Where It Began(66)

Courtney, even though she’s a sophomore in the very firm, very young flesh category, is in my Honors Spanish class and I have to watch her heated up and panting about him with Rose Lyons when she comes racing in from the semi-hidden nook behind the teachers’ lounge.

“He is so hot,” Rose says.

“Awesome,” Courtney says.

Awesome. Great. He’s publicly nibbling lips that say “awesome” constantly.

And I go, Suck it up, Gabriella. Wake up and smell the chocolates. You’re the one.

But it is actually a relief to go into painting with Mr. Rosen, who at least doesn’t want to have a meaningful dialogue about anything, and whose studio windows face the soccer field so there is no risk of a Billy sighting. Even though I never feel like I’ll ever paint anything good enough for Mr. Rosen, at least I’m better than everyone else in there, and he seems to be fine with that.

Mr. Rosen, you have to figure, is just going to keep sitting there in by-permission-only advanced painting, not noticing who I am, having no idea whatsoever about what’s going on with me apart from my portfolio.

Not that we’re actually painting in Mr. Rosen’s eleventh grade painting class. Since last semester, we aren’t. Just before Christmas break, Mr. Rosen told us that we sucked and we had to start drawing again before we were ready to paint because we had no sense of form. Therefore, we’ve spent this whole semester drawing a succession of objects Mr. Rosen throws on the little tables in front of us, and there are no paints in sight.

Every couple of weeks, a delegation of earnest artsy girls goes up to Mr. Rosen’s office where he sits with his eyes closed listening to music and looking as if he has a headache while they explain in detail how they really really feel about not getting to paint. According to Sasha Aronson, who is head of the petition brigade, no matter how respectful and convincing they are, Mr. Rosen never even opens his eyes.

So naturally, the minute I get back from my vehicular crime spree, Mr. Rosen, who you would think you could rely on not to make a big production about anything short of pure genius, makes a big production out of giving me back the paints. Not the acrylic paints, either.

Oils.

You’d like to think that mixing oil paint on a palette and painting my little heart out would just magically take my mind off things and make everything, if not A-okay, maybe semi-okay. And that I would create gorgeous, angsty art.

But I don’t.

I spend a week trying to get the light right on this little table with the remnants of a tea party or something (so not my idea, and the pastry is starting to get moldy and change color) and it just keeps getting grayer and darker until I’ve completely scrubbed any possibility of life off the canvas. I feel like my paintbrush is going to jump out of my hand, slide down the leg of the easel, and hop out the door in protest.

At least it gives me something to do that doesn’t involve scanning the horizon for Billy Nash, both wanting and not wanting to spot him.

Finally, Mr. Rosen comes up behind me and stands there for about five minutes.

“I think you’re finished with this,” he says. He bundles up the junk on the little table in the tablecloth and takes the paintbrush. Then he scuttles over to his desk and takes out a little framed sketch. Real, and from the Renaissance, a woman sitting in a chair, draped in diaphanous cloth, just done in pencil, perfect.

“Copy this,” he says, propping it up.

So great, now that I’m a juvenile delinquent who can’t even paint a moldy croissant with rancid butter, Mr. Rosen is preparing me for life as an art forger. Just great. At least it would give me something lucrative to do, something to do other than being at Winston School, where this little sketch is the only real piece of art worth forging.

“Don’t think,” he says. “Just draw. You’ll feel better. You want music?”

He goes back to his desk and sticks a tape into the world’s most primitive tape deck. “Young people like this, yes?”

And this is how, for the first time in history, everybody in advanced permission-only painting has to listen to odd German techno all period. And how I find out I’m a really good art forger. Which at least gives me something to do other than visualizing Billy pawing other girls.





LIII


“EXPLAIN THIS TO ME AGAIN,” ANITA SAYS, EATING her icy pop at break. “How is it that Courtney Phillips going down on him in the parking lot is supposed to make you feel better?”

“Anita! Just because she’s gnawing on his face—”

“Sorry, Lisa.” And then to me, even though they can see that I’m tearing up over my icy pop, “Are you completely demented? He’s not with other girls to be nice to you and prove he’s not with any one of them, he’s with other girls because he’s an incorrigible player.”

“SAT word?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t one. And it doesn’t prove he’s not with Aliza, either, it just proves he’s a jerk.”

All right, so they despise Billy and there isn’t much I can do about it.

“Why don’t you just tell him how it makes you feel,” Lisa says. (Right, that should work.) “Tell him to stop it.” (Even better.) “He says he’s still your boyfriend so it’s not like you don’t have a hold on him.”