Shatterglass

For Carinne, whose story is an inspiration

I hope you don’t mind that I quoted your monologue

She’s gone again. Across our room, and out our door, without even a glance. She gets ready the same way she always has, or at least it would look so to someone who doesn’t know her as I do. They don’t see the strained set of her shoulders. They don’t see the slight slump of her head. But I see it.

It’s no use staying in our room without her, watching light filter down through the dust stirred by her going. She’s not there, and the room is empty without her. So I go Elsewhere, counting the hours until our place will be full of her again. The others go Elsewhere too, flocking from their neatly framed places to a conglomerate of nothing where we can at least count the hours together. Sometimes it can be boring Elsewhere, but not so lonely. Someone always has a good story to tell. Something new to share. There are no secrets, here in Elsewhere.

Well, maybe one.

I find my usual group, all of us very different, save for two key similarities. One, our girls are all teenagers, many from the same high school. Two, we love our girl more than anything else that exists. It was enough to form a clique of sorts, one of the billions here in Elsewhere. We link up with nothing more than consciousness until we appear to be in a room covered wall-to-wall in mirrors. They are ornate, gilded, miniature, enormous, cracking, dirty, covered in sticky notes. One has a border written in elegant script. Another is circular with a frame reminiscent of the rising sun.

I watched the sunrise every morning through her window. First - darkness. A barren land without hope. Then, from nowhere, a blinding bolt of dawn. It always starts that way. The first sign that the long night is over. Some mornings that one streak alights the horizon and sets fire to the sky, burning the clouds into nothing more than wisps. It sets her face awash with color as she slumbers, hills of gorgeous highlight and valleys of deep shadow silently drawing her toward awakening. Other times, day comes softly. It stretches tendrils of rosy dawn out into the night, reaching like fingers to capture the moon, tucking it safely away as the soft, pink veil conducts a gentle takeover of the celestial sphere. The luminescence moves over her face like an eclipse on those mornings, casting her features in their softest mold. Her caramel skin becomes pure gold, her jet locks the darkest of silk, throwing back the radiance and dancing in her soft breath. She never saw any of it. Never cherished those moments as I did.

Her alarm back then was a soft trill, too light to rouse her unless her subconscious was ready for it. She used to wake like the princess of a fairytale. A soft yawn, a smoothing of raven hair, a light arch of her back. Her eyelashes would cast shadows on her cheeks as her eyes took in the bronze light and I would think that nothing more beautiful existed in the world. Nowadays-

“and they were on a call together ALL NIGHT!!” squeals a wood-framed standing mirror propped against the corner, cutting off my rememberings. “I was swooning. She talks about him all the time, I even got a glimpse of him when she showed a picture to you, Jessica! He’s adorable. Absolutely adorable. I couldn’t want anyone better for my pretty Callie! And ugh! Her parents won’t let them go out. She even- well, it’s better to show you.”

The standing mirror morphed within seconds into a tall girl with golden curls and deep amber eyes. She’s the spitting image of Callie, save for the fact that Reflection Callie is completely two-dimensional. She begins acting out a series of bizarre, thrilling scenes, featuring Callie, her parents, and the secret suitor. She calls out others to join her, and soon half the room has taken their Reflection forms and been given a role in this impromptu performance.

I remain an Image, just a simple, unembellished mirror on a wall. The average size for hanging above a girls’ dresser, no trim, no cracks, nothing at all to suggest that my Reflection is the most beautiful girl in the world.

The nonsensical chattering is ceaseless for ages. Hours tick by, every second drawing me closer to her again, like two bodies in orbit destined to collide. Emma’s been grounded, to her dismay and her Reflection’s delight. Hailey landed a part-time job, and Reflection Hailey is whining because her uniform color is a repulsive green.

She hasn’t been shy about letting Hailey know how unflattering her new clothes are, helping her the only way she can - pointing out truth. If the clothes make her look bad, she should fix it. It’s the way we look out for our girls, keeping them safe from the judgment of the world. Our critiques are softer than the universes, our proddings more gentle. Then our girls feel as if they’re choosing a change in outfit or hair or makeup. We all know they’ll listen to us in the end. They can’t not care.

“I mean, honestly! Don’t the uniform designers have mirrors of their own? I should call for a performance review because that’s just what we try to stop. She starts on Monday, and-”

My girl used to want to be a nurse. She spent hours folding a little nursing cap out of paper and gluing together a miniature apron. The cap rested crisply upon her crown for an entire five minutes before tumbling to the ground during an emergency operation on her very best teddy bear. She was the one who diagnosed the problem- he had overeaten and was stuffed. Her equally stuffed rabbit was playing the doctor, drooping forward with one button eye loose and in danger of needing surgery itself. How my girl did burden that rabbit with every plastic surgical tool under the sun, lips laughing, hair flying astray under her now-wrinkled headpiece as roses bloomed in her cheeks and her apron stuck to everything in sight. A glue stick squished between her toes, but she just used it to repair the surgeon’s eye and turned it into a pacifier to soothe a wayward duckling. Her life was one big adventure, a trial-and-error experiment in love, nearly too much for one childish heart to contain. I used to fear that it would shatter her. All that beauty, bursting to the surface. I thought maybe she would buckle and crack, collapsing while her alluring delicacy pooled around her like dazzling blood. How silly.

“I maintain that Sophia is the most gorgeous being ever,” begins a thin African-American girl, her waist-length braids dyed various shades of blue, “but I wish she spent as much time with me as Callie does with you! On school days, it’s always a rush out the door for her in the morning. I mean, constant oversleeper. She never has time to come up close and look into my eyes. She puts on mascara without my help.” Reflection Sophia pauses, her voice taking on a slightly dreamlike quality. Her Image form is a vanity mirror studded with little lights. “Weekends, though. She sits down and gazes at me. A full face of makeup on Saturday, then another one on Sunday. On those days, she cares so much about what I think of her. When she does her eyeliner… she leans in so closely that I can almost touch her. Sometimes these glass panes of ours are such a prison.”

“But I wouldn’t choose to be human and without her, not ever.” It’s not until silence reigns that I realize the voice was mine.

Like the tide suddenly released, a cresting wave of agreement washes over me, every Image and Reflection in the room resonating with the need to be with our girls, no matter what. They couldn’t get on without us. If we were gone, who would show them their flaws? I would never risk it being someone without my girls’ best interest at heart.

“We haven’t heard from you in a while,” remarks Olivia. “How is she?”