My arm was in a cast when school started, but I didn’t ask anyone to sign it. No one asked, either; it’s not like I spent hours each day refusing the long line of well-wishers, armed with Sharpies, who wanted to leave a mark on me. In some ways, it made me more invisible, because people saw the cast, steered clear, and weren’t even sure who the arm belonged to. I slid folded posters through the slits of random lockers. A few kids who wore their T-shirts of my poster to school, the bootleg ones they bought from Action Graphix, had to go back home and change and they were kind of legendary in those first few weeks of school.

One girl, Jenny Gudger, who I honestly had not noticed, either, wore the shirt three times and was suspended for a week. When she came back, I started sitting with her at lunch, and we’d sometimes talk about the poster. She’d been at camp most of the summer, so I liked telling her a version of what happened, pretending I was a bystander, an observer, and it was good practice, to know about the panic but not tell everything. And maybe we would have become friends, real friends, but before Christmas break, she got pregnant and her parents sent her to Atlanta to live with her aunt. I started skipping lunch and hanging out in the library instead, working on applications for college, planning my future. That was my plan, to imagine the future.

For the most part, the panic had subsided. It was like the epicenter of the disaster, where we were recovering, but the ripples of it, the seismic activity, were still reverberating farther and farther out into the world. But, honestly, no one in the pre-internet (or pre-internet-as-I-know-it-now) era could really get any consensus on who was responsible, and without deeper research, the origin was no longer important. It was just a thing that existed in the world now, and there was nothing that would change that.

With the triplets gone to college, my mom and I spent all our time together, Hobart shuffling around us, and I talked to them more and more about college, what I might want to do. We’d eat dinner and watch a movie and it was honestly the most like a family that I think I’d ever felt. I had survived something, something I’d made, and I wasn’t sure that I was happy about it, but I wasn’t sure what else could be done.