“Miles Rosentople!”
Miles slurps his lizard tongue back in his mouth. “Huh?”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Is what good or bad?”
“The phrase ‘buzzing like flies.’ Do you think that’s a good or a bad thing?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He licks his lips, still smirking at me. “Good?”
In my next class, Mr. Anderson prepares us, his little biology soldiers, for the arrival of fetal pigs, which we are to dismember for credit. I don’t know why we can’t get a formaldehyde-free computer program and pretend to dissect the pigs. Maybe because Mr. Anderson is almost a million years old, joined the marines when he was six, and believes that we’re all part of the food chain and always had and always would eat or destroy one another. “Look,” Mr. Anderson says, “if you were one of the last humans alive and you were stranded in the Kalahari Desert, do you think that a lion wouldn’t eat you if it were hungry? Do you honestly think that one lion would say to another lion, ‘Hey, don’t eat the naked, defenseless two-leggers, there’s only one thousand three hundred and sixty-three left in the world’? Baloney! And that’s exactly what these pigs would be if we weren’t using them to get you kids interested enough to learn a little science—baloney! And that’s life, my friends! Better accept that now!”
As he rants, I slip the copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from my backpack and flip through the pages, reading the notes that my father scribbled in the margins back when he was a frustrated teenager forced to flay unsuspecting frogs: Good and evil aren’t abstract concepts. Always use your magic for good. This class is bogus.
In history, we have a mock election. When the results are tallied, it turns out that a bunch of us voted for someone we could never in a million years picture as the leader of the free world. We eye each other with suspicion, wondering who the traitors are.
Then, Cooking II. Mrs. Duckmann, aka the Duck, doesn’t believe in cooking. She believes in splitting recipes in neat columns of fractions. She believes in measuring accurately using the right instruments—dry ingredients in little beige plastic cups, liquids in the clear glass. But today she’s changing things up. Today, says the Duck, we are going to apply what we have learned in our unit “The Egg” to make something basic but essential for many recipes.
“Today,” she announces, with all the fanfare of a newscaster announcing the results of the Super Bowl, “we are making mayonnaise.”
My partner, a ginormous senior who looks like a Transformer—I imagine his parts swiveling and recombining to change him from a human to an industrial fridge—breaks out in applause.
I raise my hand. “Couldn’t we make something more complicated? Like cookies, maybe? Cookies have eggs.”
Some of the teachers won’t look at me; some of the teachers won’t stop staring. The Duck’s eyes widen as if surprised to see me sitting in front of her. Her numerous wrinkles fold in origami patterns of concern. She looks like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” must have looked right before she threw Gretel in the oven.
“If the lesson is upsetting you,” she says sweetly, “perhaps you’d like to go to the principal’s office?”
The principal is not happy to see me.
Art, finally. Mr. Mymer is gone, but the art room, his room, is still my favorite place to be. I love the smell of paint, of clay and charcoal, the smells of things that make you believe that you will be okay.
I remember walking into the art room as a freshman and gaping at the giant murals on the walls, paintings on easels, sculptures made of wire and Styrofoam.
It was the only class I was looking forward to, even then. My dad was an artist, a sculptor. He made architectural models. Little houses, buildings, office parks, all perfectly scaled down to size. For my sister and me, he made Cinderella’s castle, the humble cabin of the Dwarves, Rapunzel’s tower. Who needed dolls?
So, that first day of high school, I brought a tiny house I’d built. A crazy off-kilter house, the kind of house some kind of punk fairy would have built for herself. But I didn’t know it would be so hard to get the details right. My dad helped me cut the wood and the foam boards. I used clay for the rest. I had tucked it carefully in a brown paper bag so that no one would see it until the Big Unveiling.
Mr. Mymer, the teacher, was not old, not young, and built like one of Van Gogh’s sunflowers: big head bobbing on a long, thin stalk. He had a fat nose and a weird black mole begging for surgery on his cheek. He wore black glasses, faded jeans, and some sort of fifties bowling shirt over a T-shirt. The T-shirt said SQUIRRELS CAN’T BE TRUSTED. His eyes were huge and bright and bored right into you.
I decided he was hot.
When the bell rang, he was quiet for so long we thought he was having one of those seizures, you know, the ones where people’s brains freeze up, but they look okay from the outside. Then he said, “I’m supposed to begin by saying art will free you, that it will transform you, that you will find yourself remade, renewed, reborn, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe that will happen for a few of you. But a lot of you will be bored. And all of you are going to be frustrated. Really frustrated. You’re going to want to tear up your drawings, trash your sculptures, slash your paintings. I hope you don’t. Because art will reveal your real feelings about the world better than almost anything else. And who doesn’t want to know their own real feelings about the world? Who doesn’t want to know him or herself?”
He kept talking about what we’d learn and how we’d learn it. That he would consider us adults and that we didn’t have to ask to use the bathroom or go get a drink of water (but he also said not to blame him if some random teacher or administrator caught us in the hall without a pass). That we would work harder than we’ve ever worked in any class. That we should expect to lose a lot of sleep.
I touched the brown paper bag that hid the fairy house. I already knew myself. And I’d had insomnia since kindergarten. I waited impatiently for him to stop talking. I stared out the window. I glanced at the clock.
Finally, the bell.
The other kids filed out of the classroom. I brought the bag up to his desk.
“I have something to show you,” I said. Up close, his eyes were blue enough to hurt.
“And your name is?”
“Tola Riley.”
“Okay, Tola. Let’s see what you got.”
I slipped the fairy house out of the bag and held it out to him like a birthday cake.
My new teacher took the house and examined it from every side. Then he said, “Well.”
“It’s a house,” I said helpfully.
“Yeah, I see that.” He peered inside one of the slanted windows. “Any people in here?”
“Who needs people?”
He shrugged. “Right. So, what moved you to build a house?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, why a house? Why not a dog? Or a train? Or a train made of dogs?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. I said, “Huh?”
“What were you trying to say with this house?”
Was he being deliberately stupid? “I was just trying to make a cool house.”
“Hmmm,” he said, nodding. “Okay.”
This was not the reaction I’d been going for. “So you don’t think artists should build houses. Houses are not worthy.”
“Oh no, no! I think it’s fine to build houses. There’s an old saying about art: ‘Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what you don’t know.’”
I frowned so hard my eyebrows ached. “Who said that?”
“I don’t know who said it. Rembrandt? Picasso? I can never remember. But it’s true. The more you build these little houses, the more you’ll realize how much you don’t know about little houses. Maybe you don’t even like little houses.”
“I love little houses,” I said, taking my own little house and shoving it back in the bag. I wanted to smash it to the ground.
At lunch, I called my dad. “
My art teacher is a butthead.”
But no, no, he wasn’t. And I discovered that I didn’t like little houses so much unless my dad made them for me. I started painting instead. I learned that I could fall into a painting and not come out for days. That painting took me to places I never imagined going, like a train made of dogs.
( comments )
“I don’t like to make statements during ongoing investigations regarding our teachers or our students, but rest assured that we’re taking this matter very seriously. We’re cooperating with the police; we’re cooperating with the victim’s family. Our school is an open book. We have nothing whatsoever to hide. That said, any reporter found on school grounds will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
—Mr. Thomas Zwieback, principal
“She might be okay if she’d lose the green hair. What is that supposed to be? Mold?”
—Miles Rosentople, classmate
“OMG! That girl is a complete freak. Like a cross between Dracula’s ugly little sister and, I don’t know, a hobbit. I can’t believe anyone in the universe would risk his job for her. I mean, a lot of girls at our school are so much hotter.”
—Heather Whitestone, classmate
“I wouldn’t say she was a liar. More like a storyteller. Always going on about Cinderella and Snow White and whoever. Ask her who dyed the cat blue, and she’d tell you that the fairies did it. Ask her who ate all the cookie dough and threw up behind he couch, and she’d tell you some crap about dwarves. I think that’s what drove my mom so nuts, all the dumb little stories. Sometimes you just wanted to scream, will you please tell the truth?”
—Tiffany Riley, sister
ACHTUNG
Without Mr. Mymer, art is Subs-R-Us. Today, a huge blond woman minces into the art room like one of the dancing hippos from Fantasia. Her thick hair is cut in a severe bob that makes her head look like an equilateral triangle. She’s as short as she is wide. She looks like Rumpelstiltskin. If Rumpelstiltskin had a cut-rate sex-change operation in a third-world country.
Some subs like to sit at the desk and file their nails. Some read thrillers or text their friends. This one has had Significant Art Training, or so she tells us. As we work on assignments given to us by Mr. Mymer weeks ago, she strolls around the room and inspects the pieces hanging on the walls. “I can see we have lots of talent in this school.” She taps a painting. “Look at the influence of Jackson Pollock here, the movement and the texture. Very effective.” Effective? Valerie Schenke spilled some paint across her canvas and didn’t feel like starting again.
“And this,” she says, gesturing at a pseudo-Picasso, which looks like a crime-scene photo. “I’m just amazed at the emotion I see in the woman’s face, the sadness.” I’m not sure how she can detect the sadness. In the painting, one of the woman’s eyes is actually a breast.
She keeps moving alongside the row of paintings until she stops in front of one of mine. I’d painted a woman seated in an empty stone room. The stones around her form a gray mosaic, but her dress is arterial red, and her hair is a thick braid of gold coiled on the floor. A black kitten crouches in her lap, jewel eyes winking. A small window in the corner shows the vast fields and bright sun outside. In the stone over her head, I did something I always do. I painted the title of the piece: Rapunzel Gets a Cat. Mr. Mymer said I was really starting to get somewhere.
“Now this,” she says, “this one is tricky. I don’t know. The concept is interesting, but I don’t think it’s working as well as it could. The colors are jarring and the composition feels a little off.”
Jarring? Off? What?! I can feel the hinge of my jaw release and my mouth drop open, like I’m a snake about to wrap my scaly lips around one of those thousand-year-old eggs—black around the edges and green in the middle—that they serve to crazy foodies in Chinatown.
But she’s not done. “I’m not really sure what the purpose of the text is. Text can work with art, of course, but you don’t want to reduce your art or dumb it down trying to be funny.”
Who’s trying?
And then she drops the ax. It’s huge and sharp and likes to chop things, like hope and dreams and pride and dignity. Chop, chop, chop, chop.
“See,” Rumpelstiltskin says, “how it dies on the canvas?”
Dies, dies, dies, dies. This is what I’m thinking as I walk back to my locker. I hear Chelsea Patrick before I see her and, more importantly, before she sees me. The loud mocking voice, the Gestapo stomp of her boots. I duck into my health class, wondering where I left my nerve.
In class, Ms. Rothschild has us practicing CPR on an armless, legless mannequin named Little Jane™. The boys try to stick their tongues down her sad, plastic throat.
At lunch, June meets me at our usual spot in the cafeteria. She is texting rapidly on her cell phone, which isn’t a phone as much as it’s some sort of superintelligent NASA communication device with a talent for calling other phones by itself when June isn’t using it.
“Speak to aliens yet?” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “You.”
June is a lot taller than I am (which is not saying much; if I were a mere two inches shorter I would be legally required to use a child-safety seat in cars). She wears slouchy boy jeans, a gray T-shirt, and blue cat’s-eye glasses from a thrift store. We met in the third grade. Scratch that; our moms met when June and I were in third grade, and then our moms arranged a lot of play dates for us mostly so that they could hang out. But as soon as we got into junior high, I saw June less and less. Her mom was obsessed with June’s college applications, so she filled up every minute of every day with some kind of activity. Just last year, June had Chinese, viola lessons, soccer, and a summer community-college class called “Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism.”
June’s my closest friend; she’s my only friend. Back when I was stewing in middle-school misery, I thought high school would be different. I thought I’d have a whole bunch of friends, friends like in the books I read, where girls cry together and hug each other and have Big Moments of Sharing and Caring in the girls’ room. In our girls’ rooms, the girls pee on the toilet seats and scrawl horrible messages about other girls on the walls.
“You know,” says June, pulling a sandwich from a brown bag, “we could be wearing uniforms soon, like the Catholic school kids.”
I’m already halfway through my sandwich, peanut butter and banana. “Who said that?”
June ignores her own sandwich, her thumbs flying across the keyboard. “I don’t know. Someone just sent me a text about it. Would somebody please explain to me why schools would make the girls wear skirts so short that you can see their underwear? How does exposing the thighs of young girls promote good education? Aren’t we distracted enough?”
A wadded piece of paper smacks her in the forehead. She slips the NASA phone into her pocket (where it will likely call around for a pizza), uncrumples the note, and holds it up so I can see:
SHOW US YOUR BOOBS!
“They want me to take a photo and send it to their phones.”
“Some girls actually do it.”
“I know,” she says. “Because it’s so romantic to have absolutely no self-respect.”
“And they would just send the picture around to the entire school,” I say. “Why not just come to class naked and save everyone the trouble?”
June laughs, flutters her eyelashes, and presses the note to her cheek.
When she does this, there are whoops and hoots of approval from the guys at the next table over—Pete Santorini, Ben Grossman, and Alex Nobody-Can-Pronounce-His-Last-Name. Thing is, they don’t whoop and hoot in a mean way, not really. It’s their way of flirting or something.
Pete Santorini, Ben Grossman, and Alex Nobody-Can-Pronounce-His-Last-Name then proceed to whoop and hoot at me. In a mean way.
June can tell the difference. “Maybe if you could just explain.”
I have explained. Over and over. Nothing happened with Mr. Mymer, at least not the way peopl
e think. That I know who the “witness” is; that to her, I’m just another game. But nobody cares. Not June, who is back to texting who-knows-who on her stupid phone. Not even my own mother.
But if I were to explain again, I would blame Georges and Gustav.
In other words, it’s the artists’ fault. It’s always the artists’ fault.
First, Georges. As in Georges-Pierre Seurat. French painter, born December 2, 1859, died just thirty-one years later from “meningitis, pneumonia, angina, and/or diphtheria,” according to the little pamphlet I picked up at the Museum of Modern Art in the city. Two weeks ago, when life was only the normal kind of horrible, and not the horrible kind of horrible, I went to the Georges Seurat exhibit. It was an exhibit of his drawings, most done in black Conté crayon, which is like regular crayon, only better. The drawings were packed with lots of crazy scribbles, cross-hatchings, and little dots that made them look sort of dreamlike, as if Seurat saw the world through a veil of stars.
He liked to draw actresses and circus performers. Also cows. I looked at the cows a long time. Who knew I liked cows so much? But then, that’s what an artist can do. Make you think about cows, even if you weren’t planning on it.
I said as much on my blog, the one the lawyer made me take down. But no one seemed to get it. (Several comments said, “You’re the cow!”) They didn’t want to know about farm animals. They wanted to know why we picked a museum and not a motel.
Anyway, after the cows, I went to the museum café and sat in a deserted corner. I took out my favorite journal, the one with the peeved Little Red Riding Hood on the cover, and tried to do what I was supposed to do: write an entry about the exhibit. Instead, though, I sat there, scratching the paper with my pencil, wondering how I could get a shadow to look as dense and velvety as Seurat could, how the mere absence of crayon on the page could burn so hot and white.