Glass Girl (A Young Adult Novel) (7 page)

I slid down to the floor. The air around me felt wrong and, the more of it I breathed, the lighter my body felt. My arms and legs tingled and I could swear I levitated just off the sticky floor. I sent a text to my dad.

I won’t be coming back to this school. I can sign up for online classes tonight.

He responded quickly, characteristically unruffled.

We’ll talk about it tonight. Love you.

I’m not sure how long I stayed in the same position—long enough for my legs to go numb. I needed to get to the bookstore, but I couldn’t leave until I knew the hallway was empty. Fifteen or twenty lockers slammed closed and a dozen pairs of shoes scuffled past the bathroom door before things got quiet.

Still staring at the same cracked floor tile, I breathed deeply and began counting to a hundred one more time. Someone in boots walked slowly down the hall. My eyes shifted to the wall across from me as I floated back to awareness.

“Meg,” a low voice said. “Are you in there?”

“Yes,” I said.

“They’re gone. I just wanted to let you know that. I made sure Thanet got to the bookstore.”

The boots moved closer to the bathroom door, creating a play of darkness and light on the floor around me. He bumped the door with a thud that sounded a lot like a forehead dropping against the wood. And then Henry’s voice again—even softer this time. “I’m sorry you saw that. Thanet doesn’t know you were there and I didn’t tell him. That helps some, right?”

I turned my ear toward the door because I heard him breathing. When you’re alone and afraid, the simple sound of the steady in and out of air being drawn by another person is good medicine.

“They’re no good,” he said, answering my unspoken questions. “When they’re making fun of Thanet they feel better about their own inadequacies.” He paused, a sliding of fabric sounded against the door. Maybe he’d turned and was leaning back. “I know that upset you a lot, being new here and knowing Thanet and all. Thank you for liking him that much. You’re nice, Meg. You’re really kind.”

Hearing my brother’s words coming out of Henry, this stranger in a strange town, made me feel wild with all the loss—wild and wired with no place to put those feelings. I stood up and leaned over a sink, splashing water on my face. When I opened the door, Henry leaned back giving me plenty of room.

I offered him the only thing I had to give—a smile.

“You okay?” he said, using my family’s old check-in greeting. He’d put on a dusty baseball cap since I last saw him. Not fair. Too cute.

“I’m okay.” I walked next to him toward the exit. Neither of us talked until he took a quick step ahead to open the door for me.

“Here you go,” he said.

“Thank you.” In the nearly empty lot, his black truck sat next to my Jeep.

“Yeah,” he said. “I knew you were here because of the Pennsylvania tags.”

His hands were in his pockets and his shoulders were tense. I tried to look relaxed so that he could relax.

“Is Thanet okay?”

“He’s put up with worse.” He gave me that look boys give when they want to say more but know it wouldn’t be polite. I’d grown up around that look and I missed it.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s so wrong. Were some of them football players?”

Henry stopped walking and focused on the stadium, or maybe the foothills behind it. Wherever his gaze landed, this was a lingering, thoughtful look. “You know he works with the team?” He glanced back to see my nod. “I like football. I’ve got nothing against football players…just these particular ones, I guess. They treat him like a joke and I wish he’d quit.”

“He should quit. Definitely.” I had no right to offer an opinion yet. Thanet wasn’t mine in that way. I just wanted to agree with everything coming out of Henry’s mouth.

“So, other than the end of it, how was your first day?” He searched my face for the truth and I noticed that his eyes were really unusual—light brown with flecks of a metallic color that caught the light. They were liquid bronze—I’ve seen my mom paint with it.

“Actually, it wasn’t bad—could’ve been much, much worse.”

“Don’t give up on us,” he said. “Will we see you tomorrow?”

“I’ll see you in English.” Surprised at my own certainty, I smiled. See? Mercurial. I’d be back after all, if only to see what this adorable but unavailable boy would say next.

“Well, we’re burning daylight. I’ll let you get to work. Annie’s needed your help for a while.” He glanced at the sky and took in the clouds for a long moment. “I’ve got to patch a barn roof before it rains.”

“Bye, Henry,” I said quietly, trying to keep my voice level.

“See you, Meg.” He climbed into his truck and backed out. The truck was muddy and properly beaten up for a work truck. The custom grill on the front had a “W” in the middle of it, and his tag said “Farm Truck.” He looked like a truck commercial.

***

Annie waited patiently for me to return to earth. I’d been at work a good hour before I started making sense. Stealing glances at Thanet, I noticed that he was subdued, too, but still respectful to his mom, answering, “Yes, ma’am,” when she asked him to do something. Most kids grow sullen and angry when they’re working through issues, but Thanet mustered up another kind of bullheaded strength. The kind that sees beyond circumstances to what really matters. How could anyone hurt a soul that lovely?

“You had a strange day, I think,” Annie said, leaning over the counter watching me shelve romances. “Your face is flushed.”

I hated that people knew everything I was thinking by the color on my cheeks. It had been that way all my life—I had my mom’s dark hair but my dad’s Irish complexion. My face shouted my secrets.

I tucked my hair behind my ears and pressed a cool palm to my hot cheek. “I had a fine day, actually. Don’t mind me.” I fanned myself with the paperback in one hand.

“Thanet said you met Henry Whitmire.” She walked over, slid the book out of my hand, and looked at the cover—a steamy one with some Fabio-type guy in a cowboy hat leaning over a blonde on the verge of a wardrobe mishap. “Henry makes all the girls blush.”

“Good grief, Mom, leave her alone,” Thanet called from the back. “If you ignore her, she’ll go away, Meg.”

Annie giggled and picked through a stack of books that had just arrived. “What happened to that girl Henry was seeing?” She turned toward Thanet, waiting for an answer.

Thanet rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Brooke,” he said. “She lives in Oklahoma, but she comes to Chapin in the summers to help on her grandparents’ ranch.”

“Tennyson says they’re practically married,” I said.

Thanet stopped dusting a bookshelf and looked at me curiously. “Is that really what she said?”

“Well…it had that flavor,” I said.

He snorted. “Tennyson’s had a crush on Henry all her life. It’s one-sided. I guess it smarts a little less when she tells herself he’s with someone else.”

“Who wants the new Murakami?” Annie said, pushing the conversation in a safer direction.

Thanet and I both raised our hands. He smiled and said, “Ladies first.”

At six o’clock, Annie locked the door and we said goodbye. When I got to my Jeep, I found my dad there, leaning against the door.

“So?” he said, his hands raised like he was ready to conduct a choir or perform a big magic trick. This was his thing, though. His way of opening a conversation and then waiting, patiently, for the women in his life to fill in the blanks. To surprise him. Or to make him laugh. Or to give him instructions. He could take it all. Just don’t make him wait forever.

I was so glad to see him and to watch him return to one of his best go-to gestures, that I gave him a long hug.

He took my shoulders and held me away so he could see my face. “Am I hugging a high school dropout?”

“Not today,” I said. “Honestly, ninety-five percent of the day was fine. But the last five percent sucked enough to make me consider homeschooling.”

His shoulders dropped on a released breath. “Let’s talk about the five percent over dinner.”

He took my keys from me and opened the Jeep, leaning over to raise the lock on the passenger side. “Climb in, babe.”

I threw my backpack into the back and got into the passenger seat.

“Where’s Mom?” I said. “Where’s your truck?”

“She wasn’t feeling well.” He leaned back in the driver’s seat and dropped his hands in his lap. “This might be the beginning of a new slide. I left work early to check on her and then walked over to meet you.”

A storm rolled through the Jeep. Quickly and without warning, we were soaked to the bone with worry and dread. Uncommon anxiety came to us in common hours when other people were doing mundane things like taking out the trash or checking their phones. But there was nothing to be done for this. We couldn’t change who we were or what had happened.

We craved normalcy. Dinner in a restaurant, without Mom, could be normal. By tacit agreement, we spent the evening together discussing everything but her. Dad talked about the learning curve he faced at the hotel and I spoke of one boy with cerebral palsy and another who’d come back for me. I spoke of words that hurt and words that change everything. My dad understood.

Fierce and purposeful avoidance of the issues that kept my mom in bed and stopped her hand from painting had replaced the compulsive fretting that had carried us along for months.

When Dad was in the middle of a description of the hotel’s laundry facility, I interrupted. “Why haven’t you told me today, like you do every day, that Mom’s going to be better soon?”

He looked up then. His gaze locked with mine and held a promise that no matter what he said or didn’t say, he and I would ride this out together. “I haven’t told you that today, Meg, because I don’t know.”

Dear Wyatt—

Did you see what happened in the hall? What should I have done? It was “Meg, paralyzed by school violence, take two.” I’m so sorry, Wyatt.

There’s a boy—Henry. He reminds me of you. All velvet and steel. Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne. Remember that part in
The Quiet Man
when Thornton refuses to fight over money and he’s got all this strength and resolve and passion simmering under the surface? That’s Henry.

Love,

Meg

R
outine became my friend. We grew quite attached.

Every morning, I’d meet up with Tennyson, Sara, and Taylor, in the parking lot. The four of us shared a nearly identical schedule and they’d adopted me as their plus one. Lunch was covered, too, with the promise of a seat at a table that included Henry and Thanet. I had to work extra hard at keeping my fascination with Henry private, especially at lunch.

Mostly I stayed quiet and listened. The nice thing about these friends was that they were smart enough to know my reticence had purpose. They quickly dropped the questions about why I had no social media accounts. For a while, they told people I was in witness protection. They stopped that when they realized it could actually be true. For all they knew, I was Gianna Delvecchio from the Lower East Side with a dad who knew too much.

I still believed it would be best for everyone if I didn’t unpack my bloody baggage. Once they knew about Wyatt, things would be too awkward. I needed friends, not more people who felt sorry for me.

For more reasons than I was willing to admit, English became the best part of my day. Mr. Landmann was great entertainment. He loved to throw weird ideas out there and then let us figure out if he was serious or not. He ended every class by saying, “Say smart things and don’t make each others’ lives hell
.
”

I’d figured out by the second day of school that Henry was Mr. Landmann’s favorite. He answered the hard questions in class because he seemed to have worked through the hormone fog that sucked the brain right out of most guys. A lot about him didn’t fit in a high school classroom. I caught him staring at me sometimes and, even when I glanced up and met his eyes, he didn’t look away. It was very hard to breathe when he did that. And also…there was Brooke in Oklahoma to consider.

But something kept me turning toward him anyway. I liked to watch him when he talked. He smiled with one side of his mouth no matter what he was talking about, not in an arrogant way, but in a totally self-effacing way. I found myself inching closer to him in class or in the hall.

Tennyson noticed. She caught me looking a little too long once and she said, “
Mm-hm
. Another one bites the dust.”

One day at lunch, two of the missing links from the incident on the first day of school—Grayson and Shawn—came over and slapped Henry on the back. My stomach lurched just knowing they were that close to me.

“Hey, Hen,” Grayson said, with a wicked smile. “What do you hear from Brooke?”

Henry glanced up at him with a look that said he could tear Grayson apart in ten seconds if he kept up this line of questioning, even though Grayson was as tall as Henry and fifty pounds heavier. Grayson had that thick-necked look of a linebacker and shaggy blond hair hanging in his eyes and down on his collar. “Sloppy boys turn into sloppier men,” my mom used to say when Wyatt went too long between haircuts.

Grayson kept it up. “We’ve got a bet going about how well you got to know her this summer. So far, nobody’s bet against you, dude.”

Grayson’s eyes flickered over to Tennyson and me. Other guys gathered around and they were all snickering like ten-year-olds who’d found their dad’s
Playboy
under the bed.

“Didn’t your mother teach you manners, Grayson?” Henry said, quietly. Then he met Grayson’s stare and continued. “We’re having lunch here. And it’s called discretion, man. You should look it up; it might help you convince a nice girl to go out with you.”

These guys, who didn’t have ten brain cells between them, seemed to read something lewd from Henry’s answer. “I think that tells us what we wanted to know, Whitmire,” Grayson said with a grin.

Henry turned back to his food, his hands wrapped around the bench. Tennyson and I glanced at each other with eyebrows raised. “What was that?” I mouthed to Tennyson. She shrugged and shook her head. Whatever had just happened had a tragic effect on Henry’s mood.