Fragile

by Lisa Unger

  Melody released a hacking cough and tossed her cigarette out the window.

  “The world is your ashtray, right, Mel?”

  “Shut up, Jones. When did you turn into such a self-righteous prick?”

  In between The Acres and The Oaks, on the dark, unpaved road, Jones stopped the car. He rolled down the window and took in the cold, quiet air. He could hear the babbling of the little creek that flowed through town. Somewhere deep in the woods, something moved light and quick. A deer, fleeing the sound of the engine, the high beams. Maybe something else.

  “What are you doing?” Melody asked.

  “I’m just going to look around here a minute.”

  He flipped on the rack of lights on the roof, and the area around them flooded in harsh white. Everything beyond the beam disappeared.

  He stepped out of the car and looked into the black around them, listened to it. Then he walked down the slope to the bank of the creek, peering under the bridge.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Melody had exited the vehicle and came to stand above him, leaning on the stone edge of the bridge.

  “This is where they found her body. You remember?”

  When he looked at her, she was as white as death.

  “Why are you doing this?” she said again. Her voice was a raspy whisper, her face melting in fear and grief. He felt a little jolt of regret. He hadn’t done it to hurt her or to frighten her. He just wanted someone to remember with him, wanted not to be alone with it for once. He saw how wrong that was now.

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, stared at the black water, the slick stones beneath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-She’s fine, Melody.”

  But she had already turned from him and gone back to the SUV. The slamming of the door bounced and echoed all around him. It would have been an ugly thing, a dark and hateful kind of poetry, to walk down here and see Charlene. Was that what he thought he’d find?

  Back in the SUV, Melody was weeping again. He climbed in the driver’s side and closed the door, cranked the heat. He’d been sweating this afternoon. Now the air was frigid. Winter was settling over The Hollows.

  “Am I being punished?” she asked. He had no urge to comfort her, to apologize again. He just wished he hadn’t offered to drive her around. He wished she would stop crying.

  “Do you ever talk to Travis?” she said when he didn’t answer her.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I didn’t mean-”

  “You feel it, too. I can see it on your face. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Stop it.” He put the vehicle in gear and started to drive. “Pull yourself together.”

  Jones and Travis Crosby had never been friends, exactly. No, never that. But something magnetic and irresistible drew them together over and over, either in conflict or in complicity.

  Travis’s dad was the Hollows police chief, a grim and sour man who retained his post for almost thirty-five years. During his tenure, crime in The Hollows was well below the statistical average. And revenue from parking and moving violations was higher than anywhere else in the state. But his cruelty, his rages, were well known. And everyone knew that Travis got the worst of it.

  Jones’s father, before he disappeared just shortly after Jones’s thirteenth birthday, had worked at the dairy just out of town, a family farm where kids would ride their bikes to the ice cream shop on summer afternoons or for the questionable entertainment of cow tipping on moonless nights. Once upon a time, town legend held, their fathers had been friends. But some rift had placed a distance between the two families. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, or because of some unspoken, shared hatred of their fathers, Travis and Jones wound up killing time together now and again. Almost always getting into trouble when they did.

  That afternoon, lacrosse practice had gone late. They were in the play-offs the following weekend, and the coach was busting their balls every afternoon. Jones walked to his car in the near dusk, legs shaking, feeling light-headed from exertion. He didn’t see Travis sitting on his hood until he was just feet away.

  “Nice ride,” said Travis.

  “Birthday gift from my mom.” It was a restored ’67 Mustang, fire-engine red, mint condition, custom stereo and speakers. Jones loved it but was embarrassed by it, by the attention it drew, by its cherry shine. He hated it a little, too, because of how she lorded it over him all the time. Aren’t you lucky to have a mom who would buy you something like that? You better be nice to me. Don’t leave me like your father did.

  “Must be nice to be filthy fucking rich.”

  Jones gave a little laugh. Nobody in The Hollows was rich, not back then. A few new residents were building nice houses in the hills. But people who came from The Hollows were descended from German settlers-they were peasant stock.

  “My uncle restores antique cars,” Jones said. “I don’t think it cost that much. Just a lot of hard work on his part.”

  Travis gave a slow nod, ran his hand along the hood. “Seriously, man. It’s nice.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I get a ride?”

  Travis still bore a red half-moon scar under his eye from the beating Henry Ivy had given him at the homecoming game. It seemed to have humbled him a bit, that beating. Jones, like everyone at Hollows High, was glad for it. Travis was a bully and an asshole. Though Jones couldn’t help but feel a little bad for the guy, too. It was the ultimate humiliation to get beaten down in front of the whole school by someone who had previously been regarded as the biggest geek on Earth.

  Jones nodded his chin toward the car and walked over to pop the trunk. They both dropped their lacrosse gear inside.

  He often thought about how normal everything was that afternoon, how right everything was with the world. They were just two ordinary kids. Each had his sets of problems; both were children of dysfunction. But it was a cold, pretty evening. They were well exercised, sober, healthy. They weren’t aimless or needing to blow off steam. They were both tired from school and practice, and Jones couldn’t wait to get in the shower. Any other day, each would have been home within the half hour. Jones would have eaten with his mother, then gone to his room to do homework-because if his grades fell, he couldn’t play.

  But as they pulled out of the school parking lot and made the left turn to go home, they saw a late bus stop briefly in the distance, then start moving on its way. And then they both saw her, her thin form weighted down by a heavy backpack, a violin case in her hand. Sarah Meyer walked with slow determination.

  “She walking?” asked Travis.

  “Looks like it,” said Jones. He didn’t know her at all. Once he’d walked past the music room and heard her practicing. It didn’t sound that great to him; he wasn’t sure what the fuss was all about.

  “You know what I heard about her?” said Travis. He’d dropped his voice low though they were alone in the car.

  “What?”

  “That she gives great head.”

  Jones laughed, but at seventeen, just the thought of it caused his crotch to ache a little. Of course it was a lie. Because Travis was a liar, always making up the craziest shit just to get a reaction.

  “No way.” Sarah was a small girl, skinny, with fine, mousy brown hair, forever clad in corduroy pants and some girlie sweater her mom had obviously picked out. She had this distracted air about her; even in class he’d sometimes notice her staring out the window, daydreaming.

  “I’m not kidding. She sucked Chad Donner off under the bleachers after school last week.” Travis let out that hoot of laughter he was famous for, was getting himself all excited.

  “Whatever.”

  “He said she liked it. Loved it. No, no. He said she was crazy for it.”

  “Shut up, Travis.” Jones regretted giving him a ride. This happened all the time. He’d find himself hanging out with Travis and wondering why he didn’t remember from the last time that he didn’t like the guy at all.

  “What? You don
’t believe me? Let’s ask her.”

  By the time they reached her, Sarah was just about to turn off the main road and head up the unpaved drive that led to her house. It was nearly a mile long, running first through a field and then into a thick wooded area. Wasn’t she scared, Jones wondered, in the gathering dark? She didn’t seem to be, her shoulders square, her pace steady.

  “Slow down, slow down,” said Travis, as he rolled down the window.

  Then, “Hey, Sarah,” he called. “Want a ride?”

  • • •

  But Jones didn’t allow himself to blame Travis for what had happened on that very normal evening. There had been decades to marvel at the minutiae, the little things that had led them all there: if Jones hadn’t dawdled in the locker room, reluctant to go home to his waiting mother and endure her smothering attentions-or if he’d lingered longer; if Travis’s car hadn’t been in the shop; if Sarah hadn’t missed her bus; if Melody hadn’t come strolling up from her place to meet Sarah on the road, having seen her from her bedroom window.

  But there was another part of him, too, that suspected none of it could have been altered, that no matter what any of them had done that day, they all would have arrived together at the same point in time. That there was no way to have avoided the moment when their unique combination of energies, desires, and fears unified to create something awful.

  Thinking that kept him from remembering that he was the one with all the power, literally the one in the driver’s seat. All he would have had to do was keep going, endure whatever ribbing Travis had to offer up. Aw, you always were a pussy, Cooper. He could have ignored Travis’s directive and taken them both home. Except he didn’t.

  13

  Henry Ivy got suspended for a week because of the beating he gave Travis Crosby. But he didn’t care. It had been a long time in coming. Travis had been terrorizing him since middle school. Looking back now, as a school counselor with a master’s degree in childhood development, Henry saw what a troubled kid Travis had been, could even muster some compassion for him. But at the time, after years of humiliation-tray dumping, towel snapping, locker graffiti (Henry Ivy is a faggot, gay boy, cocksucker), once a bloody nose in gym class after Travis threw a football in his face-Henry only saw him as a tormentor. He didn’t know why; he’d never done anything to Travis. Travis had merely pegged Henry as an easy target, one unlikely to retaliate, and with a kind of lackluster determination took whatever opportunity presented itself to make a fool out of him.

  For years, Henry endured. He didn’t tattle. He didn’t fight back. He just made himself as small as possible inside and waited for whatever it was Travis was inflicting to pass. More humiliating, if less painful than the actual event, was the wake of attention from his classmates. Henry, are you all right? You should kick his ass, man. One of his equally geeky friends-because Henry had been a major geek, with big, thick glasses, plaid shirts, and corduroy pants-would walk with him to the nurse’s office, offering solace and advice. But most humiliating of all was when Maggie was the one to walk with him.

  “He’s a jerk,” she’d tell him. “And a loser. One day you’ll be making millions and he’ll be pumping gas.”

  “I know,” he’d say. He didn’t know any such thing. He was just wishing one day she’d look at him without pity in her eyes. One day he wanted her to look at him with awe and pride, maybe even with love. But that had never happened, though she’d always looked at him with the affection and acceptance of enduring friendship. That was something. That was a lot.

  These days, he’d like to think that the type of systematic torture he’d suffered at the hands of Travis Crosby would not be tolerated. It would be noticed and addressed, because educators should know by now how toxic was the relationship between bully and victim, how it might turn deadly.

  But then, a kind of “boys will be boys” attitude allowed Henry’s torture to continue without much interference. Once he even saw the PE teacher smirk at one of Travis’s favorite activities, stealing Henry’s underwear and towel while he was in the shower and hiding them so that Henry was forced to walk wet and naked to his locker while everyone laughed.

  That was more than twenty years ago, but as he pulled in front of the Crosby home, it might as well have been last month. He felt the surge of adrenaline in his hands as he parked the car and shut the ignition. Whatever Henry’s history with Travis, Henry cared about Marshall. Maybe because he saw more of himself than he did of Travis in the boy. Maybe because he recognized Marshall as another of Travis’s victims. Or maybe there was something deeper, something less noble than caring for the welfare of a troubled boy. A kind of desire to salt the wound of their past.

  In high school, Henry had loved Maggie Monroe. He loved her like an ache, a terrible pain in an organ he couldn’t place or name. An illness for which there was no cure. She hadn’t loved him, of course. But she was the reason, in his junior year, that he bulked up, got contacts, convinced his mother to take him shopping for some less dorky clothes. She was the reason he’d beaten Travis in front of the entire school, in response to the most minor of assaults. As they’d passed each other on the bleachers, Travis had growled low and mean, “Fucking faggot.” It was just loud enough for the other guys in Travis’s group to hear and start to laugh.

  There was no flash of rage; he was not overcome by emotion. He just turned quickly and put a hand on Travis’s shoulder, spun him around.

  “Say it again,” said Henry.

  Surprise widened Travis’s eyes for a second, but then he smiled. “What? Are you deaf, too? Fucking faggot.”

  While Travis’s crew was still laughing, Henry brought his fist out so fast and so hard that Travis fell back to the ground with the impact as it connected with his jaw. Henry thought it would be loud, like in the movies, his fist falling with a satisfying smack. But no, flesh on flesh was a soft sound. His own hand hurt so badly that he pulled it back to his chest, surprised at the heat rocketing up his arm.

  He almost apologized, so chastened was he by the pain. But then there was something about Travis down, his hands up, his friends standing slack-jawed with shock, there was something about that momentary hush when everyone around them stopped what they were doing to look on, that caused Henry to drop to his knees, straddle Travis, and just start punching-face again, abdomen, ribs-until someone pulled him away, still swinging. He hadn’t lost himself to anger; he was aware. He didn’t feel good or triumphant. In fact, the physical effort, the pumping adrenaline, made him nauseated. Then he heard a girl weeping. “Stop it. Stop it. Please. Stop.”

  But it wasn’t a girl. It was Travis. He didn’t feel good, then, either. He looked down to see the other boy crying, lying on his side, curled into a fetal position. He felt relief only, mingled with something dark, a knowledge that he’d let the likes of Travis Crosby bring him low. He, a straight-A student with a perfect attendance record, was suspended.

  “I’m surprised at you, Henry,” said Mrs. Monroe, Maggie’s mother and the school principal. “You’re bigger than that. The smarter among us must use our intellects to resolve conflict. We can’t let the Travis Crosbys of the world drive us to violence.”

  A month before, he’d have been crushed to earn her disapproval, anyone’s disapproval. On that day in her overwarm office, Henry found he just didn’t care. He remembered all the details-a pretty picture of Maggie as a little girl, the smell of coffee brewing somewhere, his student record open on her desk, a pencil holder shaped like an elephant, flecks of dust floating in the bright sunlight. But what he remembered most was the calm he felt. This is what it feels like to do the right thing that others will think is wrong. This is what it feels like to stand up and fight back.

  “Sometimes the Travis Crosbys of the world don’t understand anything else, Mrs. Monroe.” Back talk! He’d been taught better. He thought he’d get one of the legendary Monroe tongue-lashings. But when he looked up at her, she just frowned and shook her head. She agreed with him; he saw it in the pale
blue eyes behind her thick lenses.

  “Suspension, Mr. Ivy, though it does pain me. One week.”

  He accepted his punishment and happily spent the week eating junk food and watching television, while his mother fretted about his “permanent record.”

  “What will the college people say?”

  His father, a research scientist who barely visited the real world, so lost was he in his own gray matter, surprised Henry by saying, “I have confidence that you did what you had to do, Son.”

  “You do?”

  “Sometimes the bullies of the world need a little humbling,” he said, echoing Henry’s own feelings. His dad was a good man, a bit absent-minded but always there when he was needed.

  In Marshall Crosby, Henry saw himself but without the benefit of loving parents. Someone smart but lacking a sense of worth, abandoned by his mother, abused by his father. Someone being victimized by Travis Crosby. He’d wanted to give Marshall a break no one else had seemed willing to give.

  As he got out of the car and crossed the street, he thought that Maggie was probably right. It wasn’t a good idea to visit the Crosby home, a run-down two-story in The Acres. The white paint, graying and chipped, some of the black shutters askew on their hinges-the whole place had an aura of neglect. The lawn was patchy, overgrown in some places, dead in others. The garage door stood open; it was so filled with old junk that there was no room for a vehicle. The old Chevelle that he’d seen Marshall driving around in sat in the driveway, its engine clinking as if it had recently been running. He stepped on the gray porch and felt the wood creak beneath his weight.