The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

“Oh.” I was caught off guard. It was too late to say What notebook? because he must have seen it when I took the sweatshirt out of my backpack. “It’s just for things I’m thinking about.”

  “Like a diary, you mean?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What did you write in it today?”

  I thought back to all the things I’d written about being kidnapped on I-80 and killed in some horrible way and left to rot in the Wyoming wilderness. And then before Sam had picked me up at the motel, I’d added all the ways our evening could go wrong or he could turn out to be psychotic. “Just...things.”

  “Could you read something to me?”

  I was glad it was dark so he couldn’t see my face. I remembered reading somewhere the writer’s prayer: If I should die before I wake, please throw my journal in the lake. “It’s not really happy stuff,” I confessed to him finally. “I mean, I write about things that are worrying me. You know, things that can go wrong.”

  “That’s cool,” he said. “I get it. I totally get it. That’s what I do with my art. I mean, the world has enough pictures of rainbows and kittens, you know?”

  I did know. I knew exactly. But still, sometimes I wished all the other stuff could go away, so there would be no need for anything except rainbows and kittens.

  He continued, “I mean, when I’m getting an idea for a new design, I’m thinking of things that already exist but shouldn’t necessarily exist. The things our world doesn’t think about, because we’re too busy thinking about everything else.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Makes sense.” I remembered the tiny, horrific detail of his snow globes, the figures fallen on the ground—the forced famine in Ukraine.

  “The truth is,” he said, “the world is full of horrible things. I mean, everywhere you look, it’s horrible. The worst things you can imagine are happening somewhere, right now.”

  “I know,” I said sincerely, propping myself up on my elbows. Even when I started to think, Everything’s going to be okay now, I would see something on the news, about an earthquake that had buried a village or a school shooting or a homeless person whose body had been discovered beneath a bridge, and I would realize there were still horrible things I hadn’t even bothered to consider.

  “You want to know my worst horrible thing?”

  I shifted nervously. “Um...okay.” This didn’t seem like the typical information that was shared on a first date—not that there was anything typical about Sam Ellis, or about me, either.

  He settled in a little closer to me, so that our shoulders and our arms were touching, and he said, “This is the story of my real dad.”

  “Not the guy I met earlier?”

  “Right. Jerrod Ellis is not my real dad, biologically speaking. He happens to be my stepfather, but in every way that counts, he’s my real father,” Sam explained patiently. “My real dad was this pawnbroker...”

  He was right: it was the worst horrible thing. His real dad had suffered from mental illness when Sam and his brother were younger, and one day before opening the store, he’d taken everything that was breakable out of the display cases, and he’d smashed the items against the wall in the back of the store. Sam didn’t know why he’d done it, exactly, but he remembered being there that day, trying to calm his brother and dodge flying shards of glass and pottery and even jewelry. And then his father had picked up a sharp chunk of broken metal and carved a huge gash down his own face. Sam had grabbed his brother, and they’d waited in a locked office for the police to come. All the while, his dad had been hammering at the office door with his fists, and Sam had been so scared that he’d wet himself while he was waiting.

  “When I think about it now, that was the worst part, that I stunk like piss when the police finally got to us.” He said this calmly, as if it had been so long ago that it wasn’t a part of him anymore. As if it were a small thing that could be put in a box, and the box could be packed away, and it never had to be opened again.

  In the quiet after he finished, I leaned my head against his shoulder. “That is a really awful thing.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What happened to your father?”

  “He killed himself. Hung himself by his sheets in the hospital.”

  “Oh, my God.” I swiveled around to look at him, amazed by the truly awful things a person could carry around inside himself and still go on living and breathing—and more than that, creating things and appreciating the simple beauty of a night sky.

  “It’s better now, though,” Sam said. “If that hadn’t happened, my mom never would have met my stepdad. You see?”

  “I guess.” Sam’s story made at least three-quarters of the things I’d written in my Fear Journal seem petty—all the more so because most of them were invented, could-happen things, and Sam’s terrible thing had actually happened.

  “Is it weird that I told you that?” His voice was close to my ear. “Sometimes, I just feel like I need to put the worst thing out there, to get it all out in the open.”

  “No, I understand.” I meant it. In a way, that’s what my Fear Journal was all about. If I wrote it down, it wasn’t some mysterious, nebulous concern floating around in the universe, but something I could own, something I could record and then release from my mind.

  “I have a worst thing, too,” I whispered, surprising myself. If Dad or Mom had guessed, they would have expected me to say that the most awful thing that happened to me was Daniel dying. Of course, that was a horrible thing, and maybe even the actual worst thing, but instead, I took a deep breath and told Sam Ellis about something that I had done. Even though there were only a few insects around to hear, I told him the entire story, beginning to end, in a whisper.

  Just a few days before I started high school, there was a party at the home of this junior boy named Shawn, whose parents were in Hawaii. A couple of other incoming freshmen were invited, too, including my friend Kendra, one of the few girls from my middle school who was going on to Rio with me. Although we had begun to drift apart after Daniel had died, we still saw each other every day, saved each other seats at lunch and partnered up on group projects. She knew everything that had happened with Daniel, and about some of the weirdness between my parents—although Mom’s leaving was so fresh, I hadn’t yet told Kendra it was a permanent thing. I’d made it seem like no big deal, as though Mom took trips by herself all the time and Dad and I were completely used to fending for ourselves.

  The night of the party, I told Dad I would be at Kendra’s house, and Kendra told her parents she would be at mine, and as far as I knew, no parent was ever the wiser. We’d dressed up too fancy, the way freshman girls did at parties: black skirts made shorter by rolling over the waistbands, heels higher than we could comfortably walk in, so much perfume that we could smell each other even as we walked through the streets from Kendra’s house. We giggled, drunk on our newfound freedom. My laughter had been forced at first, like a parody of what real laughter should sound like. I was rusty, not having laughed in so long. As we walked, though, I was determined to put it all behind me. Daniel, the dead brother. Mom, the absent parent. Dad, the parent who was always there, although he seemed miles away, too. I was just going to be a regular girl, fun and silly and sociable. Before we went inside, Kendra snapped a photo of us with her phone.

  Shawn’s house turned out to be one of those cookie-cutter mini-mansions plopped down next to a few dozen other mini-mansions on what used to be an almond ranch. It was the kind of house Mom would have hated. Everything was tastefully neutral, beige on blah. The house was packed, mostly with upperclassmen I didn’t know. Kendra recognized a group of girls in the kitchen, standing around the island with red plastic cups in their hands. “They’re all in the leadership class,” Kendra said, and I saw in them the same kind of crazy confidence Daniel had always had, a buoyancy that kept them floating above the rest of us
mere mortals.

  “Let’s see what’s going on outside,” I murmured to Kendra. Through the window I could see boys in trunks cannonballing into a pool. It was one of those fancy pools with a disappearing edge, so that it looked like all the water was going to spill right out and cascade down in a waterfall on the other side.

  But Kendra shot me a look and dove right into the conversation. She’d been elected incoming freshman class secretary at the end of eighth grade, and I realized that these were her people, and I was just someone she knew, a friend from her past who would be shucked off like a pair of woolly boots at the beginning of spring. I tried not to be hurt, but as a few more girls crowded in, I found myself edged out of the circle, standing behind Kendra like a toddler afraid to leave her mother’s side. One of the girls was retelling a story loudly, the sort of story that was only funny if you were an insider. Kendra laughed too enthusiastically, as if she had never heard anything so funny. She might as well have announced that she was available as a loyal, adoring sidekick.

  Not like me—the no-fun friend.

  Suddenly, one of the seniors announced that she had gotten a tattoo for her birthday, and the entire group charged from the kitchen en masse, through the dining room and up the back staircase. I followed a few feet behind, taking the steps slowly in my wobbly heels. I was sick of them already, but most of all I was sick of myself, for being the way I was. It could not possibly be normal that I was an almost-fourteen-year-old girl who wanted nothing more than to go home, throw on a three-sizes-too-big T-shirt and watch a classic movie with my dad, something like Platoon or Escape from Alcatraz, for the twentieth time.

  At the top of the stairs, the girls pushed into a bedroom, locking the door behind them. It was a private tattoo-viewing party, and I had fallen too far behind or else been deliberately excluded. It didn’t really matter—I would have felt shitty either way. Kendra was on the inside, and I was out in the hall, holding a cup of warm beer that I had no intention of drinking. I wanted to head right back down the stairs and walk home, although I knew I’d have to stop somewhere to change into the shorts and T-shirt in my backpack.

  “I almost did it, too,” I told Sam, still whispering, as if whispering could make it less real and less horrible. “I was this close to walking away.”

  “But you didn’t,” Sam said, squeezing my hand.

  But I didn’t.

  I was just standing there in the middle of a hallway, looking at a series of framed studio portraits of Shawn’s family, when someone stumbled up the stairs, tripped over the top step and fell down at my feet, cursing. He was older; I didn’t know his name. I set my cup down on the ledge of one of the portraits, and with an entire photogenic family of strangers staring at us, I let him plant a big, beery kiss on my mouth.

  I can’t say it was pleasant—his tongue was a little too meaty and rough—but it wasn’t completely unpleasant, either. It was my first real, non-parent and non-relative kiss, although he was probably too drunk to notice my inexperience. The best part of it was that I instantly felt better for not being included in the tattoo-viewing that was happening behind the locked door down the hall. I don’t need to be with those stupid girls, I told myself, and I kissed him harder.

  Here’s how I envisioned having sex would be: on a blanket in a field of wildflowers, under a blue sky. Or in a big, beautiful bed with crisp white sheets, with candlelight and roses and music. I didn’t have a clear vision of him, exactly—only that he was someone handsome, someone funny, someone who loved me. Also, I pictured myself older, with a body that didn’t resemble a twelve-year-old boy’s no matter how much I dressed it up—at a distant point in my life where I appreciated things like manicured fingernails and waxed eyebrows.

  But I guess no one thinks: I’m going to have sex on a bathroom floor with someone I met three minutes before, with one of my knees knocking against the vanity and my head butted up against the toilet. No one envisions: I’ll still be mostly clothed, with my short skirt pushed up around my stomach and my completely uncool underwear pushed down, hanging off one ankle. No one wishes for the stab of pain, for the smear of blood. Maybe the worst of it was that he was drunk and wouldn’t remember a bit of it, and I was sober and would remember every second. Or maybe the worst of it was that when he’d said, “Wanna do it? Wanna go somewhere private?” in my ear, it hadn’t taken me long to consider. Why not? My life absolutely sucked in every way. Mom wasn’t around to find out, and Dad wouldn’t notice, anyway. At least for a few minutes, I could feel special.

  Kendra found out what happened—one of the other girls had seen me coming out of the bathroom after him, my skirt twisted—and wrote me a long message on Facebook in which she said I was a “slut” and “desperate to be liked” and even “a bad influence” and not the kind of person she wanted to be associated with. And then she unfriended me—there and in real life. When we started school, she completely avoided me. In the one class we had together, Honors English, she never even looked in my direction. She got her wish and became one of those cool leadership girls, and her life was all Homecoming and rallies and making posters after school and delivering the daily announcements—a fear that popped up regularly in my journal.

  But I couldn’t blame Kendra, not at all. I agreed with everything she said; I was disgusting. When I remembered that night, and how I’d gone from standing in the hallway one minute to lying down next to a bathroom vanity the next, it was like it had happened to someone who wasn’t even me but some weak, stupid girl who didn’t have any self-respect or dignity or hope for whatever might come next in her life.

  At my annual checkup about a month after the party, while Dad waited in the lobby, I received a pelvic exam, a blood test and a stern lecture. My primary care doctor, who was sworn to the silence of her profession, was stiff-lipped when she pushed a sample pack of birth control pills into my hand. I hid them in my backpack and later threw the pack into the trash can of a neighbor down the block. The sex certainly hadn’t been spectacular; it wasn’t like I was planning to do it again.

  That year, I started hanging out with the Visigoths, the kids who wore all black and regularly professed that they didn’t care about anything—which was perfect for me. I did my work and got As and Bs in everything except P.E., but I basically stopped participating. I became the kid teachers hate, the one who has the answers but refuses to raise her hand or join a group or speak at all, unless absolutely necessary. I saved all my talk for home, where I could impress Dad with my opinions about Ho Hos over Ding Dongs because of the creme-to-cake ratio; I could explain perfectly to Dad why I preferred The Grapes of Wrath to any other Steinbeck; I could play Mom and Dad’s old ’80s version of Trivial Pursuit and rattle off things about Boris Becker or Margaret Thatcher or apartheid—things that none of my fellow students at Rio knew, I was fairly certain.

  Maybe the worst part about what I’d done at that party—the absolute worst in an episode of worsts—was that I’d kept it all inside me. “You’re the first person I’ve told,” I said to Sam, who was still holding my hand. I had the feeling I could have told him I was secretly an ax murderer and he would have withheld all judgment. Even if I lived to be a hundred years old—which would make Dad a very unlikely one-hundred thirty-three—I would never breathe a bit of it to him. I probably couldn’t conceive of all the ways he would be hurt, but for starters there was the fact that I had lied to him. Plus, he would have felt responsible for what had happened, the way he somehow did for Daniel’s death—as if he could have protected either of us from all the dangers of the world. In a way, I was protecting Dad, because he would have killed Mike Russi if he knew—maybe even literally. That was his name, Mike—which I only learned later, when I saw him at school. He was a senior who played baseball and didn’t seem particularly intelligent. It was a ridiculous relief that he never recognized me—I was just one girl, one party, one time.

  And of course, I hadn
’t told Mom, either. The pain of her leaving was still too fresh, and she would have blamed herself for not being there for me, and felt justified in believing that Dad was a bad parent, and that I was going to grow up all kinds of wrong for being in Sacramento with him instead of in Omaha with her. She might have flown back to Sacramento, packed my bags and forced me, kicking and screaming and hyperventilating, onto a plane. It would have been the lecture from my doctor times a thousand, plus the broken trust, the sad-eyed looks, the awkward conversations. Besides, even if I could have trusted her to respond in a rational way, how could such a thing be revealed over the phone? How would that conversation go, exactly? “Mom, I had sex at a party”? Or maybe I’d open with, “I thought you should know that I lost my virginity”?

  The really crazy thing was that I told this all to Sam Ellis, but somehow I’d known he would understand. Maybe it was because he was able to take major tragedies and reduce them to a small scale, or maybe it was the whole under-the-stars thing: even the biggest, stupidest things I had done felt pretty insignificant with the universe bearing down on us.

  And Sam didn’t judge. After a while, he sat up and reached into the cooler, handing me a bologna sandwich in a Ziploc bag. I ate it, even though I don’t think I’d had a bologna sandwich since I was a kid, and the ingredients of bologna, not to mention the bologna-making process, were enough to give even a very rational person pause. Then he opened a lukewarm two-liter of Coke and we passed the bottle back and forth between us, taking swigs.

  When we’d finished the sandwiches, Sam and I lay down, side by side, not saying a thing. I wrapped one of the extra blankets around us, and after a while, Sam reached over into the space between us, curling one of his pinky fingers around my own.

  It was the best night ever.

  curtis

  I nudged Olivia awake at nine o’clock.

  “It is not nine o’clock,” she answered from beneath the covers.