In this, our fourth-ever Lit Column, Proximity is pleased to present “How Dark the Corners” – new fiction by Gretchen Kalwinski.

The night Don Mitchell was killed on the train tracks was like any other high school late-summer night until the screeching South Shore line connecting Indiana to Chicago made contact with his body. Don and a few other senior guys had drifted to the tracks behind the football field to drink and watch the speedy commuter trains go by; Don was notoriously allergic to alcohol, but drinking anyway because it was his birthday. Somehow, when they heard the soft rush of the train approaching, Don mistakenly stumbled towards the tracks instead of away, as the other revelers did.

Jules pulled up in her Chevy Nova, Carla in tow, right after it happened—they’d been driving around after the football game, and heard that the senior guys were hanging out at the tracks with Mad Dog and Purple Passion. They were expecting sweatshirts, swaggers, and a boombox playing Black Crowes and Beastie Boys; instead, they walked into a chaotic, grassy field of panicked friends pointing at a body lying near the tracks and shouting for someone to call nine-one-one. Steven, one of Don’s best friends, broke away from the group and ran to the grocery store’s pay phone.

“It’s bad,” people were yelling from the hill where Don lay. Joey, the quarterback, seemed dazed when Jules asked him what happened.

“I don’t get it,” Joey muttered. “The booze grabbed him so much worse than everyone else. I didn’t even know he was allergic.” He dropped down onto the grass and sat, head in his hands, shaking.

Carla, always craving drama, flew up the hill to check out the scene of the accident and came down crying.

“Don’s mangled,” she sobbed. “Muscles and veins are spilled out everywhere. He doesn’t look like a person anymore but he’s gasping a little. Where the hell is the ambulance?”

It showed up a minute later with a police car and quickly took Don away; then the cops took names and brief statements and Jules drove home to tell her parents what happened, leaving out the drinking. The next morning, the word spread quickly: Don— insecure clown, pimply football mascot, and undateable senior— was dead. He hadn’t even made it to the hospital. Everything predictable about his future: state school, majoring in business, fraternity parties, an affinity for Ayn Rand and hemp necklaces for an unfortunate year, lust, love—was over. Jules had always thought of him as one of those guys destined to move back to the Calumet Region and commute to a job in Chicago using that same South Shore commuter train line, becoming a genial, plump dad who was allergic to alcohol and drank only nonalcoholic spritzers. Now, instead—nothing.

Rumors started about the state of Don’s mind at the time of the accident and people began asking how Don came to be on the tracks when the rest of the group was safely distant. Had alcohol poisoning really disoriented him that badly, or was there a chance he’d walked intentionally toward the train? How insecure was he?, people started to wonder. How pimply? How undateable? How dark were the corners of his mind?

* * *

A month after Don’s death, Jules brushed against mortality once again, almost killing herself to find the perfect yellow shirt for her date with Derek who was a year older, lanky, confident, and bound for college that September. An hour before he was scheduled to take her to a Chicago comedy club, Jules realized that the only appropriate outfit was jeans, sandals, and a shoulder-exposing bright yellow shirt she’d seen at the mall. Logically, she knew there wasn’t time for shopping but her desperation to look just right put her into the car, store-bound and speeding.

She’d spent the summer longing for Derek. He’d been an A-student class president in a better school system than hers; he was cool, indifferent, and most importantly, not provincial. To Jules, Derek was a trapeze and she hung her dreams of escape on him, believing that he might be the only guy she’d meet in this town who also wanted to leave it behind. She imagined them dating during her senior year, then she’d go to his college downstate. Maybe they’d wear school t-shirts and meet “on the quad,” Jules thought. In the meantime, she needed him to find her irresistible, so the summer had been filled with teeth-whitening, extra aerobics classes, and a sudden interest in current events. But Derek was leaving soon, and today, the life he could help her attain—a life she vaguely imagined to include ski resorts, beaches, comfort, theater, foods she didn’t yet know the words for, fascinating friends—all seemed to be hinged on finding that soft, lemon-yellow shirt. As she drove, the desire for the shirt seemed to become irrational, uncontrollable; it sped her car to the mall with an almost biological, Darwinian need.

She quickly found it at the Limited—bright cotton, draping off her shoulders just enough, accentuating her tan—but she caught every light on the drive home. At the Illinois/Indiana border, she did the math: Derek would arrive in a half-hour. If she made it home in five minutes, she’d still have eight minutes to shower and shave her legs, five minutes for makeup, five minutes to dress, and 12 minutes to spend on her hair. Since this timeline would work only if she didn’t get caught at the train tracks two blocks from her parents’ house, she sped up and took a sharp curve on State Line Road at 55 miles per hour. The Nova immediately disagreed with her decision, doing a three-sixty and spinning into the lane of oncoming traffic.

When the car finally halted, a massive semi-truck was barreling down on the Nova with screeching brakes that stopped in just enough time to avoid smashing her car and body. For a moment, Jules sat there with traffic stopped in both lanes, panting deeply with relief and looking at the grey-haired truck driver. He didn’t yell angrily as she expected—just shook his head and looked at her in a sad, what’s-wrong-with-you-girl? way, and she finally started the engine up, driving the few remaining blocks home at a careful fifteen miles an hour. Later that night, she relayed the story of her almost-accident to Derek, leaving out the part about the yellow shirt-quest.

“I could have died, you know,” she informed him, hoping he’d understand the near-death gravity of the incident and turn protective.

“Yeah, you kind of drive like shit,” he said.

Carla said Jules was a sap about guys. But the ones Jules chose to be sappy about—Derek, Andy the cowboy, Shawn the musician— were carefully selected guides; each had the potential to propel her to a world outside her own. She envied their entitlement; their easy, confident sense of being in the world and was less concerned with possessing them than of absorbing their knowledge of the world, spongelike. Her crushes were barely even sexual; she was an adept masturbator and didn’t rely on guys for physical kicks. No, her lust was rooted in aspiration—she was ready to exchange the potential of her face and body for cultural capital—information she couldn’t get from her parents or friends. From her team of Virgils, she found out what “good” jazz was, what to order at an Italian restaurant that wasn’t the Olive Garden, how to sit nicely on the leather furniture. With Derek at her side, college became less ethereal than if she was with Stash or Joey—the nice neighborhood guys who would take care of their moms and never leave their hometown.

But after Derek left for college, he stopped calling. Heartbroken at first, she soon became pragmatic and made a list of what she’d come away with: she now knew a few highway-avoiding shortcuts into the city, the names of coolest coffee shops in Lincoln Park and the quietest Lake Michigan beaches for skinny-dipping and that the Utne Reader was very, very important. Knowledge was power.

* * *

Don’s death in mid-August was right before classes started, so for the first week of school, there were grief-counseling sessions interspersed with hallway-crying. Mrs. Beasley, the Theology teacher, led the sessions. Instead of sitting with desks facing in rows facing the blackboard, students were encouraged to move the desks into a hippie-circle or sit on the floor to get comfortable. Some students took off their navy, v-neck uniform sweaters. Everyone loosened up. There was crying, flirting. No one knew how to act; they’d only seen grief counseling sessions on TV shows, never in real life.

Mrs. Beasley read from a pamphlet about the grieving process, written by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. First, they reminisced about Don; his homemade megaphone, his goofy green velour suit for Homecoming the previous year. They talked about the night he died; what he could’ve done differently, what they could’ve done. As one of the students who was at the scene of the accident; Jules garnered attention at the first session.

“Did you see him?” they asked. “What did he look like? How are you doing?” Jules shrugged and didn’t answer. She didn’t think she had any business at the grief sessions. She’d been only a peripheral friend to Don and felt like an imposter, plus she hadn’t seen his messed-up body and didn’t want to pretend-mourn, be a death-monger.

“I don’t belong here,” Jules hissed to Carla. “I wasn’t even good friends with him.”

“Don’t leave me,” Carla said. She tearfully raised her hand in the direction of Mrs. Beasley.

“I just want to say that nobody understands what it’s like for me because I was one of the few people who was with Don after he was hit. The rest of you didn’t see what I saw,” Carla said. Jules rolled her eyes, remembering that Carla had actively disliked Don and called him “gross” more than once.

After two weeks of grief counseling, the sessions ended. Don’s court-jester antics had been fully and sentimentally retold and immortalized, and the night itself had been gone over with a finetooth comb. No one at the school had any experience with suicide, so the questions about “what if it wasn’t an accident?” soon faded. No one would ever know if, for just one moment, Don tired of being the clown, the mascot, the undateable guy—and decided to simply fade away.

The teachers’ tools for grieving were limited and involved mostly a literal, white-haired god, and memorized, monotone deathprayers. But there, huddled on the classroom floor in their kneesock uniforms and Carmex, football confidence, big hair, acne, beginning-muscles, B-cups, involuntary hard-ons, in an asbestosridden school in a polluted town, a group of kids with no direction and fewer choices were suddenly at the heart of everything: sex and death, innocence and experience, chemicals, impermanence, inferiority, freedom, and striving.

edited by Mairead Case
illustrations by Rob Funderburk