The Girl in the Fishbowl

I first saw her at the school open-house. All the kids were sitting on the lawn, talking to friends they hadn’t seen over the summer, discussing important issues with older kids about who was the meanest teacher. We were carefree, not bothering to wonder how what we did made other people feel. I was twelve. Come to think of it, I never really knew her age. As I got to know her, she seemed to become as unaffected by time, as entirely ageless as the ever-changing ocean.

She was sitting in a wheelchair that had been wheeled to where it was sitting safely under a large shady tree. She stared straight ahead, never moving, though clearly seeing all around her. A girl I knew from elementary school walked by, glancing at the girl, then turned to talk to her friends.

¨That girl is crazy,¨ she declared loudly, not bothering to lower her voice even though the girl was certainly close enough to hear her harmfull words. ¨She can talk and stuff, but she won’t even move if you say hi to her or anything. Watch,” she commanded, going up to the girl to prove her point. She waved her hand in the girlś face, and loudly said, ¨Hi.¨ The girl’s gaze didn’t waver, she didn’t even flinch. “See?” the girl said motioning for her friends to come over and assist her in bothering the girl. I turned and walked away. It was a busy day, a teacher would probably notice the torture and shoo the cruel girls away. I wasn’t worried.

The next time I saw her was on the first day of school. I noticed that the girl was in the majority of my classes, starting with homeroom. She did her work with an aide, with whom she went everywhere with. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. She had short dark hair, and a pretty, plain face. Un-noteworthy, yet somehow she drew my attention, like the glow of a lamp attracts a moth. I found myself watching her in class, trying to sit close to her whenever the chance arose. Despite this odd attraction, she never spoke to me, nor I to her, and yet, I somehow sensed that she knew I was interested in her.

I truly met the girl for the first time when I first chose to sit with her at lunch. This was a hard decision for me, as you might realize. I had been sitting with a nice group of perfectly average people with kind eyes and top knots who discussed homework and grades and when the next Chris Pratt movie was coming out. It was during one of these conversations that I decided to leave them. I had been sitting at that table for about a month by then, school had been going for that long. I had been thinking about the girl for that long. I looked up from the dull conversation and saw her looking at me from the special needs kids table, all alone except for that aide. I looked into her eyes, and realized that she wanted me to come to her, to meet her. After that, it was almost an easy choice. I got up and simply walked over to her table, ignoring the confused calls from back at my table. I didn’t need them anymore. When I had finally reached her table, I realized I still had the aide to deal with.

Nervously, I asked, “Can… Can I sit here?”

She smiled at me and said,”Of course you can.” I sat down and looked up at the girl. She was still watching me. I didn’t know what to say. Finally, I turned back to the aide.

“Does she talk?” I asked. I felt bad wondering, and it seemed a rude thing to say, but it was better to ask at first than to still be silently wondering at the end of a wasted lunch period.

“Well,” said the aide, “She can, but most of the time she doesn’t. Ask her a question, she’ll answer if she feels like it.”

I nodded, and turned back to the girl. She looked at me with those deep, incredible eyes. “Hi,” I said, softly, as though sharing a secret only we knew. “My name’s Grace. What’s your name?”

The girl continued to stare right at me as though I hadn’t said a thing. “Her name’s Maggie.” the aide said helpfully after a short stretch of silence. I nodded again and turned back to the girl, Maggie. I looked at her for a minute, she looked at me. Then, as though it all had made perfect sense to her, Maggie nodded, an almost imperceptible shake of the head, and leaned back in her chair. She began to eat. This was the beginning of our friendship.

From that moment on, Maggie and I were almost inseperable. I followed her everywhere, and she waited for me when I had to go somewhere. It was almost as though now that I knew Maggie I was part of her sphere, a little bubble of peace in the previously chaotic world of school. We didn’t ever even talk, but somehow we seemed to know what the other was thinking. I think that it was just being in each other’s presences that put as at ease, knowing a fellow sympathizer was nearby. Maggie’s wheelchair was never in the way, despite its bulk and size. It malfunctioned often, but I knew Maggie didn’t want my help, and I never offered, because I knew that whatever she wanted to do she could do. Maggie knew I didn’t need to talk, and so she never had to start a conversation. We were happy, inconceivably so, a happiness beyond what we had known before.

I remember clearly the first time she spoke to me. We were in social studies, doing a project with partners, and I had chosen Maggie to be my partner (of course). I remember us both working in silence, and I had looked up to see what Maggie was doing, and saw that she was already looking at me. Her face intent as she studied mine, her dark eyes seeming simple, but so deep. She was beautiful, the picture of perfection. She whispered, “Grace,” and reached out, and gently, ever so gently, she touched my face, just on the cheekbone. Then she was looking down again, back to work. I knew then that this girl I had come so close to was much more, much deeper than I had ever imagined, and that I was only scraping the surface. I knew then how it felt when scientists realized how much space there was. That was the feeling I had when Maggie talked.

After the day Maggie spoke to me we grew even closer. If we had been inseperable before, now we were conjoined twins. I wanted to understand Maggie’s world, what went on in her head, that deep, unreadable mass. Maggie wanted to understand me. She wanted to know why one might go shopping, or exchange friendship bracelets, or go swimming together. How it felt to run on the beach chasing seagulls. She wanted to know how the rest of the world worked, while I only wanted to know her. It was a puzzling, magical time of discovery, and, at some points frustration. Maggie couldn’t always communicate her thoughts and questions as well as we both would have liked. There were days when she wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t even talk, as if the last few months had never happened, as if I was the stranger who had sat down at the weird girl’s lunch table again.

I sat and waited with Maggie most days after school for her mother to pick her up. I didn’t know much about her mother,I didn really know anything about Maggie’s home life in general. It was odd, how close we were at school but how suddenly far we were as soon as we left the grounds. I had caught myself at home more than once thinking of Maggie as an old friend who had died, or moved away. It terrified me how easy it was for her to disappear from me.

I knew she drove a silver Chevy, an old kind with racks on the top. To us, our families mattered little when we were together. We were family. One day, unlike most days, Maggie’s mother was late. Maggie and I had started to play a little game that we enjoyed, where each of us asked a question, and we took turns, asking and answering. Sometimes we asked silly questions, like, ‘why is your hair brown?’, but most of the time we asked serious questions, like, ‘when are you a grownup, and no longer a kid?’ This is what we were doing that afternoon, sunshine falling into our hair after slipping off greenish yellow leaves. It was peaceful, and luxurious. I felt confident, egged on by the atmosphere and the happiness of the day. So I asked, “Maggie, what do you see when you look at the world?”

Maggie was silent for a minute. Then, slowly, she looked into my eyes and in a deep, sad whisper, she said, ”I live in a fishbowl, Grace. I am alone, swimming side by side with the other fish. They do not see me. I am alone. Only I can see the truth, see that the fish are ugly and the fishbowl is slowly killing us. I know the only to escape is to jump, to leave, to fly out of the fishbowl and into the great beyond. But then, every so often, a fish swims closer by, and they float with me for a while. They show me the beauty of the fishbowl, and I start to accept that this is the truth, that I was wrong, that there is always another option. But then the fish swims away and leaves me alone again, alone with my thoughts, alone with my truths and my lies and no way to find the answers to my questions. Grace, you are a fish who swims along side me, and I know that soon you will swim away, no matter how hard you try to stay beside me, the current will force you away, and I will be alone again, because I am the girl in the fishbowl.”

I was silent. There was no answer to something like this, to when a person gives you their world and waits for a response. So we sat there, next to each other, until her mom pulled up and helped her into the car. She left, and I didn’t move. I knew I should go home, but I couldn’t, not yet, because I was still thinking about what she said. Because she was wrong. Maggie was wrong. She may be the fish alone in the bowl, surrounded but alone. But I was not the one who swam away, that was her. That was her always moving, darting in and out between the fish, going so fast that none could ever keep up. I had tried to stay with her, tried to learn what she saw, tried to keep up, but she was leaving now, she was almost gone. Soon, I would be alone again, left alone as average, and boring, and she would zoom off and find someone else, but I would still be here. Alone. I realized this. I accepted it.And I gave up. And I went home.