“I’ll go first,” I say, shoving my book into Mom’s hands. Jude’s eye-roll is a 7.2 on the Richter this time, causing the whole building to sway. I don’t care, I can’t wait. Something happened when I was drawing today. I think my eyes got swapped for better ones. I want Mom to notice.
I watch her page through slowly, then put on the granny glasses that hang around her neck and go through the drawings again, and then again. At one point she looks up at me like I’ve turned into a star-nosed mole and then goes back to it.
All the café sounds: The voices, the whirring of the espresso machine, the clink and clatter of glasses and dishes go silent as I watch her index finger hover over each part of the page. I’m seeing through her eyes and what I’m seeing is this: They’re good. I start to get a rocket launch feeling. I’m totally going to get into CSA! And I still have a whole year to make sure of it. I already asked Mr. Grady, the art teacher, to teach me to mix oils after school and he said yes. When I think Mom’s finally done, she goes back to the beginning and starts again. She can’t stop! Her face is being swarmed by happiness. Oh, I’m reeling around in here.
Until I’m under siege. A psychic air raid discharging from Jude. (PORTRAIT: Green with Envy) Skin: lime. Hair: chartreuse. Eyes: forest. All of her: green, green, green. I watch her open a packet of sugar, spill some on the table, then press a fingerprint of the crystals into the cover of her sketchbook. Hogwash from Grandma’s bible for good luck. I feel a coiling in my stomach. I should grab my sketchbook out of Mom’s hands already, but I don’t. I can’t.
Every time Grandma S. read Jude’s and my palms, she’d tell us that we have enough jealousy in our lines to ruin our lives ten times over. I know she’s right about this. When I draw Jude and me with see-through skin, there are always rattlesnakes in our bellies. I only have a few. Jude had seventeen at last count.
Finally, Mom closes my book and hands it back to me. She says to us, “Contests are silly. Let’s spend our Saturdays for the next year appreciating art and learning craft. Sound good, guys?”
Before even opening Jude’s sketchbook, she says this.
Mom picks up her hot chocolate but doesn’t drink. “Unbelievable,” she says, shaking her head slowly. Has she forgotten Jude’s book altogether? “I see a Chagall sensibility with a Gauguin palette, but the point of view seems wholly your own at the same time. And you’re so young. It’s extraordinary, Noah. Just extraordinary.”
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Dives into a Lake of Light)
“Really?” I whisper.
“Really,” she says seriously. “I’m stunned.” Something in her face is different—it’s like a curtain’s been parted in the middle of it. I sneak a glance at Jude. I can tell she’s crumpled up in a corner of herself, just like I do in emergencies. There’s a crawlspace in me that no one can get to, no matter what. I had no idea she had one too.
Mom doesn’t notice. Usually she notices everything. But she’s sitting there not noticing anything, like she’s dreaming right in front of us.
Finally she snaps out of it, but it’s too late. “Jude, honey, let’s see that book, can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with.”
“That’s okay,” Jude says in the tinsely voice, her book already buried deep in her bag.
Jude and I play a lot of games. Her favorites are How Would You Rather Die? (Jude: freeze, me: burn) and The Drowning Game. The Drowning Game goes like this: If Mom and Dad were drowning, who would we save first? (Me: Mom, duh. Jude: depends on her mood.) And there’s the other variation: If we were drowning, who would Dad save first? (Jude.) For thirteen years, Mom’s stumped us. We had absolutely no idea who she’d dredge out of the water first.
Until now.
And without sharing a glance, we both know it.
THE HISTORY OF LUCK
Jude
Age 16
3 years later
Here I am.
Standing next to my sculpture in the studio at CSA with a four-leaf clover in my pocket. I spent all morning on hands and knees in a clover patch outside school, all for nothing—it was picked clean. But then, eureka! I super-glued a fourth leaf onto an ordinary old three-leafer, wrapped it in cellophane, and slipped it into my sweatshirt pocket right beside the onion.
I’m a bit of a bible thumper. Other people have the Gideon, I have Grandma Sweetwine’s. Some sample passages:
A person in possession of a four-leaf clover is able
to thwart all sinister influences
(Art school is rife with sinister influences. Especially today—
not only is it my critique day, I have a meeting with my advisor
and I might be expelled.)
To avoid serious illness, keep an onion in your pocket
(Check. Can’t be too careful.)
If a boy gives a girl an orange, her love for him will multiply
(Jury’s out. No boy has ever given me an orange.)
The feet of ghosts never touch the ground
(We’ll get to this. Soon.)
The bell rings.
And there they are. The other clay second-years. Every last one of them ready to suffocate me with a pillow. Oops, I mean: staring dumbfounded at my sculpture. The assignment was to do another self-portrait. I went abstract, as in: blob. Degas had dancers, I have blobs. Broken, glued-together blobs. This is my eighth.
“What’s working here?” asks Sandy Ellis, master ceramicist, clay instructor, and my advisor. The way he begins every critique.
No one says a word. The proper California School of the Aliens feedback sandwich starts and ends with praise—in between, people say the terrible things they really think.
I scan the room without moving my head. The sophomore clay crew is a pretty good sampling of the CSA student body: freak-flags of every variety flying proud and loud. Normal run-of-the-mill people like me—except for a few discreet tics, sure, who doesn’t have something?—are the exception.
I know what you’re thinking. It’s Noah who belongs at this school, not me.
Sandy peers at the class over his round, tinted spectacles.
Usually everyone jumps right in, but the only sound in the studio is the electric hum of the fluorescent lights. I study the time on Mom’s old watch—she was wearing it when her car sailed off the cliff two years ago, killing her on impact—as it ticks around my wrist.
Rain in December brings with it an unforeseen funeral
(It rained most of the December before she died.)
“C’mon guys, positive impressions of Broken Me-Blob No. 8?” Sandy slowly strokes his straggly beard. If we all morphed into our mirror animals (a game Noah made me play constantly when we were little), Sandy would poof into a billy goat. “We’ve been talking about point of view,” he says. “Let’s discuss CJ’s, shall we?”
CJ, short for Calamity Jane/Jude, is what everyone at school calls me on account of my “bad luck.” It’s not just breakage in the kiln. Last year, in pottery studio, some of my bowls allegedly took flying leaps off the shelves at night when no one was around, when the windows were all closed, when the closest earthquake was in Indonesia. The night janitor was confounded.
Everyone was but me.
Caleb Cartwright raises both hands in a gesture that further clinches his mime thing: black turtleneck, black skinny jeans, black eyeliner, black bowler hat. He’s actually quite hot in an arty cabaret kind of way, not that I’ve noticed. The boy boycott’s on. I come fully equipped with boy-blinders and failsafe invisibility uniform:
To disappear into thin air: Cut off three feet of blond curls and shove remaining hair into a black skullcap. Keep tattoo tucked away where
no one can see it. Wear only oversized hoodies, oversized jeans,
and sneakers. Stay quiet.
(Occasionally, I write a bible passage of my own.)
Caleb scans the room. “I’ll
just say it for everyone, okay?” He pauses, taking great care to find the perfect words to throw me overboard. “It’s impossible to critique CJ’s work because it’s always mangled, glued together like this. I mean, we’re talking serious Humpty Dumpty every time.”
I imagine myself in a meadow. This is what the school counselor told me to do when I feel mental, or as Grandma used to say: minus some buttons.
And if anyone was wondering: DIY four-leaf clovers have no juice.
“Well, what does that say in and of itself?” Sandy asks the class.
Randall “no offense, but” Brown starts to sputter. He’s this all-star a-hole who believes he can say the most offensive things imaginable in critique if he precedes them with “No offense, but.” I’d like to bean him with a tranquilizer dart. “It would say a lot more, Sandy, if it were intentional.” He looks at me. Here it comes. “I mean, CJ, no offense, but it’s got to be that you’re fundamentally careless. The only rational explanation for so much breakage in the kiln is that you don’t knead your clay enough or let your work dry evenly.”
Nail on the head. Bingo. Pop goes the weasel.
Sometimes explanations are not rational.
Strange things happen. And if we were allowed to talk when our work was being critiqued, and if I could get a signed affidavit from someone very high up, like God for instance, that I wouldn’t be locked away for the rest of my life, then I’d say, “Doesn’t anyone else have a dead mother angry enough at them to rise from the grave and break their artwork?”
Then they’d understand what I’m up against.
“Randall brings up a good point,” Sandy says. “Does intentionality matter in our experience and appreciation of art? If CJ’s final sculpture is in pieces, does her original conception of wholeness even matter? Is it about the journey or the destination, so to speak?”
The whole class hums like a happy hive at this and Sandy launches them into a theoretical discussion about whether the artist even matters after the art has been created.
I’d rather think about pickles.
“Me too—kosher dills, big fat juicy ones. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm,” whispers Grandma Sweetwine in my head. She’s dead like Mom, but unlike Mom, who just breaks things, Grandma’s vocal and often visible. She’s the good cop of my ghost world; Mom, the bad. I try to keep my face blank as she continues. “Ho, dee, hum, what a snooze. And really, that’s a highly unattractive thing you’ve made. Why all this beating around the bush? Why don’t they tell you better luck next time and move on to their next victim like that fella there with the bananas springing out of his head.”
“Those are blond dreadlocks, Grandma,” I tell her in my mind, careful not to move my mouth.
“I say you make a run for it, dear.”
“I’m with you.”
Those discreet tics? I confess, maybe not so discreet.
But, for the record: Twenty-two percent of the world’s population sees ghosts—that’s over one and a half billion people worldwide. (Professors as parents. Mad research skills.)
While the theoretical clone-drone continues, I amuse myself by playing: How Would You Rather Die? I’m the reigning champion of this game. It’s not as simple as it seems, because making the deaths on either side of the equation comparably frightful takes enormous skill. For instance: eating fistful after fistful of crushed glass or—
I’m interrupted because to my surprise and everyone else’s as well, Fish (no last name) has raised her hand. Fish’s a mute like me, so this is something.
“CJ has good technique,” she says, her tongue stud flashing like a star in her mouth. “I propose it’s a ghost that’s breaking her work.” Everyone hardy-har-hars at this, including Sandy. I’m floored. She wasn’t joking, I can tell. She meets my eyes, then lifts her wrist and gives it a subtle shake. On it is a cool punky charm bracelet that perfectly matches the rest of her: purple hair, tattoo sleeves, acid attitude. Then I recognize the charms: three pieces of ruby red sea glass, two four-leaf clovers in plastic, and a handful of sand-dollar birds, all strung together with black ratty leather. Wow. I hadn’t realized I’d snuck so much luck into her bag, into her smock pockets. She just always seems so sad under all the ghoulish makeup. But how did she know it was me? Do the rest know too? Like that jittery new kid? Definitely minus some buttons. Been slipping him sand-dollar birds galore.
But Fish’s dead ringer of a pronouncement and bracelet are the lone fireworks. For the rest of the hour, one by one, the others skewer Broken Me-Blob No. 8 and I become more and more aware of my hands, which are in a white-knuckled clasp in front of me. They feel itchy. Very itchy. Finally, I unclasp them and try to examine them on the down low. No sign of a bite or rash. I search for a red spot that might indicate necrotizing fasciitis, more commonly referred to as flesh-eating disease, which I read all about in one of Dad’s medical journals—
Okay, got it: How Would You Rather Die? Eating handful after handful of crushed glass, or a whopping case of necrotizing fasciitis?
The voice of Felicity Stiles—signifying the end is nigh!—pulls me out of this brain-squeezing conundrum where I’m leaning toward eating the glass.
“Can I do the closing, Sandy?” she asks like she always does. She has this gorgeous lilting South Carolinian accent that she uses to give a sermon at the end of every critique. She’s like a flower that talks—an evangelical daffodil. Fish covertly mimes a dagger going into her chest. I smile at her and brace myself. “I just think it’s sad,” Felicity says, then pauses until the room is hers, which doesn’t take more than a second because she doesn’t only sound like a daffodil, she looks and acts like one too and we all become human sighs around her. She holds her hand out to my blob. “I can feel the pain of the whole wide world in this piece.” It takes a full rotation of that world for her to drawl out all those Ws. “Because we are all broken. I mean, aren’t we now? I am. The whole wide world is. We try to do our best and this is what happens, time and time again. That’s what all CJ’s work says to me, and it makes me really, really sad.” She faces me directly. “I understand how unhappy you are, CJ. I really do.” Her eyes are huge, swallowing. Oh, how I hate art school. She raises a fisted hand and clutches it to her chest, then beats it three times, saying, “I. Understand. You.”
I can’t help it. I’m nodding back at her like a fellow flower, when the table beneath Broken Me-Blob No. 8 gives way and my self-portrait tumbles to the floor and shatters into pieces. Again.
“That’s cold,” I tell Mom in my mind.
“You see,” Fish declares. “A ghost.”
This time nobody hardy-har-hars. Caleb shakes his head: “No way.” Randall: “What the hell?” Tell me about it, countrymen. Unlike Casper and Grandma S., Mom is not a friendly ghost.
Sandy’s under the table. “A screw fell out,” he says in disbelief.
I get the broom I keep at my station for such occasions and sweep up broken Broken Me-Blob No. 8 while everyone mutters about how unlucky I am. I empty the pieces into a trashcan. After the remains of my self-portrait, I toss in the useless DIY-clover.
I’m thinking maybe Sandy will feel sorry for me and postpone our big meeting until after winter break, which starts tomorrow, when he mouths at me My office, and gestures toward the door. I cross the studio.
Always walk right foot first to avert calamity,
which comes at you from the left
• • •
I’m sunk into a giant plush leather chair across from Sandy. He’s just apologized about the screw falling out and joked that maybe Fish was right about that ghost, eh, CJ?
Chuckling politely here at the absurd notion.
His fingers are piano-ing on the desk. Neither of us is speaking. I’m fine with this.
To his left is a life-size print of Michelangelo’s David, so vivid in the fragile afternoon light that I keep expecting his chest to heave as he claims his f
irst breath. Sandy follows my gaze over his shoulder to the magnificent stone man.
“Helluva biography your mother wrote,” he says, breaking the silence. “Fearless in her examination of his sexuality. Deserved every bit of acclaim it got.” He takes off his glasses and rests them on the desk. “Talk to me, CJ.”
I glance out the window at the long stretch of beach buried in fog. “A white-out’s coming for sure,” I say. One of the town of Lost Cove’s claims to fame is how often it disappears. “Do you know that some native peoples believe fog contains the restless spirits of the dead?” From Grandma’s bible.
“Is that right?” He strokes his beard, transporting flecks of clay from his hand to it. “That’s interesting, but right now we need to talk about you. This is a very serious situation.”
I think I was talking about me.
Silence prevails once again . . . and I’ve decided to eat the crushed glass. Final answer.
Sandy sighs. Because I’m disturbing him? I disturb people, I’ve noticed. Didn’t used to.
“Look, I know it’s been an extraordinarily hard time for you, CJ.” He’s searching my face with his kind billy goat eyes. It’s excruciating. “And we pretty much gave you a free pass last year because of the tragic circumstances.” He has on The Poor Motherless Girl Look—all adults get it at some point when they talk to me, like I’m doomed, shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes. I drop my gaze, notice a fatal melanoma on his arm, see his life pass before my eyes, then realize with relief it’s a dot of clay. “But CSA is a tight ship,” he says more sternly. “Not passing a studio is grounds for expulsion, and we decided to just put you on probation.” He leans forward. “It’s not all the breakage in the kiln. That happens. Granted, it seems to always happen to you, which calls into question your technique and focus, but it’s the way you’ve isolated yourself and your clear lack of investment that deeply concern us. You must know there are young artists all around the country banging on our doors for a spot, for your very spot.”