She pushed away from her desk in her rolling chair. “He’s on a conference c—” she began, but she couldn’t finish because Dad’s door flung open at just that moment.
“Hey, sweetheart, could you pull the Santosh file… ?” he was saying, nose down in a pile of paperwork, reading. He walked around the back of Britni/Brenna’s chair. She sat motionless, except for the color that crept up her face. Dad’s hand landed familiarly on her shoulder as he walked by, giving it a soft squeeze, a gesture I hadn’t seen him give to my mother in… forever. Britni/Brenna ducked her head and closed her eyes. “What’s wrong, baby? You seem tense—” Dad started, finally looking up, but he stopped when his eyes landed on me.
His hand jumped from Britni/Brenna’s shoulder and back up to the paperwork he was holding. The gesture was subtle, unassuming, almost so much so that I wondered if I’d seen what I thought I’d seen after all. I might have thought I was imagining things had my eyes not totally accidentally rested on Britni’s/Brenna’s face, which looked almost wet with a furious blush. Her eyes were trained only on the desk in front of her. She looked mortified.
“Valerie,” Dad said. “What are you doing here?”
I tore my gaze away from Britni/Brenna. “I need a ride,” I said. At least I think I said it. I’m not entirely sure because my lips were so numb. Britni/Brenna mumbled something and darted out of her chair toward the restroom. I could have guessed that she wouldn’t come out again until after I’d left. “Mom um… Mom had a meeting.”
“Oh,” Dad said. Was I seeing things or was his face looking flushed too? “Oh, yeah. Sure. Okay. Give me a minute.”
He stepped briskly back into his office and I could hear things shuffling around in there, drawers being shut, keys rattling. I stood rooted to my spot, beginning to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing.
“Ready?” Dad asked. “I’ve got to get back, so let’s move.” All business. All Dad. I expected nothing less.
He opened the door, but I couldn’t move.
“Is that why you and Mom hate each other?” I asked.
He looked like he considered pretending he didn’t know what I was talking about. He cocked his head to the side and let the door close.
“You don’t know what you think you know,” he said. “Let’s go home. It’s really not your business.”
“It’s not because of me,” I said. “It’s not my fault that you and Mom hate each other. It’s yours.” And even though I pretty much knew my parents weren’t exactly in love before the shooting, this hit me like some great epiphany. And for whatever reason I felt worse than I had before. I guess I always thought that if it was just about me, when I left the house they would be in love and happy again. Now, with Britni/Brenna’s beautiful flushed face in the picture, Mom and Dad would probably never be in love again. Suddenly all those fights they’d had over the years no longer seemed reparable. Suddenly I understood why I had clung to Nick like a life preserver—he not only understood crappy families, he understood crappy families that would never be good again. There must have been a part of me that knew all along.
“Valerie, just let it go.”
“All this time I’ve been beating myself up about making you and Mom hate each other and you were having an affair with your secretary. Oh my God, I’m such an idiot.”
“No.” He sighed, put his hand to his temple. “Your mother and I don’t hate each other. You really don’t know anything about my relationship with your mother. This isn’t your business.”
“So it’s okay?” I asked, gesturing toward the bathroom door. “This is okay?” He probably thought, given the context of the conversation, that I meant whatever was going on between him and Britni/Brenna. But what I really meant was about the lying. He was lying about who he was, just like I had. And it was okay. But it so didn’t feel okay. And I wondered how, given everything that had happened, he couldn’t see why lying about who you are isn’t okay.
“Please, Valerie, let’s just get you home. I’ve got work to do.”
“Does Mom know?”
He closed his eyes. “She has an idea. But, no, I haven’t told her, if that’s what you mean. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go to her and say something when you really don’t know anything.”
“I’ve gotta go,” I said, pushing past him and out the door. The cold air felt so much better going out than going in.
I listened hard for him as I walked down the sidewalk back the way I’d come. I waited for him to lean out the door and yell. Stop, Valerie! No, you’ve got it all wrong, Valerie! I love your mother, Valerie! But what about your ride, Valerie?
But he never did.
23
I walked back to school. I didn’t know what else to do. I left Mom a voice mail message while I walked.
“Hey, Mom. I had to get help on a homework assignment and missed the bus,” I lied. “I’ll just wait for you to pick me up after your meeting.”
When I got to school, I went inside and dropped my stuff by the giant trophy case that assailed visitors with glittering football trophies and track trophies and giant blown-up photos of coaches long gone from the school. Long gone from their glory days. Or just plain long gone.
I sat on the floor under the case and pulled out my notebook. I wanted to draw something, to get hold of my emotion with a picture. But I wasn’t sure what to draw. As jumbled up as my mind was, it was just way too hard to see reality. I couldn’t make my pencil scratch out the lines of Britni/Brenna’s face. Couldn’t make it curve into the contours of Dad’s guilty eyes—his big secret blown up. Would he marry her? Would they have children together? I couldn’t make myself imagine Dad holding some creamy-faced baby, cooing down at it, telling it he loved it. Taking it to baseball games. Living some life he’d probably consider his “real life,” the one he deserved rather than the one he got.
I held the point of my pencil to the paper and started to draw—immediately the curve of a woman’s seeded belly took form in profile. I sketched a fetus inside it, curled into itself, sucking a tiny thumb, cradling itself around an umbilical cord. And then I drew an identical curving line on the other side. A teardrop sliding down a narrow nose. My mother’s eyes. A line of fury between them. Another teardrop, clinging to an eyelash, with my name written in it.
Distantly, I heard a locker clang shut and footsteps nearing me. I shut my notebook and pretended to be staring absently out the front doors of the school. My fingers curved around my notebook, which before had always been like a fun pair of eyeglasses that would allow me to reflect the world as it really was, but now felt like a big shameful secret.
“Oh, hey.” Jessica Campbell was striding toward me.
“Hey,” I answered.
Jessica stopped in front of me and set down her backpack. She peered out the front doors. She sighed and sat crosslegged next to her backpack, just a couple feet from me. “Waiting on Meghan,” she said, as if to justify why she might be sitting in the hallway next to me if she wasn’t saving me from Angerson. “She’s retaking her German test. I told her I’d give her a ride home.” She cleared her throat awkwardly. “Do you need a ride? I can take you, too, if you can wait for Meghan. She shouldn’t take too much longer.”
I shook my head. “My mom’s coming,” I said. “She’ll probably be here pretty soon.” And then I added, “Thanks.”
“No problem,” she muttered, and cleared her throat again.
Another locker shut somewhere down the science hall and our heads turned toward the sound of a couple kids talking. Their voices faded and we heard the sound of a wooden door shutting, cutting their conversation off completely.
“You coming to the StuCo meeting tomorrow?” Jessica asked. “We’re going to go over progress on the memorial project.”
“Oh,” I said. “I figured that meeting was just a one-time thing. I thought… well, I kind of ditched you guys last time. Plus, you know, I thought you had to be voted in to be a member of Student Council. Something tells
me not too many people would vote me in.”
She got a funny look on her face and then laughed a shrill, nervous little laugh. “Yeah, probably not,” she said. “But I keep telling you it’s okay. Everyone understands that you’re going to be a part of the project. It’s cool.”
I arched one eyebrow and gave her an I doubt it look. She laughed again, this time a little more breathy and relaxed. “What? It is!” she said.
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed, too. Pretty soon we were both cracking up, leaning our heads against the brick wall behind us, the tension sliding off of us.
“Listen,” I said, studying the graffiti on the bottom of the trophy case above my head. “I appreciate what you’re doing, but I don’t want people to start leaving StuCo because of me.”
“Not everyone was against it, you know. Some people thought the idea was great from the beginning.”
“Yeah, like Meghan, I’ll bet,” I said. “She wants to be my best friend, you know. Tomorrow we’re going to dress alike. Be twinkies.”
We looked at each other for a beat and laughed again.
“Not exactly,” Jessica said. “But she came around. I can be very persuasive.” She grinned at me wickedly and wiggled her eyebrows. “Seriously. Don’t worry about Meghan. She’ll get cool with it. We need you to be involved. I need you to be involved. You’re smart and you’re, like, really creative. We need that. Please?”
A door opened at the far end of the hallway and Meghan stepped out. Jessica gathered her backpack and coat together. She shrugged. “You didn’t shoot anybody,” she said. “They don’t have any reason to hate you. That’s what I keep telling them.” She stood up and shouldered her backpack. “See you tomorrow, then?”
“Okay,” I said. She started to walk toward Meghan.
I had a sudden flash of clarity. What was it Detective Panzella had said about the girl who helped clear me? She was blond. Tall. A junior. Kept repeating, “She didn’t shoot anybody…”
“Jessica?” I called. She turned around. “Um, thanks.”
“No problem,” she said. “Just be there, okay?”
A few minutes later Mom pulled up in front of the school and honked. I hobbled out to the car and slid in. Mom looked grim behind the wheel.
“I can’t believe you missed the bus,” she said. I recognized the voice—her annoyed and frustrated voice. The one she often used when coming home from work.
“Sorry,” I said. “I had to get help with an assignment.”
“Why didn’t you just get a ride with your dad?”
The question struck me like a finger poke to the chest. I could feel my heart start to speed up. Could feel my stomach roll around, trying on the truth for size. Could hear the rational side of me screaming into my ear, She needs to know!She deserves to know!
“Dad was busy with a client,” I lied. “I would’ve had to wait just as long for him.”
I guess I should have felt guilty for lying to Mom about what I knew. But then again Dad didn’t shoot anybody, either.
24
The following Saturday I’d begged Mom to take me over to Bea’s studio after our session with Dr. Hieler.
“I don’t know, Valerie,” Mom said, a crease between her eyebrows. “Art classes? I’ve never even heard of this woman before. I didn’t even know an art studio was there. Are you sure it’s safe?”
I rolled my eyes. Mom had been in a mood for days. It almost seemed like the more I tried to move on with my life, the less she trusted me. “Yes, of course it’s safe. She’s just an artist, Mom. C’mon, can’t you just let me do this one thing? You can go grocery shopping at Shop ’N’ Shop while I’m there.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please? Mom, c’mon, you’re always saying you want me to do something normal. Art classes are normal.”
She sighed. “Okay, but I’m coming in with you. I want to check this place out. Last time I just let you run around and do whatever you wanted, you got involved with Nick Levil, and look where that got us.”
“So you remind me every day,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. I pushed my thumb into the dent in my thigh to keep myself from blowing up at her. With the mood she’d been in, she’d probably change her mind about taking me to Bea’s.
We walked into Bea’s together and I could feel Mom hesitate at the door, once the musty and heavy air surrounded us.
“What is this place?” she said in a low voice.
“Shhh,” I hissed, although I wasn’t exactly sure why I wanted her to be quiet. Maybe because I was afraid that Bea would hear her and tell me I couldn’t come to classes after all. That Mom’s negative energy would ruin the amazing purple morning light.
I walked down the aisle toward the back, where I could hear a tinkling of music—bells tapping out rhythmically—and a soft murmuring of voices. I could see backs of artists perched on the stools in front of canvases. There was an elderly lady working with paper off to one side, folding and creasing it into intricate animals and shapes, and a little boy playing with a pair of Matchbox cars under one of the low tables. Bea was bent over a mirror, around which she was placing and pasting an elaborate design of seashells. I stopped at the end of the aisle, suddenly sure that I’d misunderstood Bea before and that I shouldn’t be here. She was being nice. She didn’t really want me here, I thought. I should go.
But before I could even complete that last thought, Bea had straightened and was smiling at me, her hair teased into a glittery mound on top of her head, with ribbons and little baubles hanging from it.
“Valerie,” she said, spreading her arms out wide. “My purple Valerie!” She clapped her hands twice. “You’ve come back. I was waiting for you.”
I nodded. “I was hoping I could, er… take some art classes from you. Painting.”
She was moving toward us, then, but was completely ignoring me. Her grin had turned to a toothy smile as she enveloped my mother. I could see Mom’s body go stiff under the embrace of Bea, and then, as Bea whispered for a long time in Mom’s ear, her body relaxed. When Bea pulled away again, Mom’s scowl was gone, replaced by a look of curiosity. Bea was strange, no doubt about it. She was just the kind of person Mom would normally consider a kook, but Bea’s eccentricity fit her so well that, even in a mood, Mom seemed to be disarmed by it.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” Bea said to Mom. Mom nodded, swallowed, but said nothing back. “Of course you’ll paint with us, Valerie. I’ve got an easel right over there for you.”
“How much will it cost?” Mom asked, opening her purse and digging around inside.
Bea waved her hands in the air. “Costs patience and creativity, mostly. Also time and practice. And self-acceptance. But you won’t find any of those things in your purse.”
Mom froze, looked up at Bea curiously, then snapped her purse shut. “I’ll be at Shop ’N’ Shop. You have one hour,” she said to me. “Just one.”
“One’s my favorite number,” Bea giggled. “The word won being the past tense of win, and we can all say at the end of the day that we’ve won once again, can’t we? Some days making it to the end of the day is quite the victory.”
Mom said nothing in response, just slowly and deliberately picked her way back down the aisle. I could feel the swoosh of parking lot air waft into the studio as Mom left the building.
One. Won. One hour. Just one. Won. I tossed the words around in my head.
I turned to Bea. “I’d like to paint,” I said. “I need to paint.”
“Then you, of course, will paint. You’ve been painting since this morning when you first got up.” She tapped her temple with her finger. “Up here. You’ve been painting and painting. Using lots of purple right here. You have the painting complete. All you need to do is put it on canvas.”
She led me to a stool and I sat, mesmerized by the paintings of the artists sitting, silently working, in front of me. A lady painting a snowy landscape, another weaving rusty red colors over a barn she’d painstakingly drawn with
pencil. A man painting a military airplane, using a photograph taped to the upper-left-hand corner of the easel for reference. Bea bustled over to a nearby cart and came back with a palette and brush for me.
“Now,” she said, “You’ll want to paint your grays first, for shadowing. You’ll probably get no further than that today. You’ll need to give it some time to dry before you splash on your glorious colors.” She opened a jar and poured some brown jelly-like stuff onto the palette next to the colors. “And don’t forget to mix your paints with this. It’ll help them dry faster.”
I nodded, picked up the brush, and began painting. No sketching, no reference pictures. Just the picture in my mind—Dr. Hieler as I really saw him. There would be few shadows in this picture. No darkness.
“Hmmm,” said Bea over my shoulder. “Oh my, yes.” And then she moved to another part of the studio. I could hear her whispering gentle instruction to the other artists, giving tender support. At one point she burst into loud laughter when an artist told her he’d stuffed his cell phone in the blender that morning and turned it on the puree setting. But I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t look up at all, not until the outside air brushed the back of my neck again and I heard Mom’s voice, so staccato it didn’t belong in the studio at all, float up the aisle at me: “Time’s up, Valerie.”
When I looked up, I was surprised to see that Bea was standing next to me with her hand on my shoulder. “Time’s never up,” she whispered, not looking at me, but at my canvas. “Just like there’s always time for pain, there’s always time for healing. Of course there is.”
25
I had just turned the corner of the science hall when Meghan shouted out my name and jogged up behind me. I slowed, glanced worriedly in the direction of Mrs. Stone’s room, where the StuCo meeting would be starting in just a few minutes, and reluctantly stopped.
“Hey, Valerie, wait up,” Meghan yelled, her hair bouncing as she rushed toward me. “I want to talk to you.”
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