Girl in a Glass Case
                                                            ­                By John DeVito

Katherine Green probably had it more together than most of the girls I knew in high school. She was a star on the track team, she continuously made the honor roll and she was involved in more than a few extracurriculars. She was energetic, open and always quick to joke. She was also a die-hard feminist and any pseudo-negative remark made against women, in her presence, never went unpunished. She’d stab with her tongue and, more than a few times, kick an unsuspecting guy in the *****. She was a little crazy, maybe, but she never denied it.
I met her in a journalism class. While I was preoccupied with researching my favorite directors and writing movie reviews, she’d be researching women’s rights and the latest new clippings concerned with Hillary Clinton, wronged wives and successful female business owners. We both had our obsessions, and quietly respected each other for them. Since we would sit next to each other every day, we started talking. We laughed, joked and enjoyed each other’s company to the point that the teacher took notice and would say things like, “When’s the wedding?” And, “Get a room already.” We’d just laugh it off.
Soon enough, we actually started dating. Being my first girlfriend, I treasured her. Every time my thoughts drifted her way, a grin would take over my face and my body would feel like it was floating. I loved her, if only for the way she made me feel, and I would’ve done anything for her. And I did. I’d walk through the heat, the rain, the cold, sickness and sleeplessness to her house whenever she’d call and ask me to come over. Whenever I would get there, I was greeted either by her mother or her father. Her mother was a German immigrant. She was short, but stern and rigid, both physically and mentally. She’d always tell Katherine not to “make him bad” and say that I was a “good boy”. It made me wonder what kind of past Katherine had with other boys, but I’d quickly let the thoughts leave my head. Katherine made me feel like I was worth something and that I was special, and that was enough for me… But I digress.
Her father was New York City detective. He also had the capability of being quite stern, like his wife, but had a more playful disposition. He was nicer to me than I ever imagined a girl’s father to be to her new boyfriend, and for that I was thankful. Most of the times I came over, he’d either be watching the Jets game, the Knicks game or some type of criminal investigation show (usually Law & Order). He seemed like a pretty normal and cool dad to me, and I respected him not only because he was a cop but because he seemed like genuinely nice human being.

Only three days after our first “official” date (we went to the movies and to get ice cream), Katherine and I had ***. I was a ******, and she wasn’t. She made it clear to me beforehand that she had had *** with two other boys before me and then asked me if I had ever had ***. I lied and said, “yeah, of course, last summer at camp”, which was a lie because I didn’t go to camp the summer before and my contact with the opposite *** ended at staring awkwardly at them from across a classroom (until I met Katherine, course). So, we had ***, right there, on my bed in my bedroom on the second floor of my house. My mom and dad were home and watching TV just downstairs, but I didn’t care. I was getting to do the one thing that every boy dreams about from the moment the hormones start flooding his body and brain and makes him think of *** more times a day than food, sleep and funny things combined. When it was over, I felt like I never had before. I felt like Neil Armstrong when he first stepped foot on the moon, like Steven Spielberg after Jaws became the first Blockbuster ever, like Hank Aaron after breaking Babe Ruth’s long-standing homerun record. In short, I was on top of the world and after Katherine went home I made a point to texting all of my friends about the encounter. I had to, it was a modern reflex, I suppose.
Things went great from then on. Katherine and I went on more movie dates, laughed, texted, hung out at each others’ houses, met each others’ parents and friends and had more ***. It was like a dream, come to think of it. Things seemed too… Cohesive. They seemed too perfect to actually be happening to me. One day, after watching a movie on TV, we decided to go for a little walk. We left my house and hooked around the block toward the elementary school when Katherine said, “Do you ever cut?”
I stopped.
“What?” I narrowed my brow and removed my hand from hers.
“It was just a question.”
“Why? Do you?”
“No,” she said quietly, her eyes trailing toward my shoes. “I was just thinking.”
“Thinking what?”
“What would you say if I suggested that we cut. Together. During ***.”
“Whoa… Uh…” I had no idea where this was coming from. I never even knew Katherine ever even thought about such things. I know I never had before. I had heard of kids cutting themselves but always thought it was a juvenile and mindless thing to do. I didn’t get it.
“Forget it,” she said, and started walking again toward the school.
“No,” I yelped. “Stop.”
She stopped and looked back at me.
“Why are you asking me this?”
“I don’t know,” her eyes were innocent. “I read an article about Angelina Jolie and she said it was something that made her feel closer to her fiancé.”
“Oh.” I looked down, then back up at her and started walking.
“I don’t know about that,” I said after a block or two of trying to piece together my thoughts. “I don’t think I would like that.”
“OK,” she replied without a second’s hesitation. And that was that.

After that I seriously began to contemplate our relationship. Everything Katherine would do or say I would consider three times over, trying to analyze the deeper meaning behind her words and actions. She seemed like an enigma to me now. I felt like I had no idea who she really was, what she was really thinking. And that kind of scared me. Weeks later, we were laying on her bed and watching YouTube videos on her laptop. She was laughing at some guy falling off a park bench and I just smiled silently, my eyes drifting toward her fingers as she typed something into the search bar. And then I noticed them. Katherine was wearing short sleeves, leaving her forearms exposed, and I noticed something. There were three bruises on her left forearm, a deep blue one, an almost purple one and a fading yellowish one. I looked up at her face and then back down to her forearm.
“What happened to you,” I asked.
“What?”
“Your arm,” I said, grabbing it and turning it over so the bruises were looking at the ceiling.
“Oh, those.”
“Yeah. What are they from?”
Katherine sighed and touched her face. “Nothing, I just… Slammed my arm.”
“Slammed your arm? How? On what?”
She pursed her lips and sighed again. “At the track meet. I fell and hit the dirt hard. There were rocks and…”
“Really,” I said, shaking my head.
“Yeah, really.”
“Well, I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to believe me, Peter.”
“What really happened, Katherine?”
“Peter, just shut up. I’m telling you the truth,” her eyes started to harden. Her face got a little red, as it usually did when
she was defending a point.
“No, you’re not, Katherine.”
“Fine, Peter, I’ll tell you the truth.”
A second passed. I was staring blankly into her eyes, waiting for her mouth to open again. She shook her head.
“The track meet…”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“I didn’t make it into the top ten. I tripped a couple of times.”
“I thought you were going to tell me the truth,” I breathed out, lifting myself off the bed.
“I am telling you the truth! Just listen to me,” she reached out, grabbed my arm this time and pulled me back onto the bed.
“I didn’t make it into the top ten. On the car ride home… My dad was… Really mad.”
“He was mad at you for doing your best?”
I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen Mr. Green mad, or even upset, in my life. Granted, I knew him only for a few months, but this revelation was still shocking to me.
“He’s a very competitive man, Peter.”
“Yeah, but… You’re his daughter.”
“I am. I am his… Daughter.”
And the way she said that kind of… Really did irk me. She said with an odd combination of disdain and love. I’d never seen her speak this way before. After a few moments, she told me that she thought it was time for me to leave. I didn’t fight her, I knew this was probably the time for me to just go and let her be alone. I mean, I needed alone time after that conversation. I was an emotional wreck, if there ever was one, and I wasn’t even directly affected by this man. Her father became a mystery, one that I felt obligated to bring to light but couldn’t really bring myself to actually pursue. My hands were tied, her family wasn’t mine, her life wasn’t mine. After all, I had only known her for about five or six months when she told me what she did that day. Who was I to go pushing buttons and beating around bushes that were, frankly, none of my rightful business?


Eventually, Katherine and I broke up. It wasn’t too long after that incident that we decided to go our separate ways. Now, it’s been about three and a half years since our relationship took it’s last proverbial breaths and I still can’t get her out of my head. I regret that I didn’t push, and I regret that I didn’t try harder to get to the bottom of the matter. We’re no longer friends, so I feel like the time to do that has come and gone, but still. Something inside of me aches every time I hear her name or see a status posted by her on Facebook. I can’t help feeling like I could have… Should have done more.

When I called Katherine,
she talked to me with the same hollow
raspiness in her voice as when we were children.
I had seen her name on a pamphlet for
a historical exposition before finding the courage to call.
To my disappointment,
she seemed more pre-occupied
rather than pleasantly surprised to hear
my voice
after almost twenty years.  
When she said “Thomas,”
it was like a habit,
drawn from a long stream of monotony.  I listened
intently as she dictated when and where we would meet,
like it was a speech
she was reading off battered queue cards.
During the entire phone call,
I imagined her on the other line,
as I’d remembered her;
too bold for such a fragile body,
with curls the colour of burnt grass,
and a dot of sweaty reflection
on the tip of her pointed nose.  I saw her
mouth move faster than her words,
which trickled from behind her lips
like butterflies. When the phone clicked,
I was left with a sort of dead and empty silence,
mixed with a touch of mystical fantasy.  

This morning,
I ate alone adjacent to the window of a dingy, cheap café.  
I drank my coffee black and carefully.  
It vibrated atop my thin,
quivering
hands; as result in spite of itself and too much thinking.  
I got up from the table,
leaving a disputable tip and began walking towards our arranged meeting place.

Outside,
leaves fell like snowflakes in the dying season
and the frigid air
pressed against my body like tightly bound bandages.  
I blew warmth into my hands,
which have always been cold and dry
as clay when it’s left in the sun too long.  

Katherine,
she had laughed at the dryness of my fingers
throwing her head back
and emitting a sort of pleasant growl.  
We must have only been nine,
and the winter had just begun
to melt into spring,
but the air was still so utterly brisk.  
I was just bony hands,
as cold as a winter pole.  
Katherine had looked down
to where I’d had my hands laced
together like a knotted ball of yarn.  She’d told me
that they looked like sticks of chalk
and looked into my eyes with a warm,
doting gaze,
grinning with folly.  I had
simply stared back at her,
entirely expressionless and coy.  
She had reached into her bag
and held a warm stone out,
new flowing blood to hold.  
Oh, what a contrast you were.  
She had been so warm and light
against the bleakness of a winter day.  
My timid young fingers held a decent animal.


While walking in weather like this,
when the cold arrives so suddenly
that you find yourself awfully unprepared, it seems
like you’re getting nowhere.  
It’s like walking up a descending escalator;
you’re aware of the attempted movement,
but everything is so immobile,
that you seem to be in the same spot
for hours.  Each step is a static, solid crack;
the frozen atmosphere freezes bodies.  
Time has briefly paused and become a solid block,
one that I’ve found myself restrained within.  
The harsh coldness is a strong compression
and the frigidity is so stagnant
that movement seems strangely rare,
and when a gentle wind caresses the air,
it’s like a light stream of reality.  
The falling leaves dance
with the breeze,
but when it stops,
they pause in midair
before descending in harsh increments
onto the cement.


The cool of a temperate breeze,
from dark skies to wet grass, had tickled
the bare arms of Katherine and I one spring morning.  
The sun was still below the horizon,
but its illumination was visible
as an iris blue glow at the edge of the field
we had been walking along.  
Katherine had held my shoulder
as she balanced along a decomposing fallen tree.
All had been absolutely silent
except for the few crickets still awake,
and the miniscule scuffling of Katherine’s feet
on the bark.  In the distance,
we had heard a low cough,
and we looked up to see an old man,
sullen and with a stature similar to a refrigerator,
as he continued walking up the way
toward us.  Katherine had stopped
walking along the log and let go of my shoulder,
watching the old man grow nearer.  
The dark blue sky reflected
against her green eyes that induced aqua flashes,
corresponding with each dart of her eyes.  The old man
carried a branch,
using it as a walking stick.  
We had waited attentively
and still as if trying to camouflage
ourselves as part of the forest behind us.
The man had stopped abruptly and
turned his back to us,
raising one hand to his brow
as if blocking the sun
that hadn’t yet risen.  His head moved,
regarding the vast,
recently planted field.  
Following what seemed like a year,
he turned to us, noted that the sky revealed
what was going to be a beautiful day,
then continued on his walk.
The occurrence had left Katherine and I
in muffled giggles.  I gently pushed
her from the log
and we fell in the field,
the wet immature plants covering us
with bits of morning moisture.  
Water droplets had ricocheted onto us
with each frivolous movement.  
That now seems to me a thousand springs past.  


As I approached our designated place to meet,
I regarded my watch and realized
that I had arrived several minutes tardy.
It being a Sunday morning,
with the weather
not so preferable such as it was,
the park was nearly empty.  
I wasn’t able to see Katherine anywhere,
so I took a seat on a vacant bench to wait.  
In the distance,
I saw two young children
attempting to fly kites.  The kites followed them,
as if on a leash,
bounding up and down from the ground
as they ran.  
A sudden gust of wind sent the kites
high into the air, and
the children continued to run,
in hopes of creating their own wind,
once the present one ceased.  The wind
past under my nose and I inhaled,
absorbing the strong scent of dead leaves.


Katherine and I had once built kites together.  
They had been awfully unfortunate crafts,
made from thin cotton sheets,
twigs and twine.  It was one
of the last days of summer,
and there had been a great amount of wind
one particular day.  
We had taken our makeshift kites to the field,
where the open desolation
seemed the most appropriate.  
With only a few strides taken, our kites
had immediately flown.  
The two had soared side by side,
simultaneously.  
They had been like feathers
floating freely in the sky,
but we controlled the freedom.  
The sun began to set behind us,
painting the sky
like spilled oil in a lake.  Our high-pitched laughter
had echoed off clouds,
and that was all that we heard.  
Katherine and I ran in opposite directions,
then back toward each other.  
As she passed me,
I smelled the scent of her skin
and some foreign flowers.
When the kite lines first crossed, we tied them into knots.  
We again,
had run in opposite directions,
but the kites remained together.  
To finally fly apart, we had to cut them off.


Since then,
it’s been a book you read in reverse;
you understand less
as the pages turn.  I had pushed
memories of Katherine
to the back of my mind.  
I left them obscured,
tied to a brick and as sweet as a song.


I waited just under an hour
and Katherine still had yet to arrive.  
The sidewalks were empty,
no frail women headed towards the park.  
I watched as the last leaves fell
from a nearby tree, and
settled into a groove between exposed roots.  
Another soft wind
passed by me and I caught a brief scent of foreign flowers.  
Katherine’s memory was here.  
My hands were cracking
like an oil painting,
all white and dry in the cold.  
I’d like her to offer me
a warm stone and
stay warm and light on a winter’s day.
I looked up to the clouds sighing
and slowly rising from the bench.  
I saw two loose kites in the distance falling from the sky,
drawn to the ground in an end to flight.