Page 12 of The Glass Girl

“Don’t worry about it,” I say, trying to be all business, getting out my school laptop and firing up our PowerPoint. “Did you finish typing the paper?”

Dawn nods.

Lemon stretches out in his chair, knotting his hands behind his long hair. He smells distinctly of weed. “Bella got hella wasted at Luis’s party three weeks ago and totallylost it,” he explains to Dawn.

Dawn frowns slightly, which kind of ticks me off. I don’t want her feeling sorry for me. No one needs to feel sorry forme.

Cherie says, “Knock it off, Lemon. Like you’ve never had a broken heart.” She puts her hand on mine.

I can feel my face getting red.

“Lost what how?” Dawn says.

Lemon looks at Dawn. “You know, breakup bullshit. Booze plus breakup equals emotional implosion.” He makes a sound like a bomb going off. The old people sitting a few tables over give us a couple ofShhs.

He makes a face at them and then leans close to me. “You know, Hella Bella, I’m available. I can pick up those painful pieces and glue you back together. Don’t underestimate the healing power of the Lemon.”

“You wish, Lemon. I think I’ll stay smashed up if you’re my alternative.”

Dawn and Cherie giggle.

“Speaking of smashed,” Lemon says, “you mind if I go outside and chill for a few minutes before we start this bullshit? I need to take the edge off.”

We watch him get up and amble to the front door.

“He’s just going to light up? Right outside the publiclibrary?” Dawn says.

Cherie shrugs. “That’s his thing. Everybody has a thing, I guess. Don’t you have a thing you do to like, de-stress?”

Dawn looks uncomfortable for a minute, that look somebody gets when they’re thinking about saying something and they aren’t sure whether to say it. Mouth pursed, eyebrows close together. That look.

Finally, she just says, “I needlepoint. Geeky, I know, but it makes me feel better.”

“That’s cool,” I say, because she looks weirdly nervous, like Cherie and I are going to laugh at her, which, judging from the look on Cherie’s face, might actually happen, so I distract Cherie by angling the laptop in her direction and pointing to a slide ofAphrodite of Knidos.“Let me guess. The ones that are misspelled are from Lemon?”

The text for the slide saysstatutoryinstead ofstatuary.

Cherie makes a face. “Actually, I think that was me. Sorry. I’ll fix it.” She starts typing.

Aphrodite is naked, ornude,as our art teacher, Ms. Green, prefers we say, holding some kind of draping and covering herpubis,another word that makes our class laugh. Aphrodite has just taken a shower, I think, and I remember that her pose is contrapposto, which sounds like a dish you’d get at Olive Garden. I tell Cherie to add that in and spell it out loud for her. I love this part of our class because the statues remind me of my grandma’s photographs, not just the ones of my mom when she was younger but the ones she did much later, after her years of photographing musicians and artists and being a famous person herself. Older women, posed against the sky in the desert outside Tucson, their bodies seemingly fixed in time, beautiful and strong, like they know they matter. These statues have been through wars and plunder and maybe have lost noses or arms and legs, but still, they remain. They can’t be erased or replaced.

They aren’ttoo much.

Dawn says, “Hey, what’s wrong?”

Cherie stops typing. “Oh, Bella, oh, no, are you okay?”

I wipe the tears from my face quickly with the hem of my flannel shirt. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Breakups are hard,” Dawn says slowly. “Once, I—”

“Her grandma died, too,” Cherie whispers to Dawn. “It happened right—”

“Oh my god,” I say loudly. “Can we juststop?”

The old people at the next table say “Shush!” in their own loud way.

“Shushyourself,” Lemon says as he moseys by them. He drops so hard into his chair that he knocks our table. His eyes are pink and he reeks. “What did I miss?” He checks his own laptop, scrolling through the slides of classical Greek statuary on our project page.

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