Rachael | Burnt Ground
The ring cost 11 dollars at a folding table in the church basement, and it came in a small white box with a hinge that never quite closed, and the woman selling them kept a cash box and a roll of raffle tickets and a daughter of her own two grades below me working the far end of the table. Sterling, or something sold as sterling. A thin band with a raised line down the middle meant to suggest two paths, and inside, stamped small enough that you had to hold it under the light, the word itself. You wore it on the third finger of the left hand. That was the whole design of it. It sat where the other ring would go, and it held the place, and every time you looked down at your own hand you were reminded that the hand had already been spoken for.
The assembly came first, in the gymnasium, folding chairs in rows and a banner taped to the cinderblock behind the microphone. The man who spoke had props, because they all had props. He pressed a strip of duct tape to a boy's forearm and pulled it off and pressed it to the next boy, and by the fourth boy it hung there gray and slack and would not hold anything, and he let us look at it a while before he said a word. Somebody else, a different year, sent a rose up and down the rows and asked at the end who wanted it now. I signed the card at a table by the door on the way out, my name on one line, the date on the other, a sentence in the middle I can still recite, and then I bought the ring, and then we all went to fifth period.
I have wondered for a long time what I believed I was guarding. Not what I was giving up, since that was explained at length and with visual aids. What I was holding it for, and on whose behalf, and who was expected to come and collect, and by when.