“Aren’t we going to have to turn them in?”
“Oh, maybe. I’ll just draw something else to turn in.”
I put the sheet of paper in the folder with my transcripts. She starts on a new drawing. I put down my charcoal to watch her work.
“What are you drawing?” she asks, not looking up.
“I was trying to draw a bat, but it didn’t come out right.”
I watch the lines on her paper come together and turn into the teacher—rough strokes forming face, posture, attitude.
“That’s amazing,” I say.
“You’re new, aren’t you?” she says.
“Yeah. My name is Steph.”
“I’m Rachel. You should finish up something to turn in; he won’t grade you down as long as you’ve drawn something.”
“I need a picture to work from,” I say.
She slides her phone across the table. I glanced over at the teacher, since I’ve seen some kids at this school get yelled at for having the phone out, but he doesn’t look like he cares. I pull up a picture of a fruit bat. My second attempt is still deeply unsatisfying, but at least it looks basically like a bat. I love my camera; I love the way photography captures every detail. Rachel’s picture, and the details she puts in—the teacher’s slumping shoulders, the way he puts his hand in one pocket—make me think about what drawings do better.
As I’m packing up to go home, I slide out the picture Rachel drew of me. I’m staring down at my paper; my forehead is furrowed, my shoulders hunched in. In just a handful of spare charcoal lines, Rachel made me look tense and worried. It’s unnerving seeing myself through Rachel’s eyes—it’s unnerving how much about me she saw. Looking at the picture makes my palms sweat.
I want her to draw me again. Maybe sometime when I’m less stressed out.
I slide the drawing carefully back into a notebook so it’s protected.
Mom isn’t working when I get home; she’s wrapped up in a quilt in the living room, watching out the window.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
She looks up, not smiling. “How was your day?”
“The school here really sucks.” What I really want is for her to pull up stakes again, move again, before I’ve found anything I like. Because surely the next town will have a better school, or at least one that has Spanish 3 and calculus with an actual teacher. Mom doesn’t say anything, though; she just looks back out the window. I turn on the stove and put on a pan of water. “I’m going to make myself hot chocolate, okay? Do you want some?”
She shakes her head.
I hate it when she gets like this. For one thing, it’s frustrating because it’s so obvious that something’s wrong, but she won’t tell me what. Maybe it’s just the same thing that’s always wrong (i.e., my father). But she won’t ever tell me. A few times I’ve gotten so frustrated I’ve yelled at her, but she doesn’t yell back, just withdraws further, and that feels even worse than the frustration.
At least it looks like she went shopping after dropping me at school, because there’s food in the fridge. When she still hasn’t moved by 5:30 p.m., I pull out eggs and the big bag of grated cheddar cheese and a green bell pepper and make us both omelets. I like omelets better with sautéed onions, but I hate cutting up onions, so I leave those out.
She rouses herself a little when I put food on the table and comes over to eat it.
“How’s work?” I ask, since that’s generally a pretty safe topic.
“No word from Sochie yet,” she says and falls silent again.
Since she’s in a bad mood, anyway, I figure there’s no reason not to ask. “I’ve been thinking about what you said to the waitress, about red flags. Did my father really want to become a global dictator?”
She looks up, chewing. Swallows. “Yes,” she says.
“For real? Was he serious?”
“He wanted control. Starting with us but ending with everything. I thought it was a joke at first. He’d say things like, ‘You know I couldn’t possibly be worse at running things than the people doing it now,’ or he’d say, ‘I’m going to save the world, you know, but it has to be mine first,’ and he’d laugh, so I assumed he was joking, but he wasn’t.”
“How did you realize that wasn’t a joke?”
There’s a long pause as my mother chews, and then drinks some water, and then takes another bite of omelet, and I think maybe she’s going to answer me, but eventually I realize that she’s not going to answer. When we’re done, I wash the dishes while she stares at the wall some more.
When I was younger, Mom went through all sorts of stories about why we moved so much. First, she pretended moving was fun. For a while, she insisted that a fresh start was a good idea if you’d gotten in trouble, and we moved every time I got in trouble. When you’re little, you don’t always know just how abnormal something is.
At some point in middle school, I realized that something was really wrong. And the summer before high school, Mom sat me down to tell me about my father. We were living in Arkansas at the time, in an apartment where the air conditioner had broken, which was pretty horrible. The windows were open, and I was damp with sweat. I remember that my legs were sticking to my chair as Mom laid the laminated clipping down in front of me and told me about my father.
Afterward, I remember thinking that now, finally, my life would make sense. I thought Mom would answer my questions and I would know what was going on. But Mom still doesn’t answer my questions, and my life still doesn’t make sense, and I still don’t know what’s going on.
It feels like there’s a wall between us made of all the things she won’t talk about.
I go to my room
