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The scariest thing about seeing Myra Banks a few weeks after was that when she looked at me in the face and I looked at her in the eyes, I didn’t recognize her and she didn’t know who I was.  She looked at me with eyes-that-were-not-eyes, more like those globular fishbowls that I would keep betas in on my dresser.  Hers were green, and when they touched up to the skin of my features I knew that she was seeing me and not seeing me and I suddenly remembered the time that my little brother put green food dye in the fishbowls to keep Barry Beta from getting pinched on St. Patrick’s day and the next morning he was floating at the top.  This is what her eyes made me think of: the dark green of the water and the dark, glass-boned stillness of Barry’s body curled into the flat surface.

“Myra,” I said, and had to reach out a hand and grab her sleeve because she didn’t hear and didn’t stop.  “Hold on, Myra.”

She turned and there were those deadfishbowl eyes.  I was taken aback for a moment, and almost turned away and let her continue on that march to who knew where.

“Yes?” she asked.  When I was young, my speech therapist had told me that if I was nervous or intimidated by someone, that I should look at their nose rather than their eyes because it would be less pressure for me and they wouldn’t know the difference.  I forgot this when I was talking to her and my eyes were pressed into her own.

“I just… Well, I heard about…  I was just checking…”  I hated my words, right then.  My voice, my face, my arms for not knowing what to do with themselves.

“Oh no, I’m fine,” she said, and didn’t even try to smile.  I knew.  She knew.  Why deny this and try to make muscles do what they did not want to do?

“Just let me know, I guess.”  There was a pause.  “My mom… She’s, uh, sending me a care pack.  I could, you know, ask her to send something.”  My face felt hot and I saw her lips part to politely deny me, but I stormed on, not knowing why.  “She’s a chef except not professionally, though she did work in a bakery once and decorated this wedding cakes, but that’s… But she makes really fantastic cookies.  What’s your favorite kind?”

Myra shrugged and looked as though she didn’t want me there.  “I like chocolate chip.”

“I’ll have her send some, ok?”

“That’d be nice.”  I saw her arm twitch, her foot shuffle towards Away, but something in me was stirring at the sight of her.  She was an Irish lass to the cores of her bones and the pale pale pores of her skin that still shadowed and crept with the legacies of bruises.  There were a few lines of scabs that ran from the outside corner of her right eye down into the depths of her oversized hoodie to end or perhaps wind on forever over the paper thinness of her skin.  I couldn’t leave her, not looking like this.  It was my own damn motherly instinct.

“Hey, Davis assigned another essay.  Something about examining minor female characters in… God, I think it’s some of Byron’s works.  I dunno.  I think she mentioned the position of the female in the aesthetic movement.  But I could help you with it or something.”

Something crossed Myra’s lips and I was sure that it was a grimace but it was close enough to a smile that a hope stirred in my ribs.  She was in my Feminist Literature class and I knew her for two things: her hair and her thoughts.  Her hair because it was red like red pens and maraschino cherries and stop signs and reached to the backs of her knees.  Her thoughts because she voiced them at every possible instance and they were brilliant.  She fit the voice of a Southern Baptist televangelist into the frame of a jockey and never tired of letting people knew just how unjust the patriarchy was being.  I had talked to her about trivial things and never anything important, always torn between the intense desire to get to know her and the intense aura of power that clung to her like the scent of rain.  But right now her voice was small and husky and rough like dirt roads, and her hair was wound up again and again upon itself into a pouchy hat with a brim the pulled the shade into her eyes.  She was not, in those moments, the same girl that had slammed her book shut in the middle of class and raged to the professor at the blatant misconceptions of women as painted by eighteenth century writers.

“Another one, yeah?” Myra asked.  “I’m barely recovered from failing the last one.”

“Oh whatever, you always do well on these.”

“Only if Davis likes what I say.  And how often is that?”

“Often enough for you to be doing just fine in that class.”

Myra’s lips ghosted at a smile, but she shrugged and by the time I could see her face, it was gone.

“Well, we’ll see.  I’ll let you know if I need help.”

“Absolutely.”

“See you around, then?”

“Yeah, I’ll see you around.”

She managed to get a good ten feet away from me before I stopped her again.  Her fingers curled up around the folds and folds of extra skin on her hoodie, just knowing somehow what I would say.  Her mouth was a line tough like too-old gum and crowbars.

“What happened?  I’ve heard… I can’t tell what’s rumors.”

“He’s dead,” she said, and I couldn’t look out of her eyes.  “A week ago.   Got infected, I guess.”

The Man was dead, then.  The Man who had followed her home and forced her into an alley.  The Man who had dragged her face into the heavy gravel street.  The Man who had stolen her purity, who had raped her.

The Man whose chest was large and vulnerable when Myra’s quaking hands found a knife in his belt and wrapped those long white fingers around the hilt, whose blood was hot as it melted out onto those fingers.

I said nothing to this, and she fixed my eyes with deadfishbowls before turning away and passing over the courtyard with feet that never quite felt solid on the ground and a stride smaller than what it was.

God came in a gust of wind that yanked at the papers in my hands, tugged at my jacket, and slipped its fingers like a lover beneath the brim of Myra’s hat to free it into the sky.

In a moment I realized that her hair was cropped to her skull, that the stoplight red strands had been shorn off by The Man, that this was what they had been talking about in rumors but no one had believed it and I certainly hadn’t because she was Myra With the Hair and would I even know her without it?  I wondered if she had killed him with the knife that had parted right though that innate part of her identity.  It must be that way; it was how any novel worth its pages would end things, that flavor of dramatic irony.  Her jaw was sharp and crossed with dark scabs, and I thought that she looked on the verge of masculinity without that hair.

I wanted, I needed to do something, but hell if I knew what, and by the time I had blinked, the hat and Myra were gone.