The Fragile World. Paula DeBoard Treick

a voice behind me said, and I turned around to see Bill Meyers, holding out a hand to help me to my feet. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”

      So I stood, light-headed and unsteady. Bill took firm hold of me until we were well away from the edge of the roof. Then he held out his hand in a wide, strangely formal gesture and said, “After you.” I led the way across the roof, to the open door and down the stairs, past the serving ladies, the skin of their foreheads pinched tight by gray hairnets. They stared at me, bewildered.

      A few of my students were still gathered on the sidewalk below, although it must have been well into third period by now. Why weren’t they in class? The hacky-sack guys stopped when they saw me, the sack hitting the ground with a soft, beanbag ploop. Candace Silva was still there, too, chewing on a lacquered fingernail. On the outskirts of the group, which was just about where I could always find her, stood Olivia, weighted down by her massive backpack. I waved at her as Bill Meyers and I passed, his hand on my elbow.

      “Everything’s okay!” he boomed heartily. “Back to class now.”

      “Dad?” Olivia’s eyes were huge, her face even paler than normal.

      I took a step in her direction, but Bill clamped a hand on my shoulder. “Curtis, maybe we should have a little talk first.”

      “Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll see you in a bit, Olivia.”

      She nodded slowly.

      I felt a sudden longing for the cot in the nurse’s office, but Bill steered me out to the parking lot, straight to my dusty green Explorer. From his pocket he produced the ring of keys I’d tossed from the roof.

      “Get in,” he said. There had been some warmth in his voice when we were on the roof, as if we were two friends who had bumped into each other at a coffee shop. Now he was coolly efficient. “Passenger side, Curtis. I’m driving.”

       olivia

      By fourth period, everyone knew. I took my seat in Spanish, feeling sick and anxious, and listened to the gossip of my classmates.

      “Did you see Mr. K just totally lose it?”

      “I was sure he was gonna jump or something.”

      “If he jumped, I bet we’d get a sub until the end of the year.”

      I gritted my teeth. They were just stupid things said by stupid kids who had never experienced a tragedy beyond what they’d seen on television. I checked my cell phone for the dozenth time since Dad had left campus with Mr. Meyers. Wasn’t he going to call me? Didn’t someone want to tell me what was going on?

      A guy in the back of the room said, “Seriously, the guy must be a total wacko. The school cafeteria? Couldn’t he find like, a bridge or something?” and I almost screamed at him. Shut up! Don’t you know that’s my dad? To be fair, maybe he didn’t. It was a school of sixteen-hundred students, and I had perfected the art of being off the radar.

      But I didn’t have to listen to this. I shoved my Spanish notebook in my backpack and left class just as the bell was ringing, before my teacher had logged off whatever important email she was sending from her computer.

      On my way to the office, I passed the science wing. A cute blonde girl who must have been just out of college was Dad’s substitute. The lights had been dimmed in his room, and I recognized a Nova episode on the white projector screen.

      Mrs. Silva didn’t seem too surprised when I entered the office, although she clearly had no idea what she was supposed to do with me.

      “I just want my dad,” I said, fighting very hard not to cry. “He’s not answering his phone.”

      “I’m sure he’s fine, dear. Mr. Meyers is with him.”

      “But how am I supposed to get home?” We lived several miles away from campus—a trip I’d never made on foot.

      Mrs. Silva smiled at me patiently, like I was an idiot. “You know it’s still several hours before the end of the school day. Shouldn’t you be in fourth period now?”

      “Would you go back to class if everyone in the whole school was talking about how your father almost jumped from the roof of the cafeteria?”

      We stared at each other for a long moment over a jar of hard candy on the lip of Mrs. Silva’s cubicle.

      “I could call your mom,” she offered finally, her voice rising at the end in a subtle question mark. But of course, she knew my mom was in Omaha, and that wasn’t going to solve my immediate problem.

      “I would prefer to call her later,” I said icily.

      “Okay. Why don’t you just have a seat for a minute, and I’ll see what I can find out?”

      I plunked myself into one of the chairs outside Mr. Meyers’s empty office and listened while Mrs. Silva left several discreet voice mail messages. At one point I heard her say “I would really appreciate some guidance on what to do here once you’ve handled the situation.” Great. Dad was the situation. He was probably going to lose his job, which meant that we would lose our house and have to live on the streets with our heap of multicolored furniture. Or worse—we’d have to move to Omaha.

      I pulled out my journal and added this fear to today’s growing list. I could feel Mrs. Silva’s eyes on me and had the unnerving feeling that she could see what I was writing from ten feet away. I wrote that down, too.

      Every few minutes a staff member wandered through looking for one form or another. Some shot me sympathetic glances— Oh, you poor kid. I tried to communicate back to them telepathically—Help me out here. I need to find my dad. But they retrieved whatever they were looking for and moved on quickly, not wanting to get involved.

      Finally, after a hushed phone call that obviously concerned me and/or my dad, Mrs. Silva said sweetly, “Olivia, I think you can go ahead and wait in the library until the end of the day. Mr. Meyers is going to stay with your dad until then, and I’ll be bringing you home. Would that be okay?”

      No, it wasn’t okay. I wanted to see my dad right now, right this second. It was completely horrible to have no options, to be at the mercy of the school bell and an adult who was probably only pretending to care about me. But at least some plan was forming, my dad was apparently still alive, and he hadn’t completely forgotten about me. I bit back my sarcasm and whispered a grateful, “Okay.”

      For the rest of the day I sat in a molded plastic chair in the library, adding pages of new worries to my Fear Journal—things that had seemed highly unlikely that morning, but seemed incredibly likely now. I’m afraid of my dad cracking up. I’m afraid of my dad doing strange things. I’m afraid my dad doesn’t have enough to live for. I’m afraid I’m not enough.

      And I thought about my mom. We talked every week, sometimes several times a week, mostly about little things that meant nothing at all—how I’d done on my stats quiz, what Dad and I had eaten for dinner, which of the self-absorbed borderline mental cases had been eliminated from one reality show or another that week. It was hard for me to tell her things that really mattered. It didn’t seem entirely fair that she should get an all-access pass to my life when she had made the decision to leave. Every single time we talked, she mentioned me coming to Omaha, like the constant mention would wear me down. “I’m fine here,” I insisted. “Dad and I are doing fine.” Then she would be quiet for a long time, and I could picture her in my grandparents’ old house, which Daniel and I had visited for Christmas when we were kids. Sometimes she didn’t seem to be that far away, after all. Other times, like now, Omaha might as well have been Mars.

      I had my cell phone, so I could have called her right then. No matter how busy she was at the store or in her workshop, Mom would have dropped everything to be on the first flight out of Omaha. She would have been in Sacramento late tonight or early tomorrow morning, and then she could be in charge. She could ask Dad what the hell he’d been