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All Your Broken Pieces

The great wide somewhere is closer than you think.

By Jillian SpiridonPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
2
Image via Canva

Summer way outside the city brought with it the promise of peaches and late nights spent in the fields. Laughter fluttered along with the whistle of corn stalks brushing against each other. The kids in town always brought with them packs of beer—the older folks overlooked the fake IDs because they too had once been young—before finally settling underneath a blanket of stars. Somewhere between childhood and adolescence, they had forgotten the wonder of pointing out the constellations that couldn't be mistaken as the lights from airplanes.

It was the kind of life thought long gone, crumbling under the weight of urban mania and the materialism of the big cities. But there were some who still dreamed of existences divorced from the backs of pickup trucks. The girls especially found themselves susceptible to the allure of the great wide somewhere.

Mae Greenfield was one such girl. Her hair was caught between the color of wheat and straw, and she was a tumbleweed of a thing who made it her business to get into every bit of trouble. At seventeen, two months shy of graduating, she walked out of first-period Calculus after spitting in a teacher's face. Instead of going home—and facing the music of her mother's ranting rage—she walked along the dust-ridden roads, hitching her finger in the air every few yards as she swayed like a dancer without a partner to lead the way.

A beat-up Cadillac, rust eating the underbelly, sidled up beside her. The windows were foggy from smoke and smears alike. "You want a lift, Mae?" Cal Earnest asked, leaning forward all hopeful as if she were still a girl to be wanted rather than a girl who had just disgraced herself after she let her temper get the better of her.

Options. Some girls had them, but girls like Mae? They had them till they squandered them—or so they told themselves after days like these that seemed to eat up whole universes of time while other days went by as quick as a blink.

Mae took the passenger seat, the cracked seat spitting up foam. But the way Cal was grinning at her, she could forgive him the chariot he drove. It was the last thing he'd gotten after his daddy died and the farm had been repossessed last fall. And then Cal—well, he knew better the walk of disgrace than she did, as he too hadn't made the whole marathon to get his diploma. When asked, he said he'd gone through the school of hard knocks already and had enough of it. The town, having known the elder Earnest and his temper, hadn't needed to ask any questions after that.

But even as Cal fiddled with the dial of the static-filled radio, Mae found she couldn't help herself. "Do you miss your pa?"

Cal's hand stilled on the dial, and the cab of the Cadillac filled with a bleeding edge of sound. The singer's voice erupted like a scream shot through with white noise. But Cal's eyes were steady on the road, unyielding, until he punched the button to quiet the radio.

"What if I said no?" he asked, his question issued like a jab in a boxing ring. A challenge. He almost sounded as if he wanted her to shoot him down for not being the mourning son who kept his father's car not as a memento but as a reminder.

"I'd say that's a sorry thing," Mae said, "but at least you don't carry around those bruises anymore."

Any other guy might have refuted it—something about male pride, maybe—but Cal just stayed quiet before saying, "Whatcha doin' out of school so early, Mae? Don't you have to prep for graduation? It's soon, right?"

She might have clamped her mouth shut then, or gotten out of the car just by opening the door and rolling, but something about the slow ride made her guard low. And, if she were honest, she wanted somebody to talk to. It wasn't every day even a girl like Mae Greenfield spat in a teacher's face and walked out of the classroom without another word.

Mae's eyes retreated out to the fields passing by. Soon it would be another summer—but this time she'd be waving goodbye to her peers who would move on to better things. Bigger places. Wider reaches. The sky was the limit, as all the inspirational posters said.

"Mrs. Faye called me a slut," she said, her voice low. "She said I'd do best to keep my eyes on my textbook instead of staring at Brent Jordan."

Another boy might have laughed. But Mae glanced at Cal to see his fingers tighten on the steering wheel. He didn't look at her, not once, but she saw his mouth twist in disgust.

"She's got no right talkin' to you that way, Mae," he said. "No one does."

Mae looked away, feeling her heart flap in her chest like a bird ready to take flight. "I know," she said. "That's why I got right up out of my chair and spit in her face."

This time, Cal did not disappoint: he laughed and laughed till Mae was sure she saw tears in his eyes. But after the humor had subsided—it was a funny thing, she thought, to imagine scowling Mrs. Faye getting a loogie straight to the eye—Cal caught her gaze.

"You goin' back?" When she didn't answer right away, Cal huffed out a sigh. "Don't let a mean ol' granny like Faye be the reason you don't get your education."

He sounded like a dad right then, as strange as it seemed, but she didn't think even her own father—if he had been around—could have made her feel so emboldened.

Then, almost as an after-thought, Cal added quietly, "You'll regret it if you don't."

Her heart beat its wings again, but all Mae did was stare at her hands in her lap. "I'm not goin' back today," she said, "but I s'pose I'll see what it's like tomorrow. Bet I'll get detention—or worse."

Mae thought that would be it, as simple as any other ride she'd ever taken with Cal Earnest, but he cleared his throat. "Say, Mae?"

"Yeah, Cal?"

"Let's go see if Mrs. Faye's famous pear tree's got any fruit yet," he said. His eyes gleamed with a telltale spark of mischief. "Reckon we could nick a few and she'd be none the wiser."

This time, Mae's heart soared, the caged bird now flying free. "I'd like that," she said.

The two of them continued to pass through the dirt-stamped roads, and Mae thought maybe it wasn't such a bad thing to be a little in love with Cal Earnest.

Young Adult
2

About the Creator

Jillian Spiridon

just another writer with too many cats

twitter: @jillianspiridon

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