Disillusionment

Jessie swung her legs back and forth, banging her calves against the bottom of the bright orange seat. She glared at the apples and stars and happy stick-figured people stapled to the cork-board walls with a mixture of anger, frustration, and something deeper that she would later learn was hate. There was no other place in the grand map of her world that had walls quite like this. She knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any space this happy-looking had to be evil. She had been trying to avoid looking at the door, but looking at this was far worse.

She fiddled with the buckle of her overalls and changed her focus, doing everything she could to look away from the wall of cheer or the ominous door, behind which someone else was surely changing her life. She instead looked at the focused woman behind the cheap metal desk that rang loudly whenever the woman hit it on accident with the arm of her spinning chair. Next to her, playing with a stapler, was a boy her age. Did he get in trouble, too? She stared at him, made curious by his messy hair and baggy T-shirt. He looked up, right at her.

“Are you a fairy?” he asked. He waved the stapler at Jessie.

Jessie let go of her overall button. “What?”

“I said,” he put down the stapler and pulled himself half-way onto the desk, arms thrown forward and grasping for balance, “are you a fairy?”

“No.” Jessie frowned and pouted toward her lap.

“What about a dwarf? Are you a dwarf?”

This time she ignored him completely. She crossed her arms and curled inward.

“I knew it!” he exclaimed and slid down the desk, back toward ground, leaving the stapler behind. “Mrs. Edwards, I found a dwarf!”

Woman-at-the-desk took the stapler off the table and clicked it down on some miscellaneous papers.

The boy looked like he was going to run at Jessie, but the ominous door opened and he stopped, shifting his focus to where hers was unwilling to go. “Thank you so much,” she heard from out of sight. “Of course, this won't happen again.” Oxford loafers stepped into Jessie's line of view. “Come on, Princess. Time to go.” She wasn't a princess anymore.

“Yes, Daddy.” She hopped to the ground and fell into step behind him, leaving behind the door, woman-at-the-desk, and the boy with the messy hair.

♣

The best place to play in the playground was on the other side of the field. No one knew about it because they were all too busy throwing balls on the blacktop and fighting for a seat on the swings, but in the furthest corner of the playground was a little patch of perfect: A bench, a whole slew of blooming clovers, and an old dogwood that rained white-pink petals in the spring. Jessie curled up by the base of the trunk, hands buried in the blooming clovers and proceeded to pluck them.

“Hey, it's the dwarf!” Jessie's head darted up and twisted from side to side, looking for the boy. “Up here!” Hiding in the folds of the branches was the boy, hair still messy, shirt (now yellow) still baggy, pants torn and beaten from too much unhindered play.

“You're the stupid boy,” Jessie mumbled audibly.

“That was mean; I'm not a boy. I'm a dragon.” He jutted out his foot in an attempt to get down, failed at getting his footing, and pulled it back.

Jessie rolled her eyes. “Okay.”

“This is my land! You may dwell here, so long as you don't come into my fortress!”

“That's fine.” Jessie plucked a clover and examined its little petals, bits of dust escaping the stem. She stuck her nail into the base, piercing past the skin, until a needle-eye shape had formed. Then, she grabbed another piece of clover, just as frail and strangely beautiful as the first, and threaded the stem through the newly formed hole of the first.

The boy had found his footing while she wasn't looking and had worked his way down to the lowest branch. “What are you doing?”

She ignored him and focused on her process: stabbed the stem of the new clover, threaded the next through, a system built into her muscle memory. He hopped down and crawled in close, beast-like, and examined her chain as it grew, blossom by blossom. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn't figure out what it is she was trying to do. He asked again, with more force this time. “I said, what are you doing, Dwarf?”

She almost smiled. Almost. “I'm making a flower crown.” Just like her mother taught her, large, elegant hands covering her own as they crafted precious wilting jewelry as one person.

“Why were you in the principal's office yesterday?” the boy asked. He picked up his own clover and tried to copy her.

Jessie shrugged, threaded another flower. “Why were you?”

“Class is boring,” he said matter-of-factly, nose up in the air. He broke the end of the stem with his nail, accidentally ruining the hole. “I'm a dragon, so I know everything. I don't need to learn math.”

“If you're a dragon who knows everything, then why don't you know why I was there?”

“But I do know.” He dropped the clover, giving up, and turned his full attention toward her. The boy scrunched up onto his toes, curled in tightly, ready to pounce, and leered at her. Jessie noticed that he was missing one of his canine teeth, a new one on the verge of poking through. “I thought it would be more polite to let you tell me.”

“Oh? Then why was I there?”

“You, Jessie, were in a fight.” She frowned and pushed him away so harshly that he lost his balance and rolled backwards, a tumble of too-loose clothes and giggles. Jessie looked down at her hands. The chain had ripped – she hadn't been thinking.

Whatever, she thought, and stood up. Recess was almost over anyway.

♣

Jessie didn't think about going back to her little corner until Friday, by which time her anger had died down enough to give her a sense of clarity. Better to deal with him than everyone else, she reminded herself and proceeded toward her corner. Anyway, she was dressed nicely today and she needed to stay clean, so she didn't feel like talking to anyone right now.

As she expected, the boy was up in the tree, just as before, a pile of clovers in his lap. He still hadn't figured out the blossoms yet.

“You're back,” he said, not looking up from his failed crafting.

Jessie placed a hand on the bark but made no move to climb it. “How old are you?”

“A bajillion years old.”

“That's not a number.”

“Yes it is.”

“Fine.” She sat down at the base and stared up at him. “What's your name?”

“Alioucious.”

“No it's not.”

“Fredrifikus.”

She gave up and crawled over to her little spread of clover blossoms. The collection was looking thinner today and little scraps were lying around – probably where the boy had been trying to construct a chain of his own. Now that the most obvious patches of white had been depleted, the 3-leaf clovers caught her eye.

“I'll make you a deal: If you say I'm a bajillion years old, I'll tell you my name.”

She looked up at him, one clover in each hand. “What?”

“You have to say it.” She didn't really care. She just wanted to thread her clover blossoms in peace.

She had nothing better to do. “Fine. You're a bajillion trillion years old.”

“Now that's just mean! I'm not that old.” He crossed his arms and nearly lost his balance in the dogwood tree.

“Just a bajillion, then.”

He smiled the same off-kilter smile that made her so uncomfortable. “Cool. I'm Ari.” He picked up a clover from his lap-pile and tried to make a hole, but broke the whole through again. On the next one, he decapitated the blossom from gripping too hard. “You have to teach me how to do this.”

“I thought you knew everything,” she said and just for show, perfectly threaded three of her own in a row.

“I know how it goes. I can't do it though. It's because I'm not normally a boy. I can't control these fingers.” To make a point, he tried to pick up one of the flowers and his hand started shaking so badly that he couldn't grip for long.

“So then you're normally a dragon?”

“Now you get it.” He tried switching dominant hands and tried to puncture the stem with his left but couldn't even aim this time. Jessie doubted he was ambidextrous.

♣

Jessie's dress was still clean by the end of the day and she had avoided the principal's office. Her teacher said (when Jessie wasn't supposed to be listening) that she was starting to recover. Things were looking up. She was becoming adjusted to her situation. Jessie didn't think she was becoming adjusted to anything. She just didn't like the principal's office. She told this to Ari.

“But it's fun in there. Think of it as an adventure.”

The two of them were sitting together, waiting for Jessie's father to come pick her up from school. Other kids were talking, trading notes and stories from the day, but she was too tired. Flower petals fell from the dogwoods and the cherry blossoms and she thought she was going to sneeze. “I don't get it.”

Ari had gotten a hair cut – buzzed down enough that it was impossible to look messy. Instead, he looked nearly bald. Jessie hated it. Bald people were ugly.

“But there's all these people who come in.” He pointed a finger at one boy showing off a baseball. Jessie was pretty sure his name was Jim. “See him? The grinning one? He was in the office crying because someone said his older brother was a no good loser. And that girl?” His focus shifted to a tiny little thing in a hat and a blush. “Her mom told her she's too fat, so she stopped eating and fainted during gym.”

“Oh.”

“See? They're the interesting ones, the ones with a story.” Jessie's dad pulled up in his SUV, the tinted windows shadowing his face. It could have been anyone in that car. She hesitated and turned to Phil, who awkwardly patted her on the shoulder. “You're interesting, too.”

♣

Weekends had become the hardest at home, especially Fridays. Friday nights were family night. They were supposed to be. It was hard for Jessie to get in the car at the end of the day and remember that they weren't going directly home, but instead to the place where things were sterile and smelled like her grandmother. There was nothing happy about the hospitals, especially when you were 8 years old and wearing a dress too pretty to play in. Suddenly Jessie was somebody to be pitied by every non-person who walked by. They weren't helpful, they were pity-robots, sent to remind her of how bad she should feel. And then there was her mother, always smiling. Jessie brought a crown of clovers, like she did every week, and put them on her mom's head. Sometimes she prayed before she went to bed that her mother would grow flowers from her head and twist them into a bouquet-filled bun. Instead, her mother's scalp was barren, a drought had come upon her. She didn't like seeing any of these things.

♣

On Monday, Jessie's father dropped her off way too early. From the back seat, all she could see were his twitchy hands and the top of his scalp as he insisted that things would get better soon and that this was only temporary. But this wasn't what temporary meant to her. Temporary was something she could wipe away with the sweep of an eraser. She couldn't erase the empty hallways or the soggy cafeteria breakfast. She picked at her T-shirt and stared out the nearby window, trying to pretend her food was a feast. The eggs were too gross for words.

Jessie stood at the base of the dogwood tree and looked up. Ari was almost unreachable, barely visible beyond the eternally falling blossoms, but she could still spot him if she tried. “I see you're back, young one,” he shouted. “You seem troubled.”

“You don't know everything, do you?” she asked. Declared. Her words crashed like the storm of petals.

“I do,” he said with certainty. Jessie wanted to see wings spread out from his back and encompass the world.

“Then can you make everything better? Can you make her better?”

“I can. I'll give you all the answers, if you believe I can.” She could feel the mystery drawing her in. For a second, she did believe.

Jessie dropped her backpack on the ground and felt it scrape against her leg. At her mother's request, she had slipped one of her favorite books into her backpack, a fairytale they used to read together during the time before. It was about a princess who saved the world from a magical beast. Jessie would sit in her father's lap while her mother read, and all of them would just be. But that was before. Now, with her knapsack zipper half-opened, she could see it peeking out, whispering promises to her that she knew it couldn't keep. There were no more princesses. The smell of hospital filled her lungs. They were just kids.

“No,” she said calmly.

The wind picked up, but she continued to look on until the blossoms covered him completely. She looked down into her clover patch, where clovers weren't growing anymore.