everything, or I would never leave my room.
“Yeah. She was in my nursing school – you know how my nursing
school is really small? I never met her, but I think she was in a couple of
my bigger classes. One of my guy friends was freaking out because it’s
super contagious and he made out with her, so he didn’t know whether to
go to the student health services or not. But I think he did and he’s fine.”
Her speech had picked up its pace as her eyes widened and her hand
gestures became more animated.
“Oh,” I responded. This feeling of pity became real as the
situation settled in. I could imagine Katherine with her dark curly hair,
asking this girl for a pencil in the middle of a lecture, interrupting the
entire class with her raspy yells of a “whisper” that would carry over
multiple rows in her lecture hall. Or I could see one of my friends making
out with some random kid at a party, then going back to her room and
feeling a little sick. While I could be there taking care of her, I wouldn’t
know that these were some of the last moments I would have with this
girl who I had barely gotten to know, or that I was unknowingly putting
myself in danger as I held her hair and rubbed her back.
I got in the car with my mom and shook off the images of the
flyers from the inside of bathroom stalls calling optimistically to prevent
the contagion of meningitis. I created images of this girl for myself and
became more obsessed with this wild idea. The people who loved her the
most – her parents, her siblings, her best friends from high school – didn’t
know that when they waved her off to college, they really waved to the
last time they would know her as healthy and independent. Some of the
best friends probably didn’t even get a chance to meet her at the hospital.
Instead, this girl, Andrea Jaime, could’ve been surrounded by people she
didn’t know that well, makeshift friends that were supposed to hold the
place of her true friends she would find in the years to come, when she
had more time. Granted, I found out later that she was a sophomore, but
imagining her as a lost freshman, as I first assumed she was, cut through
my self-revolving mindset.
The day after the wedding, I started the return to college on a
huge bus that made a three-hour trip a full six hours. The haunting smell
of sweaty strangers, someone’s morning breath, and whatever torturous,
poisonous sanitizer scent crept from the back of the bus and pressed on
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