Fragile by Lisa Unger

relief washed over him as the screen came to life and he entered his password.
    Online it was all different. He was different. He could visit with people who wouldn’t give him a second glance in real life. Like Charlene Murray. He logged in to Facebook and checked his in-box. It was predictablyempty, though sometimes he heard from a girl named Maya, whom he’d met in a science fiction chat group on AOL last year. She had an impressive knowledge of the genre, but she used a picture of Hello Kitty as her image on all the social networks, which meant she was probably ugly or fat. Still, he enjoyed talking to her and was disappointed that she hadn’t answered his last message.
    He went straight to Charlene’s page, as he always did, checking first for any new photos of her. Then he checked his status updates; there was nothing new. He reread the only message she’d ever sent him personally, after he’d added her as a friend and she’d accepted. Hey, Marshall! Thanks for the friendship. See you at the Nook on Friday?
    He’d thought it was a personal invitation until he realized that her band was playing at the club that catered to the underage set, serving sodas and junk food rather than booze. She’d sent that message to everyone. Still, wasn’t there something about the message she sent to him that was different? He thought so, though he couldn’t say what.
    You just have to talk to her, man. Get to know her, let her get to know you. That’s all it is. Girls just want to talk . Sage advice from his cousin Tim. And it was good advice—if you were six feet tall, as blond and buff as a surfer, and every girl who met you fell instantly in love, if all you had to do was choose . But that was definitely not the case for Marshall. He was the kind of guy who disappeared in a crowd, the one you never thought about, who never said a word. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror, he almost felt like he couldn’t even see himself. He could focus on certain things—his mousy hair, the acne on his skin, his thin arms and undeveloped pecs. But he couldn’t get a sense of how all the separate parts of himself fit together.
    When you work out , Ryan told him, you get a better sense of your body. You’ll get to know yourself better . And when he’d been at Leila’s, Marshall used to work out with them in the makeshift gym in the basement—they had free weights and an exercise bike, a weight bench and a sit-up plank. They told him what to do and he did it, though he had to admit he did not get off on the physical effort the way they seemed to. After working out, Ryan and Tim were pumped with adrenaline, ready andraring to go. Marshall just felt like lying down. Since he’d been back with his father, he hadn’t even gone for a run. Any gains he’d made during his time with his cousins had quickly faded.
    He looked in Charlene’s notes for some new lyrics or poetry.
There’s a secret place where we can be free
Where the world will close its eyes to us
And we can be
Like the womb or the tomb
We are alone … together
It is a beginning and an end .
    He quickly went to her wall and left a note: Love the new lyrics, Char. You’re so talented.
    If he tried to say anything like that to her in person, he’d go red in the face, maybe even start to cough, make a total dork out of himself. But here he could comment on her updates, tell her what he thought about music and movies he knew she liked. She never answered him, but it was enough to know she was reading the things he wrote on her wall.
    Last week he wrote to tell her about the car his dad had given him. “Lemme know if u ever need a lift!” He didn’t tell her that it was his father’s car and the only reason he’d given it to Marshall was that he wasn’t allowed to drive for six more months as part of his parole. So Marshall had basically become his chauffeur, driving him everywhere even when he should have been in school.
    But when he’d seen Charlene in the