“Cammie always looks good,” says Adrian, smirking.
“I meant the drawing, you vermin.”
Titus remembers vermin, too. I like that.
“I'm just a red-blooded Korean love machine,” says Adrian. “You can't miss that Cammie milkshake.”
“Whatever. I wasn't in the mood to do those Egypt ones, so we came over here.” Titus shrugs.
“What he means is, they wouldn't talk to us.” Adrian laughs.
Uh-oh. Does Titus like Cammie, then? Or, please no, Taffy?
“That's true,” Titus giggles, “they wouldn't. But only because Ip made some crap comment.”
“What did he say?” I ask.
“It's not for your ears.” Titus busies himself digging around for a pencil.
“Why not?”
“It was disgusting, that's why.”
We are having a full-out conversation. Me and Titus, and Adrian.
“Adrian, what did you say?” I push.
He holds his hands up in self-defense. “I'm not saying it again. I got in too much trouble last time.”
“Try me. It's not like I'm some innocent.”
“Oh, don't worry,” he says, cracking a smile. “I don't think that.”
What does he mean by that?
Has Shane been talking about me?
What do those guys know about me and Shane? It's not like we went so far.
Would Shane talk about it?
Oh hell, would he talk about that time in the back of the movie theater?
“Ip was being a half-wit,” says Titus. “And now he's learned his lesson and he's keeping his trap shut.”
“That's true,” confesses Adrian. “Hey, Titus, what's up? Are you staying here and drawing this naked guy?”
Titus answers without looking at him. “I'm thinking yeah. I'll see if I can do better than Gretchen.”
Does that mean he thinks I draw well?
Or he thinks I draw badly?
“I'm not drawing any naked dudes,” says Adrian. “Way too gay. Come on and look for some ladies with me.”
“Oh, all right, booty master.” Titus laughs. “Your wish, my command.” He shoves his pencil back in his backpack and tucks his sketchbook under his arm. “See you, Gretchen.”
“Bye.”
And they're gone.
What did he mean, do better than Gretchen?
What did he mean, booty master?
What did Adrian say to Cammie?
“Hair like that,” Adrian said. Does that mean stupid fake red hair, or sharp electric sex-goddess hair?
And what did Shane say about me?
later Saturday night, Ma is banging pots around in the kitchen, cleaning up after a strained family dinner. Pop is letting her do it, sitting on the couch with the remote in his hand. He's handsome, my dad. He doesn't look forty-five.
“It's starting, Gretch,” he says to me as I clear the last of the dishes from the dining table. “Don't you want to come sit down?”
No. I don't want to sit down.
He's unfaithful.
He's leaving for the Hong Kong toy exhibition tomorrow.
He's leaving our family for a bachelor pad in Chelsea.
I am not watching Star Wars on TV with him.
I don't care how hot Harrison Ford used to be.
“I gotta call Katya.”
“Didn't you call her earlier?”
“She was out. I have to talk to her about something.”
“She'll call you back when she's in.”
“I don't think her mother gives her messages.”
Why hasn't she called me back? I need to dissect the whole Titus/Adrian conversation and she hasn't been in all day.
Which is weird, since she said she was watching her sisters.
I go in my room and speed-dial her. Mrs. Belov picks up, sounding frazzled, and says Katya is still out. I leave another message. Then I try to sort through my stuff, which Ma has been on me about like six times since we first discussed it, even though it was only yesterday.
I start with the baby dolls. I haven't played with them in years, but I remember all their names: Plastic Baby, Mini-Baby, Yellow Baby (this one with yellow hair), China Baby, Rollo, Lala and Pinkie. They stare up at me with hard eyes full of longing. “Don't throw us away,” they seem to be saying. “You can't shove us in a garbage bag and send us to the Salvation Army shop. How will we breathe in the bag? And what will happen to us once we get there? We'll be split up and go to different houses, and the children there will be mean to us, and we'll never see each other again. You can't do that to us, Gretchen. We love you.”
So I leave the babies alone, and skip the stuffed animals for the same reason, and start going through my clothes. A T-shirt with a stain. I could throw that out, but I could also wear it when I go running—not that I've gone in two months. But still. It's something to wear.
I put it back in my closet.
A pair of cords with a hole in the butt. But they're good cords, so soft, and I could patch them.
They go back in the closet, too.
A red vinyl micromini I've been too shy to wear. But maybe I'll get up the nerve, like if Titus ever asks me out. Besides, with money being tight now, it's not like I'll be able to get another one if I let this one go and then change my mind.
So then I look at the comics and the books, but the comics I have to keep, because I need them for my art and I'm always rereading them, and besides, it's a collection. And the picture books I know I should give to my cousin Rachel, who is only three, but I love most of them, and it seems to me that an artist should have a collection of picture books anyhow, for inspiration. I find an extra copy of Harold and the Purple Crayon, and a book called The Berenstain Bears and the Messy Room, which is a big guilt trip about cleanliness that Ma bought me in hopes that I'd learn to pick up my stuff, back when I was six—and I shove those in a bag for Rachel. But the rest, I'm keeping.
Now the chapter books. I might reread them. They're not for babies. Like I loved the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and all those Tamora Pierce books, and Artemis Fowl and Harry Potter. Who's to say I won't look at them again? I don't have a social life. I've got to have reading material.
Then I tackle the Pez dispensers, and actually shove them into the bottom of the big black garbage bag before pulling them all out again, because they could be worth something someday. I read on the Internet that there are actually Pez-collector conventions, and what if there's one here that turns out to be worth like two hundred dollars, only I've sent it off to the landfill?
Same with the action figures. I can't get rid of them. Some of them I only bought last month.
The art supplies I need. The makeup, likewise, though I hardly ever wear any. But what if I suddenly start? What if I wear some lipstick one day and Titus looks at me with new eyes, riveted to my gorgeous, honey-colored mouth? I'll need to have the rest of this stuff at my disposal.
In the end, I manage to shove the broken laptop into the garbage, along with the old bagel, the ugliest of the jewelry boxes and two books of paper dolls where the dolls are missing so there's no one to put the clothes on. That's it.
I can't throw anything else out.
Ma will be furious. She'll say I'm mired in junk, we need a new start, there won't be anywhere to keep all this stuff in the new place, what am I hanging on to it for anyhow, the movers cost money, don't I know that, and they charge by the hour?
I can't think about it. My room is a catastrophe, now that I've taken nearly everything off the shelves. I know I should straighten it up, but I somehow feel comforted by all the piles of stuff surrounding me. Like these objects are loyal, they're mine, they're not going away. They want me to keep them and love them.
So I go to sleep with the baby dolls all on the bed, around me.
monday in first-period drawing, Kensington sticks student art on the corkboard with pushpins so she can critique it publicly. It's an exercise in humiliation,
and we have to go through it several times a week. Today, we're discussing last week's assignment to “Draw Something You Love,” which is part of our general focus this term on portraiture and drawing the human body, only Kensington is also trying to get us to draw feelings and character, so now and then we have to do a personal drawing like this, which is supposed to help us invest our portraits with drama and pathos. I handed mine in late, because I just did it on Sunday afternoon and gave it to her this morning, along with my statue drawings.
“There's a lot of emotion here,” says Kensington, starting with Katya's picture. Kensington is dressed all in black, with bleached blond hair and heavy black glasses.
Katya drew baby Ella, which is sweet, but obvious. Loving your little sister. Ella looks lopsided. She's sleeping in her parents' big bed, dwarfed by the pillows and a floral duvet cover. The fabric looks stiff.
“You draw from the heart,” Kensington goes on, “and anyone would fall in love with that baby from your depiction. But you had some trouble with shading the nose, I see.” She starts talking about techniques for drawing facial features, and I look at the other pictures.
A souped-up motorcycle; that'll be Shane. The bike is his older brother's. He always draws with a soft touch like that. He made the cycle so shiny, it glows.
The electric guitar. That's Adrian. He's such a poseur. I bet he never played guitar in his life and just drew one because a guitar seemed like a slick-guy thing to draw.
A box of fancy chocolates, half-eaten, wrappers strewn all over. The paper cups look real, which I know must have taken forever. Paper is hard to draw. The chocolates make me think Cammie; she seems like the type to have a big box of candy like that. But Cammie could never draw wrappers that well. It's gotta be Malachy. He's a candy man. And he draws with that narrow line.
“Bradley Parker—which is yours?” Kensington has finished with Katya and is moving on to the next victim.
That small, freckled white woman with glasses must be Brat's mother. She looks a bit like him—washed out with a pointy chin and a tired look around the eyes.
“You've done one of the most difficult tasks in portraiture.” Kensington gushes. “You've captured the eccentricities of your subject without descending into caricature. This woman is absolutely specific, and even a little comical, but she is drawn with respect and delicacy. Nice work, Bradley.”
Brat smiles, but as always he seems slightly nervous, like he's not settled into his seat.
“Titus Antonakos,” says Kensington. “You drew a human heart?”
Titus
Titus
Titus
“My dad has these medical textbooks.”
“You worked from a photograph?”
“Uh-huh.”
“All right. Shading is getting better. There's a feeling of”—Kensington stops, pushes her glasses up her nose—“curiosity, a clinical eye. I'm looking for the emotion in this image. Class, what do you see?”
“It's icky,” mumbles this girl Margaret, who hardly ever says anything.
“It's so graphic,” Cammie breathes. I bet she just wants Titus to look at her.
“Graphic, how?” Kensington.
Cammie purses her lips in thought. “Gory. Like a horror movie.”
“Is that what you're getting at, Titus?” Kensington asks him. “Is this heart a violent image?”
“Not exactly.” Titus scratches the back of his neck.
“Can the image be clinical and violent at the same time?” Kensington prods.
No one answers.
She goes on: “Does anyone see how this drawing answers the assignment, to draw something you love?”
No answer.
“Anyone?”
Silence.
“It's the opposite of love.” Me. Talking without planning to.
“Hmm? How so?”
“People think of hearts when they think of love, but a heart is a bloody organ in the body. It doesn't have any emotions. It's like a metaphor for love that has nothing to do with what love actually is.”
“Oh?” Kensington looks at me as if asking me to go on.
“So the picture's like loving the bare truth about love, not the crap that people think is love from Hallmark cards and chick flicks.” Everyone's staring at me now. “Or it's about there being no love, not in the body. Like saying love is in the mind, or the eye—but not in the body at all. 'Cause look at that heart. There's no love there.”
Hell. Why did I say all that? It didn't even make sense. It's like two different answers that don't match up with each other.
“Is that what you're getting at, Titus?” Kensington asks.
He blushes. “Something like that. Yeah, actually. That's what I meant.”
“Well then. Good work.”
He liked what I said.
He did.
And after class he will stop me in the hall and say, “You really understand me, Gretchen,” and I'll smile in an attractive way and he'll touch my hair and our hands will brush against each other—and then it won't matter if people are walking by, he'll put his hand on my chin and kiss me, and from then on we'll—
“Gretchen Yee,” says Kensington. “I'm sure we can all guess which is yours.”
Everyone chuckles at this. Even Katya.
Shane laughs outright.
Maybe I shouldn't have laid it out comic book–style, in panels. I know that drives Kensington crazy. But I wanted to get that swoop where Spider-Man swings past the straight lines of panels, over the panels, out of the picture with his foot nearly up in your face and his left hand way in the background, holding on to the thinnest thread of webbing—to land in poor Gretchen Yee's hell-messy bedroom in the bottom panel of the page, late at night, where he rescues her from her tiny dark self and her insignificant life.
“All right, then. You love comic books.” Kensington. “What a surprise. That's easy for all of us to see from your work so far this year.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Gretchen,” she goes on, “I thought I made it clear that I can't judge your progress if you continue to draw in this stylized manner. It's been obvious since the beginning that you've got an admirable command of human musculature”—another laugh—“but you're not going to develop your own style if you keep imitating the hacks who draw for the Marvel corporation.”
But look at the drawing, Kensington. Look at the story.
“I can't judge your line, your shading, I can't judge anything when you draw this way. It's like bringing a synthesizer to a violin lesson.”
But can't you look at what I draw for the drawing it is? Not for what it isn't?
Can't you tell me how to fix the foreshortening on Spidey's foot, or get the shadows right in poor Gretchen Yee's bedroom, illuminated by the moon?
And don't you want to find out what I love? Don't you even want to look at what I actually drew?
Because it's not that I love comic books. Sure, I love them, but that's not the point.
I love the idea of the big life—the life that matters, the life that makes a difference. The life where stuff happens, where people take action. The opposite of the life where the girl can't even speak to the boy she likes; the opposite of the life where the friends aren't even good friends, and lots of days are wasted away feeling bored
and kind of okay,
like nothing matters much.
I drew a picture of the big life. Spidey's is so big he bursts through the panels. And he's swooping in to take that little me—small, angry, impotent me—and yank her out of her room full of action figures and out into the large world where she should be living.
So maybe she'll do something for once.
I love that idea, Kensington. And if you'd only look at it, it's more interesting than a guitar or a box of chocolates.
tuesday and Wednesday are uneventful. Pop leaves for Hong Kong, and it's a relief, since he and Ma have been sniping at each other every time I leave the room. One time, the day before he leaves, h
e smells like cigarettes again, which makes me wonder if he is bringing his girlfriend on the business trip with him. But I don't speak about it, and Ma doesn't either.
Then on Thursday, Titus comes up to me in the hall.
“Hey, Gretchen,” he says.
“Hey yourself,” I say.
“What's up?”
“With me? The usual. Random acts of violence, media saturation, teenage angst, utter mayhem.”
I sound like an idiot. But what else am I gonna say? My parents are getting a divorce?
I'm practically flunking drawing and literature?
My best friend's barely speaking to me and changes the subject when I ask her where she was on Saturday night?
I think about you all the time and I want your body?
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Ha ha.”
“What's up with you?” I ask.
He rubs the back of his neck. “I, well, Taffy said something, and, um, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure.”
Oh hell. Taffy, in her skintight leotards, has been talking about me behind my back? Saying what—that I give oral to my Superman drawings?
“I mean—”
“Wait,” I cut in, before he goes any further. “Just let me say that Taffy is a half-wit.”
“She—”
“Promise me you won't believe a word she says.”
“Come on, Gretchen.”
“No, I mean it. If Taffy is saying stuff about me, it's completely wrong.”
“Oh.” He looks a bit shocked. “All right then, whatever. She's actually nice if you get to know her.”
He thinks she's nice? All she ever does is sneer at me like I'm a vermin.
“I didn't know you guys were friends,” I say, trying to sound casual.
“We're not, not exactly,” he mumbles. “We've just known each other since grade school, and—”
The bell rings for the next class. “Sorry,” I say. “I'm having an off day. I'm sure Taffy's fine, she's just not my type.”
“I've gotta get to class,” Titus says. “If I'm late for lab again, I'll have to go see Valenti.” (Valenti is the principal.)
“Later,” I say. And he's off down the hall.
Hell. I clearly just ruined any chance I ever had. I've shown him my bitter ugly personality, said mean stuff about his childhood friend, and—