The Buck Pass

The Buck Pass Chapter 11

Trini’s Secret

Trini’s bedroom had always been her sanctuary. Nestled in a corner on the topmost floor of the Martoni triplex, the room may not have been the largest of spaces, but, for Trini, it served its purpose as a hideaway from her parents and a haven for her thoughts.

She pushed the door open cautiously, always alert to the possibility of some dreadful surprise. Trini’s parents were famous for their “surprises.” Once, on the night before her sixth birthday, they had let a thousand live butterflies loose in Trini’s bedroom while she slept, the idea being that she would, in her mother’s words, “wake up to the delicate flapping of dainty wings.” Unfortunately, it hadn’t quite worked out that way. Trini had awoken to the strange sensation of having a swarm of butterflies perched on her face. Confused and scared, she had flailed her arms about wildly, trying to figure out what was happening. A flurry of dead and injured butterflies, their beautiful, iridescent wings mutilated from the impact of colliding with her body, dropped out of the air and fell onto her bed covers. Trini had been so traumatized, she had needed to spend the next six months seeing a child psychiatrist. But at the moment, thankfully, her room seemed to be surprise-free.

Closing the door quietly behind her, she turned the lock and gave a sigh of relief. Privacy at last – and for what Trini was about to do, she needed it. Placing the large, pink duffle bag on the floor, she unzipped it and began to unpack. The few items of clothing that she had brought home were folded neatly, fulfilling their role as camouflage perfectly. The bulk of her belongings was sitting in a storage facility back in Boston, awaiting her return in September; the duffle bag had been crammed full with only the items that Trini had figured would be essential to surviving her time in Manhattan. She took out the clothes and placed them carefully into the drawers of her white marble dresser. Next came her toiletries, which she arranged neatly on her nightstand. After removing a few paperback novels that she had really only added as an aid to concealment, in case her parents had been nearby while she was unpacking (Trini, being a lover of all things technological, vastly preferred ebooks to their corporeal counterparts), she came, at last, to her most prized possessions: her soldering equipment.

Lovingly, she lifted the black plastic box that housed her soldering iron from the depths of the pink duffle bag and rested it on her pink, frilly bedspread. A moment later, it was joined by two enormous spools of soldering wire. Trini glanced at the door, triple-checking that it was locked before unearthing her life’s pride and passion – her metalwork creations.

Trini had never told anyone about her metalwork, mostly because she hated the idea of it being criticized. She had been introduced to the art of soldering years ago, by a boy she had dated briefly in junior high school. Whereas he, being a closet pyromaniac, had simply gotten a kick out of getting the soldering iron to emit a few fiery sparks, Trini had fallen in love with the process of manipulating metal at her will. Over the years, it had become her favorite pastime, a way of releasing stored-up, creative energy that would probably have come shooting out of her ears (and various other orifices) if she hadn’t had an outlet for it.

One by one, she lifted her newest creations from the duffle bag, those that she had crafted on the sly, during those stolen moments in her dorm room at Harvard when her roommate had been out. As a rule, Trini’s works tended to reflect her innate love of logic and realism, such as her intricate scale model of the Eiffel Tower, or her precise, miniature, three dimensional representations of geometric shapes. But during her year at Harvard, her creative endeavors had taken a radical departure. She was not quite sure how it had happened. Maybe it was related to the fact that, for the first time in her life, Trini had found herself exposed to truly challenging lessons in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Unlike the courses she had taken in high school, the classes at Harvard were no joke. And to Trini, whose brain had been starving on the most inelegant of quadratic equations for far too long, this smorgasbord of scientific fare was immensely satisfying – so much so, that she no longer felt the need to create bite-sized homages to it. Instead, she had found herself creating pieces that were anything but logical. Lines without structure, shapes without meaning, and curves that were completely conceptual had started springing from her head, and, as usual, Trini couldn’t stop herself from bringing them into existence. Despite this major change in the style of her metalwork, Trini had no problem dreaming up ideas about what to solder; her next project was always kicking around in the back of her mind. No, the problem was the same as it had been for years: figuring out what to do with her masterpieces once they were finished.