The New Rules

The Red Balloon

When Clara was six years old, she helped her father make a vanilla birthday cake.

She stood with her tiptoes on a chair beside the brass sink, peering inside the bowl at the sunflower gold blobs of yolk. Crack. Crack. Chip. Jack had it right; with a gentle tap, the hard shell opened to release the gooey insides that slipped and slid to meet the others.

"Do the eggs feel hurt when you break them?" she asked.

He assured her that the eggs didn't feel any pain. Every time he gave her an egg to crack, she smashed it too hard against the bowl, crushing it whole in her hands like a slick mess. "The only thing you will truly break my love, are hearts," Jack said.

As Clara got older, she studied biology and realized that a heart couldn't split open from tapping against a bowl. A heart pumped blood, and connected the entire body; it wasn't that easy. At least she thought this until Xavier broke hers. Her heart was broken, the way a hard fork slams up against the frail skin of the shell puncturing the membrane, forcing it open, oozing its golden insides out, until there is nothing but hollowness left.

The break up always felt like a fluke car crash, like she thought they were driving on a dry road, on a sunny day, with a clear path, but there was black ice and the car spun off into a pole, slashing the car in half. The rescue had to be done separately; both airlifted away, to different destinations, never the same again.

The day he left was remarkably cool for the end of August; an undercurrent of change in the rustling of the tree leaves, despite the sun. A warning. That afternoon, Clara stood barefoot on Xavier's cement porch, wearing nothing but a camisole and spandex shorts.

"Please don't leave," she whispered into his ear.

He scooped her up, so her legs could wrap around his waist. He was tall, 6ft1 to be exact, which suited Clara as she was taller than most of her female friends. She grew seven inches between grade 8 and grade 9, and when she started high school, the summer after the surge, as her mother used to call it, she felt like an awkward, bumbling giant. She hated how long her legs were, and how they had no shape, like two wooden sticks holding up a tomato plant. But with Xavier she felt like she was normal, the right size.

He had shiny and black hair, large hazel eyes, and smooth brown skin, but it was his smile that Clara liked best. It was wide, with a bit of a gap at the bottom, and the first time he looked at her, right at her, and smiled, she felt seen like finally someone understood.

She was a junior when they met. He went to the private school, Henry Jacobs across the block from the all girls private school Marchesa M., that she attended. They always met up during their lunch break, sometimes Xavier would skip class to meet her, since he was in his final year, and had most teachers wrapped around his finger. They'd spent their time sitting in the cramped backseat of his father's two-seater Porsche, the air conditioning blasting through closed windows in the summer, or snuggled up in a blanket on frigid winter afternoons. Mostly, they'd eat cheeseburgers, or sandwiches, or whatever they had time to drive to, while making sure not to spill anything on the seats. Clara would take off her blazer, and patent Oxford loafers, and sometimes even her knee-high wool socks. He would loosen his Kelly green tie, the colour of the Henry Jacobs sports team. Sometimes they would make out, or fool around, and other times, Clara would lie on his lap and he'd play with her hair, and they would just talk about their parents, best friends, or people they found annoying on social media. Towards the end of their relationship, Xavier talked a lot about the future.

"I feel like my mom loves me the least in my family," he said as he bit into a French fry. "Rav, Nitin, and Nikil all are perfect, all into science, all will follow into my family's profession. My mother constantly tells me that I like art too much, that I will end up poor and on the streets." Xavier had many offers to good schools, and his parents had science-based careers; his mother was an oral surgeon, his father, a pharmacist. His parents Raj and Anita hailed from the United Kingdom, though their grandparents were from India.

"And you not being interested in science doesn't help," he'd add. "Although my mother worships your mother, so the quicker you can turn into Grace, the better." Clara always concealed her hurt feelings around Xavier.

"Let's just runaway and become artists together?" she said, but deep down she knew his mother didn't adore her, but she hated being compared to her mother. Anita was pleasant, but she'd drop hints that Clara wasn't good enough, like when she asked, during dinner, if Clara knew how to make masala puri, knowing full well that she didn't. "These are first world problems X," she said. "We're having lunch in a Porsche, I'd say we're doing okay."

Before finals, he told her that he needed to take a year away to find himself, the classic words from kids who don't want to get into the shackles of The New Rules just yet. He told her that he wanted to be free, travel and experience the world. On their last goodbye, he pulled her close and lifted her up so her bare legs wrapped around his waist like a curled up pipe cleaner.

"One year," he said. "And I'll try to come back."

Clara flinched at the word try. For the past six months, he'd always said, promise, he'd promise to come back. She smelled his white t-shirt; it reminded her of powdered laundry detergent, the kind with photos of ice-capped mountains on the box. Clara bit the inside of her mouth so she wouldn't cry. She clung to him like a child grips the string of a shiny balloon, amazed at the perfect, globular thing within its reach.

And without thinking, she let go.