Free The Fragile World by Paula Treick Deboard Page A

ladies wielding massive stainless steel serving spoons, and wandered in the general direction of my classroom. I should have been right behind them, picking up the last scraps of their trash, giving the losing team a gentle goading. That’s what I’d done every other time in the history of Egg Drop Day, but today I lingered on the roof, watching my students descend the staircase and emerge from the cafeteria into the asphalt parking lot below.
    There was no reason in the world for me to stay on that roof one more minute, but I couldn’t make myself go. I tracked my students as they crossed the lot and rounded the administration building. My room was at the northern corner of the science wing. There, I imagined, they would wait, still joking around at first and then growing antsy as they waited for me to appear.
    After a few minutes, Alex came around the corner of the administration building and started toward the cafeteria. Halfway there, he spotted me on the roof. Shielding his eyes with the flat of his hand, he called up to me, “You all right up there, Mr. K?”
    “I’m fine, Alex,” I called down.
    He came closer, considering this. “You need help with anything?”
    “Not at all,” I said. I dug in my pocket and pulled out the massive wad of keys I’d been carrying around for my entire teaching career. “Hey. You want to let them into my room?”
    “What? Really?”
    I dangled the keys before me and then flung them over the side. They fell much less elegantly than my students’ eggs had fallen, just a straight shot down. Alex made a quick dive and retrieved them. He grinned, pleased with his catch, and stared up at me again, puzzled.
    “Go on.” I waved him away. He smiled uncertainly but complied, stopping once to look back at me before disappearing out of sight.
    I stayed at the edge of the roof, which was basically flat, with only the slightest peak in the center. In all my years of Egg Drop Day, I had never noticed how I could see the entire campus from this vantage. I’d spent most of my life— twenty-eight years now—teaching here. The campus had changed in that time, of course—a new gym had been constructed, and the football field had been upgraded with million-dollar artificial turf. Portable classroom buildings stretched into the horizon. The school had computer labs now, whiteboards and ceiling-mounted projectors, security cameras and automatic-flush toilets. The kids dressed differently, sure, but they were still kids—still teenagers with the same sorts of problems: love and dating and friendship and grades and finding themselves and hating their parents and figuring out their futures. Only now they all had cell phones, omnipresent as an extra limb. If I squinted my eyes and strained into the distance, I could see students on the soccer field. Olivia had P.E. this year, although I couldn’t remember her schedule. Was she the girl chasing down the ball, her dark ponytail bobbing? No—Olivia probably wasn’t the running type. But it was comforting to believe that she was out there somewhere, doing what the rest of her classmates were doing, being a normal kid.
    It weighed on me that I wasn’t giving Olivia the same shot at a great life that I’d given Daniel. That we had given Daniel—because Kathleen had been part of that pact, too. Olivia had turned into this wise-beyond-her-years kid, funny and quirky and far too well-behaved to pass as a normal high school student. Sometimes it seemed that she was tiptoeing through life in order not to disturb me, in order to make up for the fact that Daniel had died. She deserved better, and when I was honest with myself, I knew it. She would have been better off going with Kathleen to Omaha, even if it had meant going kicking and screaming, or half-drugged on medication that wouldn’t have worn off until she got to the Rockies and there was no way back.
    That could still happen, I realized.
    Olivia could still go to Omaha. She could still get