I GOT TO ART A FEW minutes late and took the empty seat next to Steven. On the whiteboard at the front of the room, Mr. Lim had written WORK PERIOD: STILL LIFE. Beneath the whiteboard was a table with an apple and two pears. The classroom was overbright and morguelike. I took out my sketch pad and pencil case and arranged them on my part of the table. Steven turned to me.
“How was the nutritionist?” he said.
It surprised me that he remembered. “Fine,” I said.
I fussed with my pencil sharpener, pretending to have exacting requirements for the pointiness of my lead. I didn’t normally interact much with Noe’s boyfriends. They seemed to exist on a different plane—too clean, too conspicuously smart. Sometimes the whole situation reminded me of a Venn diagram: there was the place where Noe and I overlapped absolutely, and two moon-shaped zones where there was no overlap at all. Noe’s boys lived in the no-overlap zone, and my obsession with being outdoors—things we happily tolerated in each other, but to which we didn’t pay much attention. I touched my newly sharpened pencil to the page and started in on the first pear.
Steven leaned his chin on his knuckles and watched me lazily. “Which nurse sent you?” he said.
“I don’t know her name.”
“Curly hair? Earrings?” He made curly hair and earrings gestures with his hands, bobbing them around his head and ears.
“Yes.”
“I got her for my meningitis shot last year. She thinks everyone’s either anorexic or depressed. It’s, like, her thing.”
“Which one are you?”
“Depressed, obviously. I’m a boy. It’s like a neonatal ward in there: girls get pink, boys get blue.”
“Did she make you see a counselor?” I said.
“Oh yes. I’m quite unstable. Ask me to show you my mood journal sometime.”
“I’m supposed to keep a food journal.”
“Can I see it?”
“I haven’t eaten anything yet.”
“Aha! Anorexic.”
“It’s only been five minutes since the appointment.”
Steven reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of Life Savers.
“Here,” he said.
“They’re all linty.” I put one of the Life Savers in my mouth, then spat it out. “Yeck. This tastes like pocket.”
“Write it down,” said Steven.
I wrote it in my notebook: linty Life Saver, 2 p.m. Then I put my notebook aside and started in on the pear again, because surely the conversation wasn’t going to last for the entire class. Steven watched me draw.
“Do I make you uncomfortable?” he said.
I looked up. “What?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t be offended. I’m just curious.”
I reddened, not wanting to explain about the Venn diagram. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we don’t really know each other outside of Noe.”
“Is that what it is?” said Steven. “In that case, we must introduce ourselves. I’m Steven.”
He held out his hand. I shook it. “Annabeth,” I said.
“Pleased to make your official acquaintance, Annabeth. Let’s be friends.”
“Okay,” I said. Then, because I felt guilty, I burst, “I didn’t mean that we weren’t already sort of friends. By association.”
“I don’t like knowing people through people,” he said evenly. “It feels too much like regurgitation.”
“Ah,” I said. “Hmm.”
I sketched in the apple and added some wavy lines to indicate brightness. Steven picked up his pencil and used it to render a photographically perfect set of fruit on his page.
At the front of the room, Mr. Lim glanced at his digital watch.
“Anybody who has not handed in their self-portrait, please do so before the end of class,” he announced into the middle distance.
“Shit,” I murmured.
“Did you say shit?” Steven said. “I was wondering whether you were a swearer.”
I flipped my sketchbook page and started drawing frantically. “I forgot my self-portrait,” I said. “Can you just—I need to concentrate.”
I drew an oval for a face, but without a mirror I realized I had no idea what I looked like. I knew I had two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and hair, but without an image to copy from I was suddenly unsure of the dimensions. Whatever, I thought to myself, I’ll take the redo. Mr. Lim was famous for his pass/redo system, which meant you could barf up a self-portrait in the last ten minutes of class with full confidence that you could do it over. Around the classroom, I noticed a few other kids whose drawing had picked up a rather mysterious speed and urgency. At least I wouldn’t be the only smudgy ten-minute portraiteer.
“Are you sure you don’t have body dysmorphia?” Steven said, openly inspecting the page I was trying to hide with my free hand. “This portrait strikes me as rather sumoesque.”
“It’s fine,” I hissed. “I don’t have time to start again.”
“Oh, come on,” said Steven. “You can do better than that. Have some standards.”
I was about to tell Steven I didn’t have artistic standards, but instead I grabbed my eraser and scrubbed at the page. The clock now showed four minutes remaining in class. I drew a new oval.
“Too wide,” said Steven. “Your face is skinnier than that.”
I flipped to a new page and drew a skinny oval.
“Skinnier,” said Steven.
“Aaaargh, it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes it does. Do you want the nutritionist to think you see yourself as enlarged by two hundred percent?”
“He’s not going to see it.”
“Are you kidding me? I tailor all my art pieces for maximal psychoanalytic potential. It keeps Ricardo busy.”
“I just need to—” I waved him off irritably.
“Okay,” said Steven. “Here we go. Eyes go in the middle of the face. Middle of the face. Nope, that’s the crown of your skull. Are your eyes on top of your head?”
I ripped the page out of my sketchbook and crumpled it up.
“Wha—why’d you do that?” said Steven. “You were doing great.”
“I can’t draw under pressure,” I said, flipping to a fresh sheet.
The bell started to ring.
“Shit.”
Steven opened his backpack, rummaged around, and pulled out a bundle of sticks tied up with a piece of string. “Here,” he said.
“What the heck is that?”
I didn’t mean to bark at him, but I really wanted to get good grades that year and it pained me to lose marks on a throwaway assignment.
“Your self-portrait,” said Steven.
“It has to be a drawing.”
“Negatory. The assignment said ‘Any Medium.’”
“Why do you have sticks in your backpack?”
“Prop from a scene we did in Drama this morning. Elsinore Forest to Dunsinane.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Hand it in.”
“Hey, Mr. Lim, here are some sticks.”
“It’s a sculpture.”
The bell stopped ringing. Kids were filtering into the room for the next class.
“Trust me,” said Steven. “I’ve been getting straight A’s in art for years.”
I ripped a piece of paper from my sketchbook and wrote, RAW MATERIALS: Portrait of the Artist as a Bundle of Dry Sticks.
“That’s more like it,” Steven said, nodding his approval. “Barren. Dead. Fleshless. Starving. Your nutritionist is going to trip balls.”
Steven McNeil. I thought to myself, as I hurried to Mr. Lim’s desk with my sticks, that he was one of the most irritating people I had ever met, and also the most confoundingly entertaining.
12
I TOLD NOE ABOUT THE NUTRITIONIST, feeling only slightly guilty as I exaggerated the details of his audiobook.
“Suck my blade, you horny wench?” screeched Noe. She shuddered theatrically. “Christ, what a perv. Trust good old E. O. James to hire the creepiest-possible fake nutritionist.”