The Truth About Fragile Things (38 page)

“Megan?” My mother’s voice broke through the door as she cracked it open. “Phil said you were still getting cleaned up. Everyone’s waiting for you.” When she saw I was decent she held the door open for my Dad and Lauren.

My father held a small black box tied with a red ribbon. “For our star,” he said as I met them at the door. “You brought down the house tonight.” I lifted the lid and saw a golden star charm strung on a thin chain. “We couldn’t find a falling one,” he said drily. “Or a hammock.”

“This is perfect. Thank you,” I told him as he gave my neck a small squeeze.

“And this one is from me and mom,” Lauren said, presenting another small box. She is horrible at surprises. Because of her smirk I opened it carefully, just in case something flew out at me. She started laughing before I even saw what lay on the soft white cotton inside.

A tiny pair of silver handcuffs.

“Oh, you’re all adorable,” I told them, slamming the lid shut. “It’s very cute, but flowers are customary. I have to go now.” I turned, but their hugs pulled me back.

When I looked up, Charlotte stood in the shadows of the backstage, watching. “I was looking for you,” she said when our eyes met. “I wanted to tell you that you did great.”

I didn’t move; I just opened my arms in invitation. She took slow steps before she let my family fold around her. “Thank you,” I told her.

“I thought she was even better than the first night,” Lauren announced after we separated.

“Maybe almost getting arrested brought her to a new emotional level,” Charlotte offered, her mouth pinched against a sly smile.

“Very funny,” I told her. “I wasn’t arrested. If you two mention that when people are around I will savagely murder you both.”

“Did you hear that, Charlotte?” Lauren gasped. “
Savagely
murder us?”

“Murder, I was prepared for. I didn’t realize it would be
savag
e,” Charlotte answered.

My father laughed and pushed them both toward the exit. “I’ll do my best to protect you. We need to go. People are waiting for Megan.”

I followed them toward the dizzy racket of the hallway. As soon as the door opened the noise and colors rushed around me. Two sophomore girls handed me pink roses. A freshman dropped a bag of gummy bears into my hand and retreated before I could thank her. Most of my teachers were there, greeting my parents, congratulating them on my performance.

“She did not!” Lauren whispered beside me. Taylor had come to greet her fans still dressed in her negligee costume.

Phillip reached us just in time to overhear. “It’s just a dress.” He smirked at the crowd of boys gathering in a tight circle around her.

“Then why are you still staring?” Lauren asked.

“Yes, Phillip,” Charlotte’s voice cut in from behind us. “Why exactly are you staring?”

“Staring? I wasn’t staring. I was looking for you. You look amazing.”

Charlotte was wearing black yoga pants and a black sweatshirt. A black handkerchief was knotted around her messy hair and she gave Phillip a glare reminiscent of the first time she met him.

Good for you
, I thought with pride.

I said thank you countless times as the crowd slipped past me, dropping compliments, but my eyes scanned for one face. I found him where I should have looked first. In the recessed doorway that led into the auditorium. He was alone and patient, a solid island in the middle of the churning sea of faces.

“Could you hold these for me?” I asked Lauren. As soon as I transferred my flowers and gift boxes to her arms I regretted it. I hadn’t realized the soft petals felt like armor in front me until they were gone. There’s nothing worse than empty hands when you stand in front of a quiet person. I broke through the current of bodies until I reached him. The volume of the room weakened as if he had slid a fader down on his control board.

He held out a small bundle of white tulips. They were tied with a light blue ribbon. I waited for words but they didn’t come. When the flowers were safe in my hand, their stalks cold and smooth against my palm, I told him thank you, the phrase trite and used on my tongue.

“Megan?” he asked. I pressed my lips together nervously, wondering what he was about to confess and what I would say. “Have you ever skipped rocks?” he finished.

“Pardon?”

“Like just skipped rocks. For fun.” Now his hands were the empty ones; they fidgeted against his pockets.

“As in jump from rock to rock?” I pictured the huge boulders strewn across the river.

He laughed and shook his head. “No. Like you throw rocks onto water and they…skip.” He pantomimed tossing a rock into a river. “Please don’t tell me you have no idea what I’m talking about.”

His smile was so embarrassed, so desperate, so amused I laughed and grabbed his hand, covering my mouth with my other fingers. “I know what you’re talking about now. I don’t know
why
we’re talking about it.” He laughed too, our locked hands swinging like a bridge between us, waiting for one of us to cross.

“I was wondering if you wanted to go out sometime and skip rocks. Not to be a cheap date. We could get dinner. It’s just…fun.” Not only did his hand not release, his finger slid a millimeter down mine and every nerve in my arm registered the touch. Softly, he extracted his fingers and waited for my answer.

“Yeah.” There were witty jokes to make, coy glances to give, but the shock of his honest invitation, his unapologetic touch wiped them all away. I looked down at the tulips, their petals just opening at the tips to reveal their dark recesses. He said ’date.’

“Yeah?”

I nodded. “Yeah. That’d be…fun.”

He chuckled at the awkwardness, and I waited for his next line. “This was the best night of the play. I’m glad you got your voice back.” He winked without closing his eye, just a flash of a joke whipping through the blue and disappearing again.

My eyes roamed over the graceful curves of the tulips, stopped to look at my fingertips as they traced the shape of one of the stems. Instead of the green stalk, I still felt the hot touch of his brave fingers. Maybe we had both found our voices.

I
was still buried
in my covers Sunday morning, trying to convince myself to get up and shower away the remnants of the thick makeup and nervous sweat from the last performance when the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number so I turned my head away, yawning.

Feet padded down the hallway, stopped at my door before my mother peeked her head. “You up?” Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel and she held out the telephone. “There’s a boy named Braden on the phone. And we leave for church in one hour.”

I sat up, throwing back my comforter, still dizzy from the late hours at the cast party. “Hello?” I asked in surprise as I took the phone.

“Morning.” His voice was odd over the phone, canned and nervous. “I was wondering if you wanted to go skip rocks today.”

“Today? In the snow?” I smoothed down my hair and straightened my t-shirt as if he could see me.

“It’s supposed to get up to forty degrees this afternoon and I know this good place.”

When he asked last night it felt like a rhetorical question—
How are you? Do you want to skip rocks?

“You know a good place?” I asked. “Braden,” my voice smiled along with my mouth. “Is this where you take all your girls?”

“Huh?” His voice was baffled. “No. I’ve never taken anyone.”

So much for flirting. But this disarming honesty was better. “I was kidding. I’d love to go. I’ll be home from church at noon.”

“Then can I come get you at 2:30? If that’s all right.”

I told him my address and wandered into the hallway on my way to the bathroom.

“What’s up, buttercup?” my dad asked, already in his white shirt with his tie draped over one shoulder.

“I think I’m going on a date.” I asked him more than told him, wondering if saying it out loud would make it less surreal. It didn’t.

“A date? When? Who’s the lucky guy?”

I leaned against the wall, trying to take all my memories of the woods and replace Phillip and Charlotte with Braden. It wasn’t working. “He’s the technical director for the plays. And he’s taking me to skip rocks. Today.”

“Skip rocks?” My dad’s silk tie slithered from his fingers and fell like a striped snake on the floor.

“That’s weird, right? To just skip rocks?” I retrieved his tie and handed it to him, wondering if I regretted saying yes. “Does that count as a date?”

“Is he a nice boy?”

I could almost smell the tulips I had carried in a mason jar to my bedside table. All the other flowers were in a huge vase in the kitchen. “I don’t know him well, but I think he might be the nicest person I know.”

“Then I say give it a chance. After all, you’re quite the naturalist now.” He swatted me with his tie before I could duck into the bathroom. “Don’t roll your eyes,” he teased from behind the closed door.

“Too late.” When I spun around to the mirror, the girl watching me grinned with anticipation. She was happy about something.

She was still grinning when Braden pulled up the driveway at 2:28. Lauren was peeking through the edge of the dining room curtains.

“I can’t really see him,” she complained.

“Don’t spy. He’s just a boy. Two ears, two eyes.”

“Oh, you didn’t tell me he had two eyes. Maybe we should call this off,” my father said as he crept behind Lauren to take a look. “Are we getting a formal introduction?”

“Please no.” I zipped up my coat and felt in my pocket to be sure my gloves were there. “I don’t even know if it’s worth an introduction. I’ll just go out there.”

“Why isn’t he getting out?” Lauren asked.

Braden’s head was bent toward his lap, occasionally glancing up at the front of the house. “Maybe he’s texting someone.”

“Oh, please tell me he’s not one of those texting people,” my mother said as she joined us. “It’s so tacky.” My mother has always had an archaic and beautiful love for conversation. I smiled at her genuine dismay.

“I don’t know his texting habits or anything else. I’ve never spoken to him for more than five minutes in my life.” I pulled my mother backward because she had inched the curtain back too far. “He will see you people. Why isn’t he getting out?”

“I think he’s praying for strength,” my father said. “It’s one thing to have the nerve to ask the pretty girl out. Now he has to go through with it.”

Lauren pulled her phone from her pocket. “Oh no,” she cried, grabbing our unanimous attention. “He is not!”

“What?” I almost shouted back.

“He is waiting until it is 2:30!” she screeched. She held up her phone. 2:29.

“He is not…” I started to say, but the screen flickered to 2:30 and we all turned in silence back to the slit between the curtain and the window. Braden took a deep breath and opened his car door.

Lauren and my father were laughing too hard to hear me mumble goodbye. If Braden got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and married me and opened an orphanage in Cambodia, he would be, until the day he died, the texting boy who waited in the driveway until 2:30. I decided to spare him their gleeful faces and suppressed laughter (at least I hoped they would try to suppress it) and met him on the front porch.

The fresh teasing tingled inside my ears as I stepped into the breezy wind, but when he looked up in surprise, like he was still preparing himself to ring the doorbell, I saw all the determination in his serious face crash against his easy, instant smile. It seemed in that fast instant like the nicest thing in the world to have a boy who would sit in driveway until he was perfectly on time.

“Hi,” he said. There was more in his face, more in his eyes, but that was the only word that made it to his mouth.

“Hi,” I answered back, liking how the bright sun made him squint against the glaring sky. He turned to his car, his arm out in invitation and led me to the passenger’s side where he opened the door for me. Phillip would have hopped in his seat and lurched the car a foot forward as soon as I reached for the door handle. I settled myself inside, with just enough time alone to cast my eyes around on the gleaming interior. Sunlight poured through the windshield and reflected off the oiled dash. He had scrubbed his car until it glistened.