The Truth About Fragile Things (24 page)

It was Phillip who saved me, who always managed to save me. “That’s my wife you’re talking about.” He said it just like his character in the play and I suddenly longed for school, for the stage, for the place so safe I could hide in the middle of a spotlight.

“Were you kidding about the bears?” I asked, grateful for any distraction.

“Little black ones. And not many. You’re fine.” Phillip tore open the bag of marshmallows and the smell made me miss Lauren. I held a soft one up to my face, felt the silky powder of it on my cheek.

“You’re supposed to eat it, not make out with it,” Phillip instructed me, his raised eyebrows lost under his hair.

“I miss Lauren.” I pushed it onto the end of a stick and held it out to the flames.

Charlotte’s marshmallows kept catching on fire and she ate them black. Phillip and I kept up a silent contest to toast ours the most even, golden brown. I usually won. I ate too many but the evening was long and empty and the dark pushed us close to the fire. After an hour I made the trip to the restrooms with Charlotte to clean up for the night. In the empty bathroom it was intimate and strange, hearing one another brush and spit, wash and pee, rustle into pajama pants in the privacy of the stalls. There were things to say, but I was waiting for the numb of midnight, the weariness that hides embarrassment, the late hours that loosen tongues. As we made our way by flashlight back to Phillip I refined a question, polished it, practiced it until I could recite it without thinking.

I held onto it until we were all sitting down, until my eyes were trained on the flames before I asked, “What is it you wish I’d say?” I felt Charlotte’s eyes slide over my shoulder, left a trail of shivers under my sweatshirt like ripples in a pool.

She thought it over before she said, “I want to know what you think of me.”

Phillip smiled in a way not to be trusted. “Ditto,” he agreed.

There is a nakedness to questions. Something like strip poker. Every answer you give unmasks a part of you and you never get it back. I glanced away, searching for a safe reply.

“No good,” Phillip blurted. “Megan, I can actually see you thinking. It’s like a printout on your head that says, ‘processing … processing…” His finger skimmed my forehead. “You have to answer without editing.”

“Yeah, I want to know what you really think of me,” Charlotte insisted.

“I think you are very direct.” My voice was clinical, my eyebrows furrowed as I pictured Charlotte in my mind’s eye instead of looking at the girl sitting beside me. Charlotte sighed, but I kept groping my way to the answer. “You’re pretty. Cynical and sarcastic and a little bitter and very brave. I think you are a natural on the stage. I think you like to shock people. I don’t always trust you. You make me nervous because you’re so different from me.” I bit my lip, chewed on a soft piece of it, wondering if that would satisfy her.

“I make you nervous?” Charlotte’s voice had the high ring of accomplishment.

“Who cares? My turn,” Phillip chirped. “What do you think of me, Megaton?”

“That’s a stupid question. Don’t you know after six years?”

“Do you know after six years?” Phil countered.

That is when I discovered campfires have the same side effect as spotlights. They distort people. Or maybe, if you’re an idealist, you’d say they reveal the hidden person. But either way they make people appear new and shiny, unexpected and unfamiliar. The shadows sharpened Phil’s lean face, clustered beneath his thick hair, made his lashes look even longer. For a fleeting moment I tried to imagine what he saw when he looked at me but I decided it was just a ponytail, a lip that curved too high in the middle, a girl too scared to admit the truth.

“You’re pretty, too, darling,” I said with a flip of my hand. “You sing like an angel, flirt like the devil, and drive me crazy. I hate your cartoon voices more than you will ever know.” The burning heat of the fire burrowed into my skin, ran down my cheeks until I could not distinguish the embarrassed warmth inside me from heat outside. “I trust you more than anyone outside my family. Except for when I know you will humiliate me. And I also know that we make perfect friends and would be a horrible, disastrous couple.”

“I used to think you should kiss me just to test the theory,” he admitted cheerfully.

“Used to?” Charlotte watched the interaction with fascination.

“Yes, used to. Then I figured out I actually wanted was to see the look on your face when I kissed you. That’s all.” He smiled, giddy that he could make me curious. People are so vulnerable when they are curious.

I caved and asked. “When did you come to that inspired conclusion?”

“Recently,” is as specific as he would get. “I wanted to be the one to get to you because you’ve never fallen for anyone. But I realized once I’d got you I’d have no idea what to do with you. Half the time I talk
at
you because you don’t talk back. Not really.”

“What does that mean?” My words hesitated in confusion.

“If I open up ninety percent, you open up thirty percent. It’s never even, Megan.”

I looked down at the scorched rocks at my feet while I tried to understand the tone of his words. Guilt seared across my stomach. “That makes me sound mean,” I whispered.

“Not mean. You’ve never been mean to anyone. You’re just…” Phillip looked up to Charlotte for help and I swallowed back the bile of pride seeing him consult her like she was an expert on all things Megan after knowing me for two months.

“Closed,” she finished.

Phillip snapped his finger. “Yes! You are just closed.”

“How much do I open up?” Charlotte asked Phillip with an eager smile, as if they were playing ‘fool the guesser.’

“If I give ninety, you give…” Phillip squinted, assessing. “Ninety.”

“Really?” There was a flushed pride to her face.

 Ninety is an A. Ninety is respectable. Megan only gives thirty. Megan flunks. My breath broke over my teeth, stumbled over my lips. Their playful voices tumbled back and forth over the fire, over the night, over me. I walked to my hammock and felt the ropes press into my back as I curled up. I had one wish at the moment. I wished I couldn’t feel. I wished I was as closed as they said.

“Megan, don’t be mad,” Phillip called after a minute.

“How would you tell?” Charlotte asked. “She can’t get quieter.”

I scraped my front teeth together, bit back my sharp reply.

“She gets snappy,” Phillip said, walking over to me. He sat down beside me, tilting the hammock dangerously toward the ground. I tried to push him away but he had size and muscle and stubbornness I couldn’t match. “Tell me you love me no matter how annoying I get.” His arm curled around my head and I could smell the day on him—sweat and dirt and fire and the strong, indescribable scent of wind and sun.

“I actually can’t stand you right now and was just thinking how I would rather share a hammock with your understudy than you.”

“She always knows how to hurt me,” he told Charlotte. “Parker has acne that makes smallpox look mild and would be a worse womanizer than me if anyone let him.”

“He has like two pimples,” Charlotte corrected him. “And no one is a worse womanizer than you.”

“Are we playing truth or dare? Do you want me to blow your mind and tell you how wrong you are?” He shifted and the hammock swung wildly.

“If we are playing truth or dare, play it from your own hammock. I would like the first time I snuggle up with a boy in the woods to mean something.”

Phillip sighed and got up, purposefully almost tipping me into the dirt. “You didn’t say you love me yet. I will go to my hammock if you say you love me.”

I growled quietly, trying to flex my mouth to let the words out. They clawed against my teeth, pried their way back down my throat. I blinked in unison with my breath. Pictured the words on a script. Read them reluctantly. “I love you even when I hate you.”

“Good enough,” he said. I closed my eyes against the simmering anger and listened to Charlotte climb into her hammock. Phillip’s hammock was too far away for conversation so he sat in the dirt between us.

“So blow my mind, big boy,” Charlotte dared him. “What do I not know about you?”

“I’m going to take this deal on faith. If I tell you, you have to tell me something just as unexpected.”

“Deal,” Charlotte agreed.

“And it stays here, on Tom Sauk,” he added, as he batted a moth away from his face.

Charlotte agreed to that one also. He pressed me until I promised, but he already knew that I never get my mind blown and I never gossip, so it was wasted breath.

He paused, then said, “Do one of you want to go first?” I didn’t blame him. Secrets are best kept.

“Just say it,” Charlotte pushed. “We’ll never tell.”

Phillip hummed for a minute, like he was warming up his mouth, preparing his lips to shape difficult words. “I’m not a womanizer. I’ve only kissed one girl more than once. I figure you can kiss as many as you want one time. But if you don’t fall in love with her, you don’t kiss her again.”

“So you fell in love once?” Charlotte asked.

Phillip laughed. “No. I just needed further tests. I couldn’t tell.”

“How many girls have you kissed once?” Charlotte sat up so she could see his face, judge if he told the truth.

“I have no idea. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was fifty.”

“Was one of them Megan?”

I coughed, swung my head around. Before I could emphatically deny it, Phillip answered. “That’s the one that got away. She’s kissed two boys, but neither of them were me.”

“Neither of them were anything,” I said, skimming through the old memories, discarding them in a hidden corner of my brain. “I was just trying to be hormonal and stupid and normal. I was pretending I could be flippant. It didn’t take.”

“Your turn, Charlotte. Blow our minds.” The ropes of Phillip’s hammock squeaked as he spoke. I liked the quiet duet.

“Wait,” I interrupted. I am as slow to ask questions as I am to answer, but I could not see an easier introduction to the one that had been winding its way through my head like a tendril reaching from one thought to the next. “We get to ask the question, right? In truth or dare?” Charlotte gave a nod. “Then I have one.” I paused, lined it up straight and uniform in my mind before I voiced it. “What do you think would be different if your dad didn’t save me that day?”

“Well, you’d be dead. That’s the first one,” she pointed our sarcastically.

“Not different for you. You would never know me. So what would be different for you?”

Charlotte’s mouth paused, barely open, her eyes shifted sideways like she was looking for the answer to a question she must have asked a million times. I followed her gaze, wondering if she always kept her answers somewhere to the left of her, where she was now staring.

“I might have had brothers or sisters,” she whispered. “Wait, can I think about this?”

I told her ‘of course’ and Phillip and I bided our time beneath the black, still leaves. Occasionally a bird swooped through the branches, shaking the quiet of the night. Her answers came slowly, mixed with long pauses, the words sometimes soft, other times so angry they were almost brutal. I collected them like the shooting stars, waiting for each one to fall. Waited in silence.

“He might have gotten a raise and taken us on a trip. I’ve never seen the Rocky Mountains. He might have taken my mom on dates and come home and woken me up just to kiss me. He would have come to my parent teacher nights. And the art fairs. Coached my basketball team or brought home the pizzas for my slumber parties. He would have told me to stay away from boys like Phillip. Mostly, I just imagine sitting next to him and asking him what he was reading. And if it was
Grapes of Wrath
I’dtell him I don’t like it and that would be okay.”

Her tears didn’t make any sound, didn’t choke her words, but I still I heard them. They fell on the inside of me, acid rain, burning through. I felt a hatred building and it was clinging to me, but not
just
to me. Some of it dripped onto the place inside where I stored thoughts of Bryon. I hated him for choosing me over Charlotte.

“I might have been stupid. I might have been so happy I just walked around giddy and stupid. I guess that’s one upside. Losing him made me smarter and stronger because I’m sadder.”

Phillip breathed out and I knew the words hurt him, too. When his grandfather died our freshman year he would not let me refer to it in any way. Not even at the funeral. He talked about a girl he liked from the beginning of the visitation to the end of the burial. Even when I found him crying in the prop closet like it would kill him the next Monday, he wouldn’t let me say the word. Wouldn’t let me say ‘dead.’ I wondered if he would make a joke to change the subject or just tell the truth and beg us to stop talking about death. He surprised me and did neither. He let her keep going. She described what would have been her thirteenth birthday present when he took her to New York to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve.

Charlotte changed her voice, slipped from the revelers in the Time’s Square back to our quiet spot in the woods. “They say that kids with dead parents do this comic book thing. They imagine their parent like a superhero. Like an idealized, perfect person who would never disappoint them. And we’re not supposed to do that because it’s not the truth and they tell us to imagine them making mistakes and letting us down and loving us in spite of…” She didn’t finish her sentence, just suspended it like clothes blowing on a line, rippling in front of us.

“Do you do that?” Phillip asked.

“The thing is I do the opposite.” From the hesitation in her voice I knew Charlotte was taking us somewhere, leading us down the tangled trail of her thoughts. I stared at the branch over my head, locking my eyes on it so I wouldn’t wander too far, wouldn’t get lost.

“You think your dad was awful?” I wrapped my fingers around the webbed rope of the hammock and held on, waiting for the force of her answer.

“No. Other kids love a dead parent because they think they would have been some kind of hero. I hate mine because he was.”

Instead of packed dirt and brown grass two feet below me, I felt myself suspended over an endless chasm, nothing but strings holding me, swinging me above a black hole. I heard Phillip stand up, didn’t pay attention to whatever he was doing. For a moment I thought he would nudge his way back onto my hammock, wrap his arms around me, hold me in place. This time I wouldn’t shove him away. But I didn’t have the option. The moments passed. No one drew near. I opened my eyes I barely knew were closed. I searched for him in the darting light of the fire and found him, sitting on Charlotte’s hammock, pressing her head against that strong spot between his shoulders and his chest that was designed for a girl’s head. I’d used it once or twice.