Picture Us In The Light(62)

So I do the only thing that feels reasonable, which is: I turn back around and walk out the door.



Walking home I work out what I’ll do, and then I spend the rest of the day trying to draw. It’s Mr. X’s face that keeps emerging from my pen no matter what I try—the hard set of his eyes, his sneer. Finally I give in and draw him talking to me, looking at me like I’m a filthy and disgusting thing. I try to, at least. I work on shading in the area around his eyes, trying to make it look like he’s staring you down. It just makes him look like a raccoon. The conversation goes roughly like this:

Mr. X: What if they’re really trying to hide something? They’re hiding out from Ballard, and you’re fucking it up? Your parents will kill you if they find out.

Me: I’m sure it isn’t like that.

Mr. X: No, you’re not sure. You aren’t sure of anything. You don’t know shit.

Me: Well, I’m sure they’re handling all this in the stupidest way imaginable. I’m definitely pretty sure of that.

Mr. X: What, exactly, do you think they should do? Huh?

Me: I mean: get a loan, or—

Mr. X: That’s what you think? You think they should ruin their own lives and their own plans so you can hang out with your friends at school a few more months? Probably won’t even talk to any of them after you graduate. You want your parents miserable because of you?

Me: The school was terrible.

Mr. X: And?

Me: I can’t go there.

Mr. X: You think you’re such a special snowflake you’re too good to go to anywhere but your one precious school? You think the world owes it to you to pay your way when you can’t do it yourself? News flash: you can’t go there. You’re too poor. You literally cannot afford to go there.

Me: I’ll figure out a way. This is important to me.

Mr. X: The world is not lining up to give you the things that are “important” to you. The world owes you nothing. You want something, you earn it yourself. You don’t freeload off the rest of us.

Me: No one needs me to go to a new school. I don’t owe that to the world.

Mr. X: You owe it to the world to follow the damn rules and stop telling yourself you’re entitled to something you couldn’t pay for.



I don’t know what to tell him. The world owes us nothing, maybe; you could look at it that way. Or you could look at the world like you love it and you expect something from it because of that, because that’s the only reason you can ever expect anything from anyone.

Or something. Maybe that’s not quite what I want to say, but it’s something. The drawing, though—it’s nothing. It’s flat and lacks any kind of heat or energy. It’s technically fine, as in obviously the guy has a nose and a mouth and all his parts, but there’s nothing to it. This is what keeps happening—a total lack of perspective, I guess. It used to work, and it doesn’t anymore.



At 3:23, long enough after the last bell’s rung and he’s had time to talk to the millions of people he always has to talk to every day but not so long that he’s already driving, I call Harry.

“Day one,” he says when he picks up. The sound of his voice feels like home. “It sucked about as much as I thought it would. How about you? How was the new school? Was it trash?”

I don’t think Regina told him anything—he’d sound different, I think, or he’d say something. “Right. Um, about that—on a scale of one to ten, how bad would it be if I just…kept going to MV?”

“Wait, did your parents say yes?”

“Not…exactly.” This is my plan: I’ll tell my parents I signed up for zero period, which starts at 6:15, and every day I’ll take the bus to Cupertino and just keep going to MV. It’s only four more months.

I’ve never taken the bus in my life, so I looked up how it works, and that was the first hurdle: to get to Cupertino by 7:35, which is when first period starts, I have to get on the 5:09 bus (which: eff). They wouldn’t believe I need to be leaving the house at like 4:55 to get to school, and so I landed on this: I’ll say I joined the swim team. I wanted to meet people at the new school and the swim team lets everyone join.

“That’s a stupid idea,” he says immediately. “Probably your stupidest ever.”

I guess I could’ve predicted that it would be too far outside the rules for him, a breach of the system. “Yes, but—”

“Do it anyway.”

“Really? You think I should?”

“I mean—no, technically, I don’t think you should, I think it’s risky and probably really dumb, but—I mean, Danny, come on, you expect me to tell you I’d rather you wait out the year in some crappy school forty minutes away? You want me to say it doesn’t make a difference to me whether or not you’re here? If that’s what you wanted someone to tell you, I’m not the person you should’ve called.”



A little after nine, I hear carpet-muffled footsteps in the outside hall and then a key jostling against the doorknob. My heart forgets itself, going quiet for a beat in my chest. Funny how your whole day can be angled toward waiting for someone to get back, and then when they do, you wish you had more time.

It’s not like you can hide in an apartment like this, though, as much as I’d like to stay holed up in here permanently, so I go out there. I do a final run-through of the lies I’ve been rehearsing all day.