It said, in blue ballpoint, in my daughter’s handwriting:
WILLA JUNE TARRANT
And underneath, because she was a person who thought about things like this:
(Willa — rhymes with pillow. Not Willow.)
And in the corner, a doodle of a very bad turtle. She drew that turtle on everything from about age nine. It was on the corner of every homework sheet in that house for eight years.
She filled that card out in May of 2016, sitting in a school gym, at seventeen, and handed it in, and eleven days later she was gone and nobody ever read it.
I have no memory of the next part. None.
People have told me things. Cal says I made a sound. Bonnie Krebs, who I have since forgiven and who cried on my porch, says I said “no” three times, which I do not remember at all.
What I know is that I came apart in a folding seat in the third row of the auditorium of a high school I had not walked into in ten years, holding a piece of card stock with a turtle on it.
