Comfort

Her name was Caitlin Faraj, daughter of a teacher mother and an immigrant father. She was seventeen years old.
Back in the sixth grade, where she helped out for extra credit for her school six blocks away, she was Brandon’s third crush. He had walked up to her one day, and gripped tightly to a pencil, and confessed this to her. She looked up at him with her large, brown eyes, the corners of her mouth turned upwards.
“And who was your second crush?” she said. He had fidgeted with the pencil, and shyly pointed behind him. His cheeks grew red and he looked at the floor.
“Marie,” he mumbled.
Caitlin gave a big smile, mussed his hair, and sent him back to his seat. His ears felt hot for the rest of the day, and he couldn’t help but to sneak glances at her. She always sat at the low, long desk that was pressed against the tall windows. She loved reading and grading in the warm sunlight where she could look out at the world below.
Brandon always thought her face looked strikingly pretty. Of course, so were some of the other girls’ in his class, but Caitlin’s was different. From the back of the room, he played around with perspective and imagined he could squish peoples’ heads between his thumb and index finger. When he got to Caitlin, he used his fingers to cover up her face in different ways. He tried to discern what was pretty about her. She had seen him looking at her, and after class she motioned him over.
“Couldn’t get to work today, Brandon?” she teased. “Mrs. Sanders won’t like that when she finds out.” She waggled her finger playfully at him.
“Oh. I don’t care much,” he still eyed Mrs. Sanders across the room with a touch of fear. He quickly looked out the window. “You were distracting me.” His cheeks grew hot.
“Really, me just grading papers over here?”
“Yup,” he watched kids on the swings. “The sun was playing shadows across your face. I thought it was. Urm. Pretty.” He tucked his chin into the collar of his vest, biting the inside of his lip.
“What about my face is pretty?” Her lips and her eyes smiled up at him.
He shrugged.
“Well, think about it. But next time, focus more on the school work so you don’t get in trouble.”
She sent him home with her big grin that made him feel giddy.

Later that week, before class, he marched up to her, a photo in his hand.
“Caitlin, I know why you’re pretty,” he declared. His finger traced his own features as he talked. “That big freckle on your cheek, just below your eye. Your big, brown eyes, and your big smile you always have. That’s what makes you the prettiest. I also think you look like her.”
He offered her the photo. He had cut it out of a magazine his mom kept out on the coffee table. It was of Natalie Portman. He had used black marker to completely scribble over everything, only the oval of her face was revealed.
“Oh, thank you Brandon!” she looked at the picture. “She’s in my favorite movie, Garden State. You probably won’t see it for a whil—ha, you even drew my hijab!”
Brandon’s lips and tongue felt the new word a few times.
“It's this,” she indicated the black cloth that hugged the edges of her face, and hung over her neck and shoulders. “I wear it out of respect. It’s part of my religion, Islam.”
Mrs. Sanders walked in, removed a small crucifix from around her neck, and carefully set it on her desk, out of sight. Brandon knew there were several types of religion, but he still didn’t like his because his mom made him sit in church on Sundays. He didn’t know too much beyond that, except next year in Mr. Reznick’s class he’d learn more about the different religions.
“What color is your hair?” Brandon asked.
“What color do you think it is?” she replied.
The other children started to walk in, so Brandon shuffled back to his desk after telling Caitlin she could keep the picture he cut out. As Mrs. Sanders wrote on the board in her big, loopy cursive, he kept whispering to himself.
Hijab. Hijab. Hijab. Islam. Islam. Islam—

Three weeks later, Brandon noticed Caitlin staring out the tall windows, completely distracted. As the class took a break between subjects, he walked up to her and sat down in the sunlight.
“What’re you staring at, Caitlin?” he swung his feet in the empty space.
“The crows out on the playground,” she couldn’t take her eyes off the birds. They were scattered about on the swing set and merry-go-round. “I just love how they hop and dance around all the time—oh look!” Two of the crows seemed to be taking turns dancing on top of the swing set.
At the end of class, Brandon nudged a small drawing in front of her. It was of a flock of crows, pecking and dancing beneath a tree. In the lower corner, he wrote his name and date carefully in blue pencil.
“For you,” he stated, looking at her oval face and bright features. She gave him a big hug and thanked him. He felt warm over the weekend, even though it was cold and rainy.

The next week, she didn’t come to class on Tuesday like she always did. Brandon’s stomach felt sick and heavy, like he swallowed a rock. Anxiously, he eyed Caitlin’s empty seat, as if enough concentration would make her appear. At nine, they got the news.
“Mrs. Sanders, please come down to the office,” the intercom announced. With a stern look, she darted out into the hall. The class knew to behave in her absence. When she finally returned, she was crying, and Mr. Grey from across the hall, was supporting her as she walked. She was clutching a small, bright yellow paper. She tried several times to read aloud, but kept sobbing and sniffing until she ducked into the hall; her cries slightly muffled.
With teary eyes, Mr. Grey read from the piece of paper. The class fell deathly silent. Brandon laid his head on his desk and listened.
Sometime the night before, Caitlin had been killed. Police had yet to publicly report when they estimated she had been attacked. Her body was found early in the morning, along the road she took when going to and from schools; dumped in the bushes at a park. One of the officers that were called in recognized her from school. One of his kids was in her class. There wasn’t any money or identification on the body, and her hijab was found ripped and torn, in another bush.
Grey clouds hung over the school. Brandon stared out the window as a tear slide down the side of his cheek; his head against the desk still. Through the window, he could see a flock of crows as they silently dispersed into the horizon.
Caitlin had loved the sun.
Caitlin had loved the crows.
Caitlin had brown hair, just as he thought.