Three #2
Cella liked the intelligent ones, soft around the edges of their voices, artistic, more anxious than her. She didn’t like jocks. She didn’t like boys who took forty-five minutes to paint eight wobbly circles.
Instead of agreeing, Cella subconsciously wiped her thumb along the edges of her mouth, cleaning up lip gloss that was only smudged in her head. Her nervous flirty tick.
I coughed so hard the car swerved. Cella shrieked and reached over to steady the wheel.
“I didn’t even say anything!” she cried.
“You like him. Your mouth said it all.”
“My mouth said no such thing.”
“So I’m wrong?” She said nothing. “You should’ve let me crash.”
“You’re overreacting again.”
“I’m underreacting.”
“Relax. ‘Guys like that’ aren’t into me anyway.”
***
First thing the next morning, Mason asked Cella on a date.
He entered art class at a jog as if that was normal, stood over Cella’s chair with his hands on his hips like a gym teacher, and announced loud enough for the whole class to hear that he’d played so well in the scrimmage that the football coach wanted him on the team.
At the same unabashed volume, he asked Cella if she’d split a sundae with him on Saturday to celebrate (“With dinner, too,” he added).
Cella’s response was embarrassed, spoken under her breath without eye contact. But it was a yes, and she was smiling.
***
I thought I handled it pretty well. I didn’t flip the table.
When Mrs. Gallagher came around to check on everyone’s progress, my painting brought her to a full stop.
My Nootka rose looked like it had been left out in the rain: discolored splotches where I had pressed too hard and the watercolors had bled, textured bumps where I’d overbrushed, muddy streaks where I’d been too impatient to let layers dry.
One corner of the sheet had somehow torn clean off.
Mrs. Graham tilted her head to study the painting.
She kept tilting to nearly ninety degrees.
Ultimately, she complimented my “bold creative choices.”
It was still better than Mason’s (now twelve) circles and Cella’s mermaid, which had ended up on Cella’s hands more than her watercolor paper.
I had never once seen her leave this class without paint or ink or charcoal all over her hands.
She held them up, two five-finger canvases covered in abstract art, and whined about her hair in her face.
Mason was behind her quick as a genie, helping her fix her headband, pulling his hands through her short blond hair unnecessarily.
The thin brush I was holding snapped in half.
I raised the hand that wasn’t holding the jagged halves and asked to use the bathroom. I stood, pushed in my chair, slung my bag over my shoulder. Then I walked out of the classroom, past the bathroom, all the way out of the building.
Sneaking past the security guard was easy, not because of any supernatural stealth but because he was asleep.
I drove out of the lot toward nothing, going no place.
I drove past the mosque, and the post office, and the trio of statues of Native American chieftains near the courthouse.
I drove as far as the detention center before circling back the way I’d come, taking the long way around.
I saw a small farmers market and passed through, sniffing fruit I couldn’t eat.
I drove past the cemetery and felt the familiar conflict, the pull of the dead against the push of the holy fixtures used to protect them.
I turned back, passed my school, and found myself in the Arts District, where I walked through a record store and a used bookstore that also, strangely, had cats up for adoption.
I drove past the community greenhouse. I stopped at a park.
It was beautiful this time of year: orange and red leaves fluttering like angry cherry blossoms. The Oregon rainy season was setting in, the sky overcast more days than not, but I put on shades and a baseball cap anyway.
After a while walking the trail, naming every plant I could to an invisible listener, the backs of my hands tingled from the sun.
As a finale, I parked outside the DMV, which stood atop a steep incline.
At the bottom was the mall’s parking lot.
I sat there in my car, watching people run around below like a disorganized ant colony.
When seventh period was over, I returned to the school and waited at the front of the lot. All of that movement, just to end up where I’d started.
Cella walked out with Mason but waved him away when she saw my car.
“So . . .” She sat in the passenger seat slowly, like it might grow teeth and bite her.
“I already told you,” I said. She had texted me a paragraph of question marks maybe thirty seconds after I walked out of class. I responded the same way now: “I’m great.”
She very clearly didn’t believe me. But she knew when to pry and when to leave it be.
“We’re going to work on the project,” she told me.
“Great,” I said. “I feel great about that. I’m so excited. This is going to be great.”
***
“If the play’s set in a high school,” Mason began, which was how he’d begun the last several times he’d spoken, with increasing volume each time, “it’ll be relatable to our peers and easy to pull off with the materials we have.”
“It will also,” I said, “be bad.”
“Worse than a gang war?” Mason retorted.
Between us, Cella sat cross-legged, bent over her notebook.
Diane was watching Tarzan at max volume in the living room, apparently for the fourth time since yesterday, so gorilla noises were the backing track of this particular argument.
“The Shakespeare-x-organized-crime shtick is old news—West Side Story ring a bell?”
“Do you hear yourself right now? Did you hear the sentence that just came out of your mouth? We aren’t trying to win a Tony.”
“But somehow my prep-school idea is too lowbrow?”
“Your idea is a Riverdale remake.”
“No way you just said that,” Mason seethed. In the distance, Phil Collins sang about the son of man.
“There are no real stakes. Any darkness will feel contrived.”
“Maybe you don’t get this because you think you’re too good to care about anything, but the student government race is important to people. Especially in an elite private school—it’s cutthroat. It’s life or death.”
“Gang violence is inherently tragic and socially relevant. The play will practically write itself! Clearly we’ll need the help, since you won’t be having any bright ideas.”
Mason surged to his feet, startling Cella, who looked up from the notebook and then at me.