All the Broken Things Read Free

controlled his breathing, felt the hardness of pavement tremor up his legs, and worked to absorb and soften it into propulsion.
    A mandatory ten laps to stay on the team, but Bo did more. He lost count. He didn’t care that this infuriated some of the other kids—the running removed care. Different things came and went from his mind: his mother, his father, sharks, Orange—her protruding eyes, and the way her body bent and twisted, and what she could be thinking. He wished he knew what she thought about when he was away.
    Mr. Morley blew his whistle. Practice was over. An hour had passed inside the space of no time.

    T EACHER DREW A wooden ship with a beautiful prow on the chalkboard. She wrote in cursive:
History
. She told stories about Cabot and Columbus. The one Bo likedbest was a story about a boat with horses on it and how they eventually ran away and made all the horses in North America.
    “Like Noah’s Ark,” said Emily.
    “Yes, a little like that,” said Teacher. She smiled at Emily. “Imagine how magical finding a new land must have been. I wonder if any of you has ever been in a boat on the ocean?”
    Bo shrank down in his chair, but Sally stretched her hand skyward, like her shoulder might dislocate if she jammed it higher.
    “Yes, Sally.”
    Teacher always smiled a little when she listened. Her bobbed hair touched her shoulders. He’d known her for a long time—since he and Rose had come to Canada—and he had to pretend he didn’t know her all that well. It wasn’t cool to know the teacher. Bo didn’t know why this was, just that it was. But Teacher knew everything about him. He practised a neutral face.
    Sally said, “We took the ferry back and forth to Ward’s Island over the summer. Twice.” Her arm stayed waving in the air as she spoke.
    “Thank you, Sally. Anyone else?” Teacher tilted her head toward Bo. “That’s Lake Ontario, of course, a ferry boat. A lake is much smaller than an ocean, and it has sweet water in it, not salt water. Most of the animals that live in a lake cannot survive in the ocean. They cannot master the salt.” She looked directly at him.
    She knew he had been in a boat on the ocean. She and ten other families had sponsored Rose and Bo to come to Canada. And even though her name was really Ann Lily, his mother called her Teacher, out of respect, and in his mind, so did he. And now, after four years, she was his teacher. Grade eight. He preferred not to think of that boat. Sweet water or salt water.
    “Have you ever been on the ocean, Bo?” she asked.
    Everyone knew already. It was the source of much of the ridicule he’d endured from the class and even from some of the younger children in the school. At fourteen, Bo should be in grade nine; he’d been held back in grade five to learn to speak and read and write in English.
    Teacher said, “Bo?”
    He stared into the middle distance, and answered. “I was on a boat on the ocean.” He did not say that everything about the boat and the ocean shamed him. The memory of it was like a monster, but just the feeling of a monster, without the actual monster, so he couldn’t fight it. That there was no actual monster made it much worse. The bad feeling settled in if he let it.
    “Can you tell the class how it was?”
    He knew she wanted only and very badly to make him real to the class, but adults didn’t understand real. They understood nice and kind and the rest they tried to ignore. In this way, they were far worse than the children, who at least teased him about the rest. The oddthing about the teasing was it made him real to the other kids for the duration of the mockery. That might be the only kind of real he would ever have.
    “I don’t remember very much, Miss. It was windy some of the time. There were fish following the boat.” In fact, he remembered everything about it. He lived those five days over and over, the looping horror of them.
    “Oh, lovely,” she said, stretching out the word, blinking,