Art & Soul

  “Me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out some papers. “Aria mentioned that you were a doctor, so I was wondering if I could talk to you. I promise it will be fast.”

  He held the papers out toward Mom, and she started frowning. She brought him into the living room and they sat on the sofa. They were whispering as all of us watched. Levi’s shoulders sank and he listened to whatever Mom was saying to him. Every now and then he would nod and say, “Yes, ma’am,” but mostly he stared at the carpet, wiping at his eyes.

  When they finished, he pushed himself up from the couch and thanked Mom before turning toward the front door and leaving.

  I hurried into the living room. “What was that about?” I asked, moving to the window to stare at Levi walking away with his hands stuffed in his jeans and his head down.

  “Poor guy.” Mom shook her head, walking back toward the dining room.

  “I don’t want guys stopping over here, Aria! Especially a boy related to that deadbeat Kent Myers! Do you hear me?”

  As Mom passed by him, tugging on her ear, she turned and said, “Give her a break, Adam. You’re acting like a real jerk.”

  He didn’t reply, maybe because he knew it was true.

  “What was that about?” I asked Mom, who sat back in her dining room chair and started eating as if nothing strange just happened. My heart was pounding in my chest wondering what she and Levi were talking about.

  “It’s a personal thing, Aria. I can’t talk about it.”

  “But…” My feet shuffled. I tugged on the hem of my shirt. “Is he okay? Is there something wrong with him?”

  Mom gave me her tight smile that told me she wasn’t going to give any more details on the subject. I debated heading over to ask him what was going on, but I knew Dad would freak out if he knew I was leaving to meet up with Levi.

  * * *

  My alarm clock went off at 5:50 A.M. the next morning. Tossing on a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie, I stepped into my shoes and climbed out of my window.

  The morning air was crisp and chilled. I wandered down the sidewalk to the edge of the forest. I was hoping Levi would be out there, wandering around trying to feed the deer. My stomach flipped when I actually did see him. A part of me was surprised that he standing a few feet away from me, but then again he had said he tried to feed the deer each morning.

  He had a handful of berries and was leaned against a tree trunk, but there didn’t seem to be a deer anywhere nearby.

  “Hi,” I said, walking over to him. I crossed my arms, trying to stay warm. His head rose and a small smile hit his lips. Clearing my throat, I leaned against a tree. “Are you sick or something?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Would it make you sad if I were?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Even though we just met?”

  “Yes.” Yes. And yes again.

  “I’m not sick,” he said. “My dad has cancer.”

  I released a breath. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  I didn’t know much about cancer. Simon’s aunt had had it a long time ago, but she had been better for years. All I remembered Simon’s mom saying about it was that cancer sucked the life out of someone and everyone around them. That idea alone was terrifying and sad, and somewhat familiar to me.

  “He can fight it,” I said, hoping to give comfort.

  “If he wants to,” he replied, dryly. “I don’t think he wants me here,” Levi said, more raw than ever before. He always was so upbeat and happy, so seeing him like this was disheartening. “Not because of the cancer or anything. He just doesn’t want me here.”

  We stood quiet, staring as the sun began to rise before us. Slowly and cautiously a deer peeked out from behind a large tree. He looked a bit alarmed, his eyes wide as he stared out. Levi whispered for me to remain still as he tossed a few berries onto the ground. I pretended that I was a part of the tree and hugged my body to the wood as the deer eased closer and began to eat the berries.

  “He comes out each time,” Levi explained. “He gets braver each time, too.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  He shook his head. The deer continued eating the berries until he ran off deeper into the forest. Levi smiled. Somehow watching the deer eat the berries brought him a level of comfort.

  He was so different.

  He was so refreshing.

  “What’s your favorite word?” he asked.

  “Favorite word?”

  He nodded. “Mine is nonsensical. My mom always had me learn ten new words a day by flipping through the dictionary, and when I landed on nonsensical I knew it was something special because the meaning of the word is meaningless. It actually means nothing, which in the end has to count for something, right?”

  “Maybe. I guess.”

  He smiled. “Maybe.”

  “Oxymoron,” I said. “It’s my favorite word. And I guess, in the end, it kind of means nothing because both parts of an oxymoron kind of cancel each other out.”

  “Ugh. How nonsensical!” he whined, slapping the palm of his hand to his face.

  “So nonsensical!” I laughed. “The word oxymoron is actually made up of two Greek words that mean sharp and dull. So oxymoron is its own oxymoron.”

  “It’s funny you should mention such a word while we’re alone together,” he said with a smirk, hoping I would pick up on his oxymoron.

  I did. Obviously.

  “Yup. It’s pretty bittersweet.”

  “But it’s kind of a comfortable misery.”

  “Oh yes. It’s awfully good.” I laughed. He laughed with me. Our laughter kind of blended into one sound instead of two.

  Then we were quiet.

  So very quiet.

  We stayed quiet for a long time. He was someone who was very easy to be quiet with. It was as if we were still having a conversation with no words whatsoever.

  Silently loud.

  But as time passed, I knew I would have to get home to get ready for school.

  “Aria?” Levi pushed himself away from his tree. “Can I walk you home?”

  I ran my fingers through my hair and nodded. The leaves crunched under our steps. Levi walked beside me and even though we weren’t touching, I could almost feel my heart skipping at the idea of such a thing happening. He had a warming characteristic about him that brought me a level of comfort.

  Was Levi Myers real? Did he really exist? Or did my sad, black heart create him because it longed for a little bit of color?

  Either way, I was happy he walked beside me.

  11 Levi

  When I was eleven years old, I came to visit Dad during the summer. One of the first days there, he took me out to Fisherman’s Creek. We rented a wooden boat from the dock and sat in the middle of the creek all day long, baking in the sun. Our fishing hooks sat at the bottom of the water, no fish seeming interested at all in being caught. Dad bought himself a six-pack of cold beer and me a six-pack of iced root beer.

  He scolded me for not wanting to put real worms on our hooks, saying that the plastic worms didn’t ever work, but Mom told me that we were supposed to respect nature. She said if we didn’t need it to eat, then we shouldn’t harm it.

  We sat chugging our beers and getting bad sunburns.

  The silence of the creek was something I always remembered. How we hardly moved in our boat, how the water only waved every now and then when a bird dipped in looking for a quick meal. After five hours of sweat, my fishing rod moved, and Dad jumped to my aid, helping me reel in the biggest catch of my life. “Pull!” he ordered, and I did. I pulled, pulled, and pulled some more.

  The moment of truth came when the fish emerged from the depths of the water and we laughed. We laughed so hard I thought my stomach was going to explode and root beer would come out of my nose. Turned out, my fish was less of a fish and more of a big hiking boot. When Dad laughed, I laughed. Dad le
aned against the side of the boat. “Dinner might be a little leathery tonight, Levi.” We kept laughing, me clutching my gut and him chuckling at my howls.

  That was the last time we’d laughed together. It was the last time we were happy together.

  I wondered what had happened.

  What had changed and made him stop loving me?

  Now the closest I got to hearing him laugh with me was when he watched old black and white comedies on television in the living room each night. He never asked me to join him, and I could tell he was a bit annoyed when I sat with him. So, I chose to sit in the foyer each night, around the corner so he couldn’t hear or see me. When he would laugh, I would laugh.

  It almost felt like we were recreating a father-son relationship that was lost in time and space.

  I’d never loved black and white comedies so much in my life.

  12 Levi

  popular | adjective | pop·u·lar | ˈpä-pyə-lər

  liked or enjoyed by many people.

  suitable to the majority.

  frequently encountered or widely accepted.

  I didn’t know how to fit in with the popular kids. I sat at their lunch tables, listened to their talk about parties, and tried my best to always smile, but the truth was we didn’t have anything in common. They came from families who had a lot of money and lived lives of luxury. I came from a cabin in the woods. They all played sports and had other after school activities. I had my mom and wasn’t allowed to join any clubs outside of the forest. I only had the violin, and Mom taught me the lessons.

  None of these guys played any instruments, and even though the girls said it was sexy that I played the violin, they never went into deep conversations about the best violinists or the interesting idea of mixing classical sounds with modern music.

  They mostly talked about sex, drinking, and the next party.

  High school annoyed me. Since I’d arrived here I’d been labeled and tossed into a box due to characteristics that were none of my doing. I was placed with a group who had no desire to know me because they were only concerned with the outside. On the outside I fit. On the inside, I was an abnormality.

  It was kind of disturbing how they all sort of slept and hooked up with each other like it was normal. Stacy dated Brian who made out with Jessica who had sex with Jason who sucked Victoria’s toes, who gave Eric a blow job after he slept with Stacy who was still dating Brian. It was like a weird, tangled up inbreeding group that only kept it in the family.

  Plus, based on the definition of popular, these people were the exact opposite of the meaning. They were mean just for the hell of it. They were such a close-knit group compared to the majority of the school. Sure, they all loved each other, but the majority of the people at Mayfair Heights high school hated their guts.

  unpopular | adjective | un·pop·u·lar | ˌən-ˈpä-pyə-lər

  not popular: viewed or received unfavorably by the public.

  When I looked across the cafeteria room, I always noticed Aria and Simon laughing with one another. Aria didn’t smile often, and her laughs were few and far between, but her friend had a way of bringing them out of her.

  I’d been thinking about her laugh since the morning we’d stood in the forest talking about oxymorons, cancer, and other nonsensical things.

  I liked that morning so much more than sex talk, drinking, and parties.

  I liked nature, and deer, and Aria Watson—who was a girl who was somehow happy and sad all at once.

  Sometimes we would lock eyes across the room and we wouldn’t look away. It was a full-blown staring contest. Who will look away first?

  I never lost. She always turned away.

  * * *

  One night at 3:45 A.M. my cell phone started ringing. I groaned, reaching across my bed to answer it.

  “Hello?” I drowsily said, my voice cracking.

  “I have this idea that I want to run by you. I’ve been thinking about opening a record store in town and I want you to come home and run it with me. It can be our thing, Levi. We can have all of the best vinyl tracks and stuff. I bet there’s an old broken down warehouse or something we could use. And—”

  She sounded so distant through the phone—so far away from reality. I’d wished the sound wasn’t familiar. But it was those same sounds and those same thoughts that pushed me away from Alabama to Wisconsin.

  “Mom. It’s almost four in the morning.”

  “Oh. Were you sleeping? I’m online now looking up to see if there are any abandoned shops in town. I even been making logos and stuff on Photoshop that we could use for the store. What do you think about blue and fuchsia? We need to come up with a name for the place. I know the people in town are always talking about how I’m a failure and won’t be successful—”

  “Nobody in town thinks that, Ma.”

  “I know what these people think, Levi. I can always hear them. Oh! And I recorded a new song. Do you want to hear it?”

  She didn’t give me a chance to reply that I had school the next morning. She kept talking and talking. I placed the phone down on my stomach after an hour of listening to her nonsense gibberish talks, and I closed my eyes. I bet she wasn’t taking her medicine anymore.

  Her late night phone call was the exact reminder I needed to why I decided to come stay with Dad instead of with her for the year.

  I needed the break from her.

  13 Aria

  I’d missed school for a week due to morning sickness and feeling like complete garbage. After finally returning to school on Thursday, I asked my history teacher, Mr. Fields, for the bathroom pass after thirty minutes of him talking about boring things that happened hundreds of years ago. I’d been having bad heartburn from the taco bar lunch. It felt like someone was reaching into me and lighting my insides on fire while they proceeded to put my heart in a chokehold. I knew if I sat in class and had to listen to Mr. Fields’ monotone voice speak about Napoleon for one more minute I would probably pass out from boredom.

  Walking down the halls, I saw my locker was once again covered with something. This time it was pregnancy pamphlets and condoms. I had to admit it was a great warning, but it was just a tad bit late.

  “I hate my life,” I muttered to myself, taking off the garbage.

  “High school sucks.”

  I turned around to see Abigail standing inches away from me. Everyone in school called her Awkward Abigail because she was pretty much a social outcast. I knew that I too was an outcast, but as far as weirdos went, Abigail was at the top of the line.

  She wore wind pants each day with an old sweatshirt that had a picture of Pink Floyd on it. Her feet were always in a pair of high heels that looked very painful. Whenever she walked, she walked hastily, which led to her making a swishing sound as her wind pants rubbed against one another. Her high heels clicked, her swishy pants swished. If she wasn’t speed walking through the hallways in a hurry to get to her next class, she was quoting some random person. Her eyebrows and hair looked bleached blond, and she was awfully pale, too. She didn’t believe in personal space, and I knew this firsthand because she was currently helping me take the condoms off of my locker, pretty much breathing down my neck.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It does.”

  “Don’t let them get to you, though. It’s not a forever thing. ‘Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.’ You know who said that? Marcus Aurelius said that.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Google, Aria. The internet is swirling with people just telling you stuff that you didn’t know. Don’t take it all in, though. A lot of it is just government propaganda trying to scare you shitless so they can steal your money.” And with that she was off, swishing away.

  I didn’t know Awkward Abigail cursed.

  * * *

  Thursday afternoons were my new least favorite thing. Mom wanted to know that I was okay, but she wasn’t sure how to get me to open up to her. I wasn’t planning
to open up to her, so maybe that was part of the problem. Since I wouldn’t talk to her about the incident that led to the pregnancy, she believed I should at least talk to someone.

  Dad was more into the pretend-Aria-doesn’t-exist parenting tactic.

  I wished Mom was a little more like him.

  Dr. Ward’s name reminded me of an asylum ward. Three of the walls in his office were bright white and the last one, baby blue. His furniture was all made out of polished dark wood, except for the powder blue couch against one of the walls, the blue candy bowl filled with jelly beans, and the blue pens that lay perfectly straight on his desk. I bet he learned that in psychology 101, the use of colors. Blue was supposedly a calming color that many often used to make people feel at peace, comfortable.

  Personally, it reminded me of Picasso’s Blue Period, which was a pretty depressing time period for him, though some of his greatest masterpieces came from that dark place.

  Another oxymoron: Picasso’s Blue Period of Brilliance.

  “What’s on your mind, Aria?” Dr. Ward asked in his very therapist-toned voice. He was old, yet somehow still young, probably in his early thirties. Old enough to be a therapist, but young enough to still seem unworthy. I didn’t have a clue why Mom had picked him to try to crack into my brain. Dr. Ward didn’t talk much, but when he did, he was always asking me about my thoughts, my feelings, and my current state of being.

  “Picasso,” I said, reaching for the jelly beans in his blue bowl.

  “Picasso?” he questioned, a hitch in his voice.

  “During 1901, Picasso went through a blue phase. He only used blues and a few shades of green in his paintings. It’s said that during those times he was highly depressed, but he also made some of his best work during that period. The Old Guitarist, for example, is one of my all time favorite paintings. It’s strange that during the darkest times of his life he created some of his best masterpieces.”

  “Hmm,” he hummed, tapping one of the many blue pens against his lips. “And what made you think of Picasso right now?”