“What is this word even?” She points on the page, holding it up.
“Ossification,” Nathan says.
“What kind of sixteen-year-old writes ‘ossification’?” Mel says, her voice ticking up in slight panic. “Why do I not use ‘ossification’?!”
“I was seventeen, actually. I’m eighteen now.”
“Me, too,” says Henna.
“Me, too,” says Jared.
“I’m nineteen,” says Mel, “and I know nothing of ossification.”
I’ll be eighteen in June. Jared is only two months older than me, but I’d sort of forgotten that this was the two months where I’m at least a whole year younger than everyone else. Including, it seems, Nathan, who’s still trying to ask us something.
“I’d like to paint the bridge,” he says and everyone looks at him, shocked. “If you guys would do it with me.”
It’s a senior tradition to paint the railroad bridge near the school. Buses, students and staff all drive under it every morning to reach the school gates. Most of the things written there are boring (“Gina, Joelle, Stefanie, Friends 4Evah” (yes, seriously, 4Evah)), stupid (“Here I paint all broken-hearted” and then they didn’t leave enough room to finish the poem) or vulgar/threatening (“Andersen sucks dicks”; Andersen being our wildly unliked shop teacher and basketball coach who probably never, in fact, engages in the behaviour in question). The tags get painted over by other boring, stupid, or obscene tags in a matter of days, but it’s tradition, as if that alone is reason enough. Slavery and buying your wife were traditions, too.
It’s also technically illegal, of course, so it has to be done at night, usually deep in the darkest part.
We were never going to do it anyway – we’re exactly the sort of nice kids who would consider it too stupid to bother; Jared didn’t even do it with the football team when we beat our district rival in the last game (to finish the season 2-7, woohoo, go team) – but with all the blue-eyed cops, the blue-eyed deer, and indie kids dying from probably blue-eyed causes, it was definitely out of the question.
Until Nathan suggested it.
“You’re not even from here,” I said, over that study lunch, but I was already too late. I could see the eyes of the others light up.
“Exactly,” Nathan said. “I’m not from anywhere. I’ve got nothing. No traditions. No friends except you guys, and you,” he said to me, “don’t even like me.”
I waited too long to protest.
“I just,” he said, shrugging, “I want something I did in high school to be … high school-y. So I can look back in fifty years and say, ‘At least I did something stupid and young as proof that I was there.’”
And that kinda cracked it. Henna agreed immediately, Mel said his story made her sad but not doing it would now make her sadder, and Jared said, “Why not?”
“Because zombie deer,” I say now, shivering even though it’s not actually all that cold, even in the middle of the night. We’re in my car again, parked a block away from the rail bridge. “And cops with murder in their eyes. And actual dead people.”
“There’s enough of us,” Jared says, squashed in the back seat with Nathan and Mel. Henna gets the passenger seat because of her still-broken arm and because she’s Henna. “We’ll be careful and we’ll be all right.”
Nathan holds up his backpack. “I got five cans. One colour for each of us. Nearly got arrested.”