The second photo is of me sitting in the same pew as the previous shot. The note says: Then one day they weren’t empty. Except I hardly recognize myself. I look, I don’t know, hopeful. And I don’t remember smiling at him like that at all. I don’t remember smiling at anyone like that in my whole life.
The next photo is also from that day. The sticky says: She said I’d know you right away because you’d glow like an angel. Yes, she was high as hell on pain meds, as was I—like I told you—but you glow. Look at you. I look at the me he saw through his camera and again I hardly recognize her. I see a girl looking very swoony. I don’t understand. I’d only met him moments before.
The third photo is of me, taken the same day but before I said he could take photos of me. He must’ve been stealth shooting. It’s the moment when I put my finger to my lips to shush him and my grin’s as law-breaking as his. The sticky says: She said you’d be a bit odd. He made a smiley face. Forgive me, don’t mean to offend, but you are bizarre.
Ha! He no offense, but–ed me, English-style.
It’s like his camera has found this other girl, one I wish I could be.
The next photo is of me taken today in the mailroom talking to Grandma Sweetwine, talking to no one. There’s no denying how completely empty the room is, how alone I am, how marooned. I swallow.
But the sticky note says: She said you would feel like family.
So he came up here to print photos and write these messages after he left me downstairs? He must’ve wanted to tell me these things even as he fled like his feet were on fire.
If you dream you’re taking a bath, you will fall in love
If you stumble going upstairs, you will fall in love
If you walk into someone’s room and find countless pictures of yourself with lovely notes attached to them, you will fall in love
I sit down, not quite believing any of this, that he might really like me too.
I pick up the last photo in the series. It’s of us kissing. Yes, kissing. He blurred out the background and added wild swirling color to everything around us so that we’re . . . exactly like the couple in the painting! How’d he do it? He must’ve used a photo he took of me kissing my hand and then manipulated one of himself into the image.
The sticky on this one reads: You asked what it would be like. This is what it would will be like. I don’t want to be just friends.
I don’t either.
Meeting your soul mate is like walking into a familiar house. I do recognize everything. I could find my way around in the dark. The bible rules.
I pick up the photograph of the kiss. I’m going to take it to La Lune and tell him I don’t want to be just friends either—
Then footsteps clomping up the steps, loud and hurried, mixed with laughter. I hear Oscar say, “Love when they overstaff. The extra helmet is right up here. And you can wear my jacket. It’s going to be cold on the bike.”
“So glad we finally get to hang out.” It’s a girl’s voice. Not Sophia’s from Transylvania either. Oh no, please. Something in my chest is collapsing. And I have about one second to make a decision. I choose the bad movie option, diving for the closet and shutting myself in before Oscar’s boots are stomping across the room. I do not like the way this girl said hang out. Not one bit. It was definitely code for hook up. Definitely code for kissing his lips, his closed eyelids, his scars, the tattoo of the beautiful blue horse.
Oscar: I could’ve sworn I left my jacket here.
Girl: Who’s she? She’s pretty.
Shuffling, shuffling. Is he sweeping the photos of me from sight?
Girl (voice tight): Is she your girlfriend?
Oscar: No, no. She’s nobody. It’s just a project for school.
Knife stab, center chest.
Girl: You sure? That’s a lot of pictures of one girl.
Oscar: Really, she’s nobody at all. Hey, come here. Sit on my lap.
Come here, sit on my lap?
Did I say knife? It’s an ice pick.
This time I’m certain no donuts are involved in the intimate sounds I’m hearing. This time I’m also certain I’m not misconstruing friendship for romance like I did with Sophia. I don’t understand. I don’t. How can the same guy who took those photos of me and wrote those notes to me be making out with another girl on the other side of this door? I hear him say the name Brooke in between heavy breaths. This is hell. This has to be karmic retribution for the last time I was in a closet I shouldn’t have been in.
I can’t stay in here.
Nobody-at-all pushes open the closet door. The girl springs out of Oscar’s lap like a crazed cat. She has long tumbling brown hair and almond-shaped eyes that are popping out of her head at the sight of me. She’s buttoning her shirt with frenzied fingers.
“CJ?” Oscar exclaims. There’s lipstick all over the bottom of his face. Again. “What’re you doing up here? In there?” Definitely a valid question. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the capacity for speech. And, I believe, for movement as well. I feel pinned to this awful moment like a dead insect. His eyes have landed on my chest. I realize I’m hugging the photograph of the kiss to me. “You saw,” he says.
“Nobody at all, huh?” the girl named Brooke says, picking up her bag from the floor and slinging it over her shoulder in preparation, it seems, for a quick, angry exit.
“Wait,” he says to her, but then his eyes dart back to me. “G.’s note?” he says, something dawning in his face. “You put it in my jacket?”
It hadn’t occurred to me he’d recognize Guillermo’s handwriting, but of course.
“What note?” I squeak out. Then I tell the girl, “I’m sorry. Really. I was just, oh I don’t know what I was doing in there, but there’s nothing between us. Nothing at all.” I find my legs are working enough to get me down the stairs.
I’m halfway across the mailroom when I hear Oscar from the stairs. “Check the other pockets.” I don’t turn around, just push down the hallway, through the door, then down the path, landing on the sidewalk, panting, sick to my stomach. I forge up the street on legs so weak and wobbly I can’t believe they’re carrying me. Then when I’m about a block away, throwing all dignity to the wind, I start checking the pockets of the jacket, finding nothing but a film canister, candy wrappers, a pen. Unless . . . I run my hands over the inside lining and there’s a zipper. I unzip it, reach in and pull out a piece of paper, carefully folded up. It looks like it’s been there a while. I open it. It’s a color copy of one of the photos of me in the church. The one with the law-breaking grin. He keeps me with him?
But wait. How can it matter? It can’t. It can’t matter if he chose to be with someone else anyway, to be with her right after writing those amazing notes to me, right after what happened between us on the floor of the jail cell room—not that I know what happened, but something did, something real, the laughing as well as the very intense rest of it when I had this sense there might be a key somewhere somehow that could set us both free. I really did.
And then: Nobody at all. And: Come here, sit on my lap.
I imagine him inhaling Brooke, inhaling girl after girl, like Guillermo said, like he’s done to me, so now he can exhale and blow me to smithereens.
I am so stupid.
They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.
I’m not even a block away—the picture balled up in my hand—when I hear someone behind me. I turn around, certain that it’s Oscar, hating the fountaining of hope in my chest, only to find Noah: wild-eyed, unhinged, no padlocks anywhere on him, looking petrified, looking like he has something to tell me.
THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM
Noah
Ages 131/2–14
The day after Brian leaves for boarding school, I sneak into Jude’s room while she’s in the shower and see a chat on the computer.
Spaceboy: Thinking about you
Rapunzel: Me too
Spaceboy: Come here right this minute
Rapunzel: Haven’t perfected my teleporting
Spaceboy: I’ll get on it
I blow up the entire country. No one freaking notices.
They’re in love. Like black vultures. And termites. Yes, turtle doves and swans aren’t the only animals that mate for life. Ugly, toilet-licking termites and death-eating vultures do too.
How could she do this? How could he?
It’s like having explosives on board 24/7, the way I feel. I can’t believe when I touch things they don’t blow to bits. I can’t believe I was so way off.
I thought, I don’t know, I thought wrong.
So wrong.
I do what I can. I turn each of Jude’s doodles I find around the house into a murder scene. I use the most hideous deaths from her stupid How Would You Rather Die? game. A girl being shoved out a window, knifed, drowned, buried alive, strangled by her own hands. I spare no detail.
I also put slugs in her socks.
Dip her toothbrush in the toilet bowl. Every morning.
Pour white vinegar into the glass of water by her bed.
But the worst part is that for the few minutes every hour when I’m not psychopathic, I know that to be with Brian: I would give all ten fingers. I would give anything.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Rowing Madly Back Through Time)
A week passes. Two. The house gets so big it takes hours for me to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen and back, so big that even with binoculars, I can’t make out Jude across a table or room. I don’t think our paths will ever cross again. When she tries to talk to me over the miles and miles of betrayal between us, I put in ear buds like I’m listening to music, when really, the other end is attached to my hand in my pocket.
I never want to speak to her again and make this very clear. Her voice is static. She is static.
I keep thinking Mom will realize that we’re at war and act like the United Nations as she’s done in the past, but she doesn’t.
(PORTRAIT: Disappearing Mother)
Then one morning, I hear voices in the hallway: Dad talking to a girl who isn’t Jude, who I quickly realize is Heather. I’ve barely given a speck of brain space to her, even after what happened between us in the closet. That horrible lie of a kiss. I’m sorry, Heather, I say in my head as I pad silently over to the window, sorry, so sorry, as I lift it as quietly as possible. I climb out, falling to safety below the sill as I hear the knock on the door and Dad saying my name. It’s all I can think to do.
Halfway down the hill, a car peels by me and I want to stick out my thumb. Because I should hitchhike to Mexico or Rio like a real artist. Or to Connecticut. Yes. Just show up where Brian is in that dorm—in a shower full of wet naked guys. The thought comes out of nowhere and all the explosives on board detonate at once. It’s worse than thinking about him and Jude in the closet. And better. And much worse.
When I emerge out of the nuclear mushroom of this thinking, burnt to a crisp, I’m at CSA. My feet somehow got here on their own. Summer classes have been over for more than two weeks and lots of the students who board are returning. They look like highly functioning graffiti. I watch them lug suitcases and portfolios and boxes out of car trunks, hug parents who are peering at each other with eyes that say, Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I vacuum it all in. The girls with blue green red purple hair shrieking into each other’s arms. A couple of tall weedy guys leaning against a wall smoking and laughing and radiating cool. A ragtag group with dreads who look like they just tumbled out of a dryer. A guy walking past me with a mustache on one side of his face and a beard on the other. So awesome. They not only make art, they are art.
I remember then the conversation I had with the naked English guy at the party and decide to take my burnt remains on a recon mission to the inland flats of Lost Cove, where he said that barking mad sculptor had a studio.
Before too long, a few seconds later maybe—because trying not to think about Brian turns me into a superhuman speed-walker—I’m standing in front of 225 Day Street. It’s a big warehouse and the door’s half-open, but there’s no way I can walk on in, can I? No. I don’t even have my sketchpad. I want to, though, want to do something, have to do something. Like kiss Brian. The idea snags me and then I can’t get out of it. I totally should’ve tried. But what if he’d punched me? Cracked my head open with a meteorite? Oh, but what if he hadn’t? What if he’d kissed me back? Because I’d catch him staring at me sometimes when he didn’t think I was paying attention to him. I was always paying attention to him.
I blew it. I did. I should’ve kissed him. One kiss, then I could die. Well, wait, no freaking way, if I’m going to die, I want to do more than kiss. Way way more. I’m sweating. And hard. I sit on the sidewalk, try to breathe, just breathe.
I pick up a stone and toss it into the street, trying to mimic his bionic wrist movement and after three pathetic tries, my whole thinking flips over. There was an electric fence between us. He put it up. Kept it up. He wanted Courtney. And he wanted Jude from the first moment he saw her. I just didn’t want to believe it. He’s a popular douchebag jock who likes girls. He’s the red giant. I’m the yellow dwarf. The end.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Everyone Lives Happily Ever After Except for the Yellow Dwarf)
I shake it off, all of it. All that matters is the worlds I can make, not this toilet-licking one I have to live in. In the worlds I make, anything can happen. Anything. And if—when—I get into CSA I’ll learn how to make it all come out half as decent on paper as it is in my head.
I stand, suddenly realizing I could totally climb the fire escape that scales the side of the warehouse. It leads to a landing where there’s a bank of windows, which must look down on something. All I’d have to do is hop the outside fence without anyone seeing me. Well, why not? Jude and I used to sneak over tons of fences so we could visit various horses or cows or goats or a certain madrone tree we both married when we were five (Jude was also the minister).
I glance up and down the quiet street. See in the distance the back of an old-looking woman in a bright-colored dress . . . who actually may be floating. I blink—she’s still floating and it looks like she’s barefoot for some reason. She’s entering a small church. Whatever. Once she’s inside, I cross to the other side of the street, then easily and quickly monkey up and over the fence. I bolt down the alley, climb carefully up the stairs of the escape, trying not to creak the old metal, grateful there’s some kind of construction going on nearby to cover up any sound I may be making. I scoot across the landing and peer around the side of the building, realizing the ear-splitting sound I’m hearing is not coming from a construction site, but the courtyard below, where I believe the apocalypse has just occurred, because whoa: It’s the scene after the aliens have launched a chemical attack on Earth. All over the yard, there are rescue workers in hazmat suits and face masks and goggles, wielding power drills and circular saws, emerging from and disappearing into white billowing clouds as they attack hunks of rock. This is a stone studio? These are stone sculptors? What would Michelangelo think? I watch and watch and when the dust settles, I see that three massive pairs of eyes are boring into me.
My breath catches. From across the yard, three enormous stone men-monsters are staring at me.
And they’re breathing. I swear it.
My ex-sister Jude would freak. Mom too.
I need to get closer to them, I’m thinking, when a tall, dark-haired man walks out of the building through an entire wall that’s pulled halfway up like a garage door. He’s talking with some kind of accent into a phone. I watch him throw his head back in supreme happiness, like he’s hearing that he gets to choose the colors for all the sunsets from now on or that Brian’s waiting for him in his bedroom naked. He’s practically dancing around with the phone now, then
he laughs a laugh so happy it blasts about a billion balloons into the air. This must be the barking mad artist and the scary-ass granite men-monsters across from me must be his barking mad art.
“Hurry,” he says, his voice as big as he is. “Hurry, my love.” Then he kisses two of his own fingers and touches the phone, before slipping it in his pocket. Total whale dork move, right? But not when he did it, trust me. Now he has his back to the courtyard and is facing a pillar, his forehead touching it. He’s smiling at the concrete like a total whack job, but I’m the only one who knows, due to my stellar vantage point. He looks like he would give all ten fingers too. After a few minutes, he pivots out of his delirium and I get the first clear shot of his face. His nose is like a capsized ship, his mouth the size of three, his jaw and cheekbones hefty as armor, and his eyes are iridescent. His face is a room overstuffed with massive furniture. I want to draw it immediately. I watch as he surveys the apocalyptic scene before him, then raises his arms like a conductor and in an instant every power tool goes silent.
As do the birds, the passing cars. In fact, I can’t hear a rustle of wind, the buzz of a fly, a word of conversation. I can’t hear anything. It’s like someone pressed mute on the whole world because this man is about to speak.
Is he God?
“I talk very much about bravery,” he says. “I say to you carving is not for cowards. Cowards stick to clay, yes?”
All the rescue workers laugh.
He pauses, swipes a matchstick on a column. It bursts into flame. “I tell you, you must take risks in my studio.” He finds a cigarette behind his ear and lights it. “I tell you not to be timid. I tell you to make the choices, make the mistakes, big, terrible, reckless mistakes, really screw it all up. I tell you it is the only way.”
An affirmative murmur.
“I say this, yes, but I still see so many of you afraid to cut in.” He begins to pace, slowly like a wolf, which is definitely his mirror animal. “I see what you are doing. When you leave yesterday, I go from work to work. You feel like Rambo maybe with the drills, the saws. You make lots of noise, lots of dust, but very few of you have found even this much”—he pinches two fingers together—“of your sculptures. Today this changes.”