The Pencil

                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.