Stained Glass

Dad pushed on my shoulder, gently as always, till the wooden chair underneath me creaked. I looked anywhere but forward. He’d already set up the laptop on the kitchen table with Skype open. The call was only loading.

I looked up to him, pleading, but we’d already had this conversation. He gave me a thumbs up and scurried off to the living room— so close, yet so far.

When the call began, she was sitting in her open-layout parlor, flooded with sunlight. Even through the choppy stream, palm trees visibly swayed through her open windows. Her hair was bleached by the sun, pulled back tight. The light made a halo around her head.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. 

“Hello, dear.” She smiled. “How was your summer?”

Well, our camping trip had been cut short. 

They’d found Chloe that first night, but it had taken Dad a whole day to share. I’d woken in the afternoon to him packing in silence. As soon as I was conscious enough to do so, I rose from the bed and put my stuff away, too.

He’d insisted that I ride in the passenger seat. Eris fell asleep in the back. As highway lights zoomed past, Dad reached out and put a hand on my knee. I tugged off my headphones, staring with my breath held.

“Chloe was attacked by a wild animal,” he said. “We found her under the waterfall.”

“Dead?”

Dad nodded. “Dead.”

“. . . How?”

Though Dad didn’t speak, staring hard-eyed through the windshield, his hand rose from my knee to grasp at his throat.

I was stuck in a haze the rest of the summer, my days spent in one bed or another. Some nights I had the nightmare, but mostly I was haunted by a recurring vision of finding Eleanor or Chloe or even Chelsea Wright dead on my kitchen floor, their necks torn out and smeared across the tile.

“Good,” I said.

“Good.” Mom nodded.

We fell into silence. I struggled to grasp the next topic. Dad lifted two hands over the back of the couch, counting on his fingers. 8.

“I’m, um—” I shifted in my seat. “I’m starting eighth grade soon.”

“Oh, that’s good.” She wasn’t looking into the webcam. There was a batik tapestry set up on her back wall, though it was too pixelated for me to make out the design. 

This was often how these conversations would go— even hundreds of miles away, Mom would rarely have enough motherly energy to play the part for more than 15 minutes. She fiddled with the Yin-Yang pendant around her neck, which made me think. . . 

“Do you know anything about reincarnation?”

Both parents turned to look at me like I’d grown two heads. My tiny face in the corner of the screen, before unusually pallid, began to turn red.

Once her surprise had passed, though, Mom’s expression shone. “Of course I do. Why do you ask?”

I knew there were several contributing factors to my parents’ divorce, most of which I was not privy to. But religion had certainly been a factor— Mom had gone from agnostic to adopting a mish-mash of Eastern beliefs, Tao and Buddhist and Hindu, and it had clashed against Dad’s well-ingrained culturally Catholic lifestyle. 

“I read about it on the internet.” The lie came easy, through my mouth like butter. “It sounded interesting.”

“It is.” Mom steepled her hands together. “You see, in Hinduism, they have a belief in samsara— the cycle of life, and. . .”

As soon as Mom got going, I regretted the question. For better or worse, in that moment I was no longer her daughter, but her pupil. And I hated school. 

Still, I listened. She talked about this cycle— life, death, rebirth— and karma. I thought of Eris and her confusing talk of fate and caterpillars and past lives. Maybe, if I listened hard enough, I’d be able to unpack what that was all about.

It had been stuck in my craw for a while. One night (or maybe afternoon, maybe morning— who knew?) during the interminable summer, I had tried to talk 

about it with Eris again. It was a stupid thing to do, because I already knew that I would never learn anything from her. 

She couldn’t know, even if I managed to say so, why the concept always moved something within me— as if my organs took half a step back. She couldn’t explain away my guilt in being interested, or kiss away the confusion that had burrowed into my heart.

I had been right. Eris had leaned over me in bed and pressed the palm of her hand against my bare stomach. I squirmed underneath the covers, my diaphragm attempting to contract out of her reach.

“There’s nothing to learn,” she whispered in my ear. “Is it not clear to you already?”

Embarrassed, I did not speak.

“You’re so quiet.” She laughed. “Like a little lamb.” With her thumb, ring still on, she stroked along my shoulder blade. “Do you suppose that’s what you used to be?”

“No,” I said, my voice hardly loud enough to rise over the rustle of sheets. “Obviously, I was a wolf.”

“A beautiful wolf,” Eris agreed blithely. Then, she went off again. “Your soul sticks to the one it needs to stick to. That’s what always happens— you find each other. Your soulmate.”

“Yes, Eris.” The side of my mouth was pressed against the warm covers; I was drooling a little bit.

“And so agreeable.” Her face against my back, I felt her smile.

“Am I a butterfly yet?” I stared at her curtained window, the sun pounding against the red inside of my eyelids.

Eris rolled me over so that I was on my stomach, and continued talking. I was showered with tale after tale of soulmates, lovers that found each other in whatever form they may take, as she scraped her hands up my thighs and 

“The goal, of course, is to accumulate enough karma so that you can break samsara— this is called nirvana.”

“Huh?” I blinked, pulled back into the present. “But— I thought reincarnation was a good thing?”

I’d broken Mom’s rhythm, too. She bobbed her head, like she was swishing vinegar, her mouth drawn in a tense pout.

 “I suppose it can be— just as all parts of life can carry positive or negative energies. But you don’t want to be strapped to a wheel for all eternity, do you?”

That sounded like something straight out of a punishment waiting for me in Hell.

“I guess not,” I said. 

The thought came back to me the first church visit of the new school year. I was sitting at the end of my row, red light from the stained glass window falling onto my face. I didn’t have much to do but think.

Eighth grade hadn’t proven itself any different from seventh. The class had lost a couple kids, gained one. We had a new classroom, a new teacher, and a new spot in the pews (we were now right of the aisle).

I folded and unfolded my legs. I was sitting in the perfect spot to see the side hallway that led to the bathroom, an emergency exit further down. I ground my teeth, trying not to look at Mrs. Porowski and her straight back at the other end of the row. Josh kept on shooting me strange looks. He mouthed, “Are you okay?”

I didn’t respond, digging my nails into the bench’s grooves. If I wanted to get up for any reason, I would have to ask the teacher’s permission.

Or, a traitorous voice in the back of my mind said, you could just leave. 

Tempting as it was, I remained in place a while longer. My thoughts snapped back to Hell even as I counted down the Mass beat by beat, waiting for the homily that would mark the third act.

Somehow, every moment spent in that pew was making my skin itch. The cherubs and saints all seemed to pin their gazes right down on me, as if they were both real and knew. That I was full of sin, sleeping with a girl and, worse, fraternizing with other religions.

I looked over my shoulder in an attempt to divert their imaginary gaze. Unfortunately, all I got was an eyeful of Diana’s bowed head, her hands soft and folded, her eyelashes fluttering. . . next to Sydney. 

Why????

I left for the bathroom so fast that I wasn’t certain anyone noticed. I leaned over the white sink and splashed my face with water. I let it drip back down to the bowl, but I couldn’t raise my face to the mirror. The bathroom’s crappy lighting flickered. 

Too long I remained there, crouched before the mirror, both hands gripping the cold ceramic until I was shaking. The tap water fell into my eyes, making me wince. I ran my tongue over my teeth, staring at the black grout between the tiles.

A sudden spike of cold made me shiver. Someone was heading my way. I knew it, though I didn’t know how. 

 Just my luck, that someone would’ve had to piss so soon. I dove into the first stall and locked it. If I sat on the toilet seat and hugged my legs to my chest, it’s unlikely anyone would notice me. Only psychos chose the first stall.

 The door was pushed open. It swung closed, wooshing, as a pair of white-sneakered feet in mismatched navy socks entered the bathroom.

I held my breath. At first, the feet remained locked in place. When they moved, they went to the handicap stall. But they didn’t go in— whoever they belonged to only looked inside, and sighed.

Someone was looking for me.

Probably one of the damn teacher’s pets— Sydney or Bianca, maybe Kitty. Couldn’t they just let me be for ten minutes? For all they knew, I left because of an emergency, not hooky.

The stall door banged closed as the snoop went to check the next one, with the same results.

I could almost feel her when she got to my hiding place; her fingertips ghosting the cold metal, the push, pushing at finding it locked. The door rattled, but held. She leaned right and I leaned left. A brown eye blinked in the gap between the stall door and wall, but I had tilted far afield. 

And now, I knew who it was.

Just as my vision was getting spotty from the not-breathing, Diana conceded. To the air, grasping at something like acceptance, she said, “Okay.” 

And went into the big stall.

I breathed at last, getting one last whiff of stale bathroom air before leaping off the toilet and fleeing the room, Converse squeaking. Diana let out an involuntary sound that I didn’t process.

I burst into the hall, AC blasting overhead. I ran as far from Mass as I could, until the wooden floor turned to beige carpet and the walls to popcorn. I danced down a flight of stairs two at a time, suddenly reviving my long-forgotten tap dance lessons, to the basement usually reserved for Sunday donuts. No lights were on except the ones from the hallway above, and all the tables and chairs were folded against the walls.

There had been some kind of never-ending construction going on in the building. Two mirrors were also leaning on the walls, facing each other. As the bubble of nervous excitement inside me burst, I walked between these with slow, long steps. 

Something about me was different. It was hard to place, and I had no idea when it had started. But seeing myself at multiple angles made it unavoidable; even without makeup, there were black bags around my eyes. I had shifted in bearing, a certain sickly pallor— my shoulders, from behind, had a distinctly dead slouch. I did not recognize the person staring back at me. I looked like a corpse in a plaid jumper. I tugged on my cheek to see if the inside of my eyelid was still pink.

A shadow passed the hall above, leaving me in darkness. I swung around to face the stairs just as the figure fled. I caught a glimpse of dark curls before the light returned. 

Something small clickety-clacked down the stairs. My eyes trailed its path down until it rolled, now silent, onto the carpet.  

It was a plain yellow pencil, sharpened to a wicked point. The only unusual thing about it was the band of sticky gray residue around the middle. I tapped it with my thumb. 

Duct tape? 

Early Saturday morning, Dad emerged from his cave before the sun was even up. He walked into the kitchen, wiping his glasses with the bottom of his shirt.

I looked up, as if guilty, my hand on the rim of the last dinner plate in the dishwasher. 

He paused. He took in the shelves of neatly stacked dishes, the still-wet sheen of the countertop, and me— miraculously awake.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“Nothing!”

It was early enough that the sun hadn’t quite risen. On the street outside, cars waited in a gray line, and the only living souls were the occasional elderly dog walker.

“I just, uh. . . wanted to ask you a question.”

He pulled me to the living room. “About salmonella?”

“Samsara,” I corrected him. I snapped my mouth closed, audibly, flushed with embarrassment that I had remembered that.

We sat side-by-side on the couch, his arm slung over my shoulder.

“Next time,” he said, “when you want to bribe me, you’re going to have to make breakfast in bed.”

“I’ll burn your hair off!”

“What hair?” He nudged me under my arm, where he knew I was ticklish. I laughed from that alone, even though it came out as more of a strangled squeak. It was pained.

Dad’s expression fell. “You know I’m only joking, right? You can always come to talk to me, no matter what. You don’t owe me anything.”

“I know, Dad.” I kicked my feet against the bottom of the couch. “I just wanted to talk about– to know. . . how someone goes about—”

I swallowed.

As I waited, I glimpsed the sunrise. It was peachy colored, jaundiced yellow across the fields, the concrete, the gnarled tree trunks. Our messy living room, with its dusty black flat-screen, the forgotten pile of Disney DVDs stuffed willy-nilly in plastic crates, was becoming something worth seeing.

“Like, when there’s something you have to do. And it’s hard, and you don’t want to, but you’ve gotta. . .”

“Who’s telling you to do things you don’t want to do?”

“Nobody!” I nearly shouted. “It’s— it’s not like that.”

Dad nodded grimly. “Go on.”

“It’s just. . . I owe it to someone. Big time. And I know it’s important, and the right thing to do, but it’s scary. I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”

“Can I ask what you have to do?”

I could see her here. I knew the place she always knelt, her bare knees in off-white carpet, my stomach to the floor, shuffling through picture books and printer paper and pretending we were. . . I didn’t even remember. Cats or something. Or princesses. Or best friends forever.

“I have to let go.”

“What?” Dad let out a startled laugh.

I shook the gloom out of my head, like removing cobwebs. “I mean— I have to. . . return something I took on accident.”

“Is it valuable?”

I shook my head.

“Will you get in trouble?”

“No. . .”

“Then—” He patted my shoulder. “I think you need to make like a bikini wax and tear off the strip.”

“Dad!” I laughed so fast it startled me. I fell sideways into the throw pillows. “Dad, this is serious!”

“And am I wrong? Or do you want to pull it out one hair at a time?”

I chucked the pillow at him. It hit him in the face, but didn’t hurt. His goofy grin remained.

“Well, maybe I’m into that.” I folded my arms. 

Dad leaned forward, returned the pillow by pressing it into my stomach. He took my hand. The rising sun was at such a point that it landed right where our hands met, like a spotlight left lighting what was most important in a scene.

“I know things are hard right now, Sweetie,” he said. “You have been doing so well. But it’s okay to be in pain, or to be uncertain. I hope you haven’t forgotten your old man.”

“O-of course not!”

“I’ll be here if you need help.” He patted my cheek, and I turned away. “And don’t be embarrassed, either. I’m a tough cookie.”

I could only see a sliver of his face from the corner of my eye.

“I love you, Sweetie.”

“Yeah,” I huffed. “Of course. That’s your job.”

He kissed my forehead. The light did, too. 

Once I noticed it, it was impossible to ignore. At every opportunity, Diana would sit next to Sydney. 

It wasn’t that they’d become friends— if anything, Sydney seemed more confused by this than I was. At lunch, Diana lingered at the edge of Sydney's friend group, so quiet that she was like a rabbit, slipping right under the predator’s line of sight. She always partnered with Sydney in Gym. She sat next to her in the library, no words exchanged. Sydney did her homework while Diana read a beat-up copy of Dracula, pink highlighter between her fingers.

The pencil stayed in my pocket the rest of the school week, occasionally jabbing me to remind me of my duty. It was during one of these quiet library moments that I swallowed my pride and rose from my seat. I shuffled past shelves decorated with autumn leaves, the librarian’s desk with its crooked crucifix, to the table where Sydney and Diana were busy ignoring each other.

I had words in mind. I really did. Even a simple ‘Hey, you dropped this’ would’ve sufficed. But as I walked her way, pencil squeezed in my fist, Diana looked up. Her expression bled from confusion to guilt to terror in the scrap of time it took me to reach her. She dropped her book and hid the contents with her hands, fingers spread out.

I stopped, leaving the table between us. It was just a stupid pencil. We made eye contact that seemed to stretch forever. Deliberately, I set the pencil on the table and released. It rolled and bounced against her fingertips. I waited for her to speak. 

Instead, Diana swallowed and looked away. She cast her eyes downwards and gave me a little nod. 

Really? That was it? 

She packed the pencil away, but I still wanted to speak. To ask her what the heck was up, why she was duct taping pencils together, spying on me in the bathroom, sticking around a jerk like Sydney— but the librarian had risen from her desk. She jabbed me with her glasses and told me to go sit back at my table. 

I turned away and didn’t look back.