Sea Glass

I

The sky had been cloudy.

An endless blank stretch of grey, unassuming but at the same time ethereal, and Elise had been observing its expanse before the other children had approached her.

They'd been playing stickball in the field, and now were finished, bounding across the grass with sticks slung over their shoulders and balls in hand.

"What'cha lookin' at?"

"The sky," she answered, giving her schoolmates a semi-glance before turning her attention back upwards.

"...oh."

Some had already lost their patience and were running back to the playing field, but the ones that stayed followed her gaze, searching for anything worth looking at. Finally their heads tilted back down with a shrug.

"Don't see anything."

"I do."

One of them stepped forward -- Thomas, was it? -- and with an awkward shuffling of feet came a proposition: "Come play stickball with us, Elise."

"...maybe some other time."

"You never join! It'll be fun!"

She chewed on her lip, eyes dull with mild disinterest. 

"Thanks, but not right now."

Thomas sighed. 

"...okay..."

With a wave of his hand they were gone, shrieks of laughter echoing across the dewy grass, and Elise was left alone to watch the sky again.

She'd never quite liked to play stickball, or jump rope, or catch down by the willow tree where the others usually congregated. She preferred to keep to herself in the still and the quiet, and notice things that others didn't. Study what made them extraordinary.

Like that clover, for instance, that had grown through a crack in the pavement. It was a miracle someone hadn't stepped on it, for it stood alone and unprotected. Or that trail of ants that had been marching past her for as long as she'd been outside. How did they manage to stay so straight? Did they have a specific destination, or were they just blindly following a leader? If one of the ants decided it didn't want to march anymore, could it just... break away...?

A slight breeze tousled her hair, and she turned her attention back to the sky once more.

No one quite appreciated the things that she did, but she didn't mind.

Admittedly, it would be nice to have somebody to look at things with. The other children were friendly to her -- Thomas included -- but they were always moving, always in action. Small things slipped by them. Sitting still was something they could barely do in class, and silence unnerved them. They had to fill it, by talking, tapping, whistling, moving. 

Elise let out a small sigh and took a few steps back to lean against the brick wall of her school, gazing at her sky.

"It's a canvas."

The voice came from her right, and she turned to see a man leaning in the same way just a few feet from her. 

Several thoughts came to mind: how long had he been there? Was he so still she hadn't noticed him, or had he just come up next to her? Was he even allowed on the property of this school?

Startled, the only question she could voice was, "What?"

"The sky. It's a canvas today."

He seemed completely unfazed by her reaction, or by the fact that he probably shouldn't have even been there.

His gaze remained focused above him, serious ice-blue eyes narrowed as he studied the mass of clouds, and his posture seemed relaxed enough that she decided he was no threat. The tension drained out of her, and she nodded her agreement.

"The sun is the paint."

Long rays of sunlight had begun to stretch across the muted grey, pale white-yellow, and the man nodded in something akin to approval. 

"Not every day the sky's blank like this. Usually much more textured."

"Yesterday there were mountains." Elise tilted her head to the side, trying to form a new painting entirely. "Great ones, wispy at the top. All crowding into one another."

"The day before that, it was just hills. Hills and valleys."

"Hidden valleys..." she absentmindedly hummed, tapping a toe on the ground once or twice, then turning to him.

"What do I call you? Your name, I mean?"

He cracked a half-smile.

"Bobby Zimmerman."

A wide smile of her own spread across her face.

"I'm Elise Stermann."

As if to prove her point, an echo of "Elise!"  reached her ears, and she stood upright, taking a few steps towards the cluster of children moving inside.

"I have to go. Thank you for watching the sky with me, Bobby Zimmerman."

He didn't reply, merely kept the smile and raised a hand in farewell, and with that she turned and ran to join the rest of her class. The usual chatter of schoolyard affairs floated around her: who had climbed the farthest up the willow tree, the slug that had attached itself to somebody's shoe (that brought to light a new set of questions about slugs. How were they not killed, moving so slow? Wouldn't the sun dry them up if they had no shells? Did they think as slow as they moved, or did they think of so much at once that the rest of them couldn't possibly keep up...?). Thomas informed her that his team had won the game, and whether he was trying to win her affections or not she couldn't be sure. Nonetheless, she offered her congratulations.

Before she could pass through the door, her teacher grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her aside, confronting her with a flustered onslaught of words: "...could have been kidnapped, what if he had killed you... what did we teach you... complete stranger..."

Elise only offered a vague apology in reply and smiled to herself. They had it all wrong. He wasn't a complete stranger, he was Bobby Zimmerman, and he liked to watch the sky.

~o~