Tiny Little Fractures

Three

It was a hot morning. I remember the air feeling so thick with moisture from the sea that it was almost hard to breathe without sucking in water. My hair and clothes were already damp with humidity as I stood outside waiting for the carpool. There was no wind. The beach never seemed to have a shortage of it, but that was a few miles west. Where I stood in the late summer sun, it was hotter than hell.

The van was white. It turned the corner reflecting the morning sun and blinding me like a beacon. My mother stood beside me with a new worry on her face and her hands clenched in her long shirt.

“Okay, here comes Doreen,” she said as she adjusted my stringy brown pigtails. “Remember what I told you. Be polite and thank her for the ride when you get to school. She’ll be back to pick you up in the afternoon, so remember what the van looks like.”

How could I miss it? There was a big Mary-Kay sticker on the side, and it was so pristinely white that my eyes had to squint just to see less of it. It rumbled along our street and stopped right out front of our house. My mom squeezed my shoulder as Doreen rolled the driver’s side window down and smiled out at us. It was barely eight in the morning, and she already had curls a mile high and a smear of perfectly hot pink lipstick on her lips.

“Hop on in, kiddo,” she said in a cheery tone that matched her bright lipstick. I didn’t want to get in the van with that strange woman. I didn’t know anything about her aside from what kind of car she drove and that she sold makeup. My mom gently nudged me toward the van.

“Thank you so much for doing this, Doreen,” she said.

“It’s not a problem at all. Monday is Doreen Day, and there’s plenty of room.” I already wanted to jump out of the car. Hopefully while in motion.

My mom pushed me toward the van again as the back door slid open with a crunching metallic sound. A kid, my age with bright eyes and greasy hair, looked out at me. He didn’t seem too happy about the early hour either. Or the driver’s peppiness. He nodded toward the van, and I climbed into the farthest back seat. The front and middle were full to capacity. Just the back bench was empty.

“Have a good day, honey,” I heard my mom say as I settled in and pulled my seatbelt on. I just grimaced at her through the window. The door slid shut again, and Doreen started the car back down the street.

“So Samantha, are you excited about your first day?” she asked as she hummed along to the upbeat Disney tune on the stereo.

“Um—I guess,” I replied.

“You’re just going to love this school. The faculty is really great, and the location is perfect. I’m sure you’ll fit right in. We have one more stop, and we’ll be right on our way.”

She sent me a smile through the rearview mirror. She didn’t seem to notice my discomfort. Either that or she just didn’t care. The Gummy Bear’s theme song came on, and she began singing along. The girl in the front seat sunk down lower as if there was nothing in the world more embarrassing than her own mother.

We stopped again on the next street over. A boy was waiting on the curb without a mother there to see him off. He must have been part of the carpool chain for quite a while. He was small then. Tiny is a better word. His blond curls were messy, and he was sitting on the curb rubbing something against his hand quickly. When the van came to a halt, he hopped to his feet and climbed right in without a word. He pushed over the kid at the door and then sat down beside me. There were no “hellos” or greetings. He plopped his Ninja Turtle backpack down between us and began digging through it. He didn’t look at me, and I did what I could to ignore him.

“Next stop, school!” Doreen said joyously from the front seat as the dark haired boy slid the door shut and got settled in again. The boy next to me rolled his eyes before hurrying to get his seatbelt on. Then he went back to digging through his backpack.

Aside from Doreen singing along to every song that came on her stereo, the car was quiet. The kids in the middle seat occasionally picked on one another by shoving and/or pulling each other into headlocks. But the girls (the one in the front seat and myself) were both silent.

Then he spoke the first words he would ever say to me.

“You still have marker on your fingernails.”

I turned to look at him and found his hazel-blue eyes burning into mine. It was his eyes that got to me. People always ask me if it was love at first sight. I was ten. In those days, ten-year-old boys still had cooties. But his eyes were round and confident and bright. He always gave you his full attention when he spoke. He didn’t waver. He didn’t look away. I found it unnerving, yet I couldn’t look away either.

“It’s against the dress code to draw on yourself,” he reminded me.

“I know. I forgot,” I replied as I rubbed my fingernail with the pad of my thumb. I had a bad habit of drawing on myself. My fingernails were usually the first place I started. He reached into his backpack and pulled out what appeared to be a wet tissue. I hesitated.

“It’s nail polish remover. My sister painted my nails last night when I was sleeping. My mom gave these to me this morning, but I didn’t have enough time to do it at home. Don’t tell anyone I have them.”

I took the tissue and sniffed it. It reeked of nail polish remover. I nodded a quick “thanks” and began to rub the marker away.

I was a nail biter growing up. My nails were just slivers embedded into my skin. They never became very long before I chewed them back down again. The marker was putting up a fight. Then the boy took the tissue from me again. He lifted my hand and began to rub the marker off. He was much better at it than I was, and his hands were soft and warm.

“I’m the only boy in my family besides my dad,” he told me, by way of explanation. “Even the dogs are girls.”

“I’m the only girl besides my mom,” I admitted.

Did I know that I was in love? No, I most certainly didn’t. I didn’t think I would ever know him better than this. At most I figured we might talk off and on while in the same carpool chain. But I never considered a friendship, let alone romance. Of course, I didn’t even think romance was anything other than a silly story back then.

Jon was a small kid. A lot of people find this hard to believe. He was puny. He had no muscle mass. He was about as tall as I was then, and that wasn’t saying much at all. He got picked on for being so small, and maybe that’s one of the reasons he turned out the way that he did. By the time we were twenty-five, he was six foot two and lean. Back then he was the weird small kid with the oversized shirt who carried nail polish remover in his backpack.

Jon once told me about the neighborhood he used to live in. I guess it was a pretty rough place. One day when he and his mom were walking home from school they were mugged by a homeless man who wanted their money and the groceries they had picked up from a corner market. Most kids would have been traumatized by such an incident. Jon viewed it as a valuable life lesson.

Instead of living in fear he began bringing two lunches to school every day, and he would meet the man by the back fence and give him his second lunch. The man would tell him stories about Vietnam and how he’d ended up on the streets. The man made Jon promise that he would never lose his compassion. He told Jon to become great, and if he did, he would never mug another person.

Since then Jon began doing that for everyone. He always packed two lunches just in case someone else didn’t have one. I had used this once or twice when my mom forgot my lunch and Jon just happened to have an extra sandwich, apple, and juice box. He always volunteered to help out when he wasn’t needed. He asked teachers to help clean up chalkboards. He helped the janitor pick up the trash off the field after recess. He volunteered to tutor for every class.

Jon got beat up a lot. He was called a geek, a nerd, a dork, a goody-two-shoes. All of those names, but that never stopped him. He would come to school with a black eye and be the first person to volunteer to help the lunch staff hand out meals. I don’t think Jon needed to meet anyone to become the person that he did. I think he was just born that way. That was just Jon. He was a giver. It brought him joy. I’d never known a more selfless person, and I guess I never would again.

“My name is Jon,” he told me as we sat in the backseat of Doreen’s van that first morning.

“I’m Sam,” I replied.

“You’re the Klein’s kid, right?”

“I am, but my last name isn’t Klein. It’s Milner.”

“Oh.”

He didn’t ask why. He never questioned it. He barely batted an eye. He knew I would tell him if I wanted to. Being the only Milner in a house full of Klein’s meant nothing to him. He just rubbed off the remainder of ink from my fingernails and stuffed the dirty wipe back into his backpack. End of story. There wasn’t a single word spoken the rest of the ride.

When we pulled up to the school, Doreen parked the van and turned to us with a smile.

“Have a good day, kids,” she said jubilantly as everyone began to file out, thankful to be out of the stuffy van with the baby music. “I’ll be back at three.”

“Steph!” I heard Jon call as the group of kids began to walk toward the building. The girl who had been sitting in the front seat turned to him. She was a pretty girl with long thick black hair and bushy eyebrows.

“Yeah?” she replied as I climbed out last.

“You and Sam are wearing the same shirt. Maybe you guys could hang out.” She looked me over. We weren’t wearing the same shirt, but they were both the Lion King, and I figured that’s what he was getting at. She shrugged.

“Yeah, sure,” she said. I looked at Jon, and he gave me a reassuring smile.

“Go on,” he said quietly, reminding me of my mother. So I hiked my backpack up and followed after her with my eyes on my feet. If this girl humiliated me, I’d have to blame Jon.

Luckily she never did. She became my other best friend, next to Jon. She was my maid-of-honor at our wedding. Her mother baked the cake. She was there for me when Jon went missing. She was there for me when they gave up the search. And sometimes I wonder if she would have been my friend at all if it wasn’t for Jon.