Still Life with Tornado(35)

I hear people walking in the park and talking to each other. I hope they don’t see me, so I become invisible. I blend into the park bench. Very quiet. Blend. Disappear.

While I’m gone, this is what happens: I remember the fighting.

I see Bruce standing at the edge of the water in Mexico. I see him throwing something into the water. Art.

When I open my eyes, it’s light, but it’s still night.

My face is sweating. I want to sleep but I can’t sleep.

I’m in Rittenhouse Square and this is not the place to sleep. When I sit up, I see ten-year-old Sarah standing next to my bench. She says, “Sarah?”

I move over and she sits next to me. There’s a college girl sitting cross-legged on the grass across from us. She’s looking right at us, a huge grin on her face. Ten-year-old Sarah says, “She’s been here for an hour. She keeps looking at her hands and giggling.”

I watch the college girl and she doesn’t seem original. She’s high on something—probably something psychedelic. Giggling at one’s own hands is a dead giveaway.

The art club takes LSD. They do it and go to Great Adventure and ride the Kingda Ka—the fastest roller coaster in New Jersey and forty-five stories high. They could be lying but that’s what they tell me. Sometimes they drop acid in school, too. Carmen is their weed connection. That’s why they keep her around. Carmen doesn’t know this. Carmen thinks she fits in, but she doesn’t fit in because she’s not like the others. Up until now you thought they were just normal art-snob teenagers in high school who steal my ideas. That’s because I tell the truth slowly. I think that’s how the truth shows up sometimes. Slowly.

I’m sitting in Rittenhouse Square watching a college girl laugh at her hands. I think about my hands. My blind drawings. I wonder if I could draw my hand without looking at the paper or my hand, the way Alleged Earl drew his chicken in University City. I dig in my jacket pocket and there’s a small lump of sky-blue sidewalk chalk left. I kneel down onto the brick paving and I start to draw my hand from memory. It’s hard to draw on brick pavers, but I go slowly. I keep breathing. In. Out. I hear the college girl giggling. I hear ten-year-old Sarah trying to get my attention, but I ignore her. I keep the image of my hand in my head and my eyes closed and I finish with my thumb and the curve to my wrist and, when I open my eyes, I see a disfigured sky-blue hand.

The college girl comes over to look at what I’ve drawn. She says, “It’s beautiful!”

Ten-year-old Sarah is angry. She’s saying, “Listen to me! Goddammit, listen to me!”

The college girl walks down the path toward the frog statue and all I have is ten-year-old Sarah. She says, “What the f*ck happened to you?”

I’m not saying anything. My mouth is open. I close it. My eyes are open. I close them. I lie back down. I make myself invisible to ten-year-old Sarah. I don’t want her to see me like this. She’s ten. She’ll think I’m crazy.

She says, “What are you?”

I ask myself what I am.

What are you?

I am a human being. I am sixteen years old.

That’s it. That’s all I have. I don’t have any other answers. I am a human being. I am sixteen years old.

I think it’s a good start.

I get up and leave ten-year-old Sarah on the bench.

I walk sixteen blocks to Mom’s hospital. Past a bunch of people who say hello or don’t, and I don’t know what to say back so I just say nothing and pretend I’m listening to music in a pair of invisible earbuds. I am good at imagining. I hear the music. It’s like nothing I ever heard before. It’s traffic and doors opening and closing and it’s a siren in the distance and it’s got a slow rhythm that is my breathing in and out. In and out.

I don’t go into the hospital. I just sit outside in the well-lit parking area near the ER. Being closer to Mom should make me feel safe. Because I don’t have my wallet, if I was found right now, I’d be a Jane Doe. Except Mom would recognize me even if I don’t.

I am a human being. I am sixteen years old.

That should be enough.

An ambulance comes into the ER bay with its lights on and its siren off. The lights are mesmerizing. Red, blue. Red, blue. Red, blue. It’s like light-art. It’s the kind of light-art that stops you in the museum and makes your heart beat faster. People move around quickly. I can’t see what’s going on, but I don’t want to.

I wanted to be an artist once. Now I just want to be a human being and be sixteen years old.

I can’t see anything wrong with this.

I can’t see anything sad about it.

“Sarah?”

It’s ten-year-old Sarah.

“I want to walk you home,” she says.

I don’t know what time it is, but it’s too late for a ten-year-old girl to be walking around Philadelphia.

“It’s late,” I say.

“I want to walk you home,” she says again.

We hold hands like sisters and she walks me back to Market, back over the bridge, down through the park, and onto 17th. She doesn’t say anything to me. When we get to the front door, she whispers, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She doesn’t even look me in the eye. When I watch her walk east down Lombard, I can feel her shame. She thinks I’m a loser. She thinks I have shitty hair and no plans and no idea what happened in Mexico.