On the ride home from school, Aunt Sheena wanted to know all about what Charlotte thought of Staley.
“Do you like it so far?” she asked from the driver’s seat.
“I guess.”
“Which is your favorite class?” The car had come to a stop and Aunt Sheena was looking at her through the rear view mirror.
Charlotte smiled uncomfortably. “Um, I don’t know yet.”
“It’s still pretty early in the year, right?”
“Yeah.”
Emi, who was sitting in the front seat with her bare feet resting on the dashboard, spoke up. “Charlotte has Mr. Gepherdt for English.”
“Uh-oh,” Aunt Sheena said. “He’s a tough one.”
“He’s like obsessed with T. S. Eliot,” Emi explained. “He starts all his classes with an Eliot poem, and if anybody complains or says they don’t like it, their grade automatically drops.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Aunt Sheena reproached.
“It is. It is true,” Emi insisted. “The only way I got an A last year was by pretending to be a fanatic for modernist poetry. Secretly, I hated it, though. I burned my textbook afterwards.”
Aunt Sheena shook her head with mock disapproval. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“My advice?” Emi said to Charlotte. “Don’t mess up this first assignment. Your grade is riding on it. Get in Gepherdt’s good graces now, or else suffer his wrath.”
Emi’s words haunted Charlotte for the rest of the afternoon. She hated homework. She especially disliked English class. And poetry. It was a perfect storm.
After dinner, Charlotte spread all her school books out on the kitchen table and simply stared at them all. She didn’t know where to begin. It was hard to believe she had so much to do after one day of school. She felt about two weeks behind schedule already.
Summoning a deep breath, she grabbed the book she most dreaded, “Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot” and flipped to the assigned page.
According to her English syllabus, Mr. Gepherdt was expecting them to read a poem and write a two-page response paper about what they thought it meant.
The poem began:
τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί
ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή
Great. What language was that? Greek? She could already tell this was not going to go well.
Thankfully, the rest of the poem was in English. But it might as well have been in Greek for all the sense it made. She found her attention wandering, and she started doodling in the margins of her book. She had almost covered all the white space when Emi stormed into the kitchen and dumped a book on the table with a bang.
“This is my yearbook from last year,” she said. She opened it to the middle. “And this is Josh Stokowski. He’s the one. I’ve decided.”
“The One?” Charlotte asked.
“The one I’m using to make Kainoa jealous.”
“Okay.”
“So what do I do now?” Emi asked a little presumptuously.
Charlotte returned Emi’s expectant stare. “You’re asking me?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one who came up with the idea.”
“Well, guys don’t usually need much persuasion when a female is involved,” Charlotte said.
“This one does.”
Charlotte studied the grainy black and white picture.
“You sure he’s the right guy for this?”
Emi jabbed her finger at the yearbook. “Have you looked at him? He’s hot. Plus, he’s taller than me. And height’s sort of a limiting factor in my case.”
“And he doesn’t have a girlfriend already?”
Aunt Sheena entered the kitchen. “Who are you talking about?” she asked.
Emi blanched and shut her yearbook. “Nobody.”
Aunt Sheena pursed her lips like she was trying to keep a straight face. “God forbid you share your thoughts and feelings with you ole ma,” she said. “I’m only the woman who conceived and birthed you.”
“Ew, mom. I don’t need those visual images burned into my brain.”
Aunt Sheena laughed and brought a big mixing bowl down on the counter. “Might there be a young man who’s caught your fancy?”
Emi sent her mother a withering stare and Aunt Sheena backed off. She tied an apron around her waist. “I’m making cupcakes. Why don’t you two join me?”
Charlotte shook her head. “Too much homework.”
“Me too,” Emi said. She took her phone out of her pocket. “I have to get in touch with my project partner for French class.”
“Who’s your partner?” Aunt Sheena asked.
“Josh Stokowski.”
Aunt Sheena whistled. “He’s a hottie!” she said, causing Emi to cover her ears in embarrassment.
“Mom! Do not say those things in front of me. It’s grossing me out!”
“He’s a cross-country state record breaker, I hear,” Aunt Sheena said, ignoring Emi’s groans. “Very impressive.”
Emi grabbed her yearbook and hurried out of the room, effectively ending the conversation.
“I love embarrassing my offspring,” Aunt Sheena said with a chuckle. As she was sifting flour, she glanced over Charlotte’s shoulder at the doodles in her T.S. Eliot book. “Wow. That’s an interesting design,” she said. “It’s kind of scary with all those skulls and things.”
Charlotte looked up at her aunt in surprise. “Thanks, I guess.”
“I didn’t know you were an artist.”
Charlotte closed the book self-consciously. “I’m not. It’s just a doodle.”
“You know, I signed you up for general music, because you took choir at your old school. But maybe you should switch into art.”
“I’m not that good,” Charlotte mumbled.
“You don’t have to be good, honey. That’s the whole purpose of art class: to learn.” Aunt Sheena said. “Hey, why don’t I ask Mr. Kerrigan if he has room in his intro class? It might be nice for you to see a familiar face at school.”
Sure enough, the next day when Charlotte arrived in music class, her teacher gave her a slip from the office:
Charlotte Banks has been transferred into Willem Kerrigan’s 12:30 art class, effective immediately. Please have her report to the art building, room 108.
“Better run,” her music teacher said, shooing her toward the door. “You don’t want to be too late.”
As Charlotte ascended the steps of the art building, she noticed for the first time that the name over the front entrance was Kapono Hall.
Whoa. Was Kapono a really common name around here, or had her uncle actually donated enough money to pay for a whole building?
She jogged down the hallway and practically slid into room 108. The room was cool and dark, with the lights turned off and only natural sunshine seeping through high windows. Everybody in the class looked up when she appeared, including Mr. Kerrigan.
“Come on in! Take a seat.” He gave her a warm smile and, to her relief, didn’t make her introduce herself to the group.
Mr. Kerrigan explained that they were doing blind contour drawings, which meant they had to sketch a subject without looking down at what they were doing on the paper. Apparently, this required drawing the picture in one continuous line, never lifting the pencil from the paper.
It was really hard. Everybody else in the class was sketching their non-drawing hand, but because her arm was in a sling, Charlotte chose to draw a chair. It took all her concentration not to peek at her paper. She was so intent on studying the chair that she didn’t notice Mr. Kerrigan sneak up to the boy sitting next to her.
“Oy!” Mr. Kerrigan shouted, causing the boy to jump a foot or so out of his chair. “I caught that, Mr. Sneaky McSneakster. You just looked down at your paper.”
In his surprise, the boy made a big jagged mark across his paper.
“S-sorry, Mr. K,” he said. “I was checking to see if it was right.”
Charlotte noticed that the boy was really small, and probably a freshman.
“Tsk,” Mr. Kerrigan said. “Don’t worry so much about what you’ve drawn. Focus on the object you’re drawing.”
He stood behind Charlotte and leaned in close to examine her work. He smelled soapy and warm.
“Hmm,” he said and walked away.
Hmm? What did Hmm mean? She stared worriedly down at her sketch, which looked like one big squiggly thing.
“Let’s stop for a moment, if you don’t mind,” he said to the class.
Everybody put their charcoal pencils down and looked at him warily. He leaned back against his desk and folded his hands in front of hm.
“What do you guys think of this exercise?” he asked. “Feel free to be honest.”
A girl raised her hand. “It depends. Are we getting graded on this? Because my drawing is ugly.”
The boy next to her propped his picture up for everyone to see. “It looks like my hand has gangrene.”
There was a collective murmur of “I suck at this” and “This is annoying.”
Mr. Kerrigan waited for all the voices to die down. “I’m hearing a lot of frustration,” he said. “And a lot of self-criticism.”
He handed out fresh sheets of paper. “Forget how you envision the outcome of your drawing. When you look at what you’re doing, you rely on a memory of the subject to guide your work. You stop seeing the subject as it truly is.”
Everybody set back to work. There was not much optimism in the air.
Again Charlotte drew a contour sketch of her hand. Again, her sketch was nothing more than a squiggle. The boy next to her also had drawn a squiggle.
“These are awful,” she whispered.
He held his picture at arm’s length “If I squint, it sort of looks like a hand. Don’t you think?”
“Sort of,” she laughed. She clipped a fresh sheet of paper on her easel and wondered if Mr. Kerrigan had set the class an impossible task.
But after five or six sheets of paper, she began to lose herself in the process. She didn’t realize that the period was over until almost everyone had left.
“Sorry to interrupt your flow, Charlotte,” Mr. Kerrigan said. “But I don’t want you late for your next class.”
Charlotte looked up, still in a daze. “I have next period free.”
Mr. Kerrigan nodded and began rummaging through some of the classroom cabinets. There were a lot of art supplies stored in cupboards around the room.
“So what did you think of today’s class?” he asked.
“It was hard. I kept wanting to look at my paper.”
“It’s surprising how tempting it is to look, isn’t it?” he chuckled “You know, it’s true in the bigger scheme of things, too. We get so preoccupied with thinking about our personal interpretation of reality that we forget to look up and observe what’s actually happening around us. Do you know what I mean?”
Charlotte began to nod by instinct, but then she realized that Mr. Kerrigan was the kind of person who wouldn’t mind explaining something twice. “Not really,” she confessed.
“Well, sometimes, when I’m sad, or I’m thinking about something unhappy that has happened in the past, everything in the present seems very sad as well. But if I stop for a few seconds to really look at what’s going on around me, I realize that there actually is a lot of joy in my life. I simply wasn’t looking for it. Does that make sense?”
“I think so,” Charlotte said. “It’s hard to stay in the present.”
Mr. Kerrigan stood on a stepping stool, his back to her, facing the cabinets. Even though he wasn’t especially good looking, Charlotte couldn’t resist watching him. Sheepishly, she lifted her eyes and they wandered from the muscles in his arms, to his shoulders, down his back, along the inseam of his khaki pants and straight to the worn leather shoes on his feet. There was absolutely nothing special about his body. He wasn’t fat or skinny or tall or short. The only distinctive qualities Mr. Kerrigan possessed were invisible. Like his voice, for example. It was very gentle. It made her want to listen closer, because he spoke so quietly.
He turned back around and Charlotte quickly averted her eyes.
“Did you know that the past and the present really aren’t so different?” Mr. Kerrigan asked. “There’s research that shows that every time our brain accesses a memory, we really only remember the last time we remembered that memory. So we don’t recall the original event as it happened, only our latest interpretation of it. Isn’t that strange?”
Charlotte nodded. She wanted to say something, but she wasn’t sure if the ideas were fully formed in her brain yet.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he said. It was a little spooky. Like he could read her mind and knew she had something to say.
“I was thinking…that memory thing you said? It’s sort of like art. When we remember stuff, we’re drawing a picture of a picture that we drew, rather than looking at the original thing.” She scrunched up her face. “Does that make sense?”
He nodded and smiled, and that smile was like a gift he was giving her, validating her. “Each memory gets further from the truth, like each drawing gets a little less accurate.”
“And it’s scary,” Charlotte added, growing in confidence. “It’s scary that memory works that way.”
“Why?”
“Because…it means we’re always living in a fantasy.”
He stopped talking for a moment, like he was turning the idea over in his mind. “That’s one way of looking at it,” he agreed. “It’s easy to live life without ever looking up from one’s paper, so to speak.”
While he was talking, Mr. Kerrigan had taken several wooden boxes from a shelf and placed them on his desk.
“What are those?” Charlotte asked.
“They’re called typecases.” Mr. Kerrigan brought one over to show her. It contained lots of compartments full of countless tiny metal cubes.
He plucked a few cubes from the box and handed them to her. They each had the imprint of a letter in the alphabet. In her hand she held an x, p and w.
“These are called movable type. You roll ink over them to print words on paper,” he explained. “Before computers, this is how people published books and other written documents.”
Charlotte ran her fingers over the little cubes. They were still smudgy with ink. “Why do you have them?”
“There’s an old printing press in the basement,” he explained. “I thought it would be fun to do some letterpress printing for this class. But it’ll take a lot of prep work.”
Charlotte admired the light that sparkled in his eyes when he talked about this. His enthusiasm was almost contagious. “What kind of prep work?”
“All the letter are jumbled together, so I have to sort them,” he said. “You know, put all the A’s together, all the B’s, and so forth. And then there are different fonts: serifs, sans-serifs, all of different sizes. It will take me hours to get it all sorted.”
Charlotte perked up. “I can help,” she offered. “It’ll be faster if we both do it.”
He turned back to the shelf and took down another typecase. “It’s very kind of you to offer, Charlotte, but I’m sure there are better ways you could spend this period,” he said. “Eating lunch comes to mind.”
With her good hand, she helped him bring down the next typecase, which was larger than the other two. Their fingers touched. She was acutely aware of the contact.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I want to help.”
They placed the typecase on his desk. Mr. Kerrigan studied his ink-stained hands as if he were considering the idea. He had very nice hands. Long fingers that weren’t too bony or chubby or hairy.
“How about this?” he said. “You bring a bag lunch tomorrow, and I’ll let you stay here and help out. But I can’t have you skipping lunch to help me,” he explained. “I wouldn’t feel right about
that.”
“Yes,” she said, pleased with the arrangement.
She could feel her heartbeat quicken at the thought of spending time with him. It would be the two of them, alone in this room. She didn’t understand why, but she’d never wanted someone as much as she wanted Mr. Kerrigan now. Her wanting of him filled her to the brim, like a river rising in mountains where snow melts.