Déjà Vu

by Kristen Miller

I watched the twelve-year-olds practicing baseball in the middle school field across the street and found myself wondering which of us was older. There was of course the fact that I was fifteen, obviously older than they were, but the matter wasn’t that simple. If watching them practice from this bench when I was eight or nine, my answer would have been that I was older. And in every way but chronological age, that was true. But now I’m three years older than them, but they all seem older than me. I have only lost years since I was nine.

Dr. Morgan stared at me from across the desk, his eyes a heartbreaking mixture of fear and anger. I sank down in the big leather chair, knowing I had caused both.

I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap, then back up at Dr. Morgan’s sad face.

“Look, I’m sorry, all right?”

Dr. Morgan stroked his gray goatee and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. I reached up and did the same with my own glasses.

“Noah...” he began, trailing off into silence. I’m sure he didn’t know what to say to me. I wouldn’t know what to say to me. Quite a mess he must have felt he’d been dragged into. On the one hand, he had this adorable, blond-headed ten-year-old in front of him who didn’t appear to be anything but sweet. And then he had that file on his desk that told him otherwise.

After what seemed like half an hour, he finally found a place to start. “Noah, why don’t you tell me about yourself? I’d like to get to know you better... before we move on.”

“Why? Why not save some time and move on to the therapy part? I’d like to hurry up and get out of here.”

“This is not something we rush through, Noah. It doesn’t work like that. What’s school like for you? I understand you’re very bright.”

He wasn’t getting this. “Look, Dr. Morgan. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not crazy, and I know it’s going to be difficult for me to prove that to you. So can we cut the ‘open me up’ crap and get down to business?”

Dr. Morgan didn’t say anything for a minute or two. He stared at me for a while, looked down at my file on his desk, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, and then went back to staring at me. Finally, he asked the question I’d been waiting on.

“Why do you think you can see the future?”

I’m not exactly the world’s most gifted athlete. And that is extremely apparent when I’m playing baseball with my friends. Not only am I terrible, but they’re all about three years older than me, with three more years than me to develop some coordination. They make it even more obvious how bad I am. When we play during summer break, I play first base. I would probably be playing outfield if we had enough people, but since we don’t first base is the next best thing since not many people hit in my direction. Mostly I just run over to the base, touch it with my foot, and hold my glove out and let whoever fields the ball do the rest. It seems to work pretty well most of the time. Tina’s the only reason I get to play. She makes the other guys let me, and since she’s always one of the captains, I never get picked last.

We were playing on the middle school field on the first day of summer break. I was over at my usual spot at first base. This guy Aaron was hitting. He’s a really good player. He goes to school with me and Tina and Henry. He’s also had a crush on Tina for about a year now. Tina knows but pretends she doesn’t cause she thinks Aaron is a jerk. Anyway, Aaron was hitting, and he smacks a line drive right at me. I don’t have any sort of coordination or reflex about things like that. All I could think to do was turn my head so the ball didn’t hit me in the face. It smacked right into my temple, and it felt like my whole head exploded.

I walked up the center aisle of the church sanctuary, holding tightly to my mother’s hand, wanting to somehow use her to hide.

Off to the side I saw Tina sitting with her parents. Seeing her made me feel a strong urge to let go of my mother’s hand, to be a man. But Tina was crying, so I decided holding Mom’s hand was okay.

We arrived at the front of the sanctuary where an open casket lay. My father, who was also there beside me, put his hand on my shoulder as we looked in.

In the casket lay Henry, who, besides Tina, has been my best friend since I was six. He didn’t look very much like he did when he was alive, but you could still tell it was him, even with the neat suit and combed hair and closed eyes. He was dead as a doornail.

“Holy shit, Noah, are you all right?”

Tina and Henry were kneeling beside me where I lay on the ground next to first base. They looked like they were surprised I was alive.

“Should we go call his mom?” Henry asked.

“No, I’m okay.” I started to sit up and felt a horrible wave of dizziness and nausea, but refused to lie back down, because if I did, Henry would go call my mom for sure, and she’d lecture me again about playing ball with kids older than me. She’d probably tell me I could never play again.

“I told you he was too little to be playing with us,” Aaron said, coming up beside Tina. Tina looked at him like she was about to punch his lights out. I’d almost like to see that, especially considering that he was the one who hit the ball.

“Maybe you should be more careful,” she said to him. “I know you can pull the ball when you want to. Did you do that on purpose?”

Aaron looked truly hurt at the accusation. “Tina, I wouldn’t do that.”

“It’s okay, Tina, really,” I said. She grabbed my one of my hands and helped me get to my feet. The world swam for a few seconds after I was standing again. Henry handed me my glasses, which had been knocked off.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. “You were knocked out for a few seconds.”

I just looked at him. What had just happened? Had I had a dream?

“I’m fine. But I don’t think I should play any more today.”

“I’ll walk you home,” Tina said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m going to.”

“If you both leave, we won’t have enough people for all the positions,” Aaron griped.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to wait and play tomorrow.” Tina rested a hand on the back of my head and we started walking toward the street. Henry left with us.

“See you, guys,” he said when he got to his bike. As Tina and I headed off down the sidewalk, he rode off toward his house in the opposite direction. I watched him go, thinking of how he looked in a casket.

“Noah, we need to... what happened?”

Both of my parents came into my room. I tried to hide the ice pack, but it was useless. They’d seen it. Had Henry told his mom, and then his mom called my parents to check on me? Probably. And in that case, any story I could think up would have been pointless and only gotten me in worse trouble. I decided to go with the truth.

“I got hit with a baseball. I’m okay.”

Their silence, the silence of not telling me we would go to the doctor to make sure I was all right, of not asking me why I insisted on playing with older kids, clued me in to the fact that they weren’t here just to check up on me. They had bad news.

“What’s wrong?” I asked them, sitting up and turning off the TV with the remote. My parents looked at each other, a silent debate to decide who was going to talk. My father ended up with the job.

“Noah, Tina’s mother called us at work. Henry had an accident. He was riding his bike and got hit by a car.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” I inquired coldly, sure I already knew the answer.

“My parents were really concerned about me,” I told Dr. Morgan. “They thought I’d deal with it better if I went to stay with my older brother Ben and his wife Erin for the rest of the summer. I went after the funeral. Let me tell you, that funeral was surreal to say the least. I mean, déjà vu times a hundred.”

“Have you ever heard a scientific explanation of déjà vu, Noah? Scientists believe it-”

“I told you, I spent the last couple months trying to figure this all out. They think that déjà vu is when your unconscious or subconscious mind receives a signal just before your conscious mind does, and your conscious mind senses that it remembers this from before, even though it’s only a fraction of a second. And like I said, it was like déjà vu times a hundred.”

“All right. Well, tell me about your brother. Your parents were concerned about you, so they sent you away? They didn’t feel like they should keep a closer eye on you?”

“No. Ben and I are really close. He’s twelve years older than me, so he’s like a nice mix between a father and a brother. My parents like that. They know I’ll talk to Ben about my problems before I’ll talk to them, but they also trust him to give me the right advice and keep them informed, too. It takes a load off them.”

“You’re a perceptive boy.”

“I know.”

“So tell me about your visit with Ben.”

“Well, it was all right. Except for how I kept seeing things before they happened. I would start to get a headache or something, and then I’d just see things.”

“Like what?”

“Like, once when I had a bad headache I was lying on the sofa and watching Ben’s baby Denise trying to walk across the living room but mostly just falling down. I closed my eyes once and saw her walk by herself for a few steps, not really that big a deal to me, but something Ben would really want to see. I opened my eyes, and Denise was still sitting down. So I called Ben into the room, thinking that if I was right, he’d get to see her take her first steps, and if I was wrong, I could just say it looked like she might make it. As soon as Ben came in, Denise pulled her little self up to her feet and started to sort of stumble around. And Ben was real happy because he saw her first steps.”

“Are there any other instances you can think of?”

“Oh, yeah, lots. Little things like what would be the next video on MTV or who would be on the phone when it rang. Let me tell you, it can make you crazy. I know that being able to see the future, well, it’s not a logical thing to assume I’m doing. You can try to ignore it, but it’s hard. Like Chinese Water Torture or something. So I started playing around with it, trying to see if I could change what I saw.”

“And how did you do that?”

“Well, something I tried at first was with the radio. I’d, you know, hear what the next song would be in my head. So I’d try to change it, I’d change the radio station, and then the one I’d change it to would have the song that I thought was going to be next. The freakiest thing happened at the Taco Bell drive-thru. I saw that I was going to spill a nacho supreme with guacamole all over my lap and the seat. I remember the guacamole because I hate it. It’s just so gross looking. So when we got to order, I was very explicit about not having guacamole on it. But you know they never seem to get your order right at any fast food restaurant, especially in the drive thru. I’d quote Joe Pesci from Lethal Weapon 2, but my parents taught me not to cuss, so I don’t. But anyway, what do you know, there’s guacamole on it. And it freaked me out so much that I dropped it and it spilled all over me.”

“That sounds very strange.”

“Tell me about it. I was starting to think I couldn’t change the things I saw, but then something important happened on the last day I was there.”

I was laid out on Ben’s porch swing with one foot on the ground to push me while I read a book. Ben was out in the yard with Denise, who was practically a professional walker by then. There was pain in my head all of the sudden, and it was so bad I shut my eyes.

There was a loud screech, the sound of breaking glass, and then a thump. The car stopped. Ben lay sprawled out on the pavement in front of the car, completely still and completely bloody, barely recognizable.

I heard Erin screaming, and Denise bawling her lungs out. “Oh my God! Ben!” Erin cried, Ben’s name choked and quieter than the rest.

Ben was jogging up the porch steps when I opened my eyes. “Noah, are you okay?” he was saying.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Didn’t you hear me calling your name?”

“No. I dozed off for a few seconds or something.” I glanced out at the yard. Denise was waddling her one-year-old steps out toward the road. I jumped up from the swing, hopped over the railing, and took off after her. Once Ben saw why I was running, he followed me, but I barely knew he was there. The image of Ben lying bloody in the road and the sound of Denise crying were all I could think about.

Denise was already at the curb by the time I was off the porch, and I got to her just as she made it out into the road. I snatched her up and ran back out of the road just as a car came blasting by.

“Oh my God,” Ben said as he reached us. That was all there was for him to say, I guess. He took his crying daughter out of my arms. Erin came running out of the house and across the lawn and grabbed both Ben and Denise in a tight hug.

I had changed the future. I saved Ben, even though he didn’t know it. It looked like I only saved Denise, but Ben would have only had time to maybe push Denise into the other lane of the road before the car hit him. There wouldn’t have been enough time for both of them to get out of the way.

“Noah, thank you,” Ben said, starting to cry.

I started trembling and sank down to my knees in the grass, unable to keep myself from crying.

“So you found out that you could change what you saw after all?”

“Yeah. It was really a great feeling. I felt like I had a purpose, like I could see the future for a reason, so I could change things. Like that guy on ‘Early Edition’.”

“Did you change anything else?”

“Not then. Summer was over, I went back to school. In September I had my tenth birthday. I had more of the minor visions, like every few days. Nothing really important, just little things like what the teacher would assign for homework or what the morning’s announcements would be. The biggest change for me was how I felt. When I went back to school, I felt different from everyone else in my fifth grade class, even more different than I had every year before. It was like I had a direction and purpose that none of them had. I think that when you feel like I did, when you realize why you’re on earth, everything about you changes, from the way you carry yourself to the look in your eyes. I spent that first month of school trying to see the thing inside me in other people. I didn’t find it in anyone my age, or even kids older than me. A few teachers, maybe, but that’s about it. I don’t see how anyone can live without it.”

“I think I see what you’re saying, Noah. And a lot of people do live without it.”

“It must be like, if you’re sick all the time, you don’t know what it’s like to be well, so you don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Maybe that’s so. But do you think a sense of purpose entitles you to hurt other people?”

I shrugged. “If, in the end, it helps even more people, then yes. I did do the right thing.”

A person my size can get killed in the hallway at my school. Since it’s a private school, all the grades are there together, and chance is against you in a stampede of middle schoolers and high schoolers on a Friday afternoon. Fate finally caught up with me one Friday in October. One second I was walking along, minding my own business, just staring down at the floor. I had a little bit of a headache. Then something hit me from behind, and I got knocked down to my knees. I should have been getting a closer look at the floor, but the floor wasn’t what I saw.

A familiar-looking young man sat down on the bench beside me. He looked over at me and smiled. He had green eyes, much greener than mine. You don’t see eyes that green very much.

“Hi there,” he said affably.

I struggled to find words, a problem I’d been having a lot recently. “H... hi.”

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Good.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a gun, never taking his eyes off me. He smiled again. “I guess you know what I’m about to do, then.”

“Noah?”

I opened my eyes and found myself looking up into Aaron Gibson’s green eyes. He looked really annoyed.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You really have a knack for getting in my way.”

“Sorry.”

Aaron grabbed my hand and pulled me up. “Can you like, not tell Tina about this? It was an accident.”

I felt the headache pain rising again. I heard myself telling him something about it not being a problem, but I’m not sure if I finished.

Tina was coming. To check on me. I wanted to tell her to stay away, but words don’t come out when they’re supposed to for me any more. All I could do was look at her, scared out of my mind. Her seeing that look on my face made her even more concerned, and she walked toward me faster. Then the gun went off, and her throat was an explosion of blood.

“What’s wrong with you, kid?”

I was on the floor again, kneeling this time instead of standing. I looked up at Aaron, trying to push what I had just seen out of my mind so I didn’t say anything weird to him.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve just got a headache. It’s making me kind of woozy.”

“I bet I gave you the headache when I knocked you down the first time, didn’t I?”

“No. Why don’t you quit being so defensive? I won’t say anything to Tina, okay?”

Aaron nodded and started to walk away. I watched him and realized that if I was going to do something, I should decide right now.

“Hey, Aaron, wait!”

Aaron came back. “Yeah?”

“I’ve got an idea how you can get back on Tina’s good side.”

“Yeah? How? And what’s in it for you?”

“Some baseball lessons. I’m wanting to play Little League this year, but I suck.”

“Yeah, you do. Why do you need lessons from me when you can get Tina to help you?”

“I could get Tina to help me, but that wouldn’t help you out at all. If you work with me some and help me out, she’ll have a hard time being mad at you. Right?”

“I guess,” he said suspiciously. “Why would you help me out like that?”

“I feel bad about her getting mad at you for hitting me with the ball. I know it wasn’t your fault. I want to help you get her to stop being mad. So what do you say? Saturday mornings or something?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Can we start tomorrow?”

“Isn’t it kind of early? You’ve got five months.”

“I need a lot of work.”

I tossed the ball up in the air and took a wild swing. I think the ball had already hit the ground before I got the bat around. I hadn’t actually hit the ball yet, and didn’t really care. This was just a way to ease my nervousness.

“Hey, Noah!”

Aaron came jogging across the street to the baseball field. “What did you want to start with?”

“Probably hitting. It’s the weakest part of my game, I think.”

“Okay. Well, first, you’re holding the bat wrong. Make your knuckles line up like this... And then when you swing, you want to bring your arms forward until you get here... And then swing at the wrists.”

Aaron stood with his back to me and made a swinging motion with his hands, making this all too easy for me. I swung. I hit what I was aiming at, for once in my life.

“You tried to kill Aaron Gibson with a baseball bat.”

I sunk low in the chair and nodded. I felt bad about this, yes, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

“For something he hadn’t done, something you had no way of knowing he would do.”

“But I did know. He was going to kill Tina. That was him in my vision, I know it was!” I was actually starting to cry now, and I tried to make myself stop, but it wasn’t happening. Dr. Morgan was just one more person who thought I was crazy.

“Noah, what you saw was in your head, not real.”

“It’s not real yet, but it was going to be. Just like Henry’s funeral and the MTV videos and stuff. I stopped Ben from getting hit by the car, and I had to stop Aaron from killing people, too.”

“Aaron spent four days in a coma and several months in physical therapy because of what you did to him. You hit him with the bat more than ten times.”

I nodded sadly. “All I can hope is that what I did, and why I did it, will keep him from becoming the murderer I saw him becoming.”

Dr. Morgan fell silent and watched me wipe away the tears on my cheeks. I hated this feeling of everyone being mad at me. I’m sure somewhere, there’s someone who doesn’t mind that feeling, but I’m not one of them. I think Dr. Morgan kind of sensed that, and he softened up a bit.

“Noah... When do you usually have these visions of yours?”

“There’s no pattern to it. I can’t, like, look into the future right when I want to or anything. I feel a headache starting and then it happens.” As I spoke, that too-familiar feeling crept into my head.

I didn’t need to use the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror, at my fifteen-year-old face. Was I really so old? I picked up the bar of soap from the sink and began to use it to write on the mirror. T-H-E F-U-T-U-R-E.

“Noah?”

“It happened again.”

“Another vision?”

“Yes.”

“What was it about?”
I stared at him.

“Noah?”

I stood up and walked over to the mirror that hung on the closet door. Yes, I was still ten all right.

“What’s wrong, Noah?”

I walked slowly over to Dr. Morgan’s desk and looked at him. I looked down at the pencil jar and casually pulled out a letter opener. It was shaped like a medieval sword. How cute.

“Noah, put that down.” He was slowly standing up and reaching out a hand toward me.

“I’m not going to be here until I’m old. I’m just not.”

“Noah, what are you doing here? And what’s all that blood?”

“Dr. Morgan wasn’t very much in favor of my leaving. I need to stay here, Ben. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Ben was clearly opposed to the idea, but arguing with me about it while I stood out on the porch probably made as much sense to him as it did to me, so he let me come inside.

“Please tell me you didn’t kill someone.”

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t believe that Ben would think I was capable of killing someone. Wait... nevermind. I could believe it.

“Noah, they called and told me to call them if you came here. You escaped from a mental hospital. They’re not going to just leave you alone. You need to go back. You won’t get better unless you stay there and let them help you.”

“I can’t stay there, Ben. They’ll keep me there a really long time if I let them. I can’t spend my life in that place.”

Erin’s voice came from down the hall. “Ben? Who was at the door?”

“It’s Noah.”

I ran out of the house, leaving the front door standing wide open behind me. I was halfway across Ben’s lawn when he made it out of the house, too.

“Noah, get back here!”

“No!” I yelled over my shoulder. “I heard you on the phone, and I’m not going back!”

“Please, Noah. I want you to go back because I love you and I want you to get help.”

I stopped when I was almost across the street and turned back around. “You don’t understand,” I said, not screaming like I had been before. “I’m not crazy.” Ben continued to run toward me. That was when I realized I was going back to the loony bin no matter what.

Dr. Morgan stared at me from across the desk, his eyes a heartbreaking mixture of fear and anger. I sank down in the big leather chair, knowing I had caused both.

I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap, then back up at Dr. Morgan’s sad face.

“Look, I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry about what I did to you and I’m sorry for running away. I’m going to be much more cooperative now because I know I need your help. And you don’t have to be afraid of me, either. I’m going to be good from now on.”

Dr. Morgan only looked at me. I saw him glance down at the bandage on his left hand for a second, probably something I wasn’t supposed to notice.

“I’m beginning to realize that this whole see-the-future thing was all in my head. In fact, that makes so much more sense that it being real.”

Dr. Morgan started to become more at ease, and actually spoke. “What do you mean?” he inquired.

“That all these things I think I saw before they happened, I didn’t really, I just added them into my memory at the wrong place and the rest of my memories changed, making me remember things differently than they happened. I don’t know if I’m being very clear or not. What I’m saying is, I’ve realized that this problem’s in my head. I’m no longer stuck on trying to prove that it’s real, and I think that breakthrough is going to help you help me.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Noah.”

I have only lost years since I was nine.

The way I remember it, I didn’t mean all those things I said about being wrong, being crazy. But that was a long time ago, a lot longer than the five years it really was. And now I’m not sure. Not sure that I thought I was just playing along. Not sure that I was playing along at all. Maybe I was finally realizing the truth. That’s what I would tell Dr. Morgan if he asked me about it. If anyone asks about that whole mess, it was all in my head, I imagined all the visions after the real thing happened and added them into my memory in the wrong place. That’s what I tell myself about it, too. But myself doesn’t believe me completely. It says it does, but it doesn’t. I may have had more visions during those five years, but even if I did, I didn’t. It’s very important for me not to have had any more visions. If I did have any, I must have pretended to forget them.

See, it’s happening already. I’m forgetting that I was crazy before and sane now. I’ve been out for three weeks, and I’m already slipping. I’m going to end up going back. I know that for sure.

A familiar-looking young man sat down on the bench beside me. He looked over at me and smiled. He had green eyes, much greener than mine. You don’t see eyes that green very much.

“You’re okay, Noah. It’s going to be okay.”

I was back. Dr. Morgan stood over me. I was lying on a bed.

“Yeah... I’m... I’m okay. Thanks, Dr. M... Morgan.”

“Noah, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. I want you to lay here and rest. Your parents are here, they’ll come back with me to see you.”

“H... How did I get here?”

“The police brought you. They were… let’s talk about this later, Noah.”

I remembered what it was that he wasn’t saying and nodded. He left.

Once he was done, I sat up in the bed and swung my legs over the edge. They’d taken my shoes and socks off, but I was still wearing my jeans and sweatshirt. They’d taken my wallet and my house key that I’d been wearing around my neck, but I still had my belt and watch.

I stood up and walked over toward the bathroom. An orderly was watching me through the window in the door. I half-smiled at him and pointed at the bathroom door. He nodded and I went in, locking the door behind me. A lock on the bathroom door meant low-security. I was here for three years before they moved me to one of these kinds of rooms, which, aside from the window in the door, seem more like they belong in a hotel than a mental hospital.

I didn’t need to use the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror, at my fifteen-year-old. Was I really so old? I picked up the bar of soap from the sink and began to use it to write onthe mirror. T-H-E F-U-T-U-R-E E-N-D-S N-O-W.

“I heard you on the phone, and I’m not going back!”

“Please, Noah. I want you to go back because I love you and I want you to get help.”

The car came out of nowhere. It was going to hit me. Ben kept running. I knew he was going to as soon as I saw the car, not the car that almost hit Denise, but the car that was going to hit him. I froze up. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get myself to move.

Ben dove at me and shoved me out of the way, onto the grass beside the road, but not in time to get out of the way himself. He was thrown up onto the windshield.

I heard Erin screaming, and Denise bawling her lungs out. “Oh my God! Ben!” Erin cried, Ben’s name choked and quieter than the rest.

I wasn’t looking at Erin and Denise, though. I was looking at Ben. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. It was obvious he was dead, and I’m ashamed to say I was glad. If he would have been alive, conscious, I would have had to look into his suffering eyes and know this was all my fault.

Those kind of thoughts began to fill me. I started to cry, and looked guiltily at Erin, who had set Denise down and was at Ben’s side. She looked at me and said in a frigid, weep-riddled voice exactly what I was thinking.

“Look at what you did.”

A familiar-looking young man sat down on the bench beside me. He looked over at me and smiled. He had green eyes, much greener than mine. You don’t see eyes that green very much.

“Hi there,” he said affably.

I struggled to find words, a problem I’d been having a lot recently. “H... hi.”

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Good.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a gun, never taking his eyes off me. He smiled again. “I guess you know what I’m about to do, then.”

I looked across the street at the baseball field. Tina stood at the sidelines yelling out criticism and encouragement at her players. She glanced over her shoulder at me, and I felt tears well up in my eyes. I looked back at Aaron. “Why?” I asked him.

There was rage in the green eyes. “For the months of horrible pain. For five years of headaches so bad they make me wish I was dead. But mostly for the pain of knowing that you tried to kill me and she was still on your side.”

One of her baseball players screamed.

THE FUTURE ENDS NOW.

I went over to the shower, standing up on the edge of the tub, undoing my belt. Once it was off, I ran the end through the metal buckle but didn’t latch it in one of the notches. I tied the end of the belt to the showerhead and tested the knot a bit to make sure it would hold.

I’m not going to deal with this any more. I’m just not.

“Noah?” my mother’s voice called out. There was a knock on the bathroom door. I pulled the leather loop over my head.