Simon Says (15 page)

I hear a snicker and snap my head around. The guy's face is dimly familiar—someone from the concert party, maybe? Some stranger who doesn't know me, doesn't matter, but who must be drawing the same conclusion as Adrian? The other student meets my eyes for only a second, then he lifts his shoulders in the barest shrug and turns away.

I grab my sketch pad, shove it into my backpack, and get to my feet, leaving Adrian to hold up the walls on his own. Why do I keep forgetting? Why do I let anyone get close? Rachel stands there, gazing at me with such understanding and regret that I want to scream at her for asking me to draw Graeme if she knew what he was like. I want to scream at Adrian, at all of them. But mostly at her. She has no right to feel for me, no right to realize what I put into that sketch, no right to sense how I feel about Graeme (
and about her—to sense how much I wish she could be like me—how much I wish she could actually know me and like me, but she can't
), no right to look at me through those cool eyes and break me into fragments and
see inside me.

I force my shaking legs to walk past her. I want to grip her in my left hand and shake her until she loses
that look of understanding, until I shake that knowledge from her brain and her eyes turn blind and meaningless like everyone else's (
Graeme's
) eyes.

Then I'm out in the steamy night, and I don't know where to go. I can't face my room, with Adrian coming back to it later. I can't think about him or I'll end up wanting to shake him as violently as I want to shake Rachel. I can't think about any of them.

My feet are moving across cracked, uneven concrete sidewalks. I'm out of the dorm area and into the main campus. I don't care about the curfew. I don't care about Whitman. I only came here for Graeme. And that's destroyed, or what I thought I'd find there never existed. I don't belong here, anyway.

Then I realize I'm heading for the studio building. I can lock myself in my studio and paint out all of them.

Excerpts from
Graeme Brandt's Journal

October 9-late (Senior Year)

He drew me. For some reason, I thought I'd be exempt, and yet ... it wasn't a caricature like before. There was no malice in it, like Tyler's. There sure wasn't any love, either, like the one he drew for Adrian. Why? What did he mean?

He drew me as a mirror, reflecting other mirrors in a grotesque dance that whirls on forever. Sure I mirror what people expect sometimes-he does the same himself. Or he deliberately acts opposite to what people expect-that's just a backward reflection. Everyone reflects people's expectations-I learned that a long time ago. That's why I wrote
The Eye of the Storm,
to show that But that's not
all
a person is. That's not all I am. Mr. Adler wanted to know what was going on, but I couldn't show him the sketch. He'd never have understood. No one would understand.

I don't understand.

Why did he single out that one aspect of me from all the others? I'm more than a reflection. But being that reflection
sometimes
means that people leave me alone when I want to do something that really matters. Isn't that how it works? We all reflect what people want us to be when we want to please them, but we're also more than just reflections of anything outside us. Aren't we? And yet...

I remember one day before I came to Whitman. My dad picked me up after work. I think maybe I'd gone to the library or something, and he came by to drive me home. It was
a crisp fall evening, and Dad drove slowly, with the windows rolled down to feel the cool air. I could catch the tart smell of leaves burning.

Dad wanted to talk to me. He started out by talking about his job, clenching the steering wheel firmly with both hands, staring deliberately out through the windshield rather than at me. He said I should know that things hadn't been going as well as he'd hoped they would at the bank, that one of the other executives there was making some sort of trouble for him. I never understood what exactly, and he didn't want to say. What he wanted to tell me was that things were on their way to getting better. He said he didn't really understand my writing, but he was proud of me, proud that I'd been accepted at Whitman. He was proud that he could afford to send me, too. And I shouldn't tell Mom because it was a big secret, but he was saving money so he could take her to Florida for a second honeymoon. She always talked about wanting to go to Florida.

I could feel that he wanted something from me, the way Charles wanted something. But I knew what Dad wanted. Mom always said how hard Dad worked, all for us, so we had to let him know we appreciated it and we believed in him. I knew what Dad wanted was for me to confirm that he was just what a father should be-hardworking and good. He wanted me to look up to him and respect him, the way Mom always praises him, so I did it I nodded at him and told him how glad I was that he was my dad, and that I'd make him proud of me, as proud as I was of him—all the lines I knew he wanted to hear. By the time we got home, he was in a great mood, joking with Mom during dinner.
And he kept looking at me like we'd been through something big together.

I knew he wanted to be the respected father to the admiring son, a television dad from the old days. And I became that son-l gave him what he wanted. It was so easy. And it didn't hurt me any. That part of your drawing is true enough, Charles-right then, I was a mirror of his expectations. And it made him happy.

We all reflect other people's expectations back at them. That's what I wrote about-the way we all do it in order to get something that's really important to us. Alan Travis wanted to save his family, and he'd show anyone whatever they expected to see in order to succeed at that So what if I do the same thing-reflect people's expectations back at them to make them feel better, or to make them like me, or help me, so that I can do what I really want? Why didn't you draw that, Charles, draw what I really want, who I
really
am? Why didn't you draw
me
in that central mirror?

If's like you didn't think I was there, inside the mirror, but 1 am-l have to be. Or else there's nothing inside any of us, just a blank surface waiting to reflect something, and that can't be. It just can't! But-I was there with my dad, only I wasn't I said what he wanted to hear. I didn't tell him what I really thought of him as a dad, because I didn't really think of him at all. I didn't have to.

Was I only real in the way I reflected what he expected to see in me back to him? And was his image made real because I reflected it back to its source? Two mirrors, constantly assuring each other of something that should have been true, and might have had a chance to
be
true, only we
insisted on accepting images, instead. Why is that, Charles? Do you know? Do you have the answer?

Or did you see more than you thought? Did you see the emptiness I've felt inside myself, and draw that? Was that what you were trying to show me, Charles? Can you tell me what that emptiness is, and how to fill it?

I've got to talk to you.

Bolts of cadmium red banging on my studio door. It doesn't matter—the hasp lock is in place. Nothing can get inside. Nothing except color and noise.

"Charles! Open the door!"

Brown tones, streaked with yellow pain. Who would cry out to me like that? Time disappeared—did I miss a class? Has Adrian come to hunt me down? Is that part of being the experienced roommate?
Adrian says ... go to class.
No, not anymore, not just the experienced roommate, the thwarted—what? Why did I sketch him?
Charles says ... stay alone.

"Open up, damn it! It's Graeme."

Graeme says ... open up and let me get closer, let me get inside you, let me—

"Charles!"

If I never open the door he'll have to go away, won't he? I don't want Graeme. I don't want any of them.

"Charles—I've
got
to talk to you!"

His voice is urgent, almost angry. I want to keep the door locked, but I can't turn him away. I hurt him last
night, and now I owe him. I owe Adrian. I owe—I drop my brushes into turpentine to keep them soft and just leave my palette. Graeme looked so shocked last night ... Why did I agree to sketch him in the first place?

"Please, Charles—"

I open the door, and we stare at each other. His brows are drawn together and his eyes are ice crystals, but then his face changes. Not a mirror, maybe—should I have chosen putty, instead?

"Are you okay?" Now his voice is gentle, caring. Why should he care? If he's so angry with me, why can't the anger be a wall between us?

I step into the hallway and shut my door, sliding the hasp lock into place. I can build the wall again, if I don't look at him. "You come here," I tell him, "you beat on my door in a rage, and the instant you see me you change character. You drop all your own anger in your rush to become what I want you to be." My voice cracks as I confess that much, at least "Don't you ever get tired of reflecting other people? How can you stand yourself? What
are
you in ah empty room?"

My voice has risen, and I hear a smothered laugh from down the hall as the anger floods back into Graeme's face. I glance at the corridor, then to the stairwell. More strangers mired in their wrong assumptions.

"There's got to be somewhere we can talk," he says in a low voice.

He looks at my locked door, but I'd rather have the whole school hear the argument than take him inside my studio. Wordlessly I lead the way up the polished
stone stairs to the roof, and step out into a soft, clear morning. Perhaps the monsoons are over at last.

"Well?" I keep my voice hard. I can do that much. "What did you want to say?"

Gravel crunches as he strides across the roof to the parapet where I'm standing. I turn and he raises a clenched fist I almost wish he would hit me—smashing whatever lies between us and proving to me finally that we're nothing alike. Then his fist opens and a crumpled piece of paper drifts down to the gravel at my feet It's my sketch.

Weary beyond fighting, I slide down the parapet siding to sit on the sharp edges of gravel I reach out to smooth the wrinkled paper. Graeme eases himself down to sit cross-legged, and we stare at the drawing, neither of us ready to look up.

"How could you draw me like that?" Graeme says finally. He points at the kaleidoscope of mirrors glaring up from the paper. "How could you see that?"

I see him sitting beside me, close enough to touch. I see the Graeme Brandt who swept into the writers' party, the Graeme Brandt who turned one face to the storm, another to the jealous student after the concert, and still another to me later that same night die Graeme Brandt who wrote a book that captured me with its honesty about how people live the expectations of others. He's one person beside me, vulnerable now (
wanting to get close to me
), but he's a kaleidoscope of all those Graemes at the same time. I don't know whether to shout at him or cry. I wanted him to be such a different person.

"How can you be so surprised? You see everybody around you—can't you see yourself?" Now that I've started I rush headlong, saying all the things I'd only half dared to think since I stood in his studio. "You're nothing but a lifeless mirror that reflects everyone's expectations! Your book reflects that empty mirror—your characters are just reflecting all the other blank lives around them. I thought you were warning people about not living like that—not just showing them how to do it because that's all you know!"

I follow the words, not even knowing where they're leading me, only knowing they're true, as true as the drawing I made. "That kind of existence isn't really life—not unless all you want to be is a reflection of the mediocrity all around you. And if you wrote that book, you can't be mediocre."
But if he's not, then—

Of course he couldn't show me how to be myself, how to escape the people who want to play Simon Says. Graeme was always the master player, himself. I just hadn't wanted to admit it He wasn't writing any sort of warning of how terrible the world could become if you pushed the idea of living up to someone else's expectations too far. He was just writing what he thought everyone was, because that's what he was himself. I look up at him, putting my heartsick realization into words. "You're dead, Graeme. You're nothing but the reflection of all the empty expectations around you. How could you write that book and not see that Alan was you?"

He stares at me in horrified silence, and I realize he didn't understand what he had done. Above us, a bird darts past, toward the trees, screaming a hoarse cry.
"You're dead, inside, where you should be most alive," I say softly, "and you didn't know."

I thought he did it on purpose. I thought he'd killed his inner self, knowing what he was doing the way I know when I hide my inner self, disguising my art as sketches so I can deal with people without suffering the pain of their rejection. But for once his expression doesn't seem to be a reflection of anything except his own inner emptiness. His eyes deaden, and his face goes slack and hollow. He sits motionless, only the breeze ruffling his thick black hair. I should have known better. It's his
life
—It's not his fault I wanted him to be someone different. That was only
my
expectation, after all. I lean forward and reach across to him.

"Graeme?"

Color comes back into his face so slowly that it takes me a while to realize he'd gone deadly white. As he comes back to himself, Graeme focuses on me. He squeezes his eyes shut and flinches, just for a moment, before he gets control of himself. Then he sits motionless, every muscle taut, with my hand lying there on his arm.

"Graeme?"

His eyes open, flicker to mine, then drop to the sketch. He takes a sudden gasping breath, and then looks at me again.

"Yes. I'm fine now." He nods jerkily. "Yes. It's okay."

I grip his arm, and he shudders convulsively.

"I—" His voice chokes off and he shuts his eyes tightly. "Charles ... what about all the others?" I have to strain to hear him. "Aren't they mirrors in their own way? Who isn't a reflection of what the world around
him expects, in the end? There's nothing ... unnatural about it"