Not Quickly Broken

by Cronk, LN

  “What was that all about?” she asked after I’d slammed my door shut.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, obviously it was about something,” she said, staring at me. “Who was that?”

  “None of your business,” I said, refusing to look at her.

  “Are you crying?” she asked, incredulous.

  “No,” I said defensively, putting my keys in the ignition and starting the truck. The stupid dome light finally faded away.

  “Yes, you are,” she argued. “What in the world is wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I insisted. “I’m fine.”

  “Well, obviously not,” she said as I pulled back out onto the road. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s wrong? You’ll probably feel better if you talk about it.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “I mean,” she went on, “I think that if you just–”

  “Charlotte,” I cut her off, raising my voice a lot more than I meant to. “For once in your stupid life, would you please just SHUT-UP?”

  And then – for the first time since she’d climbed into the cab of Tanner’s truck – Charlotte closed her mouth.

  At least I had said please . . .

  I looked at her now.

  “I really am sorry,” I told her again. “I was just having a rotten day.”

  “It’s okay,” she assured me, still smiling. “I’m glad things got better.”

  “Who says they got better?”

  “They didn’t get better?” she asked.

  I gave my head a little shake and looked away.

  “What happened?” she asked quietly, tilting her head to one side.

  “I still don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Still?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t want to get yelled at again or anything,” she said hesitantly, “but you really might feel better if you talk about it.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to try,” she suggested.

  I looked at her for a moment.

  “My girlfriend broke up with me,” I finally told her.

  “Over the phone?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s lame,” Charlotte murmured. Then she paused before adding, “I didn’t even know you had a girlfriend.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I mean, I don’t remember you going out with anyone.”

  “She lives in Chicago,” I explained.

  “Oh.” She paused. “I guess that’s why she broke up with you over the phone.”

  I nodded again.

  “How’d you meet some girl from Chicago?”

  “She used to live here.”

  “Who?”

  “You remember Rhiannon?”

  She thought for a moment. “That chick with the long braid?” she finally asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “But didn’t she move away like in the eighth grade?” Charlotte exclaimed.

  “Ninth.”

  “You’ve been dating someone who lives five hours away for two years?!” she cried.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No wonder she broke up with you,” Charlotte muttered. “I can’t believe it lasted that long.”

  “Gee, you were right,” I said sarcastically. “Talking about this has made me feel loads better. Can we stop now?”

  “Sorry,” she said earnestly, tipping her head at me again.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I sighed, shaking my head.

  “You need to get yourself a new girlfriend,” Charlotte said. “Someone who lives in Cavendish.”

  “No thanks,” I said, slouching down and leaning my head back against the couch. “I’ve decided I’m going to become a monk.”

  “You’re not Catholic,” she laughed.

  “I’m going to convert.”

  She laughed again and handed me back my calculator.

  “Well, I guess I’d better get going,” she said, slipping her own calculator into her purse. “You don’t want a ride?”

  “Naw,” I said. I dropped David’s calculator into the front pocket of my book bag. “Thanks.”

  “Okay,” she said with a little wave of her hand. “I’ll see you next Wednesday.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “See ya.”

  ~ ~ ~

  THAT NIGHT I lay awake and thought about Rhiannon. Of course I pretty much did that every night, but usually my thoughts involved daydreams that she was on her way to Cavendish to see if I would possibly take her back, or fantasies that I was driving up to Chicago to pummel her new boyfriend.

  Tonight was different, though.

  Tonight, I found myself thinking about what Charlotte had said.

  You’ve been dating someone who lives five hours away for two years?! No wonder she broke up with you.

  I wondered about that. Was Charlotte right? Had it been ridiculous for me to think that a long distance relationship like that was ever really going to last?

  I had met Rhiannon during the first week of junior high, when we were in the seventh grade. We’d had Language Arts together and our teacher had paired everyone in class up with someone so that we could work on a project together.

  We were supposed to interview each other and then write up a paper to introduce our partner to the rest of the class. We also had to make a poster about the other person. The teacher said it was a good way for us to get to know each other, but it seemed to me that she just didn’t want to teach class for about three days.

  Anyway, Rhiannon and I got paired up together and I was immediately miserable. There were about five guys in class that I already knew from elementary school and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t have gotten paired up with one of them. The last thing I wanted to do was to tell some girl I didn’t even know how dysfunctional my entire life was.

  “I’m Rhiannon,” she said after we’d pushed our desks together.

  “Jordan.”

  She looked at the list of recommended interview questions that the teacher had given us . . . I looked at her.

  Rhiannon had braces and bangs and a long braid of brown hair that fell down her back. Loose strands of hair were falling around her face. She was wearing a pink Snoopy and Woodstock t-shirt, a plastic bracelet with a something stamped into it, and a cross necklace. She looked up at me and gave me a smile which – considering the braces – was a pretty nice smile.

  “Do you want to ask me questions first?” she asked. “Or do you want me to ask you questions?”

  Still not in a hurry to tell her anything about my life, I immediately answered, “I’ll ask you first,” and she agreed.

  Rhiannon was born in Detroit, but had lived in Cavendish since she was seven years old. She had three younger siblings – a sister, who was ten, and a sister and a brother, who were six-year old twins. Her mother stayed at home and her father was a financial advisor. They went to the big church across from the courthouse and her mom was a Sunday school teacher there. They went to Myrtle Beach every summer for ten days and it was her favorite thing to do. She wanted to be a teacher when she grew up and a mother, but not both at the same time. She played the violin. She had two cats and a dog, but the dog was getting old and was having a hard time getting around – she worried that they were going to have to put it down soon. Her favorite food was pizza. She liked to cook, but wasn’t very good at baking bread or making pies yet. (But her mom made the best pies in the world and said that it just took a while to get the hang of it.) For the bread, they didn’t use a bread maker, they kneaded it by hand. The bread had to rise overnight and then get punched down in the morning and rise again the whole next day. It was really good.

  When she finally finished I just stared at her, unsure how I was going to follow all that. Somehow the truth didn’t seem like a very good option.

  My dad walked out on us about a year ago and we hadn’t heard from him since. Of course before he left, my parents had fought so much that the neighbors had actually called the
police on two different occasions, so maybe it wasn’t all that bad that he was gone, but anyway. We didn’t have any clue where Dad was and he never sent child support or anything, so we never had enough money to go on vacations and my mom (who was a nurse) worked overtime whenever she could, just to pay the bills. I cooked too, but only because Mom was always so tired that she never had time or energy to do anything around our house (which, not coincidentally, was a dump). I had never made bread – not even with a bread maker. I had two older brothers. Chase was in high school, but that probably wasn’t going to last much longer because it was only a matter of time before he either got kicked out for doing drugs, put in jail for driving drunk, or flunked out for being stupid. Tanner was a P.E. teacher here at our school, but he really wanted to be a coach at the high school. In the meantime, he was shacking up with some girl named Megan that he’d met at the bank.

  Yeah . . . that all sounded real good.

  “What do you want to tell me about yourself?” Rhiannon asked.

  Nothing.

  “Well,” I said, “umm, I really like sports a lot. Baseball’s my favorite.”

  “What position do you play?”

  “Pitcher.”

  “Really?” She looked impressed. She wrote that down.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been playing since I was three.” She wrote that down too, so then I gave her all my stats. By the time I was finished she knew every sport I’d ever participated in and every position I’d ever played. She had a whole sheet filled up and I hadn’t even had to mention my family yet.

  “What do you want to do when you grow up?” she asked.

  “Play baseball.”

  She nodded and wrote that down too. I actually wasn’t sure if I wanted to play baseball for a living or not, but Tanner had been pushing that dream pretty hard for a couple of years now and it wasn’t as if I had any ideas of my own.

  “What do your parents do?” she asked.

  “My mom’s a nurse,” I said.

  “A nurse. Okay. What about your dad?”

  I hesitated.

  “He used to work for the Department of Transportation,” I finally said, “but I don’t know what he’s doing right now. He left us a year ago and we don’t have any idea where he’s at.”

  “Oh, okay,” she nodded. She brought her pencil to her paper to write that down, but then stopped. She looked up at me. “Do you want me to put that on here or would you rather I just not even bring it up?”

  “Don’t bring it up,” I said quietly.

  “Okay,” she said. “No problem.”

  She looked at me again.

  “I won’t put anything down unless you want me to,” she assured me, and I felt myself relax.

  “Do you belong to a church?” she went on.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t remember when the last time we went was.”

  “Do you want me to write that down?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She nodded.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I said quickly, “I like church.”

  She nodded again.

  I really did like church. Ever since I had been a little boy, I’d liked the feeling I got whenever I went there. I liked the huge stained glass window with the picture of Jesus holding a tiny lamb and I liked the videos they played with the pictures that flashed across the screen that made you think about what the words at the bottom were really saying. I liked the thought that (even though my dad and brothers would constantly sit next to me, tugging at their collars and fidgeting, as if spending an hour in church was the most unreasonable use of time they could imagine) I was in a room where there might possibly be other people who felt the same way about God that I did.

  For as long as I could remember, I had always loved God. I had always known that He was there and I had always talked to Him and I had always cared very much about what He thought of me. I didn’t have anyone in my life to talk to about God or anything so I didn’t exactly have things all figured out yet, but I was definitely trying.

  I felt alone in that aspect of my life . . . well, actually I guess I felt alone in most aspects of my life. Everyone else seemed to be chasing after different stuff than I was. I didn’t really mind the alone part, but sometimes when I saw how other people seemed to feel about God, well . . . I don’t know any other way to describe it except to say that it made my heart hurt.

  The teacher told us to pack up our things and move our desks back where they’d come from.

  “I like church,” I hurriedly told Rhiannon again, as she closed her notebook. “It’s just that we hardly ever go.”

  Rhiannon slipped her notebook into her bookbag, looked at me, and nodded one more time.

  The next day, Rhiannon showed up to class with a folder full of pictures of me that she had found online. I had always been pretty good in sports and, consequently, over the years, there had been lots of articles with my name mentioned in them, accompanied by lots of photos.

  Seeing Rhiannon, sitting there with her stack of pictures, I panicked. How was I going to get pictures of her for my poster without hurting her feelings? The thought of searching for pictures of her online had never even crossed my mind and, besides that, I didn’t even remember her last name. Plus, honestly, did you get your picture made for playing the violin or for baking bread without the use of a bread maker?

  I looked at her, unsure of what to say.

  “Here are some pictures of me,” she said, handing me a flash drive. “I put a bunch on there so you could just pick whatever you want.”

  I took it from her and smiled at her and then she smiled back.

  She really did have a great smile.

  We slid our desks together again and chatted easily while we worked on our posters for over an hour. At the end of class, while we were packing up to go, Rhiannon suddenly looked at me.

  “I wanted to tell you something,” she said quietly so that no one else could hear.

  I looked up from my book bag at her.

  “I mean, I just . . .” she glanced down at her feet quickly and then back at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You know how you told me that your dad left?”

  I gave her a little nod.

  “And that you don’t know where he was and everything?”

  I nodded again.

  “Well,” she said, giving her shoulders the tiniest of shrugs. “I just wanted to let you know that I prayed for him last night.”

  That was the kicker.

  In Rhiannon I finally found someone that I could talk to and someone who felt the same way about things that I did. Before long I had told her everything about my family and was amazed at how incredible it felt to know that somebody else besides me was praying for these people that I loved.

  I had been really little when my grandmother – my mom’s mom – had told me who Jesus was. It was something I had always been grateful for, but Grandma had died when I was in the second grade and, since then, there’d been no one to really teach me more about Him.

  Rhiannon, on the other hand, had grown up surrounded by a lot of people who put God first in their lives and who had taught her to do the same. Because of this, she had a whole lot more stuff figured out than I did, but she never talked down to me or made me feel like I was an idiot or anything. She told me what she knew and told me what she still didn’t understand. And when I told her about my heart hurting sometimes, she knew exactly what I meant.

  By spring I asked her if she would go out with me. Of course by that time we were already texting each other constantly and spending all of our time together anyway and declaring that we were dating didn’t really change anything (because the fact of the matter was that we were only in the seventh grade and – at that age – going out doesn’t look a whole lot different than just being friends). But at least we were official.

  We went to a school dance together in April and by the end of the evening we finally got up the nerve to slow dance with
each other. After that we dared to hold hands periodically and whenever we said goodbye, we always hugged.

  I know it sounds corny, but the first time I ever kissed Rhiannon was on a Ferris wheel. It was the summer after seventh grade and her parents had let me go along with their family to the State Fair. That night, the two of us waited in line to ride the Ferris wheel together because I had never been on one before. It was almost an hour before we finally climbed into our seat. We were the last car that needed to be filled, so after the person in charge of the ride clanged the bar down in front of us, it took off at a rapid pace. Our seat tipped back as we took off into the darkness and Rhiannon and I reached for each other’s hand.

  As the ride went faster we could see the neon glow of the vendors and the rides streaking past all around us, the red and white lines of cars on a highway nearby, and the glowing lights of buildings in the city, far off in the distance. Up at the top, the noise of the fair would disappear, but then it would suddenly rush back to us as we descended to the bottom once again. I hadn’t ever imagined that a Ferris wheel could be so thrilling.

  It was up at the very top that I kissed her, at the end of the ride, while we were stopped so that a car at the bottom could unload. Our car was tipping back and forth in the gentle wind and a loose strand of hair was blowing across her face. I reached out to brush it away, and then – without really thinking – I leaned forward and softly touched my lips to hers. There was something extremely tender and innocent about that moment, and never again would I be able to taste cotton candy without remembering it. My first, sweet kiss.

  I had always thought that Rhiannon was pretty, but when her braces came off that winter she quickly moved beyond pretty and into the realm of beautiful. Other things were changing too, and by the time her parents took us to the fair the following summer, our kisses had lost their innocence (but not their sweetness), and I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I loved Rhiannon more than anything in the world.