Disappearing into the Wind

Anne disappeared.

No one really saw where she went. Just one day, up and poof. Just one day, some people saw her walking down the sidewalk with her hair like it normally was. She wore her straggly brown hair in pigtails. Every day.

She was supposed to be grown up. She was fifteen years old and a sophomore in high school. Girls used to look at her like she was the weirdest thing they had ever seen, wearing her hair like that. It was as if she were an alien or a foreigner. Like a leper too, because no one would go up to her and maybe suggest a different hairstyle. And they wouldn’t get the chance. Always those limp little pigtails, always hanging like the depressed limbs of a weeping willow.

She had homeroom with Samuel Murphy. They sat next to each other, but not by choice. Not by his choice. It was because her last name was Nedermeyer. Really, Anne Nedermeyer.  It was another reason she was teased mercilessly by many of her peers. The minority who didn’t avoided her. They hid from her and those watching her. 

Samuel Murphy, the rookie on the varsity baseball team who was already shoving his footprint into the mound and impressing the world, sat in front of his girlfriend. Tinsley York sat right behind Anne. She bowed her sharpened eyelashes viciously whenever she felt like it, in the fifteen-minute class period that had proven to be the only way attendance could be taken accurately at the earliest point in the morning. She wanted Anne’s seat. Tinsley would blatantly mock Anne with her versatile tongue as she smeared lip-gloss over her pink lips. She would assemble her cheerleader harpies nearby too, Marquette Whittaker and Chloe Zhang, and they would cackle about Anne’s glasses, her crummy book bag, her pimply face. They would swat at her pigtails like teasing cats of the wild.

It had never been Anne’s choice to sit there. She might not have wanted to sit next to Samuel Murphy. She might have had a crush on him. Maybe not.  It’s always assumed the nerd has to fall for the star athlete who is so far out of her league. Anne might have even chosen to scoot a chair into the closet and close the door. Mr. Perry never let the thought leave her lips the first day of school. She never had the chance to fight for the change.

Renée Olsen was distraught to discover that Anne had gone. Gone away. Gone somewhere.  Gone too far beyond the boundaries of the world she knew into the world she certainly did not. Miss Olsen’s words. Renee had observed Anne’s familiar lifestyle in her seventh period poetry class. Anne was talented. Her poetry was filled with an exuberance Miss Olsen had not seen in most professional poets. So much tension. So much angst.  Yet so much beauty. Anne was able to pour it on in the simplest way.  Miss Olsen’s words again. 

Renée Olsen cried the day Anne disappeared. An assignment was due and before the final bell, Anne handed hers in. She told Miss Olsen she had permission to leave early and Miss Olsen didn’t inquire for the proper letter. A mistake, but Anne was different from the other students. Trustworthy. Respectful. Quiet. In the last few minutes of a class where Anne hardly participated outside her wonderful pieces, she wouldn’t be missed much. Miss Olsen read Anne’s poem the minute her class was released. It was entitled “Like the Wind,” and it filled Renee with warmth. Its warmth made her cry. She never had the chance to praise it to its poet.  She never would.

The last person to see Anne was Cassandra Matthews. At the intersection of Main Street and Rose, the last corner in the small hometown, Cassandra was the seventy-three-year-old crossing guard. Anne lived on Rose Boulevard and saw the woman twice every day. When Cassandra saw the little dot of a girl ambling slowly her way, she roused herself out of her lawn seat and waited. She folded the octagonal sign with her arms and put the hollering symbol away. She tapped her foot quietly inside its tennis shoe.

Cassandra nodded at little Anne Nedermeyer and she returned it, her pigtails swaying.
“Good afternoon little miss. No one to walk with you today?” Cassandra asked every day. Anne reached her side and waited patiently for the weathered bones of her traffic sentinel to amble out into the center of the road with the prevalent red of her sign raised. Cassandra would take her time. Anne never rushed her.

“No.” Anne didn’t speak. After a while, Cassandra would ask. She would pay attention to the road, looking for any crazies speeding off the highway and forgetting about the children she was meant to protect from their road rages. But she would comprehend the little girl’s head shaking, her eyes growing even more distant and small behind her thick glasses, her pigtails swinging,  whispering to not a single companion. 

Cassandra Matthews held Anne up before she left. She did plenty of times. She would stop her and have her look up at her. Anne would, just slightly. She was smaller and leaner, just too small and too lean in every way. The wind could have taken her into flight.

Cassandra would muster up every ounce of her maternal instincts, even though warping her tired mind back to its motherly days of raising three daughters and fourteen grandbabies gave her sudden whiplash. She would tell Anne, "Now you open that little mouth and they’ll listen. Just say hello and they’ll come running to you to say hello back. It’s that easy."

Anne would never respond.

But she responded the day she faded into the long road. The day she disappeared and became just like the wind. It was something Cassandra did not expect. The little girl, who really was just a little girl on the brink of becoming a woman, let her chin float up. Her eyes sparkled with moisture, but not with tears. A blue bravery.

“I have no need. I have only the breeze that swims all throughout the world. It gives birth to sweet music out of the reed. I have no need to speak. It is like the wind that I am. I bring only the sound of wind passing and passing always along.”

Cassandra was extraordinarily confused by her poetry and paused for a moment. She watched her go as she fought for what the girl had meant. But she had meant something. She had said something. That made Cassandra return to helping the little ones walking home from school.  She never saw Anne disappear. 

Anne never re-appeared.

Tragedy ensued and lingers still in the hearts of those who knew her, those who loved her, those who could have, and those who always and forever will. 
The wind continues to blow through her quiet town though, where Tinsley York graduated from high school with a cheerleading scholarship. Where Samuel Murphy never visited Anne’s memorial plot in the local cemetery. Where Miss Olsen has pinned Anne’s last work to her bulletin every year.

The wind is forever blowing.

Whispering so softly about the day one girl disappeared. The day one little girl prayed to the sky and was taken up by the wind.

Away. Beyond. Simply gone.