Sea of Faces
2004-08-21 - 9:33 p.m.

No one at school ever saw Abbey when she walked by. Sometimes they heard her footsteps, and sometimes they looked at her, but somehow, she never registered. Her presence was like the presence of some miniscule insect, there but not there, alive but without effect. She wasn’t targeted for bullying, or picked out for excommunication; she somehow managed to avoid any sort of confrontation, good or bad. She was a weed in a hayfield.

Two days ago, a car traveling east at seventy-five miles an hour hit another car traveling roughly the same speed in exactly the opposite direction. Abbey was in one car or the other. A rich businessman who was upset to be bothered called 911 out of obligation, and she was taken to the hospital in a rush of sirens and streetlights.

Today, at exactly 1:42am, the rain that had been going on all night stopped. Coincidentally, that was the exact moment that Abigail Elizabeth Ross’s body became vacant. It would never find another tenant.

She rated fourteen lines on the sixteenth page of the Tribune. At school, an assembly was called that had nothing to do with the recent downsizing of the student body. There was no moment of silence. Sherry Jackson cried whenever she broke her nail. She was the only student who cried that day.

As the principal stared out into the crowd, he focused on his speech, on his smile, and on the reaction he was getting from his captive audience. He thought Billy Coleman looked slightly stoned, and he could see Annie Shank and Gilbert England getting too close in the back row. Kids these days.

He stared at the assembly, and the assembly stared back. As he started speaking, the individual faces melted into one impersonal entity. He never even noticed that the sea of faces was missing a face.