Drawn

  Other students filed in a couple at a time, till all but two of the desks were occupied. The empty ones flanked both sides of me. Only thirteen kids. I’d never been in such a small class.

  “Good morning, all,” Mrs. Shively said with the bell. She ticked off names in her book. “We’re light this morning. Does anyone know anything about Margie and/or Blake?”

  “Margie’s still skiing in Canada.”

  One of Mrs. Shively’s expressive eyebrows curved.

  “I heard Blake has the flu,” said a boy in a T-shirt with a fake tie printed on it. He glanced at me, then dropped his eyes to his desk when I looked back.

  “Thank you, Chad.” Her hand tapped my shoulder. “We have a new student. Would you introduce yourself?”

  I took a deep breath and forced a smile. “Hi. I’m Julie. Hi.”

  “Julie comes to us from Parnell. She was on the team that won the state Academic Olympics this year.”

  If I could have fit beneath my desk I’d have slid under it.

  Thanks a lot, Mrs. Shively. Why don’t you just tattoo “NERD” on my forehead?

  But everyone in the class smiled. Kids nodded. Then they clapped.

  What kind of egg-headed place was this?

  “It was our first year to try, and we didn’t even make it past the morning rounds,” she told me. “I’m sure Mrs. Houser will want to talk to you about getting next year’s team ready.”

  Talk to me?

  “Let’s all introduce ourselves to Julie.” Mrs. Shively sat down in one of the empty student desks. “I’m Mrs. Shively, welcome.”

  Then, one by one, the kids all introduced themselves to me. Suzie, with the elfin features and flippy hair. Vinny, who seemed shy. Gina with tea-brown skin and eyelashes a mile long.

  “Chad,” the boy with the tie-shirt nodded and smiled, but didn’t meet my eyes again.

  “Hey. I’m Peter.”

  Will and Jenny and Kevin.

  They all smiled.

  “Hey, Julie. I’m Grace.”

  “Kari Ann.”

  They were all so… friendly.

  “I’m Aisha, nice to meet’cha,” rhymed the girl with a zillion tiny cornrows tasseled in silver beads.

  “My name is Mai Yung.” She had a child’s voice, and an innocent smile, and two little barrettes holding back the sides of her straight, glossy hair. Purple-rimmed glasses made her look like a little girl in sunglasses at the beach.

  “All right,” Mrs. Shively said. “Welcome, and welcome back, to Honors English, semester two. Please open your grammar books to page seven.”

  “What about our essays?” Peter asked.

  “I’ll collect them on the way out. Thank you, Peter.”

  Essays? I already have late homework?

  “Mrs. Shively?” I raised my hand.

  She just looked at me.

  Aisha snorted. “You don’t have to raise your hand in here, girl.”

  I shoved my hand back under my desk. “I guess I missed an assignment already?”

  “Mrs. Shively doesn’t believe in vacations for her students,” Peter whined.

  Mrs. Shively shot him a dirty look.

  At my old school Peter would’ve gotten sent to the principal’s office.

  “What Peter means is that I believe in making productive use of time, and that the winter break is an excellent opportunity to practice one’s writing skills.”

  “We had to write about the most significant thing that happened to us over Christmas.” Grace caught her breath and turned to Mrs. Shively. “I mean winter break.”

  “I asked for five hundred words, but since you’re just joining us, how about you turn in three hundred? Say, by the end of the week?”

  Three hundred words about my Christmas? I nodded.

  We spent the rest of the class looking at sentence diagrams, but I planned my essay.

  Over the holidays my parents split up, sold our house, dragged me across town, away from everything and everybody I know, and made me choose between them.

  But the most significant thing that happened to me?

  That was easy.

  Damon Sheppard finally kissed me.

  * * * * *

  Kari Ann showed up again second hour, in art. Sandy Creek didn’t offer special art electives, just one class per grade, so Art 8 here made for a much bigger class than Advanced Painting did back at Parnell. I didn’t recognize any other faces, but Kari Ann slid into the seat next to mine.

  “Hey again.” She dropped her bag on the floor and grinned at me.

  “Hey.”

  “Have you met Hap yet?”

  “Hap?”

  Then Hap walked in.

  His ponytail, gray and tied with a strip of leather, hung down farther than my hair did. He wore tan Birkenstocks with matching wool socks. His pants looked like teacher pants, but in kelly green, and they frayed at the bottoms where they skimmed the floor and probably got trampled under the Birkenstocks. A brown and green flannel shirt, untucked, would’ve looked all right with the pants if he hadn’t worn a pink—yes, pink—waffle-weave Henley under it.

  “Yo-ho, my aged students.” He dropped a huge portfolio on his desk. “So good to be back in nearly-adult land. Those second-graders kick my proverbial you-know-whatsit.”

  Kari Ann leaned closer to me. “He’s really an amazing artist. Really.”

  Then Hap noticed me, and pointed. “Hey!”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  “You I do not know. Right?” He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. “Student list. Art Eight, Semester Two.”

  “This is Julie, Hap. She’s new,” Kari Ann told him.

  “All right. Excellent. Momentarily afraid I’d gone senile at the tender age of fifty-seven.” He ran his finger down the paper he held. “Julie? Juliet, this says. Brynn. That you?” He looked up.

  I nodded.

  “I’m Monseigneur Patrick Happernetzger, your friendly neighborhood art guru. You may call me Hap.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where you from, Julie Brynn?”

  “Here. I mean, I just moved. Houses. From Parnell.”

  “A defector! Most cool.” He leaned against the desk and crossed one ankle over the other. “So, why did you sign up for my class?”

  Why did I sign up for art?

  “What led you to choose such a vocation, or avocation, at this juncture in your educational path?”

  “I like art.”

  He scowled. “Not a spirit-moving riposte.”

  Okay. I pulled a sentence off an art history quiz from last semester. “I want to investigate the underlying truths of the human condition, as explored through creative media.”

  “It quotes Nyland. Excellent.”

  “I’m not an ‘it’.”

  “Certainly not. You are a muse. And amusing.” He went to the cabinet behind his desk and pulled out a big roll of butcher paper. “Come hither, one and all. Tear off as much as you can fill in during the next forty minutes.”

  “Fill in with what?” Kari Ann asked.

  “The last thing you remember dreaming.”

  Everyone stood and headed for Hap’s desk. Kari Ann giggled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “The last thing I dreamed about was Bobby Russell,” she whispered.

  I smiled. “Who’s that?”

  “Dreamboat.” She sighed. “Football player. Basketball player. Baseball player. Boy Scout. And my future husband.”

  “He’s your boyfriend?”

  She unrolled the paper and tore off a square sheet. “Right,” she said. “I told you I dreamed about him. He doesn’t know I’m alive.”

  “That might be a problem if you want to marry him.”

  She twirled a lock of reddish-brown hair around her finger as I tore off some paper. “I can’t draw him, anyway. Hap randomly posts stuff in the hallways.”

  “So? Then Bobby Russell might find out you’re alive.”

  Kari Ann
’s eyes got huge. “Are you crazy?”

  “Paints, ink, crayons. Blood, sweat, and tears,” Hap called over the din of students tearing paper and discussing dreams. “Any medium you like. Except fire. Let’s not use fire today.”

  Everyone started to work. I sat staring at my chunk of brown paper. The temptation to draw Kari Ann and Bobby Russell together—and speak it out as I drew, so the picture would come true—almost gave me the giggles. But I hadn’t seen Bobby Russell yet, and the ability I had, this Gift of Artistic Prophecy as Pam called it, still felt very strange, and more than a little outside my control. I knew what made it work: the words I spoke as I described what the sketch showed. But if the pictures went away when I tried to draw, if my mind went kind of fuzzy or foggy, then I couldn’t do it at all.

  That forgetting, or blanking out, just started happening in the last few months. My memory had never failed like that before; in the past, before I got the Gift, if I saw seen it, I’d remember it and could draw it, exactly as it was.

  “Can’t think of any dreams?” Kari Ann asked.

  “I’m trying to pick one.”

  “Good one, or bad one?”

  I shrugged. There’d been lots of bad ones recently, ever since I found out about the divorce. I still dreamed about the accident, too. The motorcycle skidding on its side down the road, and me with it, as gravel spewed up and peppered me all over. Lying there, in my blood and Adam’s. Pressing on his head as hard as I could, so Damon wouldn’t lose his brother too.

  “Draw anything,” Kari Ann suggested. “Hap won’t know the difference.”

  An idea hit me then, something that did come out of a dream. “Is there any cardboard?” I asked Kari Ann.

  “Probably.” She pointed to a box in the corner, under the window. “Hap keeps all kinds of junk in there.”

  I found a good piece near the bottom, thickly corrugated and wide enough that I’d only need to move it three or four times as I worked. I slid it under the butcher paper and grabbed my sharpest pencil. It dulled quickly as it stabbed through the paper and into the cardboard, ten, fifty, a hundred, three hundred times, and I had to sharpen it over and over again.

  “That’s a cool way to do pointillism,” Kari Ann admired.

  Hap came up behind me. “Nice balance.” He moved left, then right, and tilted his head. “Can’t make out the image yet. Abstract?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Do you have any tissue paper?”

  “What color?”

  “Lots of colors.”

  “I’ll see what I can find, Dame Demanding.” He shuffled over to the metal cabinet behind his desk.

  Completely sucked into the process, I went to that place where nothing but me and the piece in front of me mattered, and the art seemed to make itself. I tossed the pencil back into my bag and looked around for a knife.

  “Got your colors.” Hap laid a stack of tissue paper on the empty desk beside me.

  “X-Acto knife?” I asked.

  He pulled one from his pocket and handed it to me.

  I looked up at him. “You keep it with you?”

  “One never knows when a rabid chunk of cardstock might attack.”

  I shook my head and started to slice nicks and gashes into the paper. They made motion lines and wavy hair, rim spokes, thready clouds and a broken fence.

  “I’m dying to know what this is,” Kari Ann said.

  Finished with the knife, I gave it back to Hap and turned the butcher paper over. I shredded small strips of tissue paper and laid them around the piece, darker ones like grays and browns at the edges of the piece, lighter ones moving gradually toward the center. The bike I did in steel-gray and Egyptian blue. The eyes needed no tissue paper at all.

  “Can I use some tape?” I asked Hap.

  “I get what you’re doing,” he said as he squinted at the reverse side of the image. “Glue’s better. More permanent.”

  “But it shrivels the paper.”

  He nodded. “A scotch for the lady,” he said and brought me the tape dispenser from his desk.

  When I finished I held it up to the light.

  “Cool!” someone behind me said.

  The fluorescent bulbs shined through the tissue paper over the holes and slits and lit up the piece.

  Hap laughed. “Jesus on a Harley! What’d you eat before having that dream?”

  “It’s a Kawasaki.”

  “His eyes are like, I don’t know,” Kari Ann said.

  “They’re so bright,” someone else said.

  Hap took the piece. “This needs real light.”

  I followed him over to the window where he hung it on the glass with more strips of transparent tape. He stepped back, and the sun slashed through the paper.

  Kari Ann gasped. “Cool, Julie. Look,” she said to Hap and several others who had followed us to the window. “It’s all over her.”

  The paper’s shadow covered me, but the pinpoints and stripes of light on my cheeks and forehead sparkled and tingled.

  I tugged my right cuff further down my wrist to hide the jagged edges of the scar there.

  “Parnell’s loss is our gain,” Hap said, and crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s show-worthy.”

  “You don’t think it’s sacrilegious?” I asked.

  Hap snorted. “Who cares? Art and sacrilege go hand in hand. And anyway, if Jesus were around today, he’d probably be on a chopper. Not many donkeys to be procured in 1983.”

  “I wish I could do stuff like that,” somebody behind me said.

  No, I thought. I’m pretty sure you don’t.

  * * * * *

  Third hour was science. Just plain science, not honors. Everyone sat in pairs at two-person, black-top tables. I stood in the doorway and waited for the other kids to sit down.

  Aisha, from homeroom, grabbed my arm as she walked in. “Come on. My partner moved, and I’m not doing labs by myself this semester. Sit by me.”

  I saw two more people from homeroom, besides Aisha. Chad sat one row over, catty-cornered behind us next to a kid who looked just like Alfred E. Neuman, and Grace waved two fingers at me from across the room.

  The teacher, Miss Dupree, held her attendance book against one forearm and checked off names.

  “Ackerman. Brynn. Bugler, Caprio…”

  A paper airplane sailed forward from the back of the room and hit the chalkboard next to Miss Dupree’s head.

  “Oakley, Otterman, Russell…”

  Another airplane coasted to the front of the room and struck her just below her collarbone.

  “Boys!”

  Miss Dupree bent down, picked up both airplanes, and tossed them in the trash.

  “Hey, I spent like five minutes on those,” came a voice from somewhere behind me.

  A group of boys snickered.

  She finished attendance and sat down at her desk. “Open your books to chapter seven and read.”

  “Read how much?” Chad asked.

  “Till I tell you to stop,” Miss Dupree twittered, then sat down at her desk, opened a notebook and started to write.

  I raised my hand. “Excuse me, Miss Dupree? I don’t have a textbook yet. I’m new.”

  She opened the deep, lower drawer of her desk and pulled out a fat, hardbound book with an enormously close-up picture of a snail on the front.

  I went to get it from her. “Thanks.”

  In the back of the room a group of four boys clustered around a table. They whispered and laughed. The two with their backs to the front slipped around to the other side of the desk then, and all four stood up. They simultaneously drew back their right arms and launched four white airplanes in perfect unison.

  Three of the planes flew straight forward together, lined up like a trio of Thunderbirds. The fourth one, however, peeled off, did a loop-the-loop, arched toward the ceiling, then spiraled straight down into my hair.

  The boys roared, and one of them slapped another on the back. “Yo, Bobby! You got the new girl!”


  I detangled the plane from my hair and laid it on Miss Dupree’s desk as Bobby grinned at me.

  The tallest of the four, with careless shocks of wavy, blond hair that flopped across his forehead and over his ears, had to be Kari Ann’s Bobby Russell.

  Miss Dupree scowled. “To the office.”

  “But we’re studying flight,” one of them argued.

  Bobby elbowed him and shook his head. “Come on.”

  “Flight’s science, right?” Another one of them shrugged and turned up his palms.

  Back in my seat, I watched the four file out of the room. Bobby turned back and mouthed, “Sorry,” to me. I shrugged and grinned.

  Aisha looked at me across her shoulder. “Don’t fall for him,” she whispered.

  “I’m already going with someone,” I told her.

  “Okay.”

  “But anyway, why not?” For Kari Ann’s sake, I hoped Bobby didn’t have a girlfriend.

  “Half the chicas in the school like Bobby.” She rolled her eyes.

  I grinned. “Including you?”

  “Please, girl.” Aisha turned a page in her book. “I date high school guys.”

  “Is Bobby one of those jerks who sees how many girls he can go with?”

  “No, not like that. Bobby’s okay. He’s really a sweetie. He’s just kind of clueless.”

  “So why the warning?”

  Aisha shook her head at me and grinned. “For your own good. Bobby breaks hearts and doesn’t even know it.”

  That settled it. If God let me, I’d do whatever I could to help Kari Ann catch Bobby Russell.

  * * * * *

  You could almost call Sandy Creek’s gym uniforms stylish. As we filed out of the locker rooms in matching red and white striped shirts and blue running shorts with the Sandy Creek Shark mascot on them, we looked like we’d fit in at the winter Olympics.

  Two high nets stretched across the center of the gym. I didn’t have a lot of athletic ability, but I did okay with volleyball.

  A whistle squealed from across the gym. “Line up and sound off!”

  My jaw fell open. Conan the Barbarian had a teaching job at my new school.

  “If you want to build some muscle…” he yelled.

  And the kids sighed and moaned back, “We must learn to really hustle.”

  “I can’t hear you! Unless you want to all be chumps…”

  “We will let you bust our humps.”

  “Two laps walking, three laps running. And… go!”

  Chad, from homeroom and science, moved up beside me. “Bock barks.”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Bock. He doesn’t actually speak. Ever. He just yells.”