate the fact that all she did was tell me to go upstairs and stay out of her way until lunch was ready, and to clean that trashy mascara off my face.

But this all happened a long long time ago.