The Art of Losing(21)

“When did you move down here?” I asked. Last time I’d been in his bedroom, it was on the second floor, next to his sister’s.

“A couple years ago,” he said. “I couldn’t stand living next door to the mausoleum that was Allie’s bedroom anymore. It was too quiet, too empty.”

I was beginning to know exactly how that felt.

Looking closer, I could see that someone had installed frames around the art. The frames were just pieces of decorative wood painted to contrast the walls, but it looked nice.

“Did you frame these?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nah, it was my mom. She thought it would make it look less like graffiti.”

It did. It looked deliberate, almost like she approved of the paintings. If I’d done something like this in my room, my mom’s version of support would have been to hold the paint can while I repainted the walls a pristine white.

“She hates this part, though,” he said, pointing to the smaller wall next to the door. “The ‘Wall of Fame.’”

A poster board hung here, smothered in tags written in permanent marker. Not all were Raf’s.

“These are my friends’,” he said pointing out a few. He paused for a second, as if to grieve their loss. “It’s not like we could go out and tag the houses on the block or anything. The best we could do was write our tags on stickers and put them on lampposts and mailboxes all over town. So, instead, we ended up tagging our own walls,” he explained. “Or we used to anyway.”

“I can kind of see why your mom hates it,” I said. It looked like just a big mess of ink. Raf’s tags were pretty good, actually, and so were some of the others. But most were essentially scribbles.

“You wound me,” Raf said, clutching his chest in mock pain.

“What does ‘Cheech’ mean?” I asked, ignoring his histrionics.

“It’s short for Chicharrón.”

“That’s you?”

He nodded. “I’m Latino and Southern. And chicharrón is like the Latin American version of bacon or pork rinds. And I’m just as salty and delicious.”

I raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Virginia’s not really the south.”

His smile slid. “Okay, fine. My friends came up with it. Typical white boys, nicknamed me after the only Latino stoner they knew, Cheech Marin. So I looked up where he got his nickname and started telling people the Chicharrón thing.”

“Oh,” I said. I was glad he wasn’t hanging out with those friends anymore. “We should come up with a new nickname for you to deface your walls with.”

Raf’s smile returned. “Yeah. Maybe.” But he didn’t seem over it.

“Do you do regular art anymore?” I asked to change the subject, then suddenly realized how insulting that sounded. “I mean like sketches, portraits, oil paintings of fruit bowls, whatever . . . I’m not an artist.”

Raf was laughing now, too. He bent down to rifle through one of his desk drawers, pulling out a couple of sketchbooks and handing them to me.

The first one was completely full, cover to cover, with pieces that read “Chicharrón” and “Cheech.” They were colorful, with multiple outlines and 3-D effects. They looked like they should have been spray-painted on a wall.

Interspersed with those were more of his cartoonish drawings of people, all equally as skilled as the ones on his walls, though some were obviously rough sketches.

The second book, however, was full of realistic sketches of people. Sometimes close-ups, of their eyes or their hands. A few featured several people in a scene of some kind. A grandfather holding an ice cream cone for his grandson. A little boy and girl kissing under a willow tree. This was a completely different side to his art. The sentimental side, I guess.

“Wow,” I said. I could feel Raf’s eyes on me, watching my reactions as I flipped the pages. But I didn’t care that he could see how in awe of his talent I was. He deserved the praise. Still, I wasn’t expecting the pain that sliced through me when I turned the page and saw an incredible rendering of his sister, Allie. She was bald from the chemo, with a scarf wrapped around her head and dark circles under her eyes. But she was laughing at something, and her grin was the same as it always had been.

“You make me feel inadequate. I’m not good at anything like this.”

“You don’t have hobbies?” Raf asked. It wasn’t a judgment, just surprise. But it was also a way to brush aside my compliment. Calling his incredible talent a “hobby” was like calling a lion a “kitty cat.”

I gave it some real thought before I answered. I’d never really considered my hobbies. Well, I had, but only when Mom asked me about college applications and what I was going to say about how I’d spent the last three years of high school. Sometimes I wrote poetry for the literary magazine, but I didn’t want to be part of the club. I just wasn’t big on joining activities. I only went to parties when Mike or Cassidy made me and that was a commitment of mere hours.

“No, I guess not,” I said finally. “Except reading comics. But my mom doesn’t think that’s going to help me get into college.”

“Comics?” he said, quirking an eyebrow. “I remember now that your dad used to bring us Archie and Tiny Titans and things like that.”