The Truth About Fragile Things Page 25

  “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.

  “The trail I go to is at the nature center. It should only take ten minutes to get there,” he told me after he backed away. He gave a friendly wave to Lauren who now stood boldly in front of the window. “I have three sisters,” he told me, which really meant he understood and forgave me for anything my family may do, which could prove helpful, considering. I listened to his stories of his family while he drove. It was easier than I imagined, the closeness and the pauses.

  At the nature center he parked in a lot I didn’t know existed and took me through a tiny break in the trees that could hardly pass for a trail, especially with the snow still lingering in piles in the shade of the trunks. He walked slowly, holding back branches that had been pulled down by the weight of the snow. Everywhere fat, icy drops of water splashed down from the bare trees as the afternoon sun raged against the frozen world. I pulled on my gloves and followed him to the edge of a steep hill with terraced steps made of railroad ties.

  “Here,” he said after he stepped carefully down. He held out his gloved hand for mine.

  I accepted, hearing the muffled clap of thick fabric as my glove landed in his. He let go as soon as I had stepped down and I flexed my fingers, trying to make freedom feel as good as his grip. I failed.

  At the bottom of the hill was a wide strip of water, something between a creek and a river. He steered us toward a bright spot of sun that broke through a bare patch of the forest. The muddy bank was covered in rocks.

  “I think my dad taught me how to do this when I was younger,” I said, picking up a rock. I flipped it over in my hand, trying to remember the secret.

  “It’s like a bicycle. You can’t really forget once you know.” He gently took the round rock from my palm and replaced it with a flat, black one. “You want them flat. They’re all over here.” He stretched out my fingers until my hand was straight and flat. “Use the water tension to keep the rock from sinking.” He looked into my face to make sure I followed. All I registered was the press of his hands against mine. “If your hand is the water,” he continued, “you want the rock to hit it completely flat so you use as much surface area as possible. If it hits sideways it will cut the water like a knife and sink.”

  “And that’s bad,” I added, my nose wrinkling playfully.

  “Horrible,” he teased back. He took the rock and made it strike my hand in slow motion and mimicked it bouncing back into the air. “Like that. Sort of like a Frisbee—flat and even.”

  He took his rock and tossed it into the river. It splashed into the still water and disappeared under the brown surface. My eyes cut sideways in confusion to his red face.

  “So, not like that,” he said before my laughter sprang out into the chilly afternoon. He snatched up another rock and this time it bounced along the top of the water until it landed on the other bank.

  “Oh!” I said in excitement. “That was better.”

  He handed me a rock and turned me sideways like I was tossing a Frisbee. Though he didn’t touch anything but my arms or lean too close, I felt the general curve of his body around mine. Each breath of Sunday air was cold against my warm lungs. My rock hopped twice before it dove into the muddy bottom.

  “I did it!” My next three attempts failed, but after that my rocks bounced along the water in high, happy leaps. After one fervent attempt to make my rock jump all the way to a half-submerged branch, I turned around in triumph to find Braden grinning, his hands empty. He had found a dry log to sit on. I couldn’t remember when he’d stopped throwing. I had a feeling he had been waiting to say something.

  “You’re good,” he said. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

  I knew my face was pink with the cold because I felt the bite of the wind. I wondered if it looked as nice as Braden’s ruddy cheeks. “It’s really fun. Thanks for showing me.” I took a careful seat, surprised at the hesitant thrill I felt being so close to him.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you told me Friday.” Braden scooped up a smooth rock and rolled it across his palm.

  The sound room came back so quickly that I blinked in the sun, wondering how the light and trees had made their way into Braden’s little booth. “No one knows about it. Just our families and Phillip.”

  “Phillip.” Braden repeated.

  “I only told him when Charlotte moved to our school. It hasn’t even been three months.” I said the last part to myself, struggling to fit the thousands of pictures in my mind of campfires and birthday cakes and costumes and car rides into a few short months. “It seems like longer,” I admitted when I came back to the smooth log and Braden’s arm next to mine.

  “They’re a thing, right? Phillip and Charlotte? Together?”

  I didn’t miss the relief in his voice. Maybe he’d believed, like everyone else, that Phillip and I had some claim on each other. Maybe, like everyone else, he thought the girl who stole Megan’s part stole Megan’s boyfriend too. “Something like that.” I wondered if those words would ever come out smooth instead of clinging like dry sand to my throat.

  “And you’re good with that?” It’s amazing how lightly he could press the sore spots. Like a doctor’s careful touch.

  I shrugged. “I worry a little. If they fight I’m in the middle. I don’t like that. And Charlotte’s not even fifteen until December. That’s young.”

  Something bright flashed through Braden’s eye, like a meteor burning across the blue. He seemed to have run out of things to say. I wished he’d ask more, let me exorcise all the raw edges of unspoken words until I was as smooth as a river rock.

  Instead, I was the one who spoke next. “Do you have a bucket list?”

  His mouth narrowed in confusion. “Like an actual list? No. Do you?” he asked, leaning forward in curiosity.

  “I’m starting one.” I hadn’t decided if I was ready to expound. I looked around the woods, my breath trembling like the last dead leaves clinging to the trees.

  “I hope you’re planning to finish it when you’re a hundred.” There was disapproval
in his voice that reminded me of Phillip when someone mentions death. “What’s on it?”

  “So far, I want to go to an old cathedral. Like really old. Worn stones and crumbling statues. I want to see what it feels like to breathe inside a place that old.”

  “Like St. Paul’s,” Braden said. “My parents took us to London last year. We went to St. Paul’s.”

  “Are you serious? What was it like?” I moved nearer as if being closer would give me his answer faster. We both glanced down when our knees bumped together.

  I watched him struggle for a word, flipping through and discarding the ones that didn’t fit. After a long pause he looked at me with an apologetic leaning of his eyebrows. “Holy.”

  I felt my expression drain away.

  “Is that stupid?” he asked. “It’s just hard to explain. It was impressive.”

  “I like holy,” I told him. He had no idea how much. In a thousand tries, Phillip would have never come up with the word holy. “I wish there was something like that I could visit without crossing the Atlantic.”

  “There’s St. Louis. St. Mary’s Basilica.”

  My face asked every incredulous question for me and Braden’s red cheeks darkened. “My mom studied European architecture. It’s sort of her thing. I get dragged to all those places.”

  “Dragged?”

  “Okay, I like it,” he smiled. “I could take you to St. Mary’s if you ever wanted to see it. Maybe this spring. It’s right by the arch. If we leave in the morning we could be back before night.”

  “I’d really love that,” I whispered, my mind jumping to the green promise of spring, wondering if what I felt for Braden would survive that long.

  “So what else is on it?” he asked. My thoughts were so tangled around the spires of a basilica that I didn’t understand his question. “What else is on your bucket list?”

  I pulled my bottom lip into my mouth, moistened it against my tongue. My stomach was moving, begging me to speak and be silent and walk and sit still.

  “It’s secret,” I finally forced the truth out, certain they would hold the words like a dam.

  “Can I hear it?” A quiet request, like a soft rain, spilling over my walls, flooding past my defenses.

  The cold air hit my hot, nervous skin, pulling goosebumps up my arm. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “I didn’t know you got embarrassed,” he said.

  “I do.” I forced myself to look into his eyes for a long second because after I told him I might never be able to look him in the face again. And I would miss it. “This is horrible. I don’t know why I tell you things I don’t tell other people. The other thing on my list is to be kissed somewhere strange and unexpected. Like the Golden Gate Bridge or the principal’s office or…somewhere different.” I imagined the dark sound booth, all noises dying against the padded walls.

  Braden’s face went pink under his casual laugh, his almost careless shrug. “Are you looking for an accomplice?” It was a joke. I needed to laugh but my diaphragm wouldn’t spare me the extra air.

  I remembered Schatz dragging him on stage last year to catch me while I demonstrated a comedic faint. He’d caught me in arms that were surprisingly strong for a boy no taller than me. I wondered if I fell now if he would remember how to catch me, how to brace himself for the weight of my weakness. I pressed my tongue to the back of my teeth, felt my toes curl around a cliff, felt the blackness below. Wondered how people jump. How did Bryon jump in front of that car? “I don’t know.” He wasn’t the only one who could be honest. My cheeks flamed with the hot truth and I pulled off my gloves, suddenly anxious to dip my fingers into the freezing water.

  Braden’s eyes narrowed, he studied me in confusion, a hint of fear and hope mingled in his expression. “Why are you making a bucket list?”

  I halted the step I had taken toward the creek. “Because Charlotte’s dad did,” I said, knowing the story belonged to Braden now. Before I told him anything, I knew I would tell him everything. I made my way to the creek, my shoes sinking into the soft mud when I came close enough to touch the sliding water. “He left a bucket list.” For five minutes he didn’t say a word while I explained. I wondered if I was breaking a rule telling him without asking Charlotte and Phillip first, but the worry didn’t stop me. Even when I finished he didn’t move from his log, didn’t make a sound. I grabbed a smooth stone, just for ballast while I waited.

  “So how many things are left?” he asked, standing to join me. The water I had touched moments ago was slipping around the curving bend, disappearing from sight. I watched a drop of melted snow hit the surface of the stream and ripple. Braden was speaking, coming closer. His eyes were like headlights, holding me to my spot of earth. The car was coming down the road. It was jump or don’t jump.

  “Just a few.” When I blinked I felt my eyelashes brush the top of my cheeks, hadn’t realized they were so long when I wore mascara. “Just the hardest ones.”

  “You know what I think?”

  I shook my head, afraid of my voice, relieved he was stepping close to me because I couldn’t make my feet move.

  He looked up at the tangled grid of snowy branches and nodded his head in some silent assessment. “I think the nature center is a really weird place to kiss someone.” He gave me a faltering, frightened smile and then pressed his lips to mine. There was a strange moment of being aware of the temperature of his lips, the shape, the dryness.

  Then I jumped. And he caught me.

  CHAPTER 38

  I didn’t know how to do all the right things at school. Didn’t know how close to stand to Braden. Didn’t know who to tell or what to tell. If he was anything like Phillip it was the second kiss that mattered, not the first. I was brisk and efficient on Monday, early for every class, viciously focused on every assignment. I barely looked up from my papers, frightened he would be there and I would be a total fool. When the bell rang for my last hour I lingered over my desk, took my time putting away my notebook and straightening my backpack. I didn’t want to battle the surging crowds. I stepped outside my classroom and used the back stairs that are usually abandoned. I didn’t need to stop at my locker so I took the hallway that passes the theater. And the band room.

  He stood outside the door, scanning the hallway in the same occupied way I was. He smiled, something shy and uncertain and genuine in the shape of his lips. I stopped a foot short of him, uncertain how to cross from my space to his.

  “I was going to practice before I go to work.” He motioned to the band room behind us, not quite inviting, but hoping. “Are you busy?”

  “No. I’d love to hear.” My voice was formal and prim, so far from all the weightless feelings in my chest.

  He held the door open and I stepped in where five or six students were playing keep away with somebody’s mouthpiece while two flutists practiced together. They hardly paid attention to us except to yell a few hellos to Braden before going back to their rowdy game. I could tell that the world of band had the same allowances as the drama department. As long as everyone blew the judges away at performances there was a considerable amount of freedom.

  Braden led me to the piano on the far side of the room and took a seat behind it. It acted like a screen, blocking off a quiet corner as he opened his guitar case. He plugged it into a massive black speaker, but turned the sound down, plucking a few strings to test the volume.

  “Who do you like?” he asked, his fingers coaxing some broken notes into the air.

  “I don’t know. Anything.” It seemed far too early to admit something as personal as music preferences.

  He grinned and started running his fingers in fast, elastic shapes over the strings, a song from the radio shaping in the air around us. I glanced around to see if anyone else was paying attention, was as impressed as I was. All I saw was one flutist shove a boy who had upset her music stand. “That’s really good,” I told him.

  “Honestly, tell me what you want to hear. I might not know it, but I’ll try.”
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br />   “I like the one you’re playing,” I told him. I loved it when he slid his fingers, made the strings squeak in protest as if they didn’t want to lose his touch. I knew how they felt.

  The music didn’t stop for our words. Sometimes he halted to retrace a note before he moved on, gathering speed, but he spoke around the separate conversation of the melody. “Would you like to go out again sometime?”

  He said it like reading lyrics, his eyes pointed down at his guitar, guarded from sight by his thick, black lashes. I sympathized. I understood the need for a script or a score to tell you where to go next.

  “Do you really have to ask?”

  His hand slid and broke the chord with a sharp squeak. “I was hoping.”

  “Me too,” I assured him before he had to say it out loud.

  He met my eyes, searched it for clues. “Okay.” He smiled and nodded.

  It wasn’t until he finished the song that I realized that he’d already given me his second kiss. It had crept on the back of the notes of his guitar, jumping from the strings and landing on my face while he looked at his fingers and hoped they spoke for him. They did.

  Everyone was so concerned with the rumors about Phillip and Charlotte and Phillip and me that no one noticed for three weeks that my usual hideout backstage had transferred to the back corner of the band room or that my new debit card was from Second National Bank where Braden worked as a teller while his dad ran the loan department. Phillip and Charlotte were so absorbed in each other and their frequent dramas that I escaped the first awkward weeks of being someone’s girlfriend without any observation. Which was perfect for me because I was learning I couldn’t do it like other people. Luckily, Braden didn’t expect me to lean against his locker and flirt and he had the instinct not to resort to flattery, which would have embarrassed me more than anything else. He usually handed me one of his secret smiles from across the room, letting me hold onto it and linger over it during the day before I returned it in stolen moments after school. He stepped as slowly as I did, only his tracks seemed to cut firmer and deeper because something about him was more certain than I had ever been.