Helena grins and replies, “Maybe you should.” Then she returns her attention to her easel. With green and black, she evokes the shapes of the fruit and jars. I am spellbound. I’ve never seen anything like it. I have seen prints of some of Picasso’s paintings in the Cubist style, and while Helena’s piece looks like some distant cousin of that, it’s a method and a look all its own.
“I’m sorry to keep spying on you, but that’s really amazing,” I tell Helena.
“You think so?” Helena takes a step back from her easel and scrutinizes her drawing. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a little too angry?”
“Why’s that a bad thing?” I ask as Helena returns to her stool.
Whatever Helena was about to answer in response is drowned out by a very loud buzzing sound. It sounds like someone is fiddling with the school’s PA system, which is only supposed to come on in the morning during homeroom, or in an emergency.
“Hey, everybody,” a voice filters through. “Here’s a little senior surprise for the semester. Some might call it a prank, call it what you will, but I present to you my bud, DJ Ben Maxwell! Everybody, I want you out in the halls, dancing and putting your hands together for this rhymin’ fiend. Now, Benny-boy, rap!”
For a second, everyone is frozen. Nobody laughs or speaks or moves. We just stare at one another, then all eyes come to rest on Ms. Calico. A beat starts to pulse through the PA speakers.
“Well, who am I to stop you? You heard what the man said.” Ms. Calico steps back and opens the studio door.
I look at Helena, who just shrugs in return and slides off her stool. She peels off her smock and beckons for me to follow her out into the hall. The nearby classrooms are emptying into the hallway and most of the kids are standing around awkwardly, hands shoved in pockets, toes scuffing the linoleum tiles. Then, a brave few begin to dance. Now, the doors to all of the classrooms up and down the corridor are flung open, and more students are writhing and twisting to the rhythm of the PA beat. I can’t believe what is going on—it’s a dance party. Suddenly, someone touches my arm. I start and spin around. It’s Ms. Calico and she waves me back into the art room.
“Cora, before you jump into the crush, I wonder if I might have a brief word with you?” she asks.
“Um, sure,” I reply. Uh-oh. A brief word never seems like a good thing; it’s what cops and principals always had to ask my parents for when Nate was alive, after he had gotten into one kind of trouble or another.
“Your work in this class is quite impressive, Cora,” Ms. Calico states as more people brush past us to get out of the classroom and into the hall. “I can see so much potential in your line, in your forms. And I’ve seen your maps when you’ve turned in your sketch pad. They are fascinating, Cora.” She looks at me closely as she continues, “You remember I spoke about some summer art programs at the beginning of the semester?” I nod, my gut buzzing like it’s filled with a bee’s nest and the inmates have just escaped. “Good. I’d like to recommend you for one of them. Would you like that?” Ms. Calico’s gaze is piercing, as if she is searching me for some kind of answer or information, and meanwhile my heart might just swell so big it’ll pop out of my chest. She thinks my work is impressive?
“Really?” I ask. “Yeah, I would definitely be interested. That would be incredible!” My mind is whirring so fast. Can this be real? I study Ms. Calico’s face. “You really think I’m good?”
“I wouldn’t stand here and say it if I didn’t mean it. And this particular program has a cartography class that I think you’d really enjoy.”
“Wow,” I say softly.
“Yes, well, I will bring the application forms to you tomorrow. The program is in London, so you’ll have to cover the airfare, but beyond that, all expenses would be covered.”
“London?” I repeat in amazement. For a moment, I feel like I’m taking off, leaping into glorious flight. Finally, I will go somewhere. Then, reality thumps me over the head, as it always seems to do. My mother is never going to allow me to go to London for a summer. Never. “Oh, I—I don’t know…” I whisper.
“Well, how about you just fill out the application, and let’s see? All right?” Ms. Calico prods.
I can only nod my head mutely.
“Okay, go party with the rest of them,” Ms. Calico says, lightly steering me back through the door. “And remember, the application is due November fifteenth.”
Words are fumbling through my mind. Impressive. Potential. London. I know I’m walking a tightrope. I could let go and allow myself to believe in this fantasy that my art has potential, that I have talent, and that I could go to London to explore it. But, it’s too dangerous. This is something I want so badly, too badly, and I can only crash and fall flat on my disappointed face.
I walk out into the tangle of swaying bodies, my mouth hanging open as I take in the mass of wriggling dancers, the teachers standing silently, smilingly in their classroom doorways. Mr. Halpern, the assistant principal, is wading through the sea of students, helplessly flapping his arms, anxiously tugging at his greasy hair and wiping at his brow, as he tries heedlessly to shepherd everyone back to class. He makes an absurd and lonely picture in the midst of all the jollity. Actually, the whole affair makes a pretty absurd picture—a dance party in the high school hallway at two o’clock in the afternoon. But I feel lonely and removed from it all. Funny, how I am more in sync with Mr. Halpern than anyone else at this moment. I continue moving through the crowd, feeling gangly and wooden, aware of my arms hanging limply at my sides—they feel too long and stiff.
Suddenly, I walk into something. Hard.
“Ouch.” I look up. “Oh.”
Damian. He is standing in front of me, rubbing his arm. “Hey,” he says.
“Um, hi,” I reply. “Sorry about that. I was distracted.” Was he waiting for me again?
“Yeah, I could tell,” Damian says, smiling. “What’s going on? You’re not partaking in the senior prank?”
“Senior prank?” I echo.
“It’s a tradition, the senior class stages a prank sometime during the semester before Homecoming.” I suppose my face looks blank, because Damian grins, and says, “You know, big football game, fancy dance? Homecoming?”
“Oh, right…I heard about it…from…Nate.” We both look down, and I’ll bet my face looks as twisted with confusion and discomfort as his does. “Wait, Homecoming? When is it?” I ask, my mind starting to reel. I am so not clued into anything going on at school, I haven’t even thought about the dance once. I am pretty sure Rachel has mentioned it at some point or another, but I really can’t recall any details.
“Seriously? You must be the only girl in school who doesn’t know when the dance is,” Damian replies, laughing. “It’s the second weekend in November. Sound familiar?”
“Oh,” I murmur. A dance? What do I do? Do I go? Would my mother even let me go? I don’t have a dress, a date. Oh my gosh, I’m not ready for this. Images of girls in poofy Pepto-Bismol pink dresses and high heels, boys with their hair slicked back, waltz through my mind. Not to mention the game…
“Hey, do you want a ride home?” Damian asks, startling me from my train wreck of thought. He shrugs, smiling. “I thought I’d try again.”
I feel my eyelids stretching to blink over my bug-eyes. Hold on a minute, what? “Um…okay.” I answer. Wait a second; what have I just agreed to? Getting into a car with Damian Archer? I must really be losing it. My mom would have a conniption if she knew that I was riding in a car with anyone under the age of forty (Rule #3), not to mention the one person in the world she hates most and trusts least. Not to mention the fact that he’s…Damian Archer!
Little beads of sweat break out on my forehead, but I follow Damian, threading through the still-dancing students, to my locker, where he waits for me to grab my coat and books.
“You don’t need to go to your locker?” I ask.
“Nope,” he answers. I cock an eyebrow. Does he ever do homework? But I continue after h
im toward the parking lot. He drives a gorgeous, carefully painted 1971 cobalt blue El Camino with a silver racing stripe down the middle.
“My lady,” he says, opening the passenger-side door for me.
“Why, thank you, good sir.” My voice sounds tight; this playacting at normalcy feels false. My stomach is going spastic, and suddenly I realize, I’m scared. What am I doing? What am I doing?
“Nervous?” Damian asks. He looks at me closely and climbs into the driver’s seat.
I pause before answering him. That’s a big fat yes. “Ah, a little bit.”
He nods and turns the ignition. The car roars; it is a lion of an automobile. I jump.
“Don’t worry. I’ll drive carefully,” Damian tells me. He grins cheekily, but true to his word, Damian drives as slowly and deliberately as my mother. We sit in silence for a while, until Damian speaks. “Hey, do you mind if I show you something before I take you home?”
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s hard to explain. I’d rather just show you.”
I can’t imagine what he could possibly want to show me. An insatiable curiosity grips me. “All right, I guess.” Those bees start kicking around in my gut again, like they’re trying to sting me back to reason and out of this really stupid haze of pliancy.
“Good,” he says, and smiles again.
Soon, Damian crosses the county road and turns right onto Union Street. He’s heading east, away from my neighborhood and out toward the fields of the Wright farm. Oh, where are we going? I wonder. This is likely the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. There is a racket of bees buzzing in my ears, pricking my stomach with angry stings. Two minutes later, we’re pulling off the road and onto a gravel track. Damian slows before stopping altogether in front of a tall gray barn.
“We’re here,” Damian announces with that same cheeky grin as we get out of the car. He heads down an overgrown path and takes hold of one of the barn’s massive double doors. Damian waves me over. “Come on!”
I hover at the entryway to the dim, yawning space. Motes of dust flicker in the single shaft of sunlight that penetrates the crack between the doors. Damian flicks a light switch, and I can make out a host of bulky shapes standing at attention, but I can’t tell what they are. I start to feel nervous again. What am I doing here, with him?
Despite my trepidation, I follow Damian into the barn. I step gingerly, cringing as the wooden floorboards creak and groan beneath me. Damian treads lightly as a cat, carefully placing his feet to avoid the complaining planks.
“Look, what are we doing here?” I ask.
“You’ll see,” he answers. “The Wrights let Nate and me use their barn in exchange for help with some chores around the farm,” Damian explains.
“You and Nate worked on the farm?” My voice cracks with disbelief.
“You’ll see,” Damian repeats.
When we reach the back of the barn, Damian strikes another switch, and golden light floods the space. I suck in a sharp breath. “Oh my.”
There, before us, lay a jungle of sculptures, hulking pieces of twisted metal and torn wood, jumbles of wire and slabs of stone. Giant canvases covered with thick, violent slabs of oil paint, and other things hang on the walls.
“What is all this?”
“This is my studio. It was, ah, Nate’s and mine,” Damian says in answer.
“Yours and Nate’s?” I ask. “You made all of this?”
“We both worked here,” Damian explains nervously.
“When—how—how did you make all this?” I stutter.
“Well, I have a welding workshop in here; it’s over there, around in the corner, behind those sculptures. And, you know, we, uh, collected all this stuff to use, and—”
I interrupt, “You’re telling me that you and my brother made all of this?”
“Yes. I just told you—”
“I know what you told me, but how come…” My voice trails off as I gaze around the room, my eyes crawling over each piece. I can barely process any of it.
“Cora?” Damian asks.
I turn to look at him. “How come I never knew Nate was an artist?” A towering dam of tears is piling up, burning behind my eyes, threatening to spill over my cheeks.
“He didn’t…No one knew but him and me,” Damian responds softly. “He didn’t want to tell anyone.”
A vision of Nate, at ten or eleven, racing into the living room, a sheet of paper flapping in his hand, pops into my head.
“Look!” my brother cried, holding out the page to our grandfather, our dad’s father, who was visiting for the day. It was a drawing of a dog.
Grandpa drew a breath, his cheeks caving in and his lips puckering. “Did you trace this, son?” he’d asked. He’d lifted me from his lap, where we’d been reading a story together.
Nate solemnly shook his head. “No, sir,” he’d replied. “I drew it.”
My grandfather held up the drawing close, close, and lifted his glasses and peered at it. I stood up on tiptoe, straining to see the page, but my grandfather would not lower it. “Are you telling the truth?” Grandpa growled. At Nate’s vehement nod, he said, “Son, if you truly drew this, well, then I’d say you have a mighty fine talent. Mighty fine.” And Nate had grown pink, a proud flush.
That’s the only time I can recall seeing Nate show any interest in art. I knew he doodled, but nothing like this.
“How long have you guys been working on all this?” I ask Damian, and silently curse the quiver in my voice.
“I guess it’s been, like, three years.”
“I can’t believe it.” I wipe away the traitorous tears, hating myself for appearing so weak, for feeling so weak.
I turn my back on Damian and begin to wander among the pieces. “Here’s that yield sign he got in trouble for stealing.” I sniff and stop in front of a mammoth statue that has the shape of a man’s silhouette, constructed of gnarled metal rods, with the triangular traffic sign for a head.
“Basically,” Damian starts with a chuckle, “everything Nate was ever accused of ‘taking without permission’ is down here. In one of these pieces.”
“And the paintings?” I ask.
“I made the paintings,” Damian admits abashedly.
“They are amazing,” I whisper. The canvases look like bruised flesh with slashes of violet and black pigment, metal parts sticking out of small hills of oil paint. I walk closer and see that there are all sorts of objects concealed in the canvases: buttons, nails and bolts, a small wrench, computer keyboard letters.
We stand together and survey the cluttered, chaotic gallery. There are car parts that look like they came from Nate’s first car, which he also wrecked; broken bits of furniture; scraps of fabric. I’m pretty sure I recognize a pattern from an old set of my mother’s sheets. Everything precarious and wild. Yet there is a rhythm to the pieces, a poetry and a logic.
“I always thought that one day he would grow up and stop destroying everything,” I say quietly. “And it turns out, he already had.” I turn to Damian. “Why did you bring me here, show me all of this?” I ask.
Maybe if I stare at him long enough, hard enough, I’ll be able to pierce his brittle exterior and learn some truth. Some kind of truth. There has to be a meaning to all of it, a secret that he will reveal to me. Because I never, never believed that Nate—or Damian—might be capable of creating such…such beauty.
None of it makes any sense. All the time everyone thought they were just out to destroy and take everything apart, they were creating and building this wonder. My chest hurts. My chest hurts and I think my heart might be breaking. Again.
“I don’t know why,” Damian replies. “Ever since I saw you in school, I’ve been thinking about it. That’s why I was following you. I mean, your mom made it pretty clear at the funeral that I wasn’t welcome anymore, and I didn’t think you’d want to see me, either. I didn’t know how else to tell you about this, except to bring you here to see it.” Damian pauses, averting his eyes. ?
??And I think—I think Nate would have wanted you to know.” The words fall between us like a thousand raindrops.
“Well. Thank you.”
Silently, I weave between the sculptures and pass all around the barn walls one more time, as Damian stands by, watching.
“What is this one?” I’ve stopped in front of a large round stone with a tall metal pole poking from its flat top. Several two-by-six boards have been nailed together, and are leaning against the wall behind the pole and stone.
“Oh, that was…well, that was Nate’s last piece. He never finished it…Obviously.” Damian has come to stand next to me. “I think he was going to mount those boards onto the rod when he was done, but I’m not sure what he was going to do with the wood itself.”
I circle the stone base, and kneel down to study the boards, which are marked with soft gray swirls and dots and lines and smudges.
“His last piece, huh?” I turn to look at Damian. He nods. I look back at the pieces of wood. I wonder what it is, what Nate was going to do with them. I will never know.
Finally, I rise and realize that I’ve made an illegal stop after school with the Bradleys’ Number One Most Undesirable. I pull out my cell phone and check the time. It’s just after four. “I should go home, before my parents get there first. Would you take me?” I ask Damian.
“Sure. Let’s go. But, first—” Damian grabs the phone out of my hand and punches some buttons. He hands it back to me with a grin and says, “Just in case.” Then he leads me through the barn, out into the fresh air, and back to his car. And the whole time my ears feel like they’ve ignited and my heart is racing. Did he just give me his number? Oh my gosh…
Damian drives slowly through town, crossing back over Union Street. I watch the ramshackle houses trickle past. Then the houses begin to grow nicer and the lawns better kept when we near my neighborhood. I can’t think of a thing to say. I’m still flabbergasted.
But the silence between us is comfortable. When I’m sure he’s concentrating on driving, I turn to study him. His gray eyes are focused intently on the road. They are light against his caramel skin. He looks lonely, terribly lonely. And then it occurs to me that he is bereft, too, in a way. He lost his best friend. I haven’t seen him hanging around with anyone at school, certainly no one from his and Nate’s old gang.