Chapter Twenty-Five
F rom city hall, Stacey drove straight to the high school. Her mom was still at work, and after being interrogated for the previous two hours, she didn’t want to be alone. When Ms. Moreno arrived Monday evening, Stacey was seated in the shade against the stucco wall outside her classroom, waiting.
“Hi Stacey,” Ms. Moreno said, smiling. She approached the door and fumbled with her keys in the lock.
Stacey pulled herself to standing, but couldn’t muster a smile.
“Is everything okay?” Ms. Moreno asked.
Stacey shook her head. “Can we go inside?”
“Of course.” Ms. Moreno pushed the door open, ushering Stacey into the classroom. The room was warm and stuffy.
“Let me just turn on the fans.” Ms. Moreno pulled a fan into the doorway and turned the dial to high.
Dust particles drifted in the beams of sunlight stretching from the top windows across the linoleum floor. Stacey sat on a stool at the butcher block table in the center of the room, while Ms. Moreno turned on the other fans around the art lab. After setting her purse on her desk, she grabbed two cans of soda from her mini fridge and placed them on the butcher block.
“Want a Pepsi? Or a Mr. Pibb?” Ms. Moreno asked as she sat down across from Stacey.
Stacey ran her fingernail inside a deep groove in the tabletop. “I don’t know what to do,” she said softly.
“Whatever is going on, we can figure it out,” the art teacher said.
“I just spent two hours talking about it.”
Ms. Moreno leaned forward. “If you don’t want to talk to me about it, why are you here? Do you want to paint?”
“No. I don’t know. I just can’t sit at home worrying. I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes, all I see is…” Stacey shook her head and looked at the blank wall over her shoulder, and whispered, “...blood.”
“What?” Ms. Moreno gasped. “Please, Stacey, look at me. Anything you say can be just between us.”
Tears spilled over the swollen pink rims of Stacey’s eyes. She sniffed, still avoiding her teacher’s gaze. “Everyone already knows.”
“Okay. That’s okay.” Ms. Moreno got up and pulled her stool beside Stacey’s. She laid her arm on the table and gently touched Stacey’s elbow. “Then there’s really nothing to worry about. Talk to me.”
Stacey’s breath quivered as she tried to get the words out. “Jessie broke his neck. He’s in the hospital. A man died in the pool.”
Ms. Moreno’s hand drifted to her mouth. “Oh no,” she whispered.
Stacey’s eyes finally met Ms. Moreno’s. Her words began flying out frantically. “I’m a terrible person. Jessie and I had sex. Then I spread rumors about him at a party after I saw him with another girl. Now his life is ruined. And it’s my fault.” She covered her face with her hands, sobbing into them.
“What do you mean it’s your fault? How did he get hurt?”
“He wasn’t supposed to be lifeguarding!” Stacey’s lip trembled. “It was my shift. But…I was taking a pregnancy test in the bathroom, and he covered for me. We both needed to know if I was. I think he was distracted. Then the man was drowning, and Jessie dove in to save him, but it was where the water was too shallow!”
Ms. Moreno stood and put her arms around Stacey. “That is SO much to deal with.”
“That’s not all!” Stacey lifted her head up, desperate to pour the whole truth out. “I’m a horrible person. I got totally trashed at a party and made out with a guy I barely know. He almost…I…” Stacey’s voice was panicked. “…I was unconscious, and my friend Gabe had to punch him to get him off of me, and…”
“Shhhh…” Ms. Moreno sat on her stool and took Stacey’s hands between her own. “Let’s breathe. It’s okay. You’re safe.”
Stacey’s eyes skipped back and forth between Ms. Moreno’s. “It’s not okay! Nothing is okay! Not anymore!!!”
“You can tell me everything. From the beginning. But, first, let’s try to calm down.” Ms. Moreno took a long, slow breath in through her nose, and let it out audibly through her mouth.
Stacey shook her head and swallowed hard. She felt sick and sad and angry all at once. Like if she stopped trying to hold herself together she really would fragment into a million pieces.
“You can do this, Stacey. Just breathe in for three, hold it, then out for three. I promise, it will help.”
Stacey's lips curled over her front teeth as she slowly pulled air in through her nostrils and held it. Her mouth fell open as she gasped the air out.
“Good. Let’s do that again a few more times. Slowly.” Ms. Moreno continued demonstrating with her own breaths as Stacey followed her direction.
Stacey slowly relaxed with each breath.
“Okay,” Ms. Moreno said. “Now, I’m sure there are so many things running through your mind. And, like I said, I’m here and will listen to everything. But I have an idea that I think will help you stay calm while you talk. It’s something I learned to do when I’m stressed that helps me process everything. Wanna try?”
Stacey felt her eyebrows squeeze together, confused. Art? Now? “What is it?”
“It’s mostly a way to get a mess of thoughts out of my head. Sometimes they’re ideas or things I’m confused about, but a lot of the time it’s things that are bothering me. Things that upset me so much, I have a hard time letting them go.”
“So, this project—whatever it is—helps you let it go?” Stacey wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.
“Yeah, actually. It’s worth a shot, right?”
Stacey shrugged. “I guess.”
“K. Sit tight.” Ms. Moreno said, patting Stacey quickly on the knee.
She pulled several sheets of watercolor paper from a drawer, and a sheet of brown cardstock. She pulled open the art supply closet and rummaged around for a long piece of twine.
At her desk, Ms. Moreno folded the stack of paper in half, cardstock on top, then opened it again. She used an extra-long stapler to bind the pages together along the fold in three places, securing the twine under the center staple atop the cardstock cover. She grabbed a similar-looking booklet from her purse and brought both over to the table, setting them in front of Stacey.
Stacey sat, chewing on her fingers.
“I’ve never shared my journal with anyone,” Ms. Moreno said, holding up the worn booklet, covered in sketches and stickers. “But it will give you an idea of what I’m trying to explain.” She started slowly flipping through the pages.
Stacey looked at the jumble of images and words. One page had words in blue written like a sky background behind cotton-candy pink watercolor clouds. Another page had a sketch of a silhouetted couple in a warm glow at the end of a dark forest.
Ms. Moreno stopped at a page covered in dark, charcoal etchings, the face of a screaming child in the center, tearing at her hair. The words “afraid,” “alone,” and “abandoned” burned through the hellish scene in varying shades of crimson and orange.
She spoke softly. “My first few journals looked a lot like this page. If I awoke in the night, or got in a fight at school, I’d put whatever was frightening me on the page.” She closed the journal and tied the twine around it. “Then, once it was locked in here for a while, I could usually go back to sleep, or move on with my day. I was so angry, and my journal helped me stop wanting to hurt someone. Or myself.”
“I don’t know… I’m really worried about Jessie. How is some journal going to help?”
“You can’t do anything to help Jessie right now, Stacey. Only his doctors can. But you said you’re not sleeping well and are worried all the time. This will help with that, so hopefully you can be a better friend to him when you do get to see Jessie.”
“How many of these journals have you made?” Stacey asked, untying the bundle and flipping through more of the pages.
“Dozens. At first, I’d fill a journal like this in a few days. At the time, I really had no one else to tell all the horrible thoughts in my head. Sometimes I hated what I’d put inside these pages so much, and didn’t want anyone to ever see it, so I’d burn it in the fireplace. That was its own kind of catharsis.”
Stacey set Ms. Moreno’s journal down and picked up the blank booklet. “I don’t know what I could possibly put in here that would get all of the horrible things that have happened out of my head.”
“You don’t have to be able to get them all out at the same time. What if you started with one thing on one page? Just one simple image? Something easy. Maybe something you think of when you consider how all of this difficult stuff started in the first place.”
“What if I don’t know how to draw it? Or it’s really dumb?”
Ms. Moreno set a pencil in front of Stacey. “Who’s ever going to see it? Put it on the page so it stops weighing you down. Worst case: burn it after. Remember, it’s just a piece of paper.” Ms. Moreno lifted her eyebrows knowingly.
Stacey snorted at the cheesy line Ms. Moreno tossed off so often. The art teacher collected paints and watercolor pencils, brushes, a mason jar of water, and a cup full of fine tip markers. By the time the supplies were on the table, Stacey had sketched on her first blank page, and was reaching for a palette, brush, and red and blue paints.
Ms. Moreno sat on her stool beside Stacey and opened her own journal to the next blank page. She grabbed a couple of markers and began writing in the center of the page, her words spiraling outward as she rotated the journal, writing in a circular design. Then she picked up a brush and started filling in the space around the words with ribbons of black, purple, and navy paint.
When Stacey set down her paint brush, Ms. Moreno did as well, and turned to her. “How did that feel?”
“Fine, I guess.” Stacey shrugged. “It wasn’t anything serious. Just…where everything started. Like you said.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?” Ms. Moreno asked.
“It’s really dumb.”
“You don’t have to share it at all. But I meant it when I said that anything you tell me can be just between us.” She showed her page to Stacey. “Would you feel more comfortable if I shared what I put down on my page? It’s nothing earth shattering, either. Most of my entries are repetitive. Reminders to myself.”
Stacey shrugged and nodded. “Maybe.”
“I wrote: Whenever my thoughts pull me down, and I feel myself sinking into a pit of my worst fears, the best way to escape is by pulling myself free through art.”
Around the edge of the pit of words she’d drawn a grassy field with flowers arranged to spell “Art Escape.”
Stacey nodded, then pulled her own journal between them. “You said I should put down something simple. How everything started. This is all I could think of.” She pointed to a simple drawing of a cardinal red one-piece swimsuit in the bottom left corner. “I had to buy a red suit when I got the job as a lifeguard. And this,” Stacey pointed to several paragraphs of blue text written in the shape of an inverted blocky letter L, “is the community pool. I just wrote about how it felt when I got the job, and how nervous I was to wear a swimsuit in front of the crew. Especially Jessie.” She pointed to a small sketch in the bottom right corner. “This is supposed to be the ThighMaster, next to my broken lava lamp from when I was trying to lose weight quickly.”
“I like all the details.” Ms. Moreno looked Stacey in the eyes again. “How do you feel?”
Stacey chewed the inside of her cheek. “A little better, I guess. I actually found the words flowing through my head as I drew, so it was easier to put them on the page after they drifted around in there for a while.”
“That’s interesting. Maybe something will pour out of your words that surprises you. Do you want to try to do another page?”
Stacey nodded, and picked up the pencil.
For the next three hours, Stacey poured her thoughts across page after page. One page she covered in music notes. She added a stage with her own face in the corner, painted like a melting clown. Another had the sun setting over the parking lot at the movies with Jessie’s gum-wrapper airplane in the gutter. She drew the Silver Bullet in an empty field under a starless sky on one page, and her giant dream catcher beside a pair of scissors on the page opposite. She sketched a tiny golf pencil beside an empty liquor bottle. She painted the Grand Canyon, with Gabe’s silhouette on one side and hers on the other. She drew a swirling blue hot tub with a bottle of pills, a pair of ice skates, a gold medal and the words “Future” “Hopes” and “Dreams” spiraling down the drain.
On the last page, Stacey painted the background watery blue with a large red splotch in the center. With a white pen, she wrote a poem over the bloody image. Stacey was surprised how calm she felt as she read her words aloud to Ms. Moreno:
“I sat in class and dreamed of him,
The skater with a wicked smile.
I’d picked up the phone a dozen times
Too afraid to dial.
Then out of the blue he said,
‘We should watch the stars.’
I didn’t know what he really wanted.
I let it go too far.
I got too high, we dove too deep,
Burned by the summer sun.
No words could make things right.
No place far enough to drive.
Next thing I know, he’s on a stretcher
Lucky to be alive.
How did it get so fucked up?
When did things go so bad?
How did my summer fantasy
Become the worst nightmare I ever had?
I got too high, we dove too deep,
Burned by the summer sun.”
“Wow, Stacey.” Ms. Moreno had a look of compassion and understanding etched across her face. “I’m so honored you shared all of that with me. This journal is an intense and beautiful expression of your pain. You’ve experienced a lot this summer.”
Stacey nodded. “Doing this unlocked something inside me. Stuff I didn’t know what to do with before.”
“Yeah, and by the end it all came together into that powerful poem. They way it describes a moment when you get what you want and it’s nothing like you thought. Everyone goes through that. I bet you could turn those lines into lyrics for a song.”
Stacey shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Now I know you’re full of it.”
“Totally serious,” Ms. Moreno said. She put her hand on the page as if protecting it. “You really have something special here. Sleep on it, but if you ever decide to share it with anyone else, I’m certain they will tell you the same thing. You are so talented, Stacey. It shows whenever you take the feelings you keep locked inside and pour them all out onto a page.”
Stacey felt her cheeks warm. She looked down.
Ms. Moreno went on. “It’s also clear from everything you’ve shared that—while Jessie’s accident is tragic—what happened at the pool on Saturday was not your fault. Under the circumstances, it could have happened to anyone.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Stacey said, suppressing a yawn. She closed the journal and tied the twine. “Hopefully now I can sleep, at least.” Stacey picked up her journal and her keys, her shoulders feeling lighter as she stood. She pushed in her stool and started toward the door.
“Just a sec, Stace.” Ms. Moreno caught up to her in the doorway. The breeze of the fan blew over the pair of them as she handed Stacey another journal. “I put a new one together for you while you were working. Just in case something comes up, good or bad, and you want a place to put it down.”
“Thank you so much, Ms. Moreno.” Before she knew what she was doing, Stacey had wrapped her arms around her art teacher, hugging her tightly. “For everything.”