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resemble someone I barely know. With my eyes all out of focus, she even walks like a stranger. Not a word.

Vertigo
     
    The sky slants. Before dusk, it hurts my eyes. Soon it will be completely dark. I’m walking home. Nothing exists but my breath. I know this feeling. Usually it comes when something unexpected and momentously awful is about to happen, which doesn’t make sense now. I’m just going home.
     
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    I had the feeling big in seventh grade, when someone brought a message from the principal’s office into my social studies class one day. The note said my mother wanted me to go directly home after school. It was obvious that something was disastrously wrong, since I’d never received a note from my mother—especially not in school. Even though I knew it was something dreadful, I felt special.
     
    That day, as I waited for school to end, I watched myself do what everybody else did. I opened and shut my desk, reached for my books, and since my hands had become unnaturally heavy as I placed pencil tip to page, I kept breaking the black point when I was writing down the populations of Far Eastern countries. So I was sharpening my pencils with my blue whale-shaped sharpener too. I watched myself behave as if nothing was wrong, but what really happened is that a part of me lifted out of my chair and rose to the ceiling of the room and floated there, watching the whole scene. And the me that was left behind in the chair had this gruesome crawling feeling beneath my skin.
     
    The feeling is called anxiety, but I didn’t know that then. That was three years ago. Nobody around my neighborhood ever called feelings by names. Only books did. I attached the word to the feeling when I read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It’s an old book of my dad’s. Raskolnikov, the main character, was full of anxiety. Obviously, this was because he had killed somebody. Books have saved my life, or stopped me from thinking I’m purely crazy anyway.
     
    So I did go directly home after school, but not before I found Baby Teeth. She was telling everybody on the bus line that she had a note and should be able to get on first. We rode home together on my bike. I wanted to put her on the seat, but riding on the handlebars was a big deal for her when she was in first grade, so I let her. The ride was smooth. Even though it was February and unbearably cold, she didn’t complain. The tears just froze on her face. “Are you crying?” I asked when we stopped and I brushed her hair away from her eyes, but she wouldn’t answer. Just offered me her wet-mittened hand, which I held until we were well inside the house. Poor kid, she was scared. And maybe that’s what the feeling in my throat was, like a burst of wind through a pile of leaves.
     
    We found my mother, who was usually hovering around the kitchen when we returned from school, sitting in the den with the Wad. The telephone was poised on the arm of her chair. The den walls are made of wood, and heavy drapes edge the windows, so it can be very dark in there at any hour, and it was that day. The drapes had been pulled across the windows. The bronze table lamp was lit, which was unnatural, since it was afternoon. It was eerie.
     
    My brother was sitting on the couch staring into the empty fireplace. Baby Teeth let go of my hand. She rammed herself against my mother’s legs, who, instead of grabbing her, which would’ve been a natural mother move to make, just kept her eyes on the telephone. I walked over and took Baby Teeth’s wet mittens off. There were white ducks on them.

    “What’s wrong?” I finally asked. All I could hear was my own breath.
    “Pop died,” my mother said. Pop was her father. Her already dark eyes turned as black as the drain at the bottom of a sink.
    And then it was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, when the room starts spinning around and a person’s vision becomes very strange, even though the person is not moving at all. For some reason