Before You Knew My Name (16)

‘Okay, weirdo. Whatever.’

Tammy shrugs away my long silence, then waves the strip of paper in my face again.

‘Call him, Alice. Call Mr Jaaaaaaackson. You’re not a student anymore. He’s not your teacher, and besides’—she reaches over and moves a wayward strand of hair away from my eyes, her own eyes glinting—‘he’s hot. So, so hot! And let’s be honest. It’ll be the easiest money you’re ever going to make around here. Hell, I’d do it, too, if I were half as pretty as you. But ain’t nobody needs to see me like that.’

Tammy folds the piece of paper into my hand, closes my fingers around it with her own.

‘Call him. Do it. What have you got to lose?’

She doesn’t wait for me to respond.

‘The way I see it, Alice Lee. The answer to that would be nothing the fuck at all.’



‘You comfortable, Alice?’

‘Uh-huh.’

I’m lying. My legs already ache, and a muscle in my left arm won’t stop twitching. When he first moved my arms, when he asked me to hold still in this position, I wondered how hard it could be to stay like this. Reclined on a small couch in the pose he’d asked for, comfortable in my jean shorts and white singlet, it really did feel like the easiest money I’d ever make. Two hundred dollars to stay still and let a man draw me. Easy. It only took a minute for everything to start aching.

‘This is just the practice round, Alice,’ he’d said as he lifted my arms over my head. ‘Just so I can get a feel for how to capture you best. Every single body is different, and I need to learn about yours. Okay?’

When he leaned in so close, I could smell weed and scotch, and see how his fingers were stained black at the tips. I stared at his short, dirty fingernails, as he bent one knee and gently pushed my legs a little further apart. It made my stomach flip, the nearness of those fingers, and my nerves threatened to reveal themselves in a stupid, girlish giggle. I didn’t want to do anything wrong. And not just because of the stack of twenty-dollar bills he’d put down on the table next to me. I wanted to please him.

Mr Jackson.

We all wanted to please Mr Jackson.

Once, in junior year, he’d come over to my desk, and I could smell that heady combination of weed and scotch, even then. I was holding my breath as he stared at my sketch of a ballerina at the barre, the tension I had tried to capture in her muscles, when, without saying a word, he ran his fingers lightly between my dancer’s charcoal legs. Just for a second, a gesture so quick no one else in class would have noticed. But I felt it. I felt it as if he had run those fingers between my own thighs. As he walked away, I had no idea whether the butterflies swarming in my stomach signalled pleasure—or a desire to run from the room.

In my final semester, he talked to the class about life drawing, how you couldn’t really paint people unless you understood what was happening to their bodies, to skin and bone and curves. He said the best portrait artists always began with the naked form. He wanted to bring in a life model for us to draw but the school board wouldn’t allow it, so we’d just have to take his word for it—or see for ourselves once we graduated.

‘Maybe even try it from the other side,’ Mr Jackson had teased the class, staring straight at me.

‘It’s Jamie, not Mr Jackson,’ he’d chided when he helped me take off my coat this afternoon. ‘I’m not your teacher anymore, hey.’ And I’d automatically said, ‘Sorry, Mr Jackson.’ Which made him laugh, and lightly touch my cheek. He said he was glad I had called.

‘It isn’t easy in this town’—he’d waved his hand about, as if there was no need to finish the sentence.

He understood. I didn’t need him to tell me that it’s never easy around here.

The ad Tammy pressed into my hand said: Life models wanted. $200 cash. Potential for further work. My hands shook when I called his number.

‘Yes, I’m eighteen now. Yes, I’ve done this before. Yes, I’m still painting and, yes, it will be good to see you, too,’ I said on the call.

All lies, except the last part, or maybe that was the biggest lie. Thinking of two hundred dollars in cash, and the distance this could buy me.

Now, I am alone with Mr Jackson for the first time ever, watching him look from me to his sketch pad and back again, his tongue set between his teeth as he draws. He doesn’t look like the other men around here. He is slight, and tanned, and he has stubble instead of the full beard everyone seems to grow these days. He’s not wearing shoes, and his jeans, frayed at his ankles, are taut around his thighs. He used to wear slacks when he was teaching. In jeans he looks lean and coiled, and I realise I’m sketching him, too, working out the curves and lines of his body.

Skin and bone and curve.

‘That’s a serious face you had just now,’ he says, stepping out from behind his easel. ‘Just when I think I have you, Alice, your expression changes.’

‘Oh. Sorry. I guess I’m … concentrating. And, um. My arm kind of hurts.’

I let it drop and sit upright on the couch.

‘It’s harder than I thought.’

A slip. My second lie is revealed so easily, and he catches it immediately. Sees what he must have suspected. I have not done this before.

‘You want something to help you relax? It’s after’—he checks his watch—‘two o’clock.’