Where It Began(9)

We are all in the art room because Huey is briefly interested in making big papier-maché animals out of computer-enhanced photographs. Lisa finally has a buddy who can’t paint either to hang around the easels with. Then they both start standing around watching me paint and throw pots, which is somewhat creepy. I am perfectly fine with Lisa hanging on my every brushstroke. I understand the part about not wanting to disappoint your parents so much it makes perfect sense to watch somebody else drag their paintbrush up and down a canvas for hours at a time. But Huey is taking pictures.

“Jeremy Hewlett,” I say. This is Huey’s actual name. “This is creeping me out. You have to stop it.”

“I’m recording the creative process,” he says.

“Well, go record somebody else’s creative process.”

“Maybe you didn’t notice,” Huey says, “but this is Winston School. Nobody else has a creative process. Except Lolly Wu, and the shutter clicking messes with her concentration.”

Lolly Wu plays the cello. Why she isn’t going to school at Crossroads, where they have an entire orchestra of kids who know how to hold their instruments right side up, is just another mystery of life.

“Yeah, well, when I become an art goddess, you can compare me to Wu.”

But I let him keep taking pictures. Leading Vivian to tell me that I can’t be a complete social leper if I have so many pictures of myself in the yearbook.

“Right,” Huey says. “I’ll just sit here and finish up my swan until you change your mind.”

This is the first time I see Mr. Rosen up close and personal, when he shows up in Miss Cornish’s art room in search of turpentine and a rag at that exact moment. He is like a hundred years old and a real artist, paintings in museums, the whole famous artist thing, who lives down the street from Winston, and somehow they convinced him to show up three times a week to Mentor the Next Generation. It is hard to imagine how a famous guy who deserves all his glory like Mr. Rosen—who, the headmaster keeps telling us, is some kind of official German national treasure—could fall for that, but he did.

When Mr. Rosen spots Huey turning his hundreds of black-and-white photos of women into that papier-maché swan, the camera swinging perilously close to the bowl of liquid paste, he marches up behind him and sucks in his breath.

Huey just sits there frozen, holding a paste-soaked photo, gazing over at Mr. Rosen, with his googly green eyes open wide, as if he is waiting for spiritual enlightenment to come his way in a German accent.

“Did you take these photos?” Mr. Rosen asks, thumbing through the stack.

Huey says, “Yessir.”

“Well, they’re very good.” Mr. Rosen waves at Miss Cornish. “Look, Elspeth, see what nice composition?” he says, blurring his w sounds toward v’s, pointing at the black-and-white grainy picture of a freakishly large woman getting on a bus.

“You should take more photos,” he says to Huey. “Forget this duck.”

“It’s a swan,” Lisa says.

“Werner,” Miss Cornish says, visibly steamed, her skin getting whiter and her freckles standing out. “Jeremy has important things to express about beauty and metamorphosis in three dimensions.”

“Huey,” Huey says. “For Hewlett. Jeremy Hewlett the Third.”

“Cheremy Hewlett!” Mr. Rosen says. “Your mother took the raccoons out from my attic.”

Huey nods as if this were normal. He doesn’t even seem to be embarrassed about his spectacularly embarrassing mother, Bel Air’s bizarro answer to Saint Francis of Assisi, who is constantly coming to pick up Huey in the carpool line with an animal-rescue goat or a couple of ratty chickens and a three-legged pit bull in the backseat of the Bentley.

“You take maybe five hundred shots. Maybe six hundred. Then you bring me ten. Only the best.” Then he marches out with his turpentine and Miss Cornish’s blue rag.

Then he comes back.

I thought it was to give Miss Cornish back her rag, but it isn’t. It’s to look at my bowl that just came out of the kiln. “Beautiful glaze,” he says.

Lame as it is, this is my best day of school ever until Billy.





IX


ANYWAY, ACCORDING TO VIVIAN, IT ISN’T JUST LISA and Anita who are bugging the hell out of her. Huey is phoning every day too, calling the nursing station and demanding to know how I am. He is leaving messages from Huey, Jeremy, and Mr. Hewlett on the off chance that he’ll come up with a name so appealing that somebody will talk to him.

But Vivian is having none of it. She is spending her days hanging over the side of my bed trying to jog my unjoggable memory and then running off to go shopping to cheer herself up. She is buying me vats of goopy makeup that she waves in front of me, as if it’s going to make me happy. (Except that when you open up the jars, they smell like toxic waste.) She is much too busy stirring the unappetizing mess into a lumpy paste to spend a whole lot of time chatting with Huey.

But Wendy takes time out from cajoling me to get up and sit at a table and draw and not fall over to tell me about Huey’s many calls. My head feels roughly like a bowling ball in a vise and sitting up just makes it worse; I do not want to discuss how upset and concerned Huey is.

Except that Wendy thinks he’s my boyfriend.

“You’re one lucky girl,” she says, trying to get me to squeeze these stupid, squishy rubber balls as hard as I can with both hands, only I can’t. “You have very persistent friends and they all seem to care about you a lot. Especially your nice young man. And your boyfriend’s mother wants to know if she can bring a visiting therapy dog to see you!”