In the
forgotten timeout corner, she sat through gym class, sentenced there for not
participating. Her eyes peeked through arm-wrapped knees watching everyone pine
for just a small piece of the glory that was Orlando. She had walked out of the
gym unnoticed moments after his heroic goal.
She found it exactly where she knew
it would be. It sat on Orlando’s desk like a crown upon a throne of neatly
stacked books and paper. Its silver, no, platinum color was inlaid with
metallic blue squares and seemed to shine with its own source of light. She
held it, smooth and cool and heavy enough that she knew it was more mechanical
pencil than she could ever own. She rubbed the skin of her leg through the hole
in her pants just above her knee and pulled the blue denim apart until she
heard a small tear. One more glance around the room confirmed she was alone.
She slipped the pencil into her pocket and scurried back to gym class.
In the
classroom she wrote—triangle, triangle, triangle—three times, neatly, her best
cursive. Practice your spelling with muscle memory, Mr. Crouse had told the
class. She felt smarter with her new pencil, the point of the r, the loops of
the l and e, cross the t, dot the i, two more times.
Meanwhile, Orlando dug through his
backpack, he spilled the contents of his neon pencil box across his desk, a
glance at the floor and his effort gave way for a larger search party and the
assistance of Mr. Crouse. She heard only a few words of Orlando’s appeal—pencil…birthday…ten
dollars—and then Mr. Crouse louder, clearer, “Have you checked everywhere?” A
nod. “In your desk? Backpack? Where did you last see it?” More exasperated pointing,
nodding. Slyly, she glided the pencil into her pocket and replaced it with a
dull, eraserless, tooth-marked yellow Dixon.
She
hated Orlando. His good grades and good athletics and good friends, Orlando,
whose mom picked him up every day after school with a big smile in her bright
red car and hugged him and never yelled at him in public and spent ten dollars
on a pencil for his birthday. She was happy to see him crying as she gently
pulled the frayed denim of her jeans.
The
bell rang. School was over. Mr. Crouse claimed to dismiss quiet students first,
but she never made a sound and always went close to last, silently invisible in
her own corner of the room unrecognized even for her strengths. She approached
Orlando, still slumped over his desk after his dismissal, her hand clutched the
pencil, pushing down and piercing the seam of her pocket, she could feel the
smooth metal on her leg. “You’ll find it,” she whispered with empty sincerity
peering into his deep-brown, bloodshot eyes, the glistening memories of tears,
dry river beds, tracing his olive cheeks. He nodded and rose.
From
across the street she watched Orlando’s mom hug him, watched the woman’s smile morph
to sympathy, watched her pull him closer until he broke free and sullenly
climbed into the bright red car and they drove away, together.
She threaded the pencil through her
pocket seam, scratching her leg with a graphite line, out the hole just above
her knee. It rolled from her fingers to the ground and then she kicked it into
a storm drain. She listened for the bottom, a sound to break the emptiness, but
never heard a thing. Facing the brisk wind she walked, alone, to her cold,
lonely apartment.
