Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen Read Free Book Online

wound so deep it never completely healed, and for the rest of your life you went around with three vertical lines running down your left cheek. Some years later, on a dare, you went through the ice over Lake Quinsigamond (someone’s bright idea: Hey, you think that ice can hold anyone?) and the group of kids who had put you up to it stood on the shore for a long, awful moment, some of them screaming and clutching one another, others frozen in panic, until you fought your way back to the surface and scrambled and sloshed back to shore and everyone started laughing. There was something funny about it, cruelly funny, your whole life summed up in the way you stood, shivering and bedraggled, chattering, shoeless (you had kicked off your boots and they were waterlogged somewhere at the bottom of the lake, where they remain today…), saying over and over again, Oh man, Oh man, I swear to God there was something under there, some big black fucking monster like an octopus or something. I swear to God it come up to me and it touched me on the shoulder with one of its legs, and that’s when I was like, Holy shit, man, I gotta get outta here, Oh man! In the joke version of this event, as people liked to tell it, you were rushed to the hospital for a battery of tests to determine if there had been any damage to your brain, but the results were inconclusive. As a punch line the doctor threw up his hands and said: “It’s impossible to tell!”
    Elwood LePoer. All your life your name was synonymous with a kind of humiliating, pathetic stupidity. You were a walking joke, a sitting duck, a fish in a barrel. That you eventually died in an accident came as no surprise to anyone. When word of your death went through the neighborhood people received it as if a letter they’d been expecting in the mail. The only wonder was, they said, it hadn’t come sooner.
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    T he first time I ever saw you was the first day of third grade. My mother had just left her second husband and moved my sister and me across town to a new apartment, a new school. On the playground, before the day started, Malinda and I sat together cross-legged on the ground, communicating to one another without even needing to speak that this place, this school, was worse than our old school, the grass on the playground burned out and spotty, its swing set without swings, the school itself—a block of brick with grated windows and a flat roof—suggesting a prison more than anything else. Younger kids were running around playing games we were no longer interested in playing, though what we were interested in doing we couldn’t say. We were eight and nine and we were defined, that year, mostly by what we had once done but didn’t do anymore. We spent much of our time sitting around taking in the bleak landscape of our new lives as though watching a commercial, waiting for it to end and for the real show, what we hoped would be our real lives, to begin. At our new school yours was the first name we learned. Everyone kept saying it all around the playground—Elwood LePoer, Elwood LePoer—and we wondered who you were. “Elwood LePoer,” we heard someone say, “is wearing a Playboy T-shirt!” And you were pointed out, a stocky kid with blond hair that hung in your face. You stood throwing a rubber ball against the windowless wall of the gymnasium, hurling it as though a grenade, your square jaw thrust out. The ball shot up and sprang back to you over and over, a pattern that seemed to enrage you—every time you threw it, it was with increased force, as though you expected to drive the ball through brick. I kept trying to get a look at your T-shirt. I had some vague notion of what “Playboy” meant—I had heard the word before and knew it had something to do with women—but when I finally got a clear view of your shirt there was something disappointing about it, just a white shirt with the black