Cherita Chen:
I should have eaten breakfast.
The thought fills me with a sudden and unbearable shame but it's the truth. My stomach is weak and my head is swimming and I don't have any strength for what's supposed to happen today—today meaning in the next five minutes. I promised my mom that I was done skipping meals but here I am with no breakfast and too many hours until lunch. I lower my eyes to the ground and try to blink back the tears on the verge of spilling onto my face. If anyone could read my mind…they'd think…they'd think "of course." Because it's a sin for me to be so big and eat like a normal person should and feel terrible when I doubt. I shouldn't eat at all. I shouldn't eat ever again.
"There he is! There he is! Mr. Undestructable!"
Oh…
I told myself I would be ready. His hair is the same length it was before the jet engine collapsed in his bedroom. I told myself I would be ready or I wouldn't come in today. On his arm is a thick cast I can only imagine filled in with some sort of artwork. I heard his friends, those idiots Sean and Ron, talking about him coming back. In art class last year we experimented on rough surfaces and he always knew how to make things beautiful. The second I heard I heard what crashed into his room, onto his bed, I cried and left school. His uniform is buttoned up and neat like he never wears it. I thought he was dead until just yesterday.
"It's Indestructible, you idiot!"
I've been staring too long. I turn my eyes away to focus on something like a bird or what ever is off to the distance. I've been trained to deny myself the things I want the most and the things that give me the most pleasure and for my own sake I don't meet his eyes when I feel them fall on me. As always his stare burns my flesh and my body and I can feel myself melting under his gaze. I turn to look at Samantha who looks so much happier than she's looked in the few days her brother hasn't come with her to the bus stop. She's a sweet girl—innocent and not like cruel like her friends—and I hope to God she stays that way.
"Well, come on. Don't be coy, show us! Mr. INDESTRUCTIBLE."
There it is. I remember when I broke my leg when I was younger and the cast felt so heavy and thick I felt like a caged bird. I know he can use both hands to draw and to write—though he only applies it when he's concentrated on shading or painting—and I bet he feels like he has a clipped wing.
"Don't draw any dicks or anything. My mom'll get pissed," his voice is calm with a level of anxiety shimmering beneath it. He always sounds like the calm surface of a lake hiding deep mysterious bellow. He talks like they talk but he's not like they are.
"Pissed or wet?"
Before I can focus on what's going on Samantha runs at one of his idiot friends and begins hitting him with her bag…and there goes that kaleidoscope of sound that is his laugh, "Do you even know what that means?"
I turn my face away then because I don't want to hear her explanation or anything that will come after. I've been in the same class with these boys since middle school and I know what comes. It's the bad words and the bad descriptions being screamed at the top of their lungs. I keep my focus anywhere else but on him as those words come out of their mouth. I don't want him to think of that stuff and then get disgusted when he looks at me.
Joanie's voice—so sweet and yet so distastefully like her mother's—had been in the middle of the chaos but suddenly it says something that makes my gut twist like a knife has been jammed into me.
"Hey, let me sign."
There it is. There they all are. It's like a feeding frenzy around him, around my boy and I don't know what to say. My throat is tight and I squeeze my eyes shut to hold back the tears. For so long he has been just my secret delight. In middle school he was awful and because of that no one wanted anything to with him but something happened and he changed. For so long I was the only one that knew. For so long I knew he had been blooming into something so fantastic and now that he is big news everyone can sense it. Everyone wants it.
My heart is thundering in my chest on the verge of breaking because I know what's going to happen. He's been single for so long and part of me took pleasure in that but I know someone will come and take him from my secret dreams and then I will have to watch. I will have to watch them and I have this burning rage inside of me that tells me this time it will be her. It will be Joanie with her bouncing hair and her thin arms and nice legs and I am on my own. I will be a joke again. For so long he treated me like a person but like her he will turn me into a joke…I don't want to be a joke.
The bus pulls up and as always I wait for everyone to hurry on so I don't have to suffer pokes and pushes and comments at my expense. But as I wait for the last body I see the cast thrusted toward me and there it is. My voice is gone. I can't focus on what he says to me because there is her name and her number and he's showing it to me as if to tell me my hopeless dreaming is for nothing. Anger boils the inside of my bones. I want to die. I can't breathe.
"Chut up," I whisper angrily and start toward the bus.
I never want to hear his voice. I never want to see him again.