The Truth About Fragile Things

 

 

My name is Megan Riddick.

I am a junior in high school.

I killed a man when I was two years old.

It all started with a stuffed monkey and a butterfly.

I don’t want to tell this story.

M
ost days
I take my lunch down to Mrs. Schatz’s classroom and eat with her while we discuss her college theater days or my family or other teachers in the school. I’ve been doing it for over a year. I’ve never belonged in a cafeteria. Not because I don’t have anyone to sit by or I don’t know how to make conversation. I don’t belong in the cafeteria because it makes me tired.

There are only two acceptable facial expressions at a lunch table: smiling or sarcastically smirking. That’s probably oversimplifying because there are always a few criers reeling from break-ups or bad grades. But even if you add them as their own category that only leaves smiling, sarcasm, and crying. I really don’t do any of those well. At least, not without a script.

Last year, when Mrs. Schatz was giving me extra help on Steel Magnolias, we started going over my scenes together in her room at lunchtime. And then never stopped. I think she likes to avoid the teachers’ lounge as much as I like to avoid the lunchroom. But she leaves for a week every year to go to a drama convention where she hears about new scripts and plays and stage equipment and that’s why I was sitting at a lunch table with Phillip in the middle of September. I couldn’t even escape to the courtyard like I planned because a heavy rain drenched the school, pounding on the skylights above the lunch tables and making it more impossible than usual to hear anything anyone said. I used that as my excuse to just nod and stare at my food.

Phillip pushed his tray toward me and nearly yelled, “Aren’t you hungry?”

I raised my eyebrows at the stack of hamburgers on his tray. “Are you really going to eat all of those?” I asked.

“Are you really going to eat
that
?” he countered, looking at my bowl of salad. Water from the iceberg lettuce had pooled at the bottom and mixed with my ranch dressing. I sighed and pushed it away. “No.”

“Good. Then you have time to help me.” He reached into his bag. “Walker gave us theorems and I still have three left. I’ll give you a hamburger.”

“I’m not doing your homework,” I told him. I resisted looking down at the paper, but there was nowhere else to look. “Your handwriting is embarrassing.” The page was covered in scrawled numbers that looked like someone wrote them while closing his eyes. During a spasm. In the middle of an earthquake.

“I won’t get credit if I don’t have it done,” he whined. He changed his expression, running his gaze across my face and took some of my dark hair between his fingers, caressing it. “I can always count on you.”

“Phillip, when has your sex appeal ever worked on me? Ever?” I took my hair back and bravely prodded my salad. “You’re an imbecile.”