Still Life with Tornado(4)

This guy looked like he was into ruin porn—breaking into abandoned buildings, climbing bare girders, and taking pictures of collapsed ceilings and piles of rubble. This was a thing now. Ruin porn. But this guy hadn’t even broken into the building; he was just taking pictures of the outside. First, from the tripod and then he walked around and tilted his camera in different directions and did close-ups of the usual things: graffiti, rust, broken windows. I knew if I looked hard enough I could find his page on The Social and look through his online portfolio. Maybe he went to the University of the Arts. Maybe he could sell me heroin. I didn’t look him up, though. Totally unoriginal. Plus, I don’t actually want to do heroin. I want to go to Spain or Macedonia. And I have more guts than to just see a thing from the outside.

? ? ?

When I wake up to my alarm, I smooth out my clothing and I don’t even change my underwear. I hear Mom getting in from her night’s work and I hear her collapse into her bed and turn on the sound machine that she needs to sleep all day. White noise. It sounds like someone left the TV on static.

I get my favorite umbrella and put it in my backpack even though there is no rain predicted for the day. Dad is in the kitchen making me breakfast, but I walk straight out the door and up to the vendor who makes the best egg, cheese, and ham breakfast sandwiches, and when he asks “Salt, pepper, oregano?” I say yes to all three even though I don’t like oregano. Then I sit on the curb and slowly eat every bite.

? ? ?

I’m late to my new school, because I don’t exactly remember the buses I took to get here before. There are no ruin porn photographers this time.

The minute I step into the building, I pretend this is my old school on any normal day. I open my umbrella. Superstition abounds. Students act as if I’ve brought a curse upon the building, but that’s only because they don’t know that there is already a curse upon the building. The curse is: Nobody focuses on the now.

In first-period English, the teacher asks me to close my umbrella and I comply. She says, “It’s nice to see you again, Sarah.” I smile. It feels like I have a disease.

By lunch, I’m ready to leave and take the bus to anywhere, but I decide to stay. I sit in the cafeteria at a table of the other sophomore art club geeks. Carmen is here and she’s talking about tornadoes. Henry is sketching his milk carton à la Warhol. Vivian eats Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets one after the other and washes them down with bottomless black coffee. None of them know that my name is now Umbrella. The senior and junior art club geeks sit at a different table now.

Three weeks ago, our art club suffered a fissure.

The art club seniors would say the fissure was my fault, but it wasn’t.

I should have bought two sandwiches for breakfast. I’m hungry, but the ceiling seems to have collapsed on the empty vending machines.

I skip gym class the next period and stand in the locker room shower stall. I imagine curtains where there should be curtains, but there are no curtains because my new school isn’t a school anymore. There is graffiti on the inside of the shower stall. The absence of violence is not love. I think about it for a minute but I don’t understand.

I close my eyes and listen.

“I hear [popular girl] is getting a nose job.”

“She should.”

“And I hear she’s thinking of getting a boob job while she’s at it.”

“What I wouldn’t give for rich parents.”

“I think I’m going to fail my English test.”

“I can help you study.”

“I’m so bad at tests.”

“Did you hear that Jen broke up with [popular boy]?”

“It means you can go after him now, you know.”

“Shit, we’re late.”

“Can I borrow a pair of socks?”

“Here.”

“Thanks.”

Here is proof that nothing ever really happens. The proof is everywhere. I just have to stand in one place and listen.

“Brrrrring!” I yell into a room full of empty toilet stalls. “Brrring!” My voice echoes down the row of spray-painted half-size lockers with random pried-off doors. In one of the torn-apart lockers is a diorama—a prison cell made of sturdy twigs with a papier-maché sphere inside of it. The sphere is painted red. The twigs are painted silver. On the floor of the diorama are the words WE WERE HERE in black Sharpie marker.

Next period is art. I imagine the art club sophomores walking toward the art room and I join them but nobody says hello or anything.

Halfway down the hall, someone hands Vivian a note. It’s from her wannabe boyfriend. She reads it to us: “I was disappointed to find your name in the boys’ locker room bathroom stall. It was on a list titled GIRLS WHO DO ANAL. I always thought you were better than that.”

I say, “How original.”

Carmen says, “Henry, go scratch that out.”

Henry says, “I don’t go to the locker room. They all call me a fag.”

Vivian asks, “How do you change for gym?”

Henry says, “I skip gym.”

Carmen says, “I’ll go with you. We’ll get a lav pass and do it next period.”

Vivian says, “It’s probably not even there. This guy is such an *.”

“So why do you want to go out with him?” I ask.