The Truth About Fragile Things (2 page)

I know he recognized the stubborn glint in my eye because he reached across me to Brittany Pearson who is great at volleyball but couldn’t figure the circumference of a circle to save her life, let alone theorems. “Brittany, will you help me?” he pleaded.

“I dare you,” I breathed out the words so only he could hear. Phillip pushed the paper even farther toward Brittany, pressing his curly hair against my cheek.

“Get off of my face,” I said, shoving his head. It didn’t matter. He barely moved. Phillip inherited a really big head from his dad.

Brittany’s smile lit up when Phillip singled her out but then fell as soon as she looked down and saw the problem.

I sighed and took the paper. “That’s just mean,” I hissed at Phillip. “Don’t worry about it, Brittany,” I told her. She gave Phil an apologetic shrug and I grabbed his pencil so hard the lead snapped off. “Now I can’t do it,” I told him. “I can’t write if the…”

“Pencil isn’t sharp,” Phil finished for me. He blinked his thick lashes and said, “Brittany, do you have a sharp pencil?”

Thrilled to be asked something more up her alley, she dug into her bag and came up with one I found acceptable.

“Thank you,” Phillip said. “That is one beautiful pencil.” He gave her a level gaze, far too intense for a writing utensil. “And sorry about Megan. She is very difficult to deal with sometimes.”

The group within hearing range laughed while I hunched over the paper, hiding my face. I put on a calm, blank expression and started solving for
f
.  I always look up when I’m figuring something out so when I couldn’t resist the urge any longer I directed my stare through the windows to the rose bushes in the courtyard, their branches shivering under the deluge of gray rain. My eyes finally unfocused from the hazy scene when someone across the cafeteria screamed. I jerked around in unison with a hundred other students to see a small knot of soccer players laughing over a ketchup accident. I glanced back at Phillip’s paper, telling myself it wasn’t a real scream. Not the kind I’m afraid of.  I bent my head down to ensure the scenes flashing like a faded newsreel in my mind didn’t show in my eyes.

At the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City there is a wishing well where people have dropped cheap penny hopes for decades. Beside it on most fair weather days a man in a battered vest and white hair stands for a few hours hoping to collect slightly larger donations. He showed up sometime in the Clinton administration and is still at it. He carries a stuffed monkey and tries to divert coins from the wishing well to his shapeless hat by playing a street organ beside a weathered sign that reads ‘Feed the Monkey.’ Fifteen years ago on a summer morning so humid the flower petals had curled into wilted heaps, a mother grudgingly handed him a torn dollar bill while her two-year-old girl inspected one of the wrinkled blossoms. When an orange butterfly flew toward the street, the girl followed on determined, chubby legs. Four steps and she had slipped between the bumper of a Ford and a flashy Mustang. Four more and she was in the street with the coasting butterfly. Before her mother could scream, before the monkey man could turn his head, before the Jeep Cherokee cruising down Nichols Road could veer away, there was a shriek of brakes, a hopeless grunt and the surprisingly soft but sickening thud of a fragile body colliding with the bug-spattered grill.

The child’s scream tore through the air over the noise of slamming car doors and yelling onlookers, her arms and legs grated with skid marks of blood. But it was not the tiny girl that the people ran toward first; it was the broken body of the man who’d thrown her out of harm’s way.

Brittany’s voice cut the memory short. “Is that girl looking at us?” It took a moment to place myself back in the deafening lunchroom. Brittany nudged me and pointed with her shoulder across the room to one of the freshman tables. They aren’t required to sit together. They just huddle for security. The rest looked huddled, at least. Not the girl Brittany pointed out. She had thick, light hair and stared from beneath slanted eyebrows, her eyes unabashedly direct and angry. I flinched and glanced behind me to see if she was glaring at someone else, but when I turned back she only seemed more disgusted.

Other people blush when they are embarrassed or confused. I go from pale to paler. The blood always falls out of my face, out of my heart, and drops somewhere around my knees.

“I think she’s looking at me, actually,” I said.

Phillip’s eyes darted to the girl. Her baby round cheeks and soft mouth contrasted starkly with her defiant expression. If she smiled she would be something close to adorable.  Phil glared back to scare her away, but it did the opposite. The girl stood up and took one fearless step closer to us before she gave a lazy, insolent turn and dropped her entire tray into the trashcan. With a hard smile she walked out of the room.

“What’s her deal?” Phil asked.

I curled my toes in my shoes and pushed them against the dirty linoleum floor. “I’ve never seen her in my life. She probably thought I was someone else.”

Brittany said something dismissive about freshmen while I grabbed the math sheet and concentrated on each scratching line of the pencil lead, tracing a triangle needlessly.

“I’ve never seen her in my life,” I repeated quietly, wondering why it felt like a lie.

As I faded from the table’s attention, the memory reel picked up where it left off, never able to end unfinished.

The small girl’s eyes grew glazed and unfocused with terror and commotion. Policemen dropped their morning coffees and yelled into radios as they pounded past the sprinkling fountains.

The girl’s mother pulled her off the rough asphalt and searched her bruised body with disbelieving eyes. An off-duty nurse jumped over the iron rail of a restaurant patio and joined them, speaking in a rushed, clinical voice as she looked into the child’s pupils, lifted each soft arm, flexed each bleeding knee. The girl would need nothing more than three Band-Aids and some comforting words.

As the knot of onlookers tightened around the injured man, he made one effort to sit up before hands pressed him down and people ordered him not to move. He turned his head to the side and uttered two unintelligible words. When he spotted the bleeding girl in her mother’s arms he stopped mid-sentence and closed his eyes. The trembling mother breathed out fractured words against her daughter's neck that a police officer overheard and wrote down in letters as shaky as her voice.
I’m sorry. Thank you. Thank you.
And then the pleading demand—
Be okay!

While the man clung feebly to the last sounds he would ever know, the butterfly landed somewhere. That’s what I always think about when the reel finishes; where did the butterfly end up? No one will ever know. I imagine it was near enough that the dying man heard the wings open, felt them beat into the sky. Maybe they flew away together.