THE REAL LJ IDOL SEASON 9 -- WEEK 1: JAYUS
TOO SOON
I numbly shuffled out of my Trigonometry class barely aware of my surroundings, and slowly started wandering through the bustling hallways towards the cafeteria… operating purely on automatic pilot. It was my first day back after returning from Summer Recess, and nothing seemed quite real to me. Though it had been three months since the initial shock, circumstances since that day had conspired to repeatedly hammer home the full depth of the tragedy in my mind-
“Hey, Paul! Wait up!” A bubbly female voice called my name, and I turned to find Joan’s cheerful face coming towards me through the crowd. The previous year she and I had sat across the aisle from each other in Geometry class, and we were also both members of the school’s Science Fiction Society. By definition the Bronx School of Science was filled with geeks, but we seemed to share quite a few interests and so we’d become friends, though I wouldn’t call our relationship a close one - we hadn’t tried to contact each other over break. She weaved her way through the slowly thinning rabble of students in the hall and smiled up at me. “It’s nice to see you again! How was your summer?”
“Not good.” In the state I was in, I was incapable of lying. “Not good at all.”
“Aww, come on! Things can’t be that bad!” Joan was always optimistic… and she was well aware that I was her opposite in that regard, so in retrospect I can understand her initial reaction. “So tell me, what happened that was so awful?”
So I told her: “My brother Kevin died.”
She gasped sharply in response, and her face froze in shock. “What?! What happened to him?”
“He had… a neurological disease.” I had never told Joan about Kevin before, so she knew nothing of him. “He started having problems when he was about six years old… and then, month after month he just… kept getting worse.” I sighed sadly. “He’d been stuck in a wheelchair, unable to speak or move, for the past seven years. One morning, my parents went to his bedroom and found him… unresponsive. They rushed him to the hospital, but he… died that afternoon.”
Joan’s jaw dropped. “When did that happen?”
I rubbed my eyes, to wipe away the tears which were forming there. “About a week after the Summer Recess started… and the day before my family was supposed to drive up to Cape Cod for vacation.” I shook my head. “One minute, my siblings and I were all busy packing, looking forward to spending good times together, then suddenly Mom was shouting at Dad about Kevin being in distress, then the three of them are rushing out the door… and when Mom and Dad came back, they spent the next couple of hours on the phone, arranging my brother’s funeral.”
Joan blinked at me. “I’m… sorry. I don’t know what else to… What disease did you say he had?”
“We… don’t know exactly.” I sighed once again. “As I said, he had some sort of neurological disorder but we don’t know which one - none of the doctors were ever able to give it a name. The tests they ran confirmed that something was progressively destroying Kevin’s brain, but they could never tell us what it was.”
She snorted. “Your parents should have found some better doctors!”
I shook my head in frustration “You don’t understand - My parents consulted the best neurologists in New York! They had Kevin looked over by experts from Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, from NYU Medical Center, from Montefiore and Mount Sinai! None of them could tell us what was killing Kevin! And because of the blackout we had over the summer, we’ll probably never know!”
Joan stared at me in confusion. “Why? What do you mean by that?”
My voice went cold with anger. “One of these doctors convinced my parents to let him take a sample of Kevin’s brain tissue to analyze, saying that it was extremely valuable for neurological research. So he put the tissue sample into cold storage for later analysis… but when the power went out for three days, the freezer warmed up so much that the tissue sample got ruined."
Joan blinked, but her face was otherwise unreadable. “What?”
“You heard me!” I closed my eyes tightly, my rage building as I recounted the details. “My parents found out about this when the doctor’s office called them last month. This asshole actually had the gall to ask my parents if he could exhume Kevin to get another sample-“
I stopped speaking because I heard a completely unexpected sound. I opened my eyes to find that my ears were not deceiving me:
Joan was laughing. It started as a chuckle, but rapidly turned into a guffaw.
“What?” I was utterly shocked by what she was doing. “Why are you-Don’t you understand how *SERIOUS* this is?”
“I’m sorry! It’s just-“ But she couldn't stop herself; Joan was now laughing so hard that she was effectively rendered speechless.
Unable to comprehend her reaction, my cheeks burning, I turned and walked away from her as quickly as my legs could carry me.
I have heard that all comedy is based on tragedy, and I concede there is a great deal of truth in that statement. And now, 35 years after my brother’s death, I can look back on the chain of circumstances which occurred and see how it could be viewed as darkly humorous. Certainly, I have laughed at jokes and scenes where some poor schlub has a whole series of injustices dumped upon him in a very short span, and laughed heartily at their predicament.
But I can honestly say that I have only laughed at purely fictional circumstances… and hope that I would never laugh in the face of someone who had so recently endured so much misfortune.
ellakite admits that this story isn't completely true: The girl's name wasn't Joan. Other than that, however...
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