Showing the Depths of One’s Soul
Showing the Depths of One’s Soul
“HOW’S IT look, Ms. Barerra?” Reg asked hopefully. His old art teacher, still a sultry stunner although now in her late forties, surveyed the displays of student—and teacher—art on the cork boards and makeshift shelves throughout the battered high school cafeteria and gave him a radiant smile.
“Oh, Reg—it looks amazing. You really do have an eye for arranging everything.” Her eyebrow rose. “But I noticed you tried to hide your own pieces by the bathroom. What was our agreement?”
Reg felt his cheeks heat. “The whole reason we have the teacher display is for you and me to show we teach because we can do,” he recited, and she gave him a grave nod.
“Now I have an entire shelf devoted to my sculptures, front and center, and you need to get your display board out here and not back by the men’s bathroom.
” She ruffled his hair with a manicured hand tipped with scarlet polish.
“Come on, mijo—what’s the worst that can happen?
A parent will look and say, ‘He volunteers his time? Why isn’t he making a living from this? ’”
Reg rolled his eyes. “You know,” he said, trying not to whine, “it’s like having people gaze at your soul or something. It’s hard.”
“I know, my love,” she said, and her eyes held nothing but kindness.
“But your soul is so pure. I know we live in a harsh world, and sometimes it’s hard to see a silver lining for ourselves, for our students.
Remember, artists and true art give us hope that even if our souls are chaotic, there’s still beauty or kindness or strength or nobility there.
Even if there’s the sad things—the loneliness, the greed, the pain—art lets us see the human in the sad. ”
Reg nodded, letting out his nervousness in a sigh.
“Fair,” he mumbled. “I’ll go get that corkboard.”
“Put it right next to my shelf,” she said. “There’s more than enough room.”
When he returned a few moments later, she was dusting one of her abstract ceramic sculptures, but she stopped to help him position the board exactly so.
They were trying to get the exhibits set up before school got out and the art club kids showed up to decorate and set up the refreshment table and the collection for donations.
The principal—who had begrudgingly allowed them the exhibition between after-school sports events—hadn’t allowed them to charge admission to help pay for art club supplies, but they had managed to make it a fundraiser by selling refreshments and asking for donations.
But Reg and Adelle Barerra’s art was for sale, and Adelle was hoping that would bring in enough for the art club supplies and facility use for the next year.
“So,” Adelle asked as she and Reg made one last tweak to the boards, “is your friend coming?”
Reg ignored the heating of his cheeks and nodded happily. “Yeah—he’s on his way. He actually volunteered to stop by my parents’ house to help with my brother’s snake.”
“Muffin?” Adelle raised her eyebrows again.
Reg grimaced. “She’s a really nice snake,” he said in Chance’s defense. “And his friend had to get rid of her because his mother kept walking into his room and freaking out. But she’s super smart. She figured out how to get out of her habitat, and she’s rooming with Marcus. Did I tell you that?”
“No,” Adelle said, picking up her dustcloth and nodding for him to continue. “By all means….”
“Okay, so Marcus is still recovering from the plane crash in the desert,” he began, and she nodded.
Everybody knew about the plane crash in the desert.
Except the FBI, who knew that there had been a plane crash in the desert, and that two of their operatives and an asset had been injured, but were not aware that they’d been injured trying to ensure Dean’s boyfriend’s safety after he witnessed a murder.
Dean may have been a G-man, but he knew better than most that sometimes, what your government didn’t know couldn’t get you killed.
“Is he doing okay?” she asked, and Reg sighed.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he said, “especially Dean, but I think he’s depressed.
It’s one of the reasons Chance thought he’d be happy to take care of Muffin.
You know, because snakes are cool.” That had been so hard.
Marcus was, well, beautiful, Latino, and pretty much a sculpted god made of confidence and charm.
But the plane crash had shattered his left leg, and Marcus hadn’t wanted his family to see him like that.
Taking up residence in Reg’s parents’ basement might have seemed a little drastic, but over the years it had become a haven for the friends of the Royal children who hadn’t been able—for one reason or another—to go home and feel safe.
Renovating the space to accommodate a man in need of physical and occupational rehabilitation had been no more than “a neat project” for Reg’s father and Connor Dodge, their new tenant.
Marcus had access to the first floor, the backyard, the swimming pool, even a little concrete track Connor had laid for Marcus’s electric cart so he could get some air and some exercise holding himself upright, even with his leg propped up.
It wasn’t the venue, Reg had thought often in the past month, but the circumstance. Marcus was used to being, well, like Dean. An action hero. Somebody who dove in and out of danger and recovered in mid-stride.
But a plane crash was a big deal, and even Dean wasn’t back to work yet. Marcus was chafing bitterly at being a burden on his friend’s parents, even though the Royal family didn’t find him a burden at all.
“Sure,” Adelle said in response to the “snakes are cool” remark, although her tone indicated that wasn’t the word she’d use. He ignored the tone—snakes were cool.
“So Marcus was taking care of her, making sure she ate her little frozen rat pop―”
“You feed her frozen rats?” They had given up any pretense of working by now and were leaning back on the table that was soon to be decorated for the bake sale.
“Well, we thaw them out and then put them, still wrapped in plastic, in a coffee cup full of hot water—sort of like a sous-vide machine, right?”
“Which, God willing, I will never have cause to use after this.”
Reg gave her a look that said “Be nice!” that he’d learned from his older sister and was rewarded by hearing his old art teacher laugh.
“I’ll hold my peace now,” she promised. “But go on. You feed her rat pops, and she seems very content.”
“And we keep her warm and spray her off in her enclosure—and it’s pretty big.
It’s a six-foot by three-foot tank. I mean, that’s a lot of room for a three-foot snake.
Anyway, so it’s working. Marcus really is cheered up by the snake, and then—well, we all saw her testing the habitat for weaknesses, and two days ago, Marcus was concerned because she was able to lift one of the sliding panes up with her head.
We figure she unlocked the slider by doing that and then, you know, pushed it open and escaped.
So now the entire family… I guess they held a meeting, and I’m not sure who told them, because Marcus, Anthony, and I were trying to keep it a secret, and the only consensus we could arrive at was to find the snake before Mom found out she was missing. ”
“And again,” Adelle said, “this is more than fair.”
“Yeah,” Reg said and sighed. “But that meant that I had to leave my apartment early to find her. There’s sort of a hiding place that only I know about—and sure enough, she was there.
But Marcus and I had to figure out how to fix the enclosure so she didn’t slip the lock again. And then….” He sighed.
“What?”
“Well, we’re pretty sure she ate while she was out, and my folks would never use rodent poison.
They have, like, six cats, and if those little ass—erm, reprobates—aren’t doing their jobs, my mom keeps threatening to fire them.
” She was also the one who called them assholes.
Reg’s mother did not mince words. “But we have to—well, Marcus is sort of stuck, watching to make sure that whatever she ate, uhm, moves down. You know. Past her throat, where she might hork it up, and into her digestive tract, where hopefully it will be, you know, dissolved. We’re pretty sure it’s a mouse or a small rat, or even a bird, but what if it’s a rock or something?
She could die, and then, well, Marcus would really be depressed. ”
“That would be bad,” Adelle agreed, although her mouth was still compressed with humor.
“So, Anthony agreed to stay for an hour while I came to set up, to make sure, you know, Muffin didn’t, well, choke and die on a rock instead of digesting a rat.”
Adelle was obviously struggling with laughter.
“It’s not funny!” he argued, and she gave up the struggle.
“No, it’s not,” she said, “but oh my God, Reg, it so is!” And then she lapsed into another peal of laughter, one that kept going even as the final bell rang and the art club kids began to flood the cafeteria to finish up the preparations.
AN HOUR later, Reg was busy taping a butcher-paper banner over the bake-sale table, with clever cartoons of cookies on it and the words Back Sale emblazoned on the front when Anthony McCauley’s unfairly rumbly voice interrupted his wincing over the spelling gaffe.
“Whose back are you selling? Is it just the spine or the entire backside? I’m curious here—solve the mystery for me.”
Reg turned toward him with a smile, and then winced again when he turned back to the sign.
“Reynaldo…,” he said unhappily, and Adelle’s nephew, who had transferred to this high school from somewhere down south, sighed.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Royal,” he said.
“It’s an easy mistake to make,” he said. “And I hate to lose the decorations. Maybe we can just… you know….”
“Patch it?” Reynaldo suggested, and oh boy, did that sound better than redoing the entire thing a half hour before they started.
“Yeah, that,” Reg said with relief. “The art room is still open. Go make a patch and we’ll tape it up over the word. But hurry—no time to make it pretty.”