I have a hard time figuring out the truth of simple things sometimes, like whether I prefer coming to studio art over, say, second-period German, with Herr Franklin and his persistent butchering of my name (I have been “Fr?ulein Marino” since August). I’m pretty sure art class is the winner, but a couple of months ago I was pretty sure I could have completed a shading assignment, too.
Mrs. Pagonis cranks up her favorite nature sounds CD and sits on her paint-splattered stool at the front of the room. She’s got one of her half-artsy, half-suburban outfits on again: a bright patchwork jacket on top and mom jeans on the bottom. Once I saw her at the Publix with her two kids in a shopping cart. Once I saw her smoking in her car while she was leaving school. Gretchen adores her.
“I want you to continue your shading projects today and tomorrow,” she says. “Also, I want you to think about what you’ll want to enter in the juried show held by the county this year. You’ll see I’ve posted the guidelines for the show next to the whiteboard, along with photos of the winning pieces from last year, in case you need some inspiration.” She shakes her fingers at us, down-came-the-rain-style, I guess to convey the inspiration that some of us hope to get.
I am the first one up to the whiteboard.
The guidelines are the same as last year—basically, art your heart out, kid, and submit your best damn work for display. It can be painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media . . . pretty much anything except performance art.
A photo of Food Poisoning #1 is taped to the wall under the guidelines.
It’s weird seeing it that way. It’s a big painting, and here it is reduced to a four-by-six matte photograph. It’s a little like the first time I went to the Salvador Dalí museum in St. Pete and discovered that some of the paintings that looked so huge and regal in my Dalí book were actually small enough to fit on the wall of my bathroom.
Food Poisoning #1, I still have at home. I used to have it on my wall, but I got tired of my mom telling me how much it scared her, so I took it down and put it behind the headboard of my bed.
“How’s the follow-up piece going, Mercedes?” Mrs. Pagonis asks.
“It’s coming along,” I say. Whereas #1 is hiding in my bedroom, #2 is hanging unfinished in the laundry room.
What’s weird about seeing Food Poisoning #1 again, photograph or not, is that sometimes I don’t feel like I created it. It may as well be Rider’s work, or Mrs. Pagonis’s, for that matter. I don’t know how the artist made the seemingly clashing colors work together so well. I can’t figure out what sorts of brushstrokes were used to make the paint look so alive. I can’t tell what it’s about exactly, but looking at it makes my stomach churn and makes my feet warm and my knees cold, so I think it’s doing whatever it was meant to do.
Whatever I meant it to do.
Back at the Orange Table, Gretchen Grayson is shading, shading, shading the background with hues of brown and yellow, and Rider darkens the lines on an intricate pattern. And on my sketch pad—ugh, I left it open and now Gretchen and Rider have probably sneaked smiles at each other about my ridiculous piano drawing. I flip to a new page because the promise of something else is better than the mess I’ve left. I sketch and shade easy things: Gretchen’s metallic purple water bottle, the pale peach face of the Moreno-McBride duplex, the red purse sitting on my best friend’s lap.
If I ever doubt the existence of a higher power, all I have to do is look at my eyeball. My driver’s license says my eyes are brown, but really, there are a hundred colors in there, and everything is working in balance to let me see myself in this soap-streaked mirror in the girls’ bathroom. I’ve never been sure if the Creator of the Eyeball has a plan for me, or for Abuela or Vic or anyone else, but I feel like she or he or it gives us our possibilities.
Next to me, Vic pulls back her hair. “Psst,” she says. “Ansley Lyman kind of looked at you when she left a minute ago.”
But I’m pretty sure she didn’t. And even though I appreciate Vic’s acceptance of my attraction to guys and girls, I don’t know where she gets the idea that I might be interested in someone like Ansley Lyman.
What I want to do, maybe today, maybe now, is see if Vic will come over this weekend. Which is one of those things I’ve said a hundred times, but it’s felt different lately. I feel like I need to be extra careful in the way I ask, or she’ll find the secret lurking in the spaces between my words.
“It’s showtime, folks!” She pushes away from the mirror. I hope I never get tired of Victoria Caballini’s way of leaving a bathroom.
We head to the Dead Guy with our lunches. There is no more peaceful place in school than right here, at the memorial bench and plaque for one Timothy Gelpy, who died in a car accident during his junior year ten years ago. Vic takes the bench, so I sit on the ground, using the cool marble plaque stand as a backrest. When people die suddenly, it seems like everyone around them wants to create something beautiful and good in their honor, and that’s exactly what Sarasota Central High School did for Tim (Vic and I can call him that—we’ve been sitting here long enough), but not for anyone else who died in the years before or after him.
I’ll have to ask Vic sometime what she thinks about this one saintly guy being memorialized over all others, but I don’t want to spend our measly twenty-two-minute lunch period on that kind of thing.
Vic sets her container of carrot sticks aside. “Have you heard anything from your mom yet?”
I take my phone out of my pocket and click it to life. The main screen flashes its usual photo of Victoria and me at Tall Jon’s party back in January. No notifications.
“Nothing today. I guess everything’s the same. She would have told me if Abuela had woken up.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Vic’s illogical optimism always makes me smile. In her world, there’s a chance that Abuela snapped back to consciousness this morning, and now she and Mom are sitting around having coffee and watching novelas.
Vic checks her own phone out of habit. She’s got a photo from the same party as her wallpaper, though it’s from the beginning of the night, when we were looking less windblown. “How weird is it not having her around for so long?”
“It’s weird. It’s quiet. She used to always have the TV on, you know? And she would always sort of narrate her life as she went through it.”
“I remember one of the first times I came over, she was in the kitchen putting away dishes, and she just kept saying, ‘Dishes, dishes, dishes,’ the whole time. It was like she created a little theme song for every part of her day.” Vic laughs, maybe out of relief that she could fold this funny story into the most serious conversation we’ve had at the Dead Guy in a long time.
I try to smile. “Dishes, dishes, dishes,” I sing.
Abuela’s first stroke was two Sundays ago.
That Monday, Mom made the arrangements to go to San Juan, and she left on Tuesday morning.