Alone at 90 Foot by Katherine Holubitsky Page A

just, like, this really sensitive guy!”
    It’s enough to make me gag.
    Mandeep and Danny have this thing going on. Ever since I had them for dinner. They just really hit itoff. And Linda’s hanging out with Darla Miller. She’s decided she likes Darla’s brother. That one’s a littler harder to get. He wears combats. Not sometimes. But all the time. Like they really mean something. And this spiked dog collar around his neck.
    Everybody’s noticing everybody. Except me. It’s like this major thing to get involved before Mike Ortega’s year-end party. So you don’t show up alone. Good thing I don’t have to worry about it. Seeing as how Joanne got me involved for me. I know I don’t have to go along with it. But I don’t care enough to care.
    Besides, I have an excuse. I’m weird.
    â€œHow can you not be excited?” my former friends ask me. “We’re graduating from junior high!”
    â€œYeah? So? It’s hardly like the biggest event of my life.”
    They just shake their heads. “Pam, sometimes you act so weird.”
    Joanne’s been wearing so much black around her eyes lately, she looks like some kind of ghoul from
Night of the Living Dead
. Linda dyed her hair lime green and is wearing it spiked. She had her ears pierced right to the top. She pierced her nose, one eyebrow and, since hanging out with Darla’s brother, her belly-button too. For all I know, there could be other places. And I’m weird.
    Maybe it’s true. But I just can’t get excited aboutanything. It doesn’t appeal to me to put goop all over my face. I can’t shriek with excitement when someone does something different with their hair. I like my life calm. I like it arranged. If I get through the day without anything abnormal happening, it’s good. I’m getting by being boring. It works. To survive, I guess I don’t need anything else. Still, I’m getting real tired of my same dull face.
    When I was ten, my grandma, Mom’s mom, died of multiple sclerosis. She had it all my life. She lived in the extended-care unit of the hospital. I used to visit her with Mom. We went at the same time every Saturday after lunch. We brought her the same kind of cookies and the same kind of novels so she would have something to read that week. Grandma was always sitting in her wheelchair at the same table in the cafeteria. She could only move her head. In front of her was one of the books, propped open on a music stand. Paper clips were attached to the pages. When Grandma finished a page, she bent forward and, catching the paper clip, turned it with her nose. She spoke very slowly, taking lots of breaks. And when she finished, she was always out of breath. I could not understand her, but Mom could.
    I would look around the room and see the same people doing the same thing. Mr. Cruikshank was always shaking the tray on his wheelchair. Tryingto break out. He’d been in a car accident and was missing a piece of his brain. Mrs. Grewal was always dancing by herself in a corner. To music only she could hear. A man in his twenties lay on a bed with his eyes closed, soaking up the sun. He was surrounded by pictures his three-year-old daughter had drawn for him. Mr. Jones, a very, very old man, a pilot in the war, sat in a corner and smoked a pipe. He blew smoke rings in the air. And a girl my age, with big scared eyes, lay very still in a large crib, watching something, I don’t know what, maybe just the shadows dancing across the walls.
    At one o’clock the physical therapist would come in. She would have them do exercises. Lift a finger, nod their head, make a circle with their foot, whatever they were able to do. At one-thirty she would leave.
    â€œMom,” I said one day as we left the hospital. “Those people are always doing the same thing. It’s like they’re waiting for something to happen. Just sitting there, passing