Pearls, Grace Piccard

Pearls

My mother wears a string of pearls around her neck. She takes them off and puts them in a green glass bowl in her bathroom. They are shiny like little moons, and I want to touch them, but I’m not allowed to. I want to touch something infinite but I can’t, so I look out the window and try to find the real thing behind the eucalyptus trees across the street.

At school we grow butterflies in a big net in the corner of the classroom, and one spring morning we release them onto the playground. The boys yell and chase them. Monica cries because she doesn’t want them to leave. I watch them fly like loose paper caught in a fan. They look too small against the bright blue sky, too weak to fly, wings like snowflakes and birthday-party confetti.

Ellen Jacobs and I sit in the shelter of the playground slide, and she asks me who I like. I tell her that I like lots of people. She says no, who do you like like, and I know instinctively that Harry Potter and James Kirk are not good answers because they’re not real, and she’s talking about flesh-and-blood boys who wear football jerseys to school and make spitballs out of paper towels in the bathroom during recess. Nobody, I say. Ellen Jacobs looks at me weirdly and says are you a lesbian, but I’m not sure what that means so I just say that I like being alone right now. But then she gets up and walks away, and I realize that I don’t really mean what I said.

Grace Piccard ’14

16 Pillars of Salt