At the end of the aisle I was dumped into a clearing and I gasped. There were easels everywhere, at least a dozen of them, and a long table covered with newspapers next to an eastward-facing window. All around were baskets and boxes of supplies—paints, cloth, ribbons, lumps of clay, pens.
The denim-smocked lady that I’d seen outside was perched on a stool in front of an easel, stroking wide purple stripes across a canvas.
“I think the morning sun is most inspiring, don’t you?” she said without turning around.
I didn’t answer.
“Of course, at this time of day all the people in that grocery store are getting the brilliant light. But I…” she raised her paintbrush and poked the air with it. “I get the most inspiring sun of the day. They can have their sunset. It’s the sunrise that gets people’s attention. Rebirth always does.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even entirely sure she was talking to me. She still had her back turned to me and was working so intently on her painting I’d wondered if maybe she was talking to herself.
I was rooted to the spot anyway, not sure where to look first. I wanted to touch things—run my fingers along plaster vases and smell the insides of boxes and squish my hands into a lump of clay—and was afraid if I moved, even moved my lips, I’d give in to my whim and be lost in this labyrinth of un-creation forever.
She added a few dabs of purple in the corners of her canvas, then got off her stool and stood back, admiring her work.
“There!” she said. “Perfect.” She placed her palette on the stool and balanced the paintbrush across it, and then, finally, turned to face me. “What do you think?” she asked. “Too much purple?” She turned and studied it some more. “Never too much purple,” she muttered. “The world needs more purple. More and more, dontcha know.”
“I like purple,” I said.
She clapped her hands twice. “Well, then!” she said. “That settles it! Tea?” She bustled behind the cash register and I could hear china clattering around. “How do you take it?” she asked, her voice muffled.
“Um,” I said, shuffling forward. “I… I can’t. I have to get back outside. My mom.”
Her head popped up—a lock of frosted brown hair had come forward over her forehead. “Oh! And I was hoping to get some company today. This place always seems so abandoned after my classes leave. Too quiet. Great for mousies, not for Bea, that’s me.” She sipped out of a tiny teacup with rabbits printed on the front of it—a teacup from a child’s tea set. She held out her pinky while she drank.
“You teach classes here?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said. She came around the counter with a flourish. “I teach classes. Lots and lots of classes. Pottery, painting, macramé, you name it, I teach it.”
I moved to my left just slightly and pushed a finger into a bucket of wooden beads.
“Can anyone take a class?”
She frowned. “No,” she answered, staring at my hand in the bead bucket. I pulled it out with a jerk and two beads fell, danced across the floor. She smiled when I blushed, as if my embarrassment were endearing to her. “Oh no, I don’t teach just anyone. Some teach me.”
I was just about to leave when she reached out and grabbed my hand. She flipped it palm-up and studied it, her penciled-on eyebrows shooting up into her nest of hair. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Oh!”
I tried to pull my hand back, but didn’t put much oomph behind it. As weirded-out as I was getting from her touching me, I wanted to know what her “oh’s” were about.
“I should go,” I said, but she ignored me.
“Well, I can spot another artist anywhere. And you are one, yes? Of course you are. You like purple!” She turned and clasped my hand harder, pulling me behind her. She took me to the canvas she’d just been working on. With her free hand she picked up the palette and brush on the stool and pointed to it. “Sit,” she said.
“I really think I should…”
“Oh, do sit! The stool doesn’t like it when its invitations go unnoticed.”
I sat.
She handed me the paintbrush. “Paint,” she said. “Go on.”
I stared at her. “On this? On your picture?”
“Pictures are taken by photographers. This is a painting. So paint it.” I stared at her a beat longer. She pushed my hand toward the canvas. “Go on.”
Slowly I dipped the brush into the black paint and made a stripe across the canvas, perpendicular to the purple.
“Hmmm,” she said, and then, “Ohhhh.”
The best way I can describe the feeling was that it was miraculous. Or maybe soulful. Or maybe both. I don’t know. All I know is that I couldn’t stop at that one line or the next splotch or the tree-like dots I made along one border. And all I know is that I felt faraway when I was doing it and that I could barely hear Bea’s little exclamations behind me, her humming, her talking in baby voices to the colors I dipped into (“Oh, yes, it’s your turn, ochre! Does wittle cornfwower want a chance?”).
Before I knew it I was ripped out of my reverie by a buzzing in the front pocket of my jeans—my cell phone startling me away from the canvas, which suddenly just looked like a canvas again.
“Oh, dratted technology,” Bea muttered as I answered. “Why can’t we communicate by carrier pigeons anymore? Beautiful feathers with a lovely note attached. I could use some pigeon feathers around here. Or peacock. Oh yes, peacock! Only nobody ever communicated by peacock, I don’t think…”
“Where are you?” Mom’s voice bleated on the other end of the phone. “I’ve been worried sick—no Dr. Hieler, no you. For God’s sake, Valerie, why can’t you just stay put like I asked you to? Do you know where my mind was going?”
“I’ll be right there,” I mumbled into the phone. I got up from the stool as I shoved the phone back into my pocket. “Sorry,” I said to Bea. “My mom…”
She swatted the air with one hand, picking up a broom with the other, making a beeline for a pile of sawdust under a woodworking table by the far wall. “Never be sorry about a mother,” she answered. “Be sorry for a mother, yes, but about one, most certainly not. Mothers almost always love purple. I should know—I had a very purplish mother.”
I scurried down the aisle I’d come in through—feeling like I was fleeing a dark and mystical forest—and had just about reached the door when Bea’s voice floated across the store.
“I do hope I’ll see you back next weekend, Valerie.”
I smiled and plunged outside. It wasn’t until I’d ducked into Mom’s car, breathless and sweaty from hurry and exhilaration, that I’d remembered I’d never told Bea my name at all.
21
Lunch was some sort of petrified Mexican pizza, which was just fitting for a Monday, if you asked me. I felt like petrified pizza on most Mondays too, being forced out of my little cocoon of happiness in my bedroom and into the spotlight of Garvin High.
Other than Saturday morning, my weekend had been blissfully uneventful. Mom and Dad weren’t speaking for whatever reason, and Frankie was off at some church retreat with a friend. Not that our family ever went to church, something that was brought up time and again in the media right after the shooting, but apparently there were a couple girls that went to his friend’s church and Frankie was determined to get some time alone with one of them. Truth be told, if Frankie could get his hands on a girl at some point during the weekend, he’d do it without thinking twice—church retreat or not—which I thought was so wrong, but at least trying to get to third base at a church retreat kept him from having to endure Mom and Dad’s cold war at home.
I could endure it just fine by staying in my room. Not like my parents expected anything different from me. They didn’t even ask me to come down for dinner anymore. I’m guessing they probably didn’t even have dinner. I just crept down when I figured everyone was off doing their own thing and rummaged something out of the fridge, ferreting it back up to my room like a raccoon with garbage can spoils.
; Once, Saturday evening, I crept down into the kitchen after hearing the front door close only to find Dad at the table, hovering over a bowl of cereal.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought you guys were both gone.”
“Your mother went to some support group,” he said, staring straight into his bowl. “There’s nothing to eat in this goddamn house,” he said. “Unless you like cereal.”
I peered into the refrigerator. He was right. Other than a carton of milk and some ketchup, a small bowl of leftover green beans and a half dozen eggs, there wasn’t much to be had. “Cereal’s okay,” I said, pulling down a box from the top of the refrigerator.
“It’s goddamn stale,” he said.
I stared at him. His eyes looked red-rimmed, his face unshaven. His hands looked rough and shaky and I realized it had been so long since I’d looked at Dad, I hadn’t even noticed how much he’d aged lately. He looked old. Spent.
“Cereal’s okay,” I repeated, more softly now, grabbing a bowl out of the cupboard.
I poured my cereal into the bowl and sloshed some milk into it. Dad ate silently. As I was leaving the room, he said, “Everything in this house is goddamn stale.”
I stopped, one foot on the bottom step. “Did you and Mom fight again or something?”
“What would be the point of that?” he responded.
“You… you want me to order a pizza or something? For dinner, I mean?”
“What would be the point of that?” he repeated. Seemed like he was right, so I just crept back up the stairs to my room and listened to the radio while I ate my cereal. He was right—it was stale.
I had slapped the petrified pizza onto my tray and was spooning some slimy canned fruit cocktail into the square next to it when I heard Mr. Angerson’s voice just over my shoulder.
“Not planning to eat that in the hallway, are you?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess I was,” I said, going about my business. “I like the hallway.”
“That’s not what I was hoping to hear. Should I go ahead and line up a teacher for Saturday detention?”
I turned and leveled my stare at him, using every ounce of determination that I had left. Angerson didn’t even bother to try to understand. “I guess so.”
Stacey, who’d been in line just ahead of me, took her tray and ducked away, scurrying toward her table. I could see her in my peripheral vision saying something to Duce and Mason and the gang. Their faces turned toward me. Duce was laughing.
“I’m not going to let you orchestrate another tragedy in this school, young lady,” Mr. Angerson said to me, a little red coloring creeping up from under his tie to his chin. So much for the medal and the letter and all that hero and forgiveness crap, I thought. “There is a new school policy that no personal isolation is allowed in this school. Anyone who is caught regularly secluding herself from the student body will be carefully scrutinized. I hate to say but some extreme cases could be subject to expulsion. Are we clear?”
The line was moving around me and out the door now, I realized, and kids were staring as they went. Some of them had curious grins on their faces and were whispering to their friends about me.
“I never orchestrated anything,” I answered. “And I’m not doing anything wrong now, either.”
He pursed his lips and glared at me, the red creeping from his chin up his cheeks. “I would like you to consider your options,” he said. “As a personal favor to the survivors of this school.”
He let the word “survivors” drop on me like a bomb and it worked. I felt shaken by it. Felt like he said the word extra loud and that everyone had heard it. He turned and walked away and after a minute I turned back to the fruit cocktail. I loaded more of it onto my tray with shaky hands, even though my stomach suddenly felt very full.
I paid for my food and carried my tray out into the main part of the Commons. I felt like everyone was staring at me, like a bunch of rabbits caught in the middle of the night by back porch lights. But I looked forward, only forward, and headed out into the hallway.
I could hear Angerson just inside the cafeteria talking to some boys about where French fries belonged and where they didn’t, and steeled myself for another face-off when I heard footsteps coming around the corner.
“You sure you want to do this?” he asked, as I sunk to the floor, carefully balancing my tray on my lap.
I opened my mouth to answer, but was interrupted as a bustle of motion burst into the hallway. Jessica Campbell, holding her lunch tray, whisked around Angerson and slid to the floor next to me. Her tray rattled against the linoleum as she shrugged out of her backpack.
“Hi, Mr. Angerson,” she said brightly. “Sorry I’m late, Valerie.”
“Jessica,” he said, one of those statements that sounds like a question. “What are you doing?”
She shook her milk carton, opened it. “Having lunch with Valerie,” she answered. “We’ve got some Student Council stuff to talk about. I figured this would be the best way to talk without getting interrupted. It’s so loud in there. Can’t hear yourself think.”
Mr. Angerson looked like he wanted to punch a hole in something. He stood around for a minute, then pretended he saw something alarming going on in the Commons and scurried off to “break it up.”
Jessica giggled softly after he left.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Having lunch,” she said, taking a bite of her pizza. She made a face. “God, it’s petrified.”
I smiled in spite of myself. I picked up my pizza and took a bite. We ate silently, side by side. “Thanks,” I said around a mouthful of pizza. “He’s totally looking for a reason to expel me.”
Jessica waved her hand at me. “Angerson’s such an ass,” she answered, and then laughed as I opened my notebook and drew a picture of a bare butt wearing a suit and tie.
22
[FROM THE GARVIN COUNTY SUN-TRIBUNE,
MAY 3, 2008, REPORTER ANGELA DASH]
Abby Dempsey, 17—As Student Council Vice President, Dempsey was manning a fundraising table selling doughnuts. She was shot twice in the throat. Police believe that the bullets were stray, intended for a student in line approximately three feet to Dempsey’s left. Dempsey’s parents had no comment for reporters, and are said by friends of the family to be “grieving deeply for the loss of their only child.”
Mom called and left a message on my cell phone telling me she had a meeting and couldn’t come pick me up. My first reaction was outrage that she would expect me to ride the bus after everything that had happened. Like I could just flop down in a seat beside Christy Bruter’s posse now and everything would go fine. How could she? I thought to myself. How could she throw me to the wolves like that?
I guess it goes without saying that I wasn’t going to ride the bus home, whether Mom was driving me or not. Truthfully, my house was only about five miles away and I’d walked the route more than once. But that was back when both of my legs were normal. I doubted my ability to do it now, sure that halfway there my thigh would begin throbbing and force me to sit down and wait for the nearest predator to whisk me away.
But I could probably make it a mile or so, I figured, and Dad’s office was not much farther than that. True, getting a ride from Dad was definitely not top on my list. Probably not any higher up than giving me a ride was on his. But it would be better than trying to avoid the drama on a school bus any day.
There was once a time when I was embarrassed that Dad’s office wasn’t more imposing. Here he was, supposedly this big-shot lawyer, and he was in a tiny brick “satellite office,” which, if you asked me, was just another way of saying “hole in the wall in the suburbs.” But today I was glad he worked in a hole in the wall not far from school, because the October sun did nothing to warm up the air and within just a few blocks of walking I was beginning to be sorry I hadn’t taken the bus after all.
I’d only been to Dad’s office a couple times before; he didn’t exactly put out a welcome mat for his family to sh
ow up at work. He liked to pretend it was that he didn’t want us exposed to the, as he called them, “lowlifes” he represented. But I think the truth was that Dad’s office was his escape from the family. If we started showing up there, what would be the point of him always being at work?
My leg felt tight and I knew I was lurching along like a horror movie monster by the time I opened the big double glass door set in the brick of Dad’s office. I felt glad to have made it.
Warm air settled around me and I stood in the entryway rubbing my thigh for a minute before walking into the office itself. I could smell microwave popcorn, buoyed on top of the air and snaking around me, and I felt hunger twist inside of me. I followed the scent through the vestibule and around the corner to the waiting area.
Dad’s secretary blinked at me from behind her desk. I couldn’t remember her name. I’d only met her once before, at some family picnic the head office had sponsored a summer or two ago, and thought it was Britni or Brenna or something young and trendy like that. I did remember, though, that she was only twenty-four and had the most incredibly shiny straight sheath of cocoa-colored hair that hung down her back like a superhero cape and these big cow eyes that blinked slowly and housed giant trusting pupils ringed with the color I can best describe as spring green. I remembered her being cute and shy and laughing longer than anyone else every time my dad told one of his stupid corny jokes.
“Oh,” she said, a blush rising to her cheeks. “Valerie.” It was a statement. She didn’t smile. She gulped—actually gulped like they do in the movies—and I imagined her reaching for a red security button under the desk just in case I should pull a gun or something.
“Hi,” I said. “Is my dad here? I need a ride.”