The Fragile World. Paula DeBoard Treick

      April 26, 2013

      It was a fairly normal day at Rio Americano—at least, what had become normal for me. I’d gone through the motions of note-taking in my American History class, worked the problems in precalculus, and then ditched P.E. for the fourteenth time this semester to sit in the last stall of the D wing girls’ restroom and do absolutely nothing. The bathroom was public-industrial gross, with huge wheels of single-ply toilet paper bolted to the wall and graffiti etched into the stall doors—swearwords and gang signs and the names of girls who were sluts, courtesy of the girls whose boyfriends had been stolen. Every now and then someone would enter, and I heard a series of electronic beeps; public school bathrooms in this century seemed to be used solely as a quiet place for sending uninterrupted text messages. For the fourteenth time that semester, I was sitting cross-legged on top of my backpack, which sat on top of a floor that, even when freshly mopped, was as sanitary as a petri dish.

      Still, it was a million times better than being in P.E., which had become my nemesis and the focal point of my fears: the rushed, awkward changing of clothes in the locker room, shivering in short sleeves while I did the world’s slowest jog around the turf, being picked last for a team and then ignored by my teammates, ducking when one sort of ball or other zoomed toward my head, trying to avoid Ms. Ryan, the whistle-tooting P.E. teacher who was determined to make an athlete out of me. “Kaufman!” She would boom in that teacher-projection voice from across the length of a football field, and I’d wish I could melt into a little puddle and evaporate, like the Wicked Witch of the West.

      It was infinitely better to sit on a bacteria-laden public restroom floor.

      I shifted so I could dig into my backpack for my Fear Journal, the twentieth or so version of the book I’d used since Daniel died. The others, dense with my hasty scribbles, were stacked on a shelf in my bedroom. It was comforting to know that they were there, that my fears had been recorded and catalogued and preserved for posterity. I opened my latest notebook and wrote in black ink the new fear that had occurred to me that morning during American History: Getting hit in the head by a falling 80s-era ceiling tile. Underneath it I had scrawled this explanation: If I got hit in the head with a ceiling tile and passed out, someone would call my dad in his classroom, and he wouldn’t be able to take it, so he would probably have a heart attack. And then when I came to, I would be an orphan. (Or as good as.)

      I put a little asterisk by this fear, because it was way more terrifying to me than some of my other fears, such as bugs that look like sticks, and also way more likely to actually affect me, since there was a full month left of school, and I sat underneath those industrial ceiling tile rectangles for approximately six hours a day, and it only made sense that at some point, one of them would fall. This was the sort of fact I should bring up in my statistics class—which was both the most fascinating and horrifying class I had ever taken. But that would mean raising my hand and contributing, and this was something Olivia Kaufman simply did not do. The bug that looked like a stick was something I’d seen in a natural history museum during a forced field trip to the Bay Area, so it might not even live in Sacramento. But the ceiling tile...this was a very real worry. Maybe it could be mentioned in an anonymous note addressed to the school board?

      I was considering this—a private, philanthropic act that would be far more beneficial to my fellow students than, say, a new vending machine outside the cafeteria—when I heard my name over the intercom and froze, pen in hand.

      “Olivia Kaufman, please report to the office. Olivia Kaufman, to the office, please.”

      Shit. I looked around reflexively, as if I’d been spotted in a crowd. Had Ms. Ryan reported me? This was possible, but not part of what seemed to be the unwritten agreement that governed my life at Rio. Basically, the other teachers and staff members seemed to treat my dad and me with equal parts pity and protection—they pitied us because Daniel was dead; they became protective when my mother left almost three years ago. And recently, our dog had died—our beloved Heidi—and I’d written a poem about her for my English class, forever securing the sympathy of my teacher and her lunchroom buddies. Ms. Ryan had agreed not to talk to my dad about my failing grade in P.E. as long as I talked to my guidance counselor about my “options” for next year. And my dad, caught up in his own turmoil, seemed a much happier person for not being bothered with the truth of it all.

      I’d agreed to see the guidance counselor, but I’d never made the appointment. I knew exactly what Mr. Merrill would say when I took a seat in his office that was more or less the size of the bathroom stall I was currently wedged into. He would tap a few keys, pull up a file, frown at me and say “Are you really failing P.E. for the second time? You know that’s going to put you twenty credits behind, don’t you? You do realize that you’ll be spending your senior year in not one, but two P.E. classes, and that it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to fill out any college applications?”

      I knew what he would say, because I’d already had the conversation with myself a few hundred times. No—I wasn’t going to visit Mr. Merrill and talk about my “options” when there really weren’t any. And although I’d survived almost three years of scrutiny from teachers who had known and loved Daniel, I wasn’t in any hurry to have our differences made any more obvious. Daniel had applied for universities across the country, been accepted everywhere, had received a full-ride offer from Oberlin and a $1,000 scholarship from the teachers’ union. It was becoming glaringly obvious that I’d be lucky to graduate high school, much less go on to any kind of college. But, really—I was okay with that, too.

      How could I possibly move away from home and into some kind of dorm situation? College represented a host of new fears. I would have been scared to live on anything other than the first floor, since I was scared of both heights—specifically, falling from them—and depths—specifically, falling into them. Hundreds of reckless students holding knives in the cafeteria meant that violence was possible at every meal, and fires could be started by lit candles in dorm rooms. Besides, I would be absolutely alone without my dad—a very legitimate fear for someone who lost her brother and then, sort of, her mother, and then, finally, her dog.

      Even the thought of attending community college freaked me out. I’d have to drive myself there or depend on public transportation, either of which could go wrong in dozens of ways. I had accepted the necessity of riding shotgun in Dad’s Explorer to and from school, to and from the grocery store or Target or the pizza place on J Street, but I refused under any circumstances to ride in a bus. How in the world could a bus, with no seat belts and a rather loosely formed seating structure, be any kind of safe? And forget about driving myself anywhere. Dad had cajoled and tried to bribe me into a driver’s training course, but I professed profound disinterest in this particular rite of passage. “I’m not always going to drive you everywhere you want to go,” he’d said, which was kind of funny, because I didn’t particularly want to go anywhere. In response, I’d said, “I’ll walk. It’s healthier, anyway.” But no safer, I reminded myself bitterly. Daniel had been walking, after all.

      Dad had said that he might as well put me into a padded room, and I know he said this out of frustration, to show me how ridiculous I was being, but I pounced on the idea.

      “You could get me padded walls for my next birthday,” I’d suggested. “But soft padding, like a couch cushion. Nothing hard like a gymnastics mat.”

      The memory of this conversation brought a smile to my lips, and I was just about to relax because clearly I’d imagined the page from the office, when the voice came over the intercom again, more insistent this time: “Olivia Kaufman, to the office, please.”

      I tucked my notebook into my backpack and slowly did the zipper. The jig was up. Ms. Ryan had reported me, and the entire office staff—and maybe even my father—was likely waiting to ambush me in some kind of intervention. My repeated P.E. failures were probably being discussed right now. I took a deep breath and hoisted myself from the floor to a standing position.

      The last thing I wanted was to face a hallway crowded with students. If there had been a tunnel from the D-wing girls’ bathroom to the outside world, I would have taken it—even if that would be the sum of all my fears: a dark, tight-fitting, possibly rat-infested and ultimately unknown