Sapphire Blue in the Straw

Jenny was a ruby, as was her sister and her mother. Her father was a sapphire as was her brother. Ruby and Sapphire were what the girls in her high school nicknamed their loveliest and most handsome schoolmates. But as lovely and handsome, most of them were selfish, self-obsessed snobs, never above ridiculing anyone they considered beneath them. Jenny was the exception. She never joined in their pranks, or snickered or looked down on anyone less fortunate, no matter how hard they tried to pull her in. They tolerated her because she was beautiful, talented, intelligent, sharp-witted, and her parents were among the wealthiest in the town. Even when she chose as her closest friend, the plainest girl in school, they turned a blind eye, because her fairness and kindness extended to them as well. Jenny had everything, beauty, brains, wealth, a promising future beginning with the most prestigious college her parents could well afford. She had everything, except for the boy she admired, and whose affection she yearned for. No one knew, not even Lilac, her closest friend. Certainly none of the Rubies. The boy's name was Ronald Leonard Chapman, and he lived a few blocks from her, which might as well have been the moon. She had never seen him before that afternoon at a baseball game in the town's major league ball park. Her parents had procured front row seating for her brother James and two of his friends, avid baseball fans like himself. He was older than her by three years, and since the day she began to walk, she had followed him everywhere around their home. They had remained close over the years. He had always been kind, never teased her as her older sibling, Eleanor. It was natural, when one of his friends had to forego the game, that her brother should ask her to take his place and join him. She might not be alive today, eight years later, Jenny thought, treading her comb through waves of short silky dark blonde hair, if it was not for Ron who happened to be sitting beside her that afternoon. She'd hardly noticed him, except for the cane that had caught her eye as she bent to re-tie the shoe lace that had come undone on her left sneaker. His teenage face, somewhat drawn and sallow, would be a memory long lost and gone, if during an unforgettable pitch, the ball had not shot like a rocket toward her head, and this stranger had pushed her to the side so that it impacted his collar bone, instead of cracking her skull.