Free The Fragile World by Paula Treick Deboard

through it. If she wanted to watch long stretches of Hitchcock-fest on AMC, then that’s what we did, with Olivia writing things down in her Fear Journal as she went: birds, heights, dizziness, strangers on trains, trains....
    Days had passed without me thinking about Robert Saenz at all. When he was locked up, living in the hell of his own making, Saenz hadn’t deserved another minute of my time.
    But I woke up on Friday morning with a tight feeling in my chest. Not “call the ambulance” tight, but uncomforable enough that I had to steady myself against the bathroom counter for a long moment, until I could pull it together. Robert Saenz’s face swam in front of me, all fleshy chin and dead eyes. Dr. Fisher would have called what happened next a “break—” comfortable, padded-chair speak for going bat-shit crazy.
    “You all right?” Olivia had asked me on the way to school, gripping on to the door handle the way she always did, like our route was one of hairpin curves, rather than a fairly straight shot.
    “Of course.”
    “You don’t look all right.”
    I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. “What do I look like?”
    “I don’t know. You look sort of gray.”
    I gave what I hoped was a convincing smile. “Like the Tin Man?”
    Olivia frowned. “Not exactly. More like you’ve got a case of rickets or something.”
    “I think you mean scurvy. That’s the Vitamin C deficiency. But I don’t know if it actually turns you gray.”
    “Great. Then you have some kind of undiagnosed illness that no one has been able to name yet. Thanks, Dad. Major consolation.” She dug in her backpack and came up with her journal.
    Ordinarily, I would have had another joke at the ready. Olivia and I had developed, in these past, lonely years, a sort of Abbott and Costello routine with each other, as if everything were a joke, as if our problems were basically just ways of trying out new material on each other. Some days I suggested we take our show on the road. But now I turned on the radio, raising the volume a few notches to drown out the words in my head: After serving sixty-three percent of his court-ordered sentence...
    First period physical science was a blur: take roll, collect papers, write key terms on board. Then my second period physics students arrived with noisy enthusiasm: it was Egg Drop Day, our annual competition to drop raw eggs in carefully constructed cages from the cafeteria roof to the ground fifteen feet below. Ordinarily, it was one of my favorite teaching days of the year. I had been known to greet my students in a white T-shirt with a smear of fresh yolk across the front. It was a new shirt every year, and I’d embellished it with a Sharpie: “Oops” one year, “Your Egg is My Breakfast” another. This year I’d forgotten.
    I pretended to marvel at my students’ creations: eggs in toothpick cages, eggs riding in Styrofoam canoes, eggs dressed as babies in cotton diapers. We walked en masse to the cafeteria and the class split into teams. I monitored the dropping of eggs from the roof while Alex, my Berkeley-bound T.A., judged their landing from the ground.
    The competition moved along on schedule: the preliminary rounds with the heartbreak of early elimination, the tense drops during the semifinals and at last, a face-off between my two best students that ended with a dramatic finish as one egg came free of its wrapping during descent and hit the ground with a sudden stain of yolk. With all the screaming and cheering and congratulatory crowd-surfing, it might have been the pep rally before the first football game.
    “All right—we clean up, and everyone heads back inside. Bell’s about to ring,” I called down, shielding my eyes from the bright, piercing blue of the sky. The few students who remained on the roof were vowing revenge, if life should ever allow them another Egg Drop Day. One by one they went down the staircase to the lower level of the cafeteria, past the hair-netted