But you didn’t call me back is what I hear the man whisper into his cellphone at Gate 8, an anthill of people and commotion blurring around me, the thumbtack beginning its push, center of my forehead, neat as a surgeon’s needle, a migraine sprouting, here of all places, my left hand numb, sprockets in my vision, But you didn’t call me back and you said you would, the man repeats, his hands coned around the cell now as if he’s speaking prayers into it, and suddenly I’m thinking about Ms. Marshall, my ninth grade Chemistry teacher who I haven’t recalled in years, the way we taunted her, making fun of her masculine mix-and-match pantsuits, how she’d wear them in different colors but two days in a row, how the mocking progressed, clever kids that we were, becoming more insidious until there were dead rodents left inside her desk, her purse, a mangled cat in her mailbox after someone learned her address, until she stopped showing up at school, until there was dowdy Mrs. East instead, no fun at all, firm with detention, and later the rumors spread like STDs, that Ms. Marshall had hung herself in the garage, and for weeks afterward I imagined her swinging from a rope, wearing a beige pantsuit under a bare bulb because of what we’d done, because she had no one to call, or maybe she did but they didn’t pick up, and now the migraine is drilling like a motherfucker and the crackly speaker is announcing boarding rows but it’s all just dots, people and memories becoming diaphanous, like see-through dust or microscopic motes, too tiny to be real or meaningful, because nothing is real or meaningful, right, and so why should anyone ever call back, why should anyone even bother to ask in the first place?
