The Fragile World. Paula DeBoard Treick
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went down the staircase to the lower level of the cafeteria, past the hair-netted ladies wielding massive stainless steel serving spoons, and wandered in the general direction of my classroom. I should have been right behind them, picking up the last scraps of their trash, giving the losing team a gentle goading. That’s what I’d done every other time in the history of Egg Drop Day, but today I lingered on the roof, watching my students descend the staircase and emerge from the cafeteria into the asphalt parking lot below.
There was no reason in the world for me to stay on that roof one more minute, but I couldn’t make myself go. I tracked my students as they crossed the lot and rounded the administration building. My room was at the northern corner of the science wing. There, I imagined, they would wait, still joking around at first and then growing antsy as they waited for me to appear.
After a few minutes, Alex came around the corner of the administration building and started toward the cafeteria. Halfway there, he spotted me on the roof. Shielding his eyes with the flat of his hand, he called up to me, “You all right up there, Mr. K?”
“I’m fine, Alex,” I called down.
He came closer, considering this. “You need help with anything?”
“Not at all,” I said. I dug in my pocket and pulled out the massive wad of keys I’d been carrying around for my entire teaching career. “Hey. You want to let them into my room?”
“What? Really?”
I dangled the keys before me and then flung them over the side. They fell much less elegantly than my students’ eggs had fallen, just a straight shot down. Alex made a quick dive and retrieved them. He grinned, pleased with his catch, and stared up at me again, puzzled.
“Go on.” I waved him away. He smiled uncertainly but complied, stopping once to look back at me before disappearing out of sight.
I stayed at the edge of the roof, which was basically flat, with only the slightest peak in the center. In all my years of Egg Drop Day, I had never noticed how I could see the entire campus from this vantage. I’d spent most of my life— twenty-eight years now—teaching here. The campus had changed in that time, of course—a new gym had been constructed, and the football field had been upgraded with million-dollar artificial turf. Portable classroom buildings stretched into the horizon. The school had computer labs now, whiteboards and ceiling-mounted projectors, security cameras and automatic-flush toilets. The kids dressed differently, sure, but they were still kids—still teenagers with the same sorts of problems: love and dating and friendship and grades and finding themselves and hating their parents and figuring out their futures. Only now they all had cell phones, omnipresent as an extra limb. If I squinted my eyes and strained into the distance, I could see students on the soccer field. Olivia had P.E. this year, although I couldn’t remember her schedule. Was she the girl chasing down the ball, her dark ponytail bobbing? No—Olivia probably wasn’t the running type. But it was comforting to believe that she was out there somewhere, doing what the rest of her classmates were doing, being a normal kid.
It weighed on me that I wasn’t giving Olivia the same shot at a great life that I’d given Daniel. That we had given Daniel—because Kathleen had been part of that pact, too. Olivia had turned into this wise-beyond-her-years kid, funny and quirky and far too well-behaved to pass as a normal high school student. Sometimes it seemed that she was tiptoeing through life in order not to disturb me, in order to make up for the fact that Daniel had died. She deserved better, and when I was honest with myself, I knew it. She would have been better off going with Kathleen to Omaha, even if it had meant going kicking and screaming, or half-drugged on medication that wouldn’t have worn off until she got to the Rockies and there was no way back.
That could still happen, I realized.
Olivia could still go to Omaha. She could still get that shot at a better life.
I felt again the strange tightness in my chest and lowered myself to a sitting position, allowing my legs to hang weightlessly over the edge of the roof. It felt good to just sit down for a minute. There wasn’t a huge rush. My students would have packed up their things by now, and I could still stand up, head down the stairs, out the cafeteria door, and be back to my classroom before the tardy bell rang.
And then I remembered the letter, that itch I’d had to consciously remind myself not to scratch all week. Robert Edward Saenz has been paroled from this facility effective on this day, the 15th of April, 2013.
Distantly, I was aware of the bell ringing and students swarming out of classrooms. They looked not like ants, exactly, but like some type of laboratory experiment, their bodies squat and foreshortened. It was beautiful how they all blended together, this mass of color and energy. I squinted into the sunlight. Was Olivia, wearing her ubiquitous head-to-toe black, one of them?
“Hey!” someone called, pointing up to the roof of the cafeteria, at me.
A few students stopped to look.
“It’s Mr. K!”
“What are you doing up there, Mr. K?”
“Is this for Egg Drop Day? Throw me an egg, Mr. K!”
I gave them a polite wave but didn’t answer. Most of the students glanced at me and kept walking, but a small crowd had begun to gather below. I recognized Alex among them, my key ring in his right hand. He was such a conscientious kid; he’d probably fended off my incoming class at the door and locked up before returning to find me.
“Mr. Kaufman!” someone called, and I focused in on Candace Silva, the principal’s secretary, waving her hands over her head in such an exaggerated way that she might have been signaling to an incoming aircraft. Everything about Candace Silva was exaggerated, from her very pink cardigans to her candy-themed office cubicle, which had always made me slightly dizzy, in an overindulged way.
“You have class!” she called to me now. “Mr. Kaufman! Curtis! You need to come down now!”
I will, I thought. I’ll come down in a minute.
“Are you sick? Do you need me to call you a substitute?”
“No,” I whispered, which of course she couldn’t hear. Everything seemed to be moving farther and farther away—the buildings on campus, the horizon, the distant hum of the freeway. On the ground below, one of the kids called my name, but all noise had dissolved into a drone. I saw Alex step forward uncertainly, handing my key ring to Candace.
“Curtis? Do you hear me? You just stay right there! You don’t need to move a muscle! I’m going to take care of this!” I watched as she began walking back to the office rapidly, and then broke into a near-run after a few steps, her heels clattering. In all the years we’d known each other, I had never seen Candace Silva run.
I was dimly aware that more time had passed and that what was happening was not normal, but I didn’t seem to be able to prevent it. Standing up was out of the question, an act of superhuman strength and resolve. I shielded my eyes and looked out farther, at the horizon, a distant place where sky met land. The whole world was so tiny, so fragile, just waiting to be crushed by a giant footstep.
Over the intercom I heard Olivia’s name paged, and I thought distractedly, How nice. Everyone else must love Olivia, too.
The campus security squad—two burly guys in their twenties who intimidated even the staff members—arrived and hustled the students below back to class. The only students who remained, I realized, were mine, the students who should have been sitting in my third-period class. I recognized a group of boys who perennially sat in the rear of the room, and smiled to see that they were kicking a hacky-sack in a circle, and not looking up at me at all. Then Candace was back, pointing and gesturing frantically to Bill Meyers, Rio’s principal for the last decade. Bill waved an arm at me, and I raised mine in a weak salute.
I heard Olivia’s name being paged again, and I thought: Liv. I should get up now, just for Liv. I could feel the sun beating down on my head, where every day I combed fewer and fewer hairs. Olivia thought I had rickets, but maybe this was simply a case of sunstroke. Kathleen would take care of