Cracked glasses part 2

She was careful not to bang the screen door as she walked in. There wasn’t any need to be in trouble before the time came and she cringed at the thought of her mother’s reaction. She made her way slowly to the kitchen, letting her backpack rest quietly on one of the chairs before she sat. The plate of cookies and glass of milk waiting for her on the table didn’t make her feel any better about what had happened.

Her mother was turned toward the counter, washing the dishes. She was singing to herself, humming some unrecognizable song. Finally, she finished and turned around to see her little girl sitting mournfully at the kitchen table. She rested her hands on her hips and pressed her lips together into a tight line, quickly recognizing the situation for what it was.

“So it happened again?” she asked, her voice somewhere between anger frustration and pity.

“Yup.”

“Lindy,” she said. “You promised me that last time was going to be the last, didn’t you, sweetheart?”

She sank into a chair and her mouth twisted itself into a frown. The words came out pleading.

“I couldn’t help it, Mama,” Lindy said quietly, finally meeting her mother’s eyes. “They all sort of ganged up on me.”

“I’ll call the principal tomorrow to see if I can do something about it. Maybe I can talk to their parents,” she said, forcing herself up out of the chair.

She placed her hand under her daughter’s chin, raising her face up.

“We’ll have to get you a new pair of glasses,” she said. “Again. But it’ll have to wait a few days. I’ll order a new pair tomorrow but the optometrists can’t make them as fast as you break them. You’ll have to keep wearing these for a while.”

Lindy shoved the broken glasses up from the tip of her nose and gazed mournfully at her mother.

“Yes, Mama,” she said.

With a heavy sigh, Lindy’s mother walked out of the kitchen and in a minute, Lindy could hear her sorting laundry in the living room.

She looked down at the cookies and wrinkled her nose. She couldn’t eat them. Somehow, she knew they’d feel like lead in her stomach. She pushed the plate across the table and away from herself and hopped of the chair.

Unzipping her backpack, she pulled out her hard-won book of fairy tales and, hugging it to her chest, pulled open the back door. The kitchen door led into a garden or at least what used to be a garden. Lindy’s house sat in the corner of town and as a result had the privilege of sitting next to the forest.

The garden, which had been a well-tended, geometric masterpiece long ago, had been started by the people who lived in the house before them. Lindy’s mother never had the patience for plants, just as she had never really had the patience for children, so the garden had been allowed to go to wreck and ruin. The paths had become overgrown and barely recognizable in the green wild. Roses climbed wherever they chose, filling the air with their heady scent in the spring. Ivy had begun to climb the houses walls of its own accord, green covering up the ugly brown brick.

Lindy made her way past the garden to the edge of the forest, settling down against the wide trunk of her favorite old tree and cracking the book open across her knees.

She didn’t read this time, just let her fingers trace the lines of the old drawings as the tears dripped down from her eyes.

“That wasn’t what she looked like at all,” said a little voice over her right shoulder.

Startled, she looked around, but couldn’t find anybody.

She looked down at her book once more and was forced to squint at the pages, not believing what she saw.

A tiny little person with gossamer wings stood in the middle of her page, pointing at the picture of Cinderella with her toes. Her feet were bare and her dress seemed to be made of leaves, although they sparkled like no leaves she had ever seen. Her wild little tangle of hair was pinned back by what looked like leaf-stems, and her startling blue eyes looked up at Lindy.

“She had the darkest hair I’ve ever seen,” the little person said. “I don’t know why they always draw her as blonde. And her dresses were far prettier than the ones here. These pictures don’t do them justice. I have no idea what the artist was thinking.”