by Ashley Ustazewski
Main Street in Greensburg, PA bustled with as much life a small suburb could manage. Hondas and minivans passed as I walked down the cracking sidewalk to the bright green front of The White Rabbit, where a glass-paned green door deposited me in a coffee shop of college hipsters and old people sipping tea with their friends. In the back corner, beyond the people and display of freshly baked pastries, sat Anna Mowery, fishnets and chunky black boots crossed over a plush green couch. She sipped on a bright red mug of cappuccino or perhaps a latte, lifting it up with black-tipped fingers past the newly shortened ends of hair she had hacked away in her home bathroom. This was a place she frequented, alone or with her small circle of friends. At nineteen, a coffee shop was an ideal hangout for doing homework or chatting while functioning solely because of obscene amounts of caffeine. Charmingly mismatched picture frames, gilded doorknobs, and the occasional key scattered themselves lovingly across the pale yellow walls of the café, reflections of Anna’s own haphazardly methodical ways of functioning. I understood why this was a place she felt at home; its affinity for quirky chaos matched hers.
“I have a skull like that at home,” she remarked, gesturing to one of the frames housing a skull covered in swirling black flowers. “His name’s Orpheus.” She then looked at me with carefully charcoal-lined eyes, a glint of amusement shining in their green-ness. “Did you know I took a heart from my bio lab? He lives next to Orpheus on my bookshelf. I call him Henry.”
I’d always heard that people lose touch as time goes on. I didn’t think it would happen to us, but, when she transferred schools sophomore year of high school, it did. That’s not to say we didn’t try to stay in contact—we did try—but my confusion when she posted a photo on Instagram junior year of herself in a green-striped costume with a high ruffled collar holding a pig’s heart proved that maybe we weren’t in as close of contact as I thought. Especially when I assumed she was still wearing the light blue peasant blouse her mom bought her from Bon-Ton with ill-fitting flared jeans and still crying at the death of butterflies as she did in freshman year. It was, at that point, a few months before I would have my own big personality change at the end of junior year, so I couldn’t yet fathom how someone could change so much. I get it now.
The heart is preserved in a jar on Anna’s bookshelf. Henry. A result of declining mental health and teenage boredom. Where once sat a rotund pink pig figurine was a jar of bio-ethanol encasing the heart of a real pig.
It was sixth period when she took Henry.
She shuffled past the wooden door into her school’s token biology lab a minute or two before class started. Tinges of formaldehyde seared into her nose and permeated the entirety of the room: dissection day. Following the wall lined with towering glass-encased shelves of bones, jars of preserved specimens, and microscopes, Anna made her way to her assigned station at lab table number eight and grabbed a thick rubber-coated apron from the table’s drawer. Her fingers shook slightly as she tried to tie the strings of the apron behind her. Dingy cord stumbled around antsy hands into some semblance of a bow. Her mental health had gotten worse since deciding to leave her previous high school at the end of freshman year—restlessness and impulsivity were side effects of undiagnosed ADHD, made greater by undiagnosed depression’s plea for self-destruction.
On the matte black lab table were four sets of dissection kits and specimen trays atop copious layers of old newspapers. Anna quickly got to work removing the scalpel from her station and began to stab at the strange black putty-like substance in the bottom of her specimen tray. The weird putty stuff in the bottom made it easier to cut things on, she figured. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that it was fun to poke holes in.
“Don’t touch the hearts until I tell you to,” Anna’s teacher warned her table while he reached into the white plastic bucket he was carrying with a purple gloved hand, plopping a foul-smelling heart onto each of the four empty specimen trays. “And stop stabbing your tray.”
Across the table from her, Anna’s station mates mumbled something to each other about the hearts looking browner than expected. Anna put her scalpel down and turned to the empty seat to her left, assuming her classmate wasn’t going to show up for class that day. She eyed up the unclaimed heart. It called to her from its loneliness, begging her to give it a home and end its solitude. She wasn’t sure why, but she desperately wanted to.
Lab began.
The heart sat.
Lab ended.
The heart sat.
Anna cleaned up her station.
Her tablemates left.
Anna and the heart sat.
Quickly glancing away from the heart to confirm that her lab teacher was turned toward the sinks at the opposite end of the lab and paying her no attention, Anna stacked some of the sheets of newspaper that were on the table, grabbed the heart, and swaddled it in crumpled stories. She shoved it in her backpack and left, shuffling out past the wooden door and into the hall.
“It was an oddly easy feat to get away with,” she told me. “I just kind of left with it, you know? No questions, nothing.” She looked down at the empty red mug she cupped in her hands, eyebrows upturned in a way that said ‘I amuse myself, and that’s enough for me.’ “Luckily Amazon Prime is a thing so I ordered some bio-ethanol fuel stuff, ‘cause Google said it would preserve it. I got it two days later and huzzah! I had a heart son in a jar and named him Henry.”
Henry ended up making the trek four hours away with Anna from her Greensburg home to Catholic University in Washington D.C., against her parents’ urges for her to not “be weird” and take a heart to college. She herself went there against her own agnosticism. Catholic University had connections with a really great study abroad program at Oxford University in England, which was decidedly far more important to her than enjoying college life in America. Henry sat sloshing in her suitcase that looked like it was sewn entirely from 1920s floral curtains, wrapped in plastic Giant Eagle bags in case of spills.
He sat, lonely, on her bookshelf when she flew to Oxford. Then when she flew to a study abroad program in Ireland. And when she held back tears on the flight back to America when the program was forced to end early due to the Coronavirus, stress deteriorating her soul.
“I was so, so sad. I was proud of myself for not crying on the plane, though,” she remarked with subtle bitterness. “I just got back in last Sunday; I was supposed to be there for the rest of the semester.”
Being at home had proved to be devastating for her. Restlessness turned to anxiety turned to depressive spirals turned to routinely crying herself to sleep. She became shut in her bedroom, trapped by the fear of parental confrontation and learned helplessness. Her reprieve came in the form of her sister, Sarah, a spunky high school sophomore who used her as a free chauffeur service. Driving her around was a little bit of freedom in a house and town that did everything they could to take her autonomy away from her.
During the days she now spends inside her bedroom rather than on the shores of Galway, I learned that she looks to Henry as a reminder of her spontaneity and freedom. That she has some form of control, even when it feels like she doesn’t. She took a heart, she can survive another day at home. She can go for a drive, sneakily light incense. Stealing a heart was easy, and so, she hoped, would be trying to heal her own.
I watched as Anna left The White Rabbit, making her way past the walls of eclectic treasures, out past the storefront windows, and up the sidewalk of cracked cement with heavily falling booted feet. The fragrant smell of freshly made coffee tickled my nose where I remained looking at the empty plush green couch. Something like determination wove throughout my body; I hoped to one day find my Henry that made life feel a little more okay. Anna, on the other hand, stepped back into Harriet the Noble Chariot, her maroon Honda Passport, and drove to nowhere.
Ashley Ustazewski is a junior majoring in Psychology and English with the hope of pursuing creativity in her future wherever she can, whether that be as an author, or something else entirely. Aside from writing, Ashley enjoys drinking coffee, banging out the tunes on her ukulele, guitar, flute, or trumpet, painting animals wearing little hats, and dying her hair impulsively. She has been published in Penn State’s Kalliope and hopes to become more involved in Penn State’s writing community.