The Cracks in Everything by George Nevgodovskyy
Schoolgirl Jackie is frustrated about being kicked out of her favourite teacher’s classroom because of a dead rat, and starts to see cracks in the façades put up by the adults in her life.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
The smell hit us the moment we entered our classroom on Monday morning – like my socks if I left them in my bag for a few days after figure skating practice. And that wasn’t the only strange thing. Ms. Krenshaw didn’t greet us at the door like she usually does, and instead was busy speaking to our principal, Ms. Lorry, with concerned looks and hushed voices.
Ms. Krenshaw looked put-together like she did every Monday. My mother used that phrase, and it reminded me of Humpty Dumpty – my favourite nursery rhyme when I was little – who couldn’t be put back together, even with the help of all those knights and all those horses. I imagined Ms. Krenshaw waking up early to tape up the cracks in her shell – cracks that wouldn’t stay sealed. But as the week went on, Ms. Krenshaw’s cracks would begin to show, little by little. Mondays, Tuesdays, parent-teacher nights, field trips, and any school performance or assembly, Ms. Krenshaw made sure they were well-hidden. I’d always wondered about that. Didn’t she want to look put-together every day? At the time I remember feeling worried thinking that that was what waited for us all in adulthood – a never-ending war with our bodies to keep them from coming apart. I even recall trying to see whether I had any cracks once. I looked for a long time with the bathroom door locked, using my mother’s makeup mirror, and was relieved when I couldn’t find a single one.
But on this day, even though it was a Monday morning, I saw the cracks already beginning to show when something in her conversation with Ms. Lorry upset Ms. Krenshaw. I could only catch bits and pieces, but I managed to hear Ms. Lorry say something about the situation being out of her hands.
“That’s ridiculous, Jen,” Ms. Krenshaw told her, “Respectfully, you’re in charge here. Call pest control and quit waiting for someone else to come and tie your shoelaces.”
I couldn’t believe Ms. Krenshaw would speak to Ms. Lorry that way, seeing as the principal’s office was known to be the scariest room in the entire school. Like a troll’s cave. Ms. Lorry said something back in a sharp tone, then she marched past us down the hall.
Finally, Ms. Krenshaw turned to her students and announced this: “Keep your backpacks on, kids. There’s a dead rat in the wall and we’re being kicked out of our classroom until further notice.”
None of us knew what to think, and we were too nervous to ask any questions for fear of upsetting Ms. Krenshaw anymore. Instead, we followed her in silence to the spare portable classroom on the grass field, still wet from last night’s rain. Shoes collecting mud along the way.
Once we arrived, set our backpacks down, and settled into our new desks, she explained that we were to stay in the portable until someone from the school district extracted the dead rat from the wall, because it wasn’t safe to be breathing in that smell. That was the word Ms. Krenshaw used. Extracted. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, and I’m sure the rest of the students in our class didn’t know either – except maybe for Sam, who had screaming fits but could memorize entire chapter books. No one asked, not even Olivia who loved to put up her hand and ask what a word meant just to be the centre of attention, because we could all sense the bubbling frustration in our teacher’s voice. My guess was that it meant “thrown out,” probably into the giant green dumpster that stood at the back of the school. Our tiny blue classroom can surely couldn’t handle a dead rat, I thought.
Our school had a rat problem. We were all familiar with the signs of a sighting from one of the classrooms down the hall: first the lone scream, followed by screams from the entire class. It gave me the shivers every time. Not because I was afraid of rats, but because they brought back a memory from the year before: a scream from outside our window. I still remember Dad looking outside, gasping a swear word under his breath, then telling me to go to the living room and watch TV. I did what he’d asked, but I played my shows really quiet so I could still hear my parents whisper to each other in the kitchen.
That’s how I found out someone in our building had jumped off their balcony.
Anyway – of rats, thankfully, we’d never had any sightings in our classroom. This wasn’t a surprise, since Ms. Krenshaw had the cleanest, nicest classroom in the entire school. You couldn’t get bored even if you tried with all that stuff in there – so much that it felt like it would take an entire lifetime to uncover all its secrets. Like archaeologists studying the pyramids, where Ms. Krenshaw said they were still finding hidden rooms and corridors. I always looked forward to when I was finished a spelling test or a math test early, just so I could look at the colourful posters of classic paintings, like Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, with all its squiggles and circles, whose style we tried to copy in art class, the photographs of the animals on the alphabet chart, the famous quotes from people like Terry Fox or Rosa Parks, their names spelled out in bold, important letters underneath. One quote I memorized was “Leave nothing for tomorrow that can be done today,” which came from Abraham Lincoln. When I told my mom, she said she wished Dad would be a little more like Lincoln sometimes, just minus the beard.
And then, of course, there was the giant plastic peach which stood on the cabinet behind Ms. Krenshaw’s desk. One day, when my best friend Maya had to stay after school because her grandpa was late to pick her up, she discovered the peach was actually a secret candy jar. While Maya waited in the classroom, Ms. Zhang-Brown came in and started chatting with Ms. Krenshaw. Then, Maya said, she watched Ms. Krenshaw take the lid off the peach and pull out two pieces of white candy. The next day, when Maya and I asked Ms. Krenshaw if we could have one of the candies, she told us they were for adults only. After that moment all we dreamt about were those mysterious adult candies, thinking they must be the best and sweetest candies in the world, so good that one bite would make kids addicted forever. Like video games, or Uncle Jake’s cigarettes.
It was true that Ms. Krenshaw could be pretty strict, but our friends from other classes still said we were lucky to have her as our teacher. We took pride in that. It almost made sense that ours would be the only classroom in the school that was free of rats. Sometimes it felt like we deserved it.
That’s why it also made sense that Ms. Krenshaw would be so angry about our situation. She explained that it could take days, even weeks for the school district to send someone to extract the rat, because they were a bunch of shirkers who couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger for anything more than picking their noses. A few students giggled when she said that, but I stayed silent. I knew she wasn’t trying to be funny.
The walls of the portable were bare, with nothing to look at but the clock with the black and red hands, ticking toward recess. The only pieces of our classroom Ms. Krenshaw brought with her were the items she kept on and around her desk, including the giant peach. Maybe she really was addicted to her adult candies, I thought. When I finished our spelling test there was nothing to do but listen to the loud, annoying hum of the ceiling lights. They reminded me of camping, when a single mosquito snuck into your tent while you were falling asleep and buzzed around your ear.
I turned around to get the attention of Maya, sitting behind me, her hair in a pretty braid that I knew her older sister tied for her, which meant she must be in town visiting. She felt my stare and looked up from her spelling test, widening her eyes into a look that said it all. Things were bleak.
We finally got a chance to meet at recess. Maya and I saw Joe talking with Ronald and Xi, leaning against the fence around the basketball court, a carefree smile glued to his face. Laura and Kate and Marcie were there, too. I didn’t like those girls, especially Laura. I did, however, like Joe. In fact, Maya once asked me if I like liked him, and I said yes. She swore she wouldn’t tell a soul.
“I hate the portable,” Joe said. He was wearing his blue shirt with a picture of a shark driving a truck on top of a big wave, the words “Ride the Waves” below. “There’s no toys or books in there.”
“At least it’s not stinky,” said Xi. “The rat smelled like barf.”
“No. It smelled like gasoline at the gas station.”
“You guys,” said Ronald, “I actually saw the rat yesterday at recess.”
“That’s impossible. It’s in the wall,” said Xi.
“Yes I did, I saw it before it went to die in the wall. It was huge and hairy and it had teeth like samurai swords.”
“I saw it too,” said Joe. I didn’t really believe him, but I made a surprised face along with everyone else.
“That’s so disgusting,” said Laura, her crew all in agreement, squishing up their faces in the exact same way.
“I have a pet rat,” said Ronald, grinning proudly. He seemed to enjoy getting a reaction out of the girls.
“Ewww,” they all cried, which seemed like the correct response. I thought about my parents, and how they would always say little girls don’t do this or little girls should do that. Somehow, I thought my parents would approve of Laura and her friends.
I mentioned this to Maya later on the swings, when we were alone. “Have you ever seen a rat before?” I asked her, swaying sideways so our chains would rattle together.
“No. Have you?”
“No. But I want to.”
“Me too.”
That’s why I liked Maya. She didn’t care if you said you wanted to see a rat even if you were a girl and you were supposed to make squishy faces at them.
That evening, when I tried to tell my parents about the rat they were horrified.
“We need to get you out of that school,” my mom said.
“But I like it. All my friends are there.”
“You’ll still be able to see them if you move schools, sweetie. It’s not like you’d be moving to France.”
I knew that wasn’t true, because Riley H. moved schools last year and we haven’t seen him since. He might as well be living in France now. I couldn’t even remember what the H stood for.
“No one’s moving schools. She doesn’t want to leave her friends, Michelle. And do you have any idea how much private school is?” said Dad.
“And do you have any idea why we can’t afford it, Chris?” Mom said. “Do you have any idea who took a trip to Atlantic City last summer? Jackie needs to be challenged more. She needs to be in an environment where she can reach her potential.”
“It’s only one dead rat,” I argued. “I don’t wanna move schools just because of that.”
“Jacqueline, it’s not polite to talk about dead rats at the dinner table. We’ll finish this discussion later.”
We sat in silence for a few moments, with just the sounds of our cutlery hitting against our plates.
“Elevator took forever today,” Dad finally said.
“Someone’s moving in upstairs.”
“Moving into…”
“I think so.”
I knew by the secrecy in their voices they must’ve been talking about the person who committed suicide.
“I wonder if they know. You think they do?”
“I think I’d rather not know,” Mom said. As I continued to eat quietly, I wondered how this was a more appropriate topic for dinner conversation, but once again I chose to keep that thought to myself.
There was still a cloud of mystery surrounding the person who jumped off the balcony. Was it a man or a woman? What was their name? Why did they do it? I didn’t bother asking my parents – I knew they wouldn’t like it, and probably wouldn’t answer me anyway. In my mind I pictured a man, blonde and thin like my dad. Bare feet on a cold metal railing, tears running down his cheeks. He must’ve been a very sad person, I thought. At the time, the saddest thing I could possibly imagine was a divorce, so my brain immediately formed the connection between divorce and suicide. This worried me constantly. What if my mom and dad divorced because of private school. Because of me. Would Dad get sad, too?
I looked up from my plate at his face, the black railing on our balcony, and realized suddenly that I wasn’t hungry.
The next day at school was just as depressing. Ms. Krenshaw seemed even more frustrated with the principal and the school district and the portable and the dead rat stuck in the wall. The rest of us were in a sour mood too, spending recess and lunch listening to the rain clanging on the metal roof of the portable. Kids threw tantrums for no good reason, lashed out at the smallest problem. Not even a game of dodgeball in P.E. could raise our spirits.
The day after wasn’t any better. Sometimes the humming of lights seemed so loud I could hardly hear Ms. Krenshaw’s voice. Ronald got in trouble for kicking Jennica’s chair – arguing that it had been an accident – and the water in our sink stopped running, so we couldn’t wash our hands after art until Ms. Krenshaw found an old bottle of sanitizer that made our hands smell like oranges (which scared Michael, who was allergic and insisted that Ms. Krenshaw should get his EpiPen).
We needed to escape the cursed portable as fast as possible.
Luckily, the rain clouds cleared up just in time for lunch, when a group of us met once again by the basketball court fence.
“We should extrat the rat,” said Xi.
“Yeah,” said Ronald. “Let’s go extrat it right now. We’ll just take it out of the wall.”
“Who’s gonna touch it?” said Joe, the leader. Laura, Kate, and Marcie squished their faces at the thought of that.
“You have a rat at home, don’t you Ronald?” said Xi.
“Yeah. But only my dad touches it. I’m not allowed to.”
“I would barf if I touched a rat,” Laura chimed in, and though I didn’t see it this way at the time, I now know this was part of her early, clumsy attempt at flirting. I’d seen her act this way before, but this time her reaction got to me. Maybe it was all those hours of sitting under the mosquito hum of the portable, the colorless walls, but in that moment I felt I needed to be the opposite of Laura, to prove something important, something I couldn’t explain – not just to the boys, but to myself.
“I wouldn’t,” I said.
Everyone looked at me, the boys giggling nervously.
“That’s so gross,” Laura said, glaring. “Maybe you should go extract the rat.” For a second the conversation stood still. Even the boys were silently waiting for my response. Laura looked pleased, like she’d called my bluff and would now show the boys that I wasn’t any different from her and her friends. I saw her mouth start to twist into a smug smile of victory.
“Alright,” I said. “I’ll go.”
The boys looked at me in awe, the girls in shock. Maya, confused at first, but not wanting to leave me hanging, started nodding. “We’ll go extract it together,” she said. Joe was staring at me with wide eyes. I couldn’t back down now.
“Don’t worry. I’ve done it lots of times before.”
Maya and I decided we’d go after lunch. That’s when Ms. Krenshaw would send our class to Mr. Cho, the music teacher, and we knew we could slink out on the way to his room. If someone in our class told Mr. Cho we were gone, Joe said he would make an excuse for our absence. That was as far as we got in our planning. After that, we’d have to improvise.
The school bell went off like a starting pistol.
“Good luck,” Joe told us.
When we entered the portable our class lined up right away at the door for music class. This time, Maya and I made sure to take spots at the very end. My stomach was in knots. I’d always been a good student and never got in trouble, so the possibility of that happening weighed on me. I felt my palms get clammy. My teeth clenched. The door opened, and Mr. Cho walked in, smiling.
“Sorry I’m late, everyone. I forgot about your beautiful new classroom,” he said. “Now don’t forget, as soon as we enter the school building, quiet as mice. Or, should I say, rats?”
Though our class laughed at Mr. Cho’s joke Ms. Krenshaw made a point to ignore it, busy shuffling some papers at her desk.
“Alright, everyone. Follow me,” Mr. Cho said as he walked out the door.
Sneaking off was easy. As soon as our class entered the main building, Maya and I turned down the hallway that led to our classroom. We thought that we were in the clear, but when we heard Ms. Armstrong, the secretary, speaking to someone on the phone, we froze. We’d forgotten we’d have to walk past the principal’s office to get to our classroom.
“What should we do?” I whispered.
“I don’t know. You think Ms. Armstrong’s gonna see us?”
We’d gone too far to turn back now. While we couldn’t see her, we knew Ms. Armstrong always sat facing the office window, ready to take attendance sheets from students in the morning or to greet parents and visitors. She knew Maya and I by name, and would question if she saw us walking the halls together during class time.
“Let’s duck our heads when we pass by,” Maya suggested.
“Okay.”
I followed her lead, crouching just enough to pass beneath the office window without being seen. My heart thumped against my chest.
We pressed on down the hall toward our room, the pink door with Ms. Krenshaw’s name on the side. Almost by habit I reached for the cold metal handle, feeling it turn smoothly in my hand. The door was unlocked. We opened it carefully, praying the creaking wouldn’t echo down the hall, and stepped inside.
The smell came over us immediately, so awful that Maya suggested we breathe through our mouths. But we both quickly realized that to find the location of the rat, one of us would need to smell.
“Let’s do rock, paper, scissors,” Maya said. So when I played scissors and she played paper, it was decided that she would be the smeller. She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose. For a moment her face looked like she’d just tried a sip of spoiled milk, except she had to keep on drinking.
“Can you tell where it’s coming from?”
Deep in concentration, Maya began to walk around the room to figure out the source.
“I think it’s stronger here.”
We walked past the blackboard, posters, quotes, alphabet chart, the bookshelf with all our silent reading books, until finally she stopped, turning to the spot in the wall right underneath the clock, identical to the one in the portable. She approached the spot and took a breath.
“It’s really bad here,” she said, putting her nose close to the wall’s surface.
“That must be where the rat died,” I said.
“How are we gonna extract it, now?”
I didn’t have an answer, and neither did Maya. For a moment the wall seemed as sturdy as a castle in a fairy tale.
“Maybe you can kick through it,” I said. “I saw Ray do it last year.”
I told Maya about how last year in Ms. Callaghan’s class, I remembered seeing Ray kick the wall when Ms. Callaghan confiscated his Pokémon cards. I knew it could be done, though I didn’t think I’d be able to kick as hard as Ray could. “But you can.”
“You think?”
“Like kicking a soccer ball.”
Maya had just started playing on a team this year, and she was good. So good the coach ended up moving her to the boys’ team.
“Okay,” she said, excited by the thought of using her body as a weapon. To help her aim, we marked the spot where Maya smelled the rat with the dark tip of a sharpie we found in the art bin. She practiced the movement a few times before backing up to give herself room for a running start. That’s when I started overthinking everything.
“Do you think we’re gonna get in trouble for this?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “We’re just trying to help.” The doubt in her voice didn’t make me feel better. She bent her knees into a starting position, like she was waiting for the coach to blow the whistle.
“What if the rat’s not in there,” I said, but Maya didn’t hear me.
She darted forward. It was too late for second thoughts.
There was a loud boom when Maya’s foot connected precisely with the black dot, and in its place a dark opening appeared on the white wall. Maya stood back, cringing slightly at the pain in her foot, admiring her results, while I got close and peered inside.
At first I didn’t see a thing except the scattered pieces of wall, making me scared that we’d gotten it wrong, that Maya had mistaken the origin of the smell. But as I looked closer, I noticed a strange, fleshy string lying on the floor.
It was the rat’s tail.
“It’s there,” I told Maya, terrified of what would have to come next, of what was on the other end of that tail. I pictured a monster the size of a dog, its fur covered in blood and long, ugly teeth. Teeth like samurai swords, I heard Ronald’s voice say. I knew that I would have to do this part myself, and I was dreading it.
“What does it look like?” she whispered, though there wasn’t any need.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back. “I can’t see it yet.”
I thought about how I would bring the rat into view, how we would get rid of it. Then I remembered that all of us still had our set of cold weather clothes stored in our cubby holes left over from the Winter which we never bothered moving to our portable. I walked over to the cubby area, found my thick wool gloves and slipped them on my hands.
“Hold on,” said Maya, as she walked off and returned with the empty garbage can from the corner of our class. “You can throw it in here. Then we’ll take it outside and dump it in the big green dumpster.”
“Okay.”
I took a deep breath through my mouth and let it out slowly. Then, in one swift motion – the same way my mom killed spiders – I reached my gloved hand into the hole, grabbed the tail, and dragged the rat into view.
Neither of us moved as we studied the rat inside the wall. It had a small face and no teeth that I could see, with short, greyish-brown hair covering its body. It wasn’t as big or horrifying as I pictured, but so different from all those pretty things in Ms. Krenshaw’s classroom. It was nothing like the paintings on the wall, the flowers on the windowsill. Yet, in some way, it felt more real. It wasn’t part of the world that adults designed for you, but the world that truly was.
The worst part came next. As I got ready to pick up the rat, I pictured it coming alive between my fingers, to bite at my wrist and leap onto my face, latch onto my skin with its claws. I couldn’t catch my breath.
“It’s already dead, Jackie. It won’t hurt you,” Maya said.
It was like she’d heard my thoughts. Once more I readied myself to reach inside the hole. Then, before I knew it, I was holding the rat by its soft body, fear jolting its way up my arm like a thousand little ants. I heard a scream – my own, Maya’s – then a metallic plonk as the body hit the bottom of our steel garbage can.
“You did it. It’s over.”
I threw my gloves into the garbage can before Maya tied the ends of the black plastic bag. Then we carried it out through the back door of our classroom, which led outside to the green dumpster. I climbed the stepladder next to it and chucked the bag inside the huge black hole. Just like that, the rat was gone.
When we came back inside, we washed our hands at the sink. Then we decided to cover the hole using tape and a blank white sheet of paper. The colour of the paper didn’t match the wall, but we figured it was the best repair job we could do. When it was over we smiled at each other, feeling proud of ourselves. Feeling invincible.
But our smiles vanished when we heard a noise at the door. We stared at each other in panic, realizing there wouldn’t be enough time to hide, bracing instead for whatever was to come.
The handle turned, the door opened, and Ms. Krenshaw stepped inside, holding the handle of a red plastic watering can. She looked at me, at Maya.
Then we watched as her eyes drifted to the paper on the wall.
We told Ms. Krenshaw the truth.
She listened without speaking. Then, when we were finished, she sent us back to the portable to wait for the class to return from music while she stayed behind to water the plants.
Trudging back through the field, I remember a guilty feeling tingling across my whole body, weighing me down so my feet dragged across the grass.
“Do you think she’ll send us to the principal’s office?” Maya said, probably feeling the same thing I was. I wished I could’ve given her an answer.
We sat back down at our desks in silence, staring at the empty walls, the clock inching closer and closer to the end of our music lesson at two P.M. Finally, we heard our classmates’ hollow, thudding footsteps as they came up the wooden ramp outside.
When they entered the portable it seemed word had already made its way around to the rest of the students who weren’t at the lunchtime meeting. The kids all looked at us with a mixture of wonder, concern. It was Joe who approached first.
“Did you do it?”
We nodded silently. His mouth was hanging open. Even Laura looked at me and Maya in quiet awe. But before anyone could say anything, we heard another set of footsteps, heavier this time. Ms. Krenshaw opened the door and stared at our class with a look that was impossible to read.
Time seemed to stand still.
Then after the longest pause of our lives, with a completely straight face, she spoke: “I hope you didn’t get too attached to this portable, kids. Looks like tomorrow we’re moving back to our classroom.”
We did our usual end-of-day jobs which were rotated each week. Maya and I were on sweeping duty. As we cleaned, there seemed to be tension in the air which no one dared to disturb. I’m sure my classmates had a thousand questions they wanted to ask us, but Ms. Krenshaw’s uneasy silence left us all on edge wondering how angry she really was, what her punishment for us would be.
When the last bell rang Ms. Krenshaw told Maya and I to stay behind. Our classmates looked at us with grim glances, some waving with their backpacks on as they walked outside to meet their families. We sat in front of Ms. Krenshaw’s desk, hunched over, waiting for her to speak.
“Before I call your parents,” she began, “you already told me how you two did it. Now, I want to hear you tell me why.”
Our eyes met, neither of us wanting to say the wrong thing and risk getting the other into trouble. Then I saw Maya’s head dart to face Ms. Krenshaw.
“We wanted our classroom back. We didn’t want to be in the portable for weeks,” she said.
“I see.”
I felt I needed to add something to Maya’s explanation. That there was something more Ms. Krenshaw wanted to hear.
“We got tired of waiting for someone else to tie our shoelaces,” I said.
A look of confusion sprang across Ms. Krenshaw’s face. “Is that from one of the quotes I have up in my room?”
“No,” I told her. “That’s from you.”
“Is it?” she said, her expression widening into an amused smile. She stood up, and to our surprise, picked up the giant peach jar from the shelf behind her.
“Have you two ever tried school chalk?” she said as she lifted the lid and fished out a fistful of little pale candies neither of us had seen before. We shook our heads. “These are Dutch candies,” she continued. “When we lived in Amsterdam my mother had a jar of these at her house, and if we got good grades or finished all our chores she would give my sister and I each a piece of school chalk. Here.”
She handed each of us three pieces of candy, and after we thanked her we both popped a piece into our mouths. The shell was crunchy, but inside was a soft, chewy centre made of minty black licorice.
“Good, right?” Ms. Krenshaw said, chewing a piece of her own. Maya and I nodded in agreement.
We said bye to Ms. Krenshaw. Then, as soon as the door shut behind us, Maya and I looked at each other and spat out the candies into the palms of our hands, giggling as we walked off to find our parents.
The ride with my dad was normal, but when we got home I could tell Ms. Krenshaw had already phoned my mom and told her everything.
“What were you thinking, Jacqueline,” my mom said when she saw me. “You could’ve gotten a disease.”
“We were careful. I was wearing my winter gloves.”
“Now we’ll have to buy you a new pair. I don’t even know what possessed you to do such a thing.”
She was upset, and so was my dad when she told him what had happened, but they didn’t ground me for it, which was a relief. I went to figure skating practice that evening, and by the time I came back in time for dinner they even started joking about the whole thing, saying how hungry I must be after all that rat taming I did at school. I wondered how Maya’s parents had taken the news.
“Oh, almost forgot. You got a call while you were skating,” my mom said. “Your friend Joe.”
I knew I should’ve been happy. If Joe wanted to talk on the phone outside of school, it meant that he might like like me, too. I should’ve been excited to return his call, but I wasn’t, and I didn’t. I thought back to my talk with Maya when I first told her about my crush, and realized that I may have been too hasty. Maybe I just liked Joe. Maybe I wasn’t ready to get serious with any boy yet. So, instead of calling him back, I decided to take a shower and go to bed.
After I washed and dried myself off I locked the bathroom door, which was something I usually never did. I wiped the steam off the mirror and studied my face, searching for cracks.
To my surprise, I found one – or at least I thought I did – right underneath my eye.
I stroked it with my pruney fingers. Had that always been there? I wasn’t completely sure, but as soon as I saw it, I felt a strange sense of relief. Like things were happening the way they should. Suddenly I looked around and began noticing cracks in everything – between the floor tiles, the paint on the walls, the wooden cabinets. Nothing was flawless or perfect. Maybe Humpty Dumpty never wanted to be put back together, I thought.
After I changed into my pyjamas, I turned off my bedroom light and went under my covers. I lay there for a few minutes, almost at the point of falling asleep, when I was jolted awake by the sound of the door.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hey sweetie. Hope I didn’t wake you. I just wanted to say good night.”
I was quiet for a moment, building up my courage, feeling brave after today’s victory.
“Mom, if you and Dad think it’s best, I’ll go to the private school.”
She looked at me in shock. “I thought you liked your school.”
“I do. But I don’t want you and Dad to get a divorce.”
“Why would we get a divorce?”
“Well, you’re always fighting. About private school, and about money and everything.”
She smiled. “All parents fight.”
“Maya’s don’t.”
“That’s because parents don’t show certain sides of themselves around guests, but trust me, they do. No couple is perfect. You know, your dad and I just want what’s best for you.”
“I know.”
“But I like that Ms. Krenshaw. She’s taught you a lot this year, and she told me on the phone today you’re a strong student,” she said. “There’s a good chance she’ll be your teacher again next year, and if she is I think we can keep you at that school. Would you like that?”
“Yeah. I would.”
“Good.”
I paused for a moment, looking at my mother’s shadow on the carpet. “Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Last year, who was the person that jumped off the balcony?”
That took her by surprise. This time my mom was silent, weighing her words carefully.
“Joanie,” she said, quietly. “Your dad and I knew her.”
“Really?”
“Sort of. We’d met before in the elevator, at the mailbox. She was always friendly, all smiles.” She paused. “I guess we didn’t really know her all that well. Goodnight, Jackie.”
“Night, Mom.”
My mom shut the door, leaving me alone in the dark. I lay there for a while longer, thinking about Joanie. And as I started to fall asleep, another thought came into my head, strange and unexpected.
I got up and went to my closet and found the pink raincoat I’d been wearing that day. I unzipped the pocket and fished out the two remaining school chalk candies Ms. Krenshaw had given me. And although I knew I wasn’t supposed to eat anything after brushing my teeth, I put one of the candies in my mouth. This time it didn’t taste as awful. There was something so unusual about that taste that made me to want to try it again.
So I ate the last candy, too, then went back to bed. I pulled the covers over my body, soft and warm. I closed my eyes, darkness washing over me like waves over a beach, leaving on my tongue, my lips, not salt, but memories of black licorice.
