The Black Rose

FOUR YEARS LATER...

My fingers danced over the keys with a minimal flick of the wrists. The keyboard was my instrument, the computer, my muse. I sat in this monotonous advanced programming course in the back row of the lecture hall, my eyes flicking ever so slightly across the coded screen before me to the scruffy, coffee-laden professor. I would soon be a graduate of Georgia Tech University with my undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Scientific Engineering, and zero clues as to what came after this.

While my prodigious ranking afforded me a handful of internships at various social media platforms like Facebook or Myspace, part of me felt tethered to school. School was my safe place, a place where I didn’t have to forcibly interact with others. I could sit in the backseat of my classes, trudge back to my modest one-bedroom apartment, plug into the online world, and remain relatively in the shadows. Just the way I preferred.

At barely twenty-one years of age, I still found most people, including some professors, irritating beyond reproach, but as a brilliant teacher once taught me, in order to make it, I had to be liked, or at least not hated. While much of my time consisted of avoiding people or crowds as much as possible, I did force myself to put my best acting foot forward and go out and have a “good time”. Due to this spontaneous me, I had managed to procure two friends with whom I didn’t hate.

Maurice Brown, aka Mo, was a hacker genius, sporting long dreads, questionable hygiene, a defined video game pudge necessary to store food reserves for arduous hours in front of a screen, and an affinity for the male anatomy. He lived one floor below me. Then there was Cassy.

Cassandra Duncan was a purple-haired, anime-loving, vegetable-eating feminist, and yeah, needless to say, dangerous with a computer in hand. Together and to the internet world, we were known as the Three Musketeers. We hacked together, played video games together, drank together, and avoided the “cool” people together. “You would be proud,” I mumbled to myself, willing Mrs. Greenwald’s face to appear. I winced. It had been six years, but it still felt as if it was yesterday...

At the beginning of my junior year, Mrs. Greenwald arrived promptly at eight am as she always had. She met me in the office which was converted into a two-woman classroom, or I liked to call our escape room. She sipped her coffee, unpacked her bag, and prepared for the day’s lesson routinely, except this time her face passably chipper. I could feel the tension, her faint, pained expression, her anxiety. I didn’t have to wait long for the truth to rip my already papery thin world to shreds.

Sometimes the truth could be unbearable. Why would any sane person ever want to know the truth? Climate change, nah not real. Death, heaven, hell, none of its true, especially in the premeditated artful dose of cancer. Let me remain in blissful ignorance until it kills me.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t afforded this luxury, because some truths we can’t ignore. Some truths crack our exterior or burrow through our menial defenses, lay wee alien babies, and then rip us apart from the inside out. The truth was Mrs. Greenwald had been diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She had been given a dire prognosis. The truth was, I learned what it meant to truly know pain, anger, and sadness for the first time. I watched as my teacher, my friend, fought for her life, and I watched as six months later she gave her last brittle, wide familiar smile. Mrs. Greenwald was gone, and whatever shred of emotion I felt, I buried it with her. Emotions sucked. Vulnerability, weakness, and pain was something I didn’t want any part of again. That day, I began to rewrite the code to my brain. It received a software upgrade impenetrable to viral assailants.

I decided to test out of high school after my junior year, and to my credit, was able to attend university as a seventeen-year-old freshman at Georgia Tech University.

“I’ll see you all next week to review for the final exam. Have a great weekend,” Professor Kortiz’s voice rang my bell.

I woke from my trance startled. Had I really faded the entire class? I quickly saved my work and closed my computer. This was the last advanced programming class of the semester. The next week was final preparation and then the last finals I would take as an undergraduate. Part of me felt relieved, the other part petrified. I needed to figure out what I wanted to do next. Maybe I could start my own IT business, hire Mo and Cassy, and together we could invent our own apps or our own social media platform like Mark Zuckerberg.

I shook my head, who was I kidding, that would involve way too much face-to-face interaction. No, we could hack into offshore bank accounts of filthy rich nerds like Mark Zuckerberg, and steal their money (or at least some of it), then we could travel the world living in remote huts and villages playing video games all day until our eyes bled. That sounded more like our style. A style I’m sure Mrs. Greenwald wouldn’t approve of, but she should’ve been here. She should be here.

My mind wandered once again to her, to the most favorite day of my young life...

Mrs. Greenwald and I had just finished taking Art History together, and it just so happened her favorite era of the late 1900s, Academic Art, had arrived at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. To add fuel to the already stoked fire, her favorite painting, The Shepherdess by William Adolphe Bouguereau, was a part of the new, much-awaited collection.

Mrs. Greenwald decided a hands-on field trip was in order, and on a gloomy, dreary Thursday, she dressed me to the nines in the same faux fur coat, while she sported a long, black, sleek trench coat. We looked like two fashionable, rich, French women. Our task, to observe the painting, my assignment of the day, to speak only in French, my homework, to write a paper on how the painting and experience made me feel.

Looking back, I loved how Mrs. Greenwald could smash a million lessons into one (even though at the time I never quite understood or appreciated her unconventional methods). I accepted the challenge, and we set foot in the High Museum of Art. The stark white building reminded me of a futuristic white house. Inside, the beige-tiled flooring meshed with the expansive white walls. It was truly a magnificent piece of architecture, which made me feel as if I had been transported elsewhere.

After purchasing tickets to the museum and exhibit, we moved room by room. To be honest, I hadn’t given much thought to art or its importance. I held art to the same esteem as acting. Both painted a facade of a better time, obscuring the truth, molding it to one’s liking, but when my eyes fell on that painting, everything changed. It was like The Shepherdess spoke to me as if she was me. Not only did we resemble one another with our wavy wild dark hair, but her pale complexion, and her defiant dark gaze.

“What do you see?” Mrs. Greenwald asked (in French of course). For several moments I couldn’t even form words.

“I see a woman taking charge of her life. A woman doing a man’s job. A woman walking barefoot through the fields because physical pain doesn’t faze her. Nothing phases her. She seems hardened by her world, confident, unshaken. Young, wild, and free.”

“Good,” Mrs. Greenwald murmured. I gazed wide-eyed, moving as close as the thick glass box would allow. I identified with that stare. To hold that confidence during that time, when women weren’t viewed much differently than livestock. She had seen things, done things, become things.

I could feel Mrs. Greenwald’s thick gaze upon me...

Reaching my gated apartment, I unlocked the rusty red door and the familiar stench of frozen food and stale laundry overwhelmed my senses. I needed to clean, especially before Mo and Cassy came over. Lucky for me, it was Friday, and we had the whole weekend to game and hack. My last assignments as an undergrad could wait until Sunday evening, my bread and butter, pulling all-nighters amped up on energy drinks and Doritos.

I placed my computer bag down on the vintage metal bar stool and opened my fridge. Yikes. I needed to make a beer and food run. Slamming the door, I moved to my room to change my clothes into something more appropriate for an all-night video game extravaganza.

I pushed the door ajar and gasped. There was a figure dressed in black, sitting quietly on my bed, they lurched towards me. “What the...” I yelled but felt a jabbing pain as something sharp impaled my neck from another figure behind the door. My world blurred as I stumbled and everything went black.