3
O livia scrawled her name on the front office sign-in sheet at Mason County Elementary School before following a familiar path down the third-grade hallway.
She’d visited several different kids here during her years with the Big Brothers Big Sisters mentorship program, but her longest assignment was with Avery Pinson—a little boy who really just needed a friend.
She paused outside a classroom with colorful ducks on the door and knocked softly before pushing it open. The teacher, an elementary-school veteran named Mrs. Benedict, glanced her way.
“Avery!” the woman called, barely pausing her lesson. She was used to this exchange, which happened every Thursday after lunch.
A little boy with messy red hair rose slowly from a desk near the back, and Olivia furrowed her brow in concern. Avery was always excited to see her; sometimes he even knocked things to the floor in his haste to reach the hallway. But this time, he looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.
“Hey, buddy!” Olivia said brightly when he’d finally crossed the threshold and closed the classroom door behind him.
“Are we doing more art today?” Their current project was his submission to the fall art show: an owl made from soda tabs and a small ceramic pot.
She’d spent countless visits wielding the superglue while he’d placed each painted metal tab in the perfect spot, building layers of bright feathers that made the tiny planter come to life.
Avery mumbled something incoherent as he shuffled across the tile floor.
“What was that?” she asked.
“I said it’s gone!” he repeated, almost shouting the words in the empty hallway.
Olivia stopped dead. “What happened?” she asked in dismay. The owl had been nearly finished the last time she’d seen it. The little boy’s eyes teared up, and Olivia immediately threw her arm across his shoulders. “Okay, how about we go to the library?” she asked quickly.
She steered him to the left and pushed open the first door they came to. Then she guided Avery past the reference desk, snatching an unattended box of tissues as she went, and led him into a small courtyard just beyond the wall of windows.
His first tears fell as the glass door shut behind them.
“Hey, it’s okay, we’ll make it better somehow,” she said in an attempt to soothe him.
But it didn’t work. The tears fell harder and faster, and, while she wasn’t supposed to have prolonged physical contact with her young friends, she decided that—in this particular moment—the rules needed to be suspended.
She set the tissues on the picnic table and pulled him into a hug.
He returned it with surprising force for an eight-year-old, and Olivia had to concentrate on breathing properly.
“She sm-smashed it,” he spluttered. The words were wet, as was the front of Olivia’s shirt, and she reached awkwardly to one side for the tissues, glad now that she’d thought to bring them .
“Who did?” she asked. She finally managed to pinch a Kleenex between her fingers and pull it from the box, and she offered it to Avery as his grip on her torso loosened.
“My m-mom.”
An unsettled feeling blossomed in Olivia’s chest. She’d been told years ago that Avery’s father was in prison, and she’d heard stories of his tumultuous homelife with his mom. Whatever had happened to the owl, she was sure it hadn’t been an accident.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
Avery’s tears slowed, and he mopped his face with the tissue she’d given him. Then, when that was too damp, he lifted the hem of his shirt and scrubbed at his cheeks. “She was mad,” he said miserably.
“At you?”
“No, at Dennis.”
“Who’s Dennis?” Olivia asked. Avery was an only child, at least as far as she knew.
“Her boyfriend,” the little boy explained. “She threw my owl at him, and it cracked against the wall. There were p-pieces everywhere. Tabs everywhere.”
Olivia stayed quiet, waiting for whatever parts of the story Avery chose to share, but her uneasy feeling solidified into anger.
He’d been working on that owl for months , carefully collecting can tabs from everyone in the building—students and teachers alike—before painting them by hand and affixing them where he wanted them.
Last week, all the bird had lacked were feet.
And this week, it was gone.
“She threw it away,” he went on. “She said I should have left it at school.” He stared miserably at the ground, and Olivia handed him another Kleenex when the sniffles started again. “I just wanted her to see it,” he added.
The angry ball in Olivia’s chest grew bigger, and she reminded herself to control her facial expressions as Avery finished drying his eyes for the second time.
“I’m so sorry, buddy. I know you were really proud of how it turned out,” she said, though she knew it was poor consolation.
“We could start another one, if you want?”
“There isn’t enough time. The art show is in two weeks,” he pointed out.
Olivia felt the weight of his disappointment pressing down on her shoulders and was filled with the need to ease it. “Okay, so what if we start now and you can have it in the spring show? There’s another one in April, right?”
Avery considered this. “Yeah. The end-of-year showcase.”
“Alright! So we could make it even bigger this time, since we have the extra months to work.”
Avery nodded, a little of his normal light returning to his eyes. “But that would take more tabs. It took forever to get the ones I had.”
“Well, then it’s a good thing college students drink an unhealthy amount of soda, now isn’t it?” Olivia added, and she was relieved to see him smile.
“I’ll have to find another planter. Maybe Mrs. Franklin has one,” he said. Mrs. Franklin was the school’s art teacher, and her collection of found objects was probably unrivaled in the state of Tennessee. If anyone had what Avery needed, it was her.
“Let’s go look!” Olivia encouraged, and she stood before taking his hand and tugging him to his feet. The energy that should have never left his body seemed to be returning .
“Maybe she has one with holes in it! We could put the eyes on the front instead of on top,” he imagined aloud, and Olivia breathed a silent sigh of relief. Maybe this would all be okay—for now.
But that didn’t keep the angry embers in her chest from glowing hotter by the second as she pictured Avery’s devastation when the first project had shattered. If she had her way, she’d like to throw another planter... this time at Ms. Pinson’s head.
Noah stared at a color-coded diagram of the cardiovascular system with his eyes slightly out of focus.
He’d been memorizing the names of veins and arteries for so long they were starting to blend together in his head.
He squeezed his eyes shut and stretched both arms toward the sky, feeling the burn in his upper back.
“You almost done, honey?”
He opened his eyes to find Mrs. Becky, who ran the Redtail Café, wiping down a plastic chair nearby. She looked at him with concern.
“Do you need this table?” he asked, closing his textbook and sliding it closer to his chair. He was the only person at the café, but he’d been done eating for at least an hour. He wouldn’t blame her if she needed him to leave.
“No, no, sweetheart. We won’t have another rush until at least three o’clock,” she explained. “I just think you might need to take a walk or something before you fall onto the floor.”
Noah stretched his legs and rotated his ankles. She wasn’t wrong.
“What is it today, anatomy or physics? Or both?” Mrs. Becky asked .
Noah smiled. Maybe he studied here a little too often. “Anatomy,” he answered, and he dropped his heavy book into his backpack where it leaned against his chair. There wasn’t any point in torturing himself any more today. The exam was tomorrow, and either he knew the material by now or he didn’t.
Mrs. Becky sidled closer and pulled a red candy bar from the pocket of her apron before sliding it across the tabletop in front of him. “Have some, sweetheart. You work too hard for a man your age,” she said, nodding down at the KitKat.
Noah felt a smile bloom on his face. Mrs. Becky had been working the counter at the campus café for a long time, and he had obviously gotten predictable.
“Thank you,” he said as he tore open the wrapper and bit into the first stick.
“And I have to work hard; I can’t get by on my looks forever. You, on the other hand...”
Mrs. Becky chuckled and snapped her dish towel in his direction. “Get up and go home, silly boy. Stop flirtin’ with me.”
Noah grinned and finished collecting his things before devouring the last of the chocolate. Mrs. Becky was probably old enough to be his grandmother, but she was always sweet to him, and it was fun to make her blush every once in a while.
She shook her head in a fond sort of way, much like his mother often did. “Go find a girl your own age,” she ordered as he slung his backpack over one shoulder, “and not one of those airheads you make eyes at in here!”
Noah huffed out a laugh. It wasn’t a horrible suggestion, though the “airheads” he usually spent time with were the ones who didn’t expect too much from him, and that was how he liked it.
Expectations created attachment, which created relationships, which created the opportunity for someone to get hurt—and they always did.
He lived by the philosophy that if he didn’t open that door in the first place, he wouldn’t have it slammed in his face later—and so far, it was working.