Glass Girl (A Young Adult Novel)

by Laura Anderson Kurk

Copyright 2013 by Laura Anderson Kurk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover design by Angela Llamas

Published in association with MacGregor Literary Inc.,

Portland, Oregon

For Alan, Amelia, and Anderson

Love never fails.

Life rarely gives second chances.

If you’re reading
Glass Girl
for the first time, you won’t know that this is a revised edition of a book released in 2010. I’m glad you’re here. You honor me.

If you read the original version, welcome back. You’ll notice some changes. Good ones, I hope. My goal in revising
Glass Girl
and releasing it again was to reach a broader audience—readers who might not have found the book before because it had been narrowly categorized and difficult to find. The heart of the story is still there. Only, it’s bigger. You’ll see. Read on.

“I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”

—Tennessee Williams

W
yatt told me once that if tenderness were a disease, I’d be terminal.

“You’re just a little glass girl,” he’d murmur every time I blushed or cried or stared too long at someone.

I didn’t mind it so much. The point was he knew that one day I’d break—not my heart, but all of me. I suppose he was right. I feel physical pain when I see a stranger hurting. When it’s someone I care for, I come undone.

Robin, my counselor, had been trying to fill the fissures that opened on the day Wyatt died. Her voice no more than background noise, she tried to coax me into talking. I usually did my best to block her, but something she said at the beginning of this session slipped in, called to mind a memory as sharp as razor wire, and suddenly I was there again—in a happier time and place. I was little, and Wyatt sat next to me, all warm and alive.

“Meggie, you’re drooling on me! You’ve gotta wake up. Meg, we’re here.” His whispered words smelled like the waffles he’d had for breakfast.

I couldn’t have been more than seven on this vacation because I’d just finished the first grade. Wyatt was ten and tall for his age. People treated him like he was much older, and he usually rose to the occasion.

Dad got a wild hair and decided his East Coast family needed to see the South. So we’d driven a rented black Suburban from Pittsburgh to Nashville, Tennessee. Mom insisted that if he planned to torture us like that we had to at least stay somewhere decent. We ended up at the Tennessean Hotel, a garish testament to the fact that Nashville considered itself the Hollywood of the South.

Every hotel employee patted my head and told me I would be blown away by the laser light show. I started believing them. The first night, after my bath, I begged Mom and Dad to let me stand outside our door to watch the show to beat all shows.

Even at seven, I knew it was overplayed. Locals crowded into the atrium waiting for it to start. Then the lights went low, the fountain started dancing, and a few lasers changed the color of the water in a predictable pattern. Somebody banged out a patriotic song on a white baby grand.

Misplaced histrionics—that’s the only way to describe the crowd’s reaction.

“Mom, haven’t they been to Niagara Falls?” I clearly remember asking.

“It’s human nature to make a big deal out of something if you’re told it’s a big deal,” she’d whispered. “You just remember to let your own mind form your opinions.”

I’ll never forget the look in her eyes as she pressed her finger to my temple.

I didn’t ask to see the show after that night.

That memory wasn’t the one eating at my heart. On our second day in Nashville, Dad insisted we go to the local theme park. Wyatt and I thought it had potential—he was into roller coasters and I was into cotton candy.

We pulled into the parking lot that morning, ready to hit the gate as soon as it opened. It was July, and every paved surface in Nashville steams in July. I could already smell the asphalt around us heating up as Wyatt handed me the sun-block and bug spray. I copied the way he put them on himself.

Loaded down with maps, cameras, and illegal water bottles, we piled out of the car and started the mile-and-a-half walk to the park gate. Ahead of us, I could see a crowd gathered around an older red pickup truck. I worried that they were looking at a dog that had been left in the truck in this heat. The spectators jeered at whatever was in the truck’s bed.

Wyatt told me to put my hands over my ears, and I did, but I left slits on each side between my fingers. I never wanted to miss anything important.

Male voices whined in the heat.

“Hey, big girl, did they drive you to town and forget about you?”

“What’s your dress made out of? A hot air balloon?”

“There’s a weight limit on this axle, lady.”

Three men were speaking—three men who looked and sounded alike to me. They were thin and sunken-chested, and they had the twitchy look of dogs with fleas. Mom and Dad crossed us quickly to the other side of the row of cars, and Wyatt watched my face intently to make sure I couldn’t hear them.

Did Wyatt know what was in the truck? I couldn’t see it yet, because I was too short. And then, just as we were directly behind the truck, the crowd walked away laughing, and I saw her.

She was gigantic. She must have weighed five hundred pounds. Her body filled the entire bed of the truck. In fact, parts of her bulged over the sides of the truck, and I think that must have been painful.

Her short black hair had probably been cut with dull kitchen shears, because it stuck out in greasy, spiky strands. She wore what looked like a blue bed sheet sewn together, with holes cut for her arms. More tragic still, it was too short, or maybe it had been pulled up when she slid into the truck. No one would have been able to settle it down around her knees if she was sitting on it. It fell awkwardly just to the very top of her thighs.

She fiddled with a bag of malted milk balls—my favorite candy—and when she finally opened it, it exploded. The chocolate balls flew into the air in a thousand directions and fell. They made no sound, falling on her soft body or on the hot asphalt.

Her eyes have haunted me. I only caught them for a second as she glanced our way, wondering what we had to say to her.

“Don’t stare, Meg, it’s rude,” Wyatt said through his teeth, taking my hand in his and tugging me along gently.

But I wasn’t staring to be rude. I was intensely curious about the emptiness I saw there. I caught no hint of interest, no flicker of emotion. I looked back over my shoulder to make sure she was breathing.

She turned and tilted her head as she watched me and then, most amazingly, she smiled. And it wasn’t a malicious smile meant to scare me into not staring. Hers was a smile with sweetness in it. She liked children—she must have children, grandchildren—and she liked me.

Her eyes softened when I smiled back and waved, and she held her hand up to wave.

And because I was there, she was happy.

I repeated this story to Robin when she asked me, again, why I would feel guilty about Wyatt’s death. I couldn’t explain away my guilt; I just knew that I’d played a role. I’d touched the stage before the actors had entered and my touch had screwed something up. Wyatt died and I lived.

I pleaded with Robin to understand.

“My mother would be able to function if Wyatt were here instead of me,” I said.

Robin shook her head and put her pen to her lips. “That’s not true.”

“Wyatt’s death is connected to everything ugly in the world,” I added. “How can you not see that?”

The fan, buzzing away in the corner, oscillated my way, blowing long strands of my hair across my face. I left them there as an excuse to close my eyes.

“Why is your brother’s death part of a worldwide tragedy, Meg?”

Through my hair, my gaze met hers in a look that I hope conveyed serious disdain. “Nope. Not what I said. You’re doing that thing where you turn my words around and try to feed them back to me.” Every adult in my life did that and I hated it.

“Then tell me what you meant when you said—” She stopped to read from her leather-bound notebook. “—‘Wyatt’s death is connected to everything ugly in the world.’”

I chose to be long-suffering to speed this session up. “I meant that the hatred of that July day in Nashville was alive and well on that horrible day in Pittsburgh. People hate others so they strike like snakes. It’s all connected—we’re all connected, bumping around into each other, some of us good, some bad, most a mixture. Every thought acted upon has consequences. Every one.”

I cleared my throat, surprised that I’d put into words what I’d concluded on the day Wyatt died. I’m sure my surprise registered on my face because Robin studied me for a moment. Then she adjusted the throw that she had over her crossed legs—she used these visual cues to relax me—and looked at me calmly.

“Meg, you’re feeling pain, and it’s palpable; you’re feeling guilt, and it’s normal. But these feelings don’t define you. They are false constructs that your mind has created to make sense of your loss.”

She clicked her pen several times and took a long time considering what to say next, what I would actually hear.

“This assumption you developed when you were little—that you are somehow responsible for the happiness, or even the safety, of others in your life, whose paths you cross, that woman in the truck in Nashville—is wrong, and it’s dangerous for you. That’s something you need to come to terms with.”