All-American Girl (4 page)

But dogs are smart. Birds are kind of stupid.

But not, I realized later, as stupid as humans can be. Or at least this particular human. Around five fifteen—I could tell because the classical music station had started doing the news—Susan Boone said, “All right. Windowsill.”

And everyone but me got up from the benches and propped his or her drawing pad, with the drawing facing into the room, on the windowsill. Windows ran around all three sides of the corner room, big, ten-foot factory-style windows, above a sill wide enough to sit on. I hurried to put my pad with the others, and then we all stood back and looked at what everyone had drawn.

Mine was clearly the best. I felt pretty bad about it. I mean, here I was on my very first day of class, already drawing better than everyone else in it, even the grown-ups. I felt sorriest for John: his drawing was just a big old mess. Gertie's was blocky and smeared. Lynn's looked as if a kindergartner had drawn it, and Jeffrey had drawn something unrecognizable as fruit.

UFOs, maybe. But not fruit.

Only David had drawn anything remotely good. But he hadn't drawn quickly enough to finish his. I had gotten in ALL the fruit, and I had even added a pineapple and some bananas, to kind of balance it all out.

I hoped Susan Boone wouldn't make too big a deal out of how much better my drawing was than everybody else's. I didn't want to make anybody feel bad.

“Well,” Susan Boone said. And then she stepped forward and started discussing each person's drawing.

She was really quite diplomatic about the whole thing. I mean, my dad could probably have used her over in his offices, she was so tactful (economists are pretty good with numbers, but when it comes to human relations, they, like Rebecca, don't do so well). Susan went on about Lynn's dramatic use of line and Gertie's nice sense of placement on the page. She said John had improved a lot, and everyone seemed to agree, which made me wonder how bad John had been when he started. David got an “excellent juxtaposition,” and Jeffrey a “fine detail.”

When she finally got to my drawing, I felt like slinking out of the room. I mean, my drawing was so obviously the best one. I really don't mean to sound like a snob, but my drawings are
always
the best ones. Drawing is the one thing I can do well.

And I really hoped Susan Boone wasn't going to rub it in. The rest of the class had to feel badly enough already.

But it turned out I needn't have worried about how the rest of the class was going to feel as Susan Boone sang the praises of my drawing. Because when Susan Boone got to my drawing, she didn't have a single nice thing to say about it. Instead, she peered at it, then stepped up to it and looked at it even more closely. Then she took a step back and went, “Well, Sam. I see that you drew what you knew.”

I thought this was a pretty weird thing to say. But then, the whole thing had been pretty weird so far. Nice—except for the hair-stealing bird, which hadn't been so nice—but weird.

“Um,” I said. “I guess so.”

“But I didn't tell you to draw what you know,” Susan Boone said. “I told you to draw what you see.”

I looked from my drawing to the pile of fruit on the table, then back again, confused.

“But I did,” I said. “I did draw what I see. I mean, saw.”

“Did you?” Susan Boone asked, with another of her little elf smiles. “And do you see a pineapple on that table?”

I didn't have to glance back at the table to check. I knew there was no pineapple there. “Well,” I said. “No. But—”

“No. There is no pineapple there. And this pear isn't there, either.” She pointed at one of the pears I had drawn.

“Wait a minute,” I said, still confused but getting defensive. “There are pears there. There are four pears there on the table.”

“Yes,” Susan Boone said. “There are four pears on the table. But none of them is
this
pear. This is a pear from your imagination. It is what you know to be a pear—a perfect pear—but it is not any of the pears you actually saw.”

I didn't have the slightest idea what she was talking about, but Gertie and Lynn and John and Jeffrey and David knew, apparently. They were all nodding.

“Don't you see, Sam?” Susan Boone picked up my drawing pad and walked over to me. She pointed at the grapes I had drawn. “You've drawn some beautiful grapes. But they aren't the grapes on the table. The grapes on the table aren't so perfectly oblong, and they aren't all the same size, either. What you've drawn here is your idea of how grapes should look, not the grapes that are actually in front of us.”

I blinked down at the drawing pad. I didn't get it. I really didn't. I mean, I guess I sort of understood what she was saying, but I didn't see what the big deal was. My grapes looked a lot better than anybody else's grapes. Wasn't that a good thing?

The worst part of it was, I could feel everybody looking at me sympathetically. My face started getting hot. That is the thing about being a redhead, of course. You go around blushing something like ninety-seven percent of the time. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to hide it.

“Draw what you
see
,” Susan Boone said, not in an unkind way. “Not what you know, Sam.”

And then Theresa, panting from her climb up the stairs, came in, causing Joe to start shrieking “Hello Joe! Hello Joe!” all over again.

And it was time to go. I thought I would collapse with relief.

“I'll see you on Thursday,” Susan Boone called cheerfully to me as I put on my coat.

I smiled back at her, but of course I was thinking, Over my dead body will you see me on Thursday.

I didn't know then, of course, how right I was. Well, in a way.

When I
told Jack about it—what had happened at the Susan Boone Art Studio, I mean—he just laughed.

Laughed! Like it was funny!

I was kind of hurt by this, but I guess it
was
kind of funny. In a way.

“Sam,” he said, shaking his head so that the silver ankh he wears in one ear caught the light. “You can't let the establishment win. You've got to fight against the system.”

Which is easy for Jack to say. Jack is six foot four and weighs over two hundred pounds. He was assiduously courted by our school football coach after the team's best linebacker moved to Dubai.

But Jack wouldn't have any part of Coach Donnelly's scheme to dominate our school district's sectionals. Jack doesn't believe in organized sports, but not because, like me, he is resentful of their draining valuable funds away from the arts. No, Jack is convinced that sports, like the Lottery, only serve to lull the proletariat into a false sense of hope that he might one day rise above his Bud-swilling, pickup truck–driving peers.

It is very easy for a guy like Jack to fight against the system.

I, on the other hand, am only five foot two and do not know what I weigh, since Mom threw out the scale after seeing a news story on the prevalence of anorexia in today's teenage girls. Plus I have never been able to climb the rope in PE, having inherited my father's complete lack of upper body strength.

When I mentioned this, however, Jack started laughing even harder, which I thought was, you know, kind of rude. For a man who is supposed to be my soul mate, and all. Even if he maybe doesn't know it yet.

“Sam,” he said. “I'm not talking about
physically
fighting the system. You've got to be more subtle than that.”

He was sitting at the kitchen table, polishing off a box of Entenmann's chocolate-covered doughnuts Theresa had put out for us as an after-school snack. Entenmann's is not what we normally get as after-school snack fare. My mom only wants us to have apples and graham crackers and milk and stuff. But Theresa, unlike my parents, doesn't care about Jack's grades or the political statements he likes to make with his BB gun, so when he comes over when she's around, it's always like a big party. Sometimes she even bakes. Once she made fudge. I am telling you, Lucy's getting the one guy who will inspire Theresa to make fudge proves there is seriously no justice in the world.

“Susan Boone is stifling me creatively,” I said indignantly. “She's trying to make me into some kind of art clone….”

“Of course she is.” Jack looked amused as he bit into another doughnut. “That's what teachers do. You tried to get a little creative, added a pineapple, and—POW!—the fist of conformity came crashing down on you.”

When Jack gets excited, he chews with his mouth open. He did that now. Bits of doughnut went flying across the table and hit the back of the magazine Lucy was reading. She lowered her copy of
Cosmo
, looked at the bits of doughnut stuck to the back, looked at Jack, and said, “Dude, say it, don't spray it.”

Then she went back to reading about orgasms.

See? See what I mean about her being oblivious to Jack's genius?

I took a bite of my own doughnut. Our kitchen table, at which
we generally only eat breakfast and snacks, is located in this kind of glass atrium that juts out from the rest of the kitchen into the backyard. Our house is old—more than a hundred years old, like most of the houses in Cleveland Park, which are all these Victorians with a lot of stained-glass windows and widow's walks, painted bright colors. For instance, our house is turquoise, yellow, and white.

The glass atrium the kitchen table is in was added onto our house last year. The ceiling is glass, three walls are made of glass, and the kitchen table, actually, is made out of this huge piece of glass. Everywhere I looked, I could see my reflection, since it was getting dark outside. And I didn't much like what I saw:

What I saw sitting on either side of my reflection I liked even less:

And:

And there was me, in the middle. In between. Where I always am.

I once saw a documentary on birth order on the Health Network, and guess what it said:

Story of my life.

Although if you think about it, the fact that I am left-handed indicates that I was probably, at one time, a twin. According to this article I read in the dentist's office, anyway. There's this theory that most lefties actually started out as one in a pair of twins. One out of every ten pregnancies starts out as twins. One out of every ten people is left-handed.

You do the math.

For a while I thought my mom had never told me about my dead twin to spare my feelings. But then I read on the Internet that in
seventy percent of pregnancies that begin as twins, one of the babies disappears. Just like that. Poof. This is called vanishing twin syndrome, and generally the mothers don't ever even realize that they were carrying two babies instead of just one because the other one gets lost so early in the pregnancy.

Not that any of this really matters. Because even if my twin had survived, I'd still be the middle child. I'd just have someone else to share the burden with. And maybe to have talked me out of taking German.

“Well,” I said, dropping my gaze from my reflection and scowling instead at the place mat beneath my elbows. “What am I supposed to do now? Nobody ever said anything to me about not adding things in school when we had art. They let me add things all I wanted.”

Jack snorted. “School,” he said. “Yeah, right.”

Jack was having an ongoing and extremely bitter feud with our school's administrative offices over some paintings he'd entered in an art show at the mall. Mr. Esposito, the principal of Adams Prep, where Jack and Lucy and I go, didn't approve of Jack's entering those paintings in Adams Prep's name—he never even saw them. So when they were accepted, he was peeved, because the subject matter of the paintings wasn't what he considered “Adams Prep” quality. The paintings were all of baseball-hatted teens slouching around outside a 7-Eleven. They were titled
Studies in Baditude, Numbers One Through Three
, though at a recent board of trustees meeting one irate parent called them
Studies in Slackitude.

The Impressionists, I often remind Jack when he is feeling down about this, weren't appreciated in their day, either.

In any case, there is no love lost between Jack and the John Adams Preparatory School administration. In truth, were it not for the fact that Jack's parents are major contributors to the
school's alumni fund, Jack probably would have been expelled a long time ago.

“You've just got to find a way to fight this Susan Boone person,” Jack said. “I mean, before she drives out every creative thought in your head. You have got to draw what is in your heart, Sam. Otherwise, what is the point?”

“I thought,” Lucy said in a bored voice as she flipped a page in her magazine, “that you're supposed to draw what you know.”

“It's
write
what you know.” Rebecca, down at the opposite end of the table from me, looked up from her laptop. “And draw what you
see
. Everyone knows that.”

Jack looked at me triumphantly. “You see?” he said. “You see how insidious it is, this thing? It's even seeped into the consciousness of little eleven-year-old girls.”

Rebecca shot him an aggravated look. Rebecca has always been fully on my parents' side on the whole issue of Jack.

“Hey,” she said. “I am not
little
.”

Jack ignored her. “Where would we be if Picasso had only drawn what he saw?” Jack wanted to know. “Or Pollock? Or Miró?” He shook his head. “You stay true to your beliefs, Sam. You draw from your heart. If your heart says put in a pineapple, then you put in a pineapple. Don't let the establishment tell you what to do. Don't let others dictate how—and what—you draw.”

I don't know how he does it, but somehow, Jack always says the right thing.
Always.

 

“So are you going to quit?” Catherine, calling me later that evening to discuss our bio assignment, wanted to know. Our bio assignment was to watch a documentary on the Learning Channel about people who have body dysmorphic disorder. These are people who, like Michael Jackson, think they are horribly disfigured, when
in reality they are not. For instance, one man hated his nose so much he slit it open with a knife, pulled out his own nasal cartilage, and stuck a chicken bone in there.

Which just goes to show, no matter how bad you think something might be, it could always be much, much worse.

“I don't know,” I said in response to Catherine's question. We had already fully discussed the whole chicken bone thing. “I want to. That class is filled with a bunch of freaks.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said. “But you told me there was one cute guy.”

I thought about familiar-looking David, his Save Ferris T-shirt, his big hands and feet, and his liking my boots.

And the way he had seen me totally and utterly crushed, like an ant, in front of him by Susan Boone.

“He's cute,” I admitted. “But not as cute as Jack.”

“Who is?” Catherine asked with a sigh. “Except maybe for Heath.”

So, so true.

“Will your mom let you quit?” Catherine wanted to know. “I mean, isn't this supposed to be kind of a punishment for the C-minus in German thing? Maybe you aren't supposed to like it.”

“I think it's supposed to be a learning experience for me,” I said. “You know, like how Debbie Kinley's parents sent her to Outward Bound after she drank all that vodka at that party at Rodd Muckinfuss's house? Art lessons are supposed to be like my Outward Bound.”

“Then you can't quit,” Catherine said. “So what are you going to do?”

“I'll figure something out,” I said.

Actually, I already had.