Balance of Fragile Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

against the turban. He looked small under all that hair. He was sitting on the edge of his bed reading a comic. She wanted to go in, wanted to talk, but she wouldn’t. What was he reading? A story about a rabbit samurai? She couldn’t read the rest of the cover. Ach , she wanted to enter, but she remembered hearing somewhere that it was best to give space to teens. She just hoped he wasn’t imagining what it would feel like to hold a sword in his own hands. But then she remembered his aversion to sharp objects and felt better.

Isabella
    T he stage was a collection of loosely assembled wood, nails, and glue, its floor covered in thick black paint, dulled and scratched by a thousand feet that crossed it in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Crucible . Behind the curtained walls: four metal chairs, six bowler hats, broken track lights, a working stepladder, and a podium. Stage left: a wooden cutout of a leafless willow tree painted black and gray. Stage right: petite Isabella Singh, with long black hair and caramel eyes hidden behind glasses, and sixteen-year-old Erik Fritjof, who looked like a scrawny descendant of Vikings.
    Isabella’s surroundings were standard as far as high school theaters went, but she had never been inside a real theater. The Royal Cineplex 5 didn’t count; that was where she’d sneak in the back door with a bag of sour gummy worms tucked in her pocket and stay all day long, bouncing from one movie to the next as if it was her job. This theater was different. Its smell, for one thing, was a combination of dense mothballs and Elmer’s glue. Isabella imagined that the stage was pasted together and wondered if it might collapse under the six drama club members and one rotund teacher. She estimated the distance to the exit was thirty seconds away at a sprint, and she wondered, if she ran fast enough, whether she could defy the space-time continuum and go back in time to three weeks earlier and not join the drama club.
    â€œAre we square? One more time.” Mr. Tewkesbury rubbed his belly over his red flannel shirt. Mr. Tewkesbury’s Worcester accent caused him to avoid Rs as though they were arsenic, so his square sounded like sk-way .
    Isabella adjusted the bowler hat tipped on her head. The black circle drawn over her left eye with face paint was running down her cheek. Rumor had it that the face paint was left over from when Tewks had done a stint in the circus as a clown. That was after his off-Broadway days, which he reminded his students of often. They’d been practicing the scene from Waiting for Godot because it would, as Tewks put it, help them intellectually understand his own play, 1,001 Cries , which they would be performing in three weeks. Each week, he’d cast a different actor as Vladimir or Estragon. Now it was Isabella’s turn as Estragon.
    Isabella read her line. “Where are the leaves?”
    Erik said, “It must be dead.”
    Isabella said, “No more weeping.”
    Tewks screamed, “No, no, no! You both sound like robots. Put some feeling into it. Remember what I told you earlier.”
    Isabella pushed her glasses higher on her nose. The rest of the club held its breath, too afraid to express their lack of comprehension. “Um, no, Mr. Tewkesbury. What do you mean by ‘defiling plot,’ and what does, er, something about ‘rupturing representations of reality’ mean?”
    He growled and clumsily cleaned his round spectacles on the edge of his shirt. “I knew my gift to you all would go unappreciated.” He twisted his copy of Waiting for Godot into an object appropriate for hitting students, then spread his hands and pushed outward at the students, as if through this action he could blast them all off the stage and out the rear door. “The author is a postmodernist. He is destroying the grand narrative.”
    â€œI get it, Mr. Tewkesbury. They don’t, but I do.”