Carla at a separate table folds paper one way, makes diagonals, folds the bottom points to make a tail. Just so. Ms. Adept. Even two tables over and most of the other students gone, I see her open up the left and right sides, fold down the wings and pull up the head and tail. She learned from me. While students with untrained fingers mangle their cranes, the crimson and gold crane rises from two dimensions to three in her hands. She doesn’t toss it in the basket. In her palm the crane is crisp and bright.
She walks out the dining hall door by the creepy-boy mural. The few students left are busy, heads bowed. I catch the door out of the dining hall before it swings shut.
“Wait, Carla.”
She stops so fast the forward motion keeps her head moving forward; then it bobs back. No force but the force of her will resists the momentum.
“I don’t hear you,” she says.
“Fine,” I say, “but don’t go.”
“Because why?”
“Because I saw you with Kyle.” Carla straightens her back. The crane rests in her hand, palm up.
“So?”
“So, I’m wondering how you’re doing,” I say. Two meters behind her, I am the distance from the earth to the moon away.
“Now you wonder?” She spins around. “Now you wonder. Does someone have to die before you talk to me?” Her face is red, and her curls bounce right to left.
“In here,” I say and take her shoulder in my hand. She jerks her shoulder away and takes straight-legged steps into the classroom. The chairs scrape the floor. We sit facing each other. Carla crosses her arms across her front. She’s the sitting-down version of the standing-up Carla after Kyle said “Boo!” in the cornfield.
“How are you?”
“As if you care,” she says. Her fingers through her hair make her curls fall in her eyes.
“I do,” I say. Mr. Crap-on-My-Career not thinking about Carla, my only concern has been the force to resist the forward momentum we had. Mr. Empathy. Mr. Mature.
“Sure.” Her arms crossed, she falls back against the chair.
“What happened in the cornfield?”
“Did you follow us?”
“Something happened out there.”
“Now you’re spying on me? Why’d you go there?” She looks at me through her curls. All of her is far away. “Oh, I get it,” she says. “You want to know about Kyle.”
“Of course. Kyle is, Kyle was one of my concerns.” Using the past tense is hard.
“Right,” she says. She draws out the one syllable into a long sound, pulls the word with her chin from left to right. “I saw you two together. You liked him.” The slump in her body keeps her farther away from me, but her face gets brighter. The optical illusion is the idea of a smile on her face. It builds into a smile. She likes this idea.
“Liked,” I say. “Yes, Mr. Harney was unique.”
“Is that what you’d call it?” The smile is breaking out on her face. Its force is motion with no equal or opposite reaction except inside me. The Taiko mallet rises inside me. “Suuu,” the drummer exhales. The drum beats on my sternum, beats on my ribs.
“He was brilliant, if different.”
“And you like different,” she says. She straightens up in the chair. “Did you like him the way you liked me?” In unison the team of Taiko drummers sound the drum so loud the building shakes around me.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what? You’re the one who likes students.” The mallet cracks my sternum; the cracked sternum presses my lungs.
“You know better than that.”
“Whatever.”
“Stop it, Carla. You like messing with minds too much.” My hand rises up like I might bat away a ball she tosses. If only my hand could bat away my transgressions.
“Turn it on me, why don’t you?” she says. “Awesome. Good work.” Satisfaction on a face is an equilibrium of forces. The strike of the mallet on my ribs has less force. “Blame everything on me. Go ahead.”
“Forget I asked,” I say. “Forget it.” I’m the one now to lean back in my chair.
“I try,” she says. “A lot.”
Standing up, Carla is a girl, not fully grown, her motion in pieces. Her back leans forward, legs rise, legs straighten, back opens up. The distance between her standing and my sitting is a meter, and she is still a moon away.
She cocks her elbow, twists her wrist, raises her middle finger, bends her arm, flips me the bird, and walks out.
The mallets do not rise to strike the drum in me. Carla’s wrong. I care a lot about her. Two masses exert force on each other. The one with greater mass exerts the greater attraction. What I can’t explain to Carla is the force that Kyle exerted on her, or on me. Without the mass of him, we are not balanced. What I can’t explain is the science of loss, the weight, the density, the draw. There is turbulence in loss, a wild spinning of particles. There is a vacuum that is not an absence. It is full.
How to fold a crane is all I can explain.