She is crying, she is crying again. She is open-mouth wailing and the tears are carving canyons into the dirt on her cheeks. Her shirt is stained and grubby; she wipes her nose on the collar.
I am trying to speak sense into a seven-year-old. It is as easy as teaching my cats to jump rope. I am being paid something like five dollars an hour for her care, for the care of her group of twelve, and nobody has told me what I’m supposed to say to stop the constant tears.
Lunch was fine until she dropped her dessert on the floor. I saw the bowl go flying, as if it slowed down for dramatic effect, the arc of the dish, its facedown demise. She began to scream, and I took her hand and led her out of the cafeteria, found us a quiet stairwell to fill with her upset. And the crying continued for awhile, for too long to make it to the movie screening the girls had next. When she gathered herself, bit her quivering lip, and asked if the movie started without her, we had another ten minutes of crying after my answer. Better here than in front of the group.
In the window, sun glitters off the lake. I see hot pink bikinis launching off the dock. We sit, her shaking breaths, my trembling hands.
And now she wipes her cheeks, her eyes glassy mirrors, and says she is ready to go, and we both know she isn’t, and so I say, “Don’t be facetious.”
“What’s facetious?” she asks.
“When you’re not serious when you’re supposed to be, like making a joke instead of being honest.”
She considers me, her fine hair haloing her face in the bright sunlight. “I’m not facetious,” she says, and I notice she isn’t crying.
“You’re being facetious right now!” I tell her.
“No!” she says, as deliberately as if I were the child, “I’m never facetious.” And I think that she’d wink if she could.
We both begin to giggle, and it spreads from our bellies to our fingers and toes; it echoes in the stairwell and I bathe for a moment in the joy.
“You ready, kiddo?” I ask her. She puts her hand, as small and tender as a leaf, in my hand.
We walk towards the canteen, the small building the camp uses as a movie theater, staff lounge, and store.
“Do you think they all hate me?” she asks. I think of the bowl flung into the air, the way her face crumpled, the way the other campers stifled their laughter. The way nobody waited for her.
“Sweetheart,” I say. I kick a rock and it skitters down the gravel road. “Nobody hates you.”
“You hate me,” she says quietly, almost lost in the crunch of our footsteps.
“I could never, ever hate you,” I tell her, squeezing her hand. My little mirror shines up at me, a radiating gratitude, the temporary ease of being loved. I feel it, too, her warmth, the rarity of her trust in me.
And I hope she doesn’t notice it when my eyes fill and chest tightens, like a sob is waiting in my throat for release. And I feel the same later, later when she’s settled in to watch the movie alongside the other girls, and I see them eye her with practiced wariness. Nobody says hello to her, not even in a whisper. And I feel the same later still, as I sit in my cabin, the night so awfully silent, cold with solitude. The girls are asleep, my room is empty – I’m alright, I tell myself, and I begin to cry.
Allya Yourish is from Portland, Oregon, where she now lives with her wife, dog, and three cats. She was a nanny in France, a Fulbright grantee in Malaysia, a news assistant for the New York Times, and most recently, she received her MFA in creative writing from Iowa State University. Now, she works for a science museum, spending her breaks in the planetarium. Often, she buys too much nail polish. Find her work in the North American Review, ANMLY, Ecotone, Terrain, The Citron Review, and more.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Theen Moy
