Bad Apple (2 page)

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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 people 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.

I must have been sitting for a long time, scratching at the same spot with my pencil, because when I remembered where I was, an hour had passed, and I was beyond starving. I went up to the counter and ordered a hot chocolate and a dessert plate, which cost about as much as a boob job, and sat back down. I was trying to come up with something brilliant to put in my journal, something about how Seurat was able to elevate a simple cow to the Ethereal Essence of All Cowness, when someone cleared his throat. I looked up to see Mr. Mymer standing there, a study in browns and oranges, his pumpkin-colored hair sticking up in every direction, a book—
The World of Gustav Klimt
—under his arm. His T-shirt said: SILENCE IS GOLDEN, DUCT TAPE IS SILVER.

Now that I’m thinking about it, if it weren’t for Georges and his stupid cows, I probably would have been on the bus on my way home by the time Mr. Mymer showed up with his stupid T-shirt and his stupid, stupid book. And then what would people be talking about?

June’s sandwich still sits uneaten in front of her. I rip off a
corner and pop it into my mouth. Cheese.

“Hey!” she says.

“You never eat your food,” I say.

“And you can’t
stop
eating.”

“What’s your point?”

I say this last bit loudly, to drown out the jeering of Pete Santorini, Ben Grossman, and Alex Nobody-Can-Pronounce-His-Last-Name.

“Ignore them,” June says.

“Yeah?” I say. “How?”

“Okay. Don’t ignore them. Distract them.”

“With what?”

“With a real boyfriend.”

“Right. And who would that be?”

“How about Seven?”

I glance up to see him, a tall bony guy, loping by, his Sideshow Bob curls bobbing. He’s carrying a pretzel decorated with ribbons of mustard.

“He grew out his hair,” June says. “He looks amazing.”

“He looks like a giant caramel with some carpet lint stuck to the top of it.”

“Don’t you have a crush on him?”

“When I was in the sixth grade.”

“You always remember your first love,” June says.

I say, “Love schmove.”

Is that his real name? And if not, what’s the Seven stand
for? No one knows. Every year, the first day of school, before the bell rings, before the teacher can call attendance, Seven whispers in his/her ear. So when roll is taken, and all the Jonathans (Jon), Elijahs (Eli), Rogers (T-Ball), and Lucianas (Lulu) have waved off their given names and offered up a nickname they can tolerate, Seven is only and forever Seven.

We ask ourselves, one another, what’s it mean? Is it a numerology thing, a religious thing? June wonders if it’s a black thing. She polls the other black students in the junior class. They are amused. They begin calling each other Thirty-three, Ninety-two, Decimal Point.

“Infinity, my man, what up?”

“Not much, Pi.”

Says June, “Okay, okay, I get it. It was a stupid poll.”

“Whiteness,” I say. “It’s the other side of racism.”

“And
you
can just shut up.”

Talk about distraction. I’m mesmerized by Seven the Lint-Topped Caramel. I wonder which paint colors I’d have to mix to capture his skin, and how many. White, umber—raw and burnt—sienna, a single drop of crimson like a jewel of blood.

As if he can hear my thoughts, Seven whips his head around and fixes me with a gaze. I freeze, imprisoned in my own body like a princess in the thrall of a spell.

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