I almost asked Lily if she’d noticed the hostility lurking in every line of his body, then got paranoid I’d sound paranoid. I shrugged, so Lily dropped the subject and opened the door.
I breathed in the familiar smell of the art room. It helped calm me: Conté crayons, wet clay, spilled acrylics.
I had met Lily here last year, in Art I. For months, I had watched her out of the corner of my eye, curious that someone so quiet would dress in such a riot of color. Lily was a kaleidoscope that shifted every day into a new pinwheel pattern. She wore striped tights, red Chinese flats, blue nail polish. Her hair might be green. The next time I saw her, pink. She kept to herself, tucked into a corner of the classroom, her materials spread around her table like a protective wall.
We were working on our self-portrait projects when everything changed.
Mr. Linden had said we could choose our own medium. I peeked at Lily and wasn’t surprised to see her with a set of watercolors. Me, I kept scrapping whatever I tried. I had crumpled yet another sheet of paper into a ball when I heard the sound of a fallen glass and something spilling. I glanced over and saw water flooding onto Lily’s self-portrait. She kept her head down, shoulders stiff. A purple mascara tear ran down her cheek. Then she lifted her face and looked at me.
I smiled. It was a small smile of sympathy, and anything but spontaneous. It took several seconds for me to do it, which may not sound like a long time, but in my head I spent an eternity screwing up the courage to make my mouth muscles work.
Lily stood, crossed the room to my table, and said, “Etchboard.”
I blinked. It took me a moment to realize she was offering advice—good advice. Before she had returned to her seat, I had snatched some etchboard and India ink from the supply closet. I started to work again on my self-portrait, and by the end of the period I had something that didn’t look like a total waste of energy. And I had my first friend at Lakebrook High.
Now Lily and I shared a table in Art II. We sat quickly. I was eager for class to begin. I was eager for anything to distract me.
Mr. Linden liked to perch on a stool by a podium. He began speaking softly, and everyone settled into silence. “You will have one project in Art II.” He stood and walked to the blackboard, a piece of chalk gripped in his stubby fingers. “Here it is.”
He wrote: Do Whatever You Want.
God, I loved Art.
So I should have gotten busy right away, spinning ideas about my Whatever I Wanted. Instead, the image of that boy’s face slipped into my mind. He acted like he knew you, Lily had said.
Was that possible?
There was so much I didn’t know about my own past, so much I didn’t remember. And then there were the many towns I had blown through like a scraggly leaf. Maybe I had met him, somewhere, sometime.
I felt jittery again. Fizzy, crackly. I glanced down and saw a stylus clenched in my hand.
It had never occurred to me before that a stylus could be used as a weapon. But it could. Easily. It was long and thin—more or less a pen-sized needle with a wicked point.
This was the tool I had used last year for my self-portrait. Etchboard is heavy white, glossy paper. I had painted over the entire surface of one sheet with India ink. The wet ink gleamed—black as my eyes, black as my long hair. When it had dried, I scraped at it with my stylus, revealing the white paper below. Listening to the scritch-scritch of the tool, I watched the features of my face emerge. A ghost, rising out of the night.
Etchboard art works not by adding color but by taking it away. Lily, even though she didn’t know me then, had chosen well.
I was abandoned outside a Chicago firehouse when I was five years old. I had no memory of whatever my life was like before that morning—only of the rosy dawn, the frigid cold, the weary face of the firefighter who found me, and how the social worker in charge of my case handed me a styrofoam cup of hot chocolate. I didn’t even know my own name. “Darcy Jones” is what the social worker chose to scribble on my file. I guess “Jones” is proof of her total lack of imagination. As for “Darcy,” well, she named me after her black cat.
Silly. I made myself drop the stylus to the table. You’re acting crazy, I told myself. Loony, loopy, mad as a hatter. So a boy had stared at me. It didn’t happen often, but it wasn’t earth-shattering either. It was stupid to feel vulnerable. And if I had met him before and had forgotten, no big deal.
Still, how can you trust your memory when it has so many holes?
How can you interpret the behavior of others when you’re a mystery to yourself?
3
As the morning went by, I didn’t see him again. I began to breathe more easily, and my eyes stopped darting up and down the halls.
Bio was fine, though Lily and I gagged when we found out we’d have to dissect a fetal pig. Pre-Calc was worse, much worse, but Raphael and I weren’t too worried because we had Jims’s notes from last year.
I was feeling iffy about lunch. As Raphael and I pounced on one of the small round tables, I couldn’t help doing a visual sweep of the cafeteria. He wasn’t there. I let out a slow breath and unpacked my crinkly brown lunch bag.
Jims and Lily joined us, Lily looking slightly traumatized from her PE class last period. The four of us slipped into the usual dance of our conversation as if three months hadn’t gone by. Lily and Jims had spent the summer at a Young Scientists camp in Wisconsin. Never mind that they liked science about as much as I’d like to lick the inside of a used petri dish. Mr. and Mrs. Lascewski (Jims’s parents) and Mr. and Mrs. Chen (Lily’s) worked at a Department of Energy lab, and were practically clones. They lived next door to each other. They carpooled. And they ignored what their children wanted with pretty much the same level of intensity.
As for Raphael and me, we’d been working fifty-hour weeks—him at his parents’ gas station, me at the Jumping Bean Café. He sometimes came by for a black Americano, and twice we took the train to Chicago for the day. We had fun, but it wasn’t like when we were all together. It wasn’t the same.
“New Boy’s a senior,” Jims announced, jerking my attention right back to where it had been for most of the day.
“I didn’t ask you to do recon on him,” I said.
“You didn’t have to.” Jims waved a lazy hand. “I know you’re curious. I’d be, too, if he’d locked eyes with me in front of the entire student body. He’s a quiet kid. Dull as dishwater, if you ask me.” Catching Lily’s disbelieving look, Jims rolled his eyes. “Oh, all right. Pretty dishwater.”