by C.T. Millis
Chapter 3
At school that day, James had a hard time not looking over at Sophie. He wondered if she knew anything of what was going on at his house.
“Everyone partner up for the bus ride!” Ms. Hopcke shouted while James was looking at Sophie, she looked at him, smiled, and nodded. They were going on a field trip to the art museum. James and Sophie had become an institution of best friends in the class. Everyone understood they would work together on most projects. They were both ignored enough by most of the classmates to escape any teasing for their closeness despite the fact that James was a boy and Sophie was a girl. “Okay, line up and let me write down all of your names, don’t lose each other! Remember: responsibility!”
Ms. Hopcke walked through the line and recorded each group’s names and then called for them to walk neatly and quietly to the parking lot outside of the front entrance to the school. The whole line moved forward, spilling out at the sides from the more rambunctious children the way macaroni noodles that were not drained enough would slide off a fork.
“Everyone keep order!” Ms. Hopke warned, “We’ve got a long trip ahead of us,” the art museum they were going to was a town away. The one in their town was not worth a school field trip and was mainly filled with art of the owner’s son. They boarded the bus. James and Sophie were towards the end of the line, so they were loaded into the front of the bus. They were far enough away from Ms. Hopcke and the wild bus driver as well as ignored enough by the children for only James to hear Sophie say,
“Every day, I find a thousand ways to run away and disappear,” she was looking out of the window at the garbage truck that took the same route and picked up trash from the school as part of the route. Sophie was imagining curling up in a trash bin and disintegrating from everyone’s memories.
As soon as Sophie spoke, James knew that she knew exactly what was going on with their parents.
Sophie looked at James, “So, how much do you know?”
“He’s in my house,” Sophie turned away from James and looked out the window, “how long did you know this was going to happen?”
“The PTA meeting,” she began, “there was something about the PTA meeting, I just knew.”
“Sophie, how is your mom?”
“She pretends like nothing happened, I see her sometimes,”
“How does he have time, what does he do for work?”
“He used to sell life insurance, but he doesn’t do that much anymore.” She looked at James, “can we talk about something else?”
“Yeah,” he looked around, “do you know what art museum we are going to?”
“I think the big one, not the one at the capitol, or the one across from the deli- the one in the town about an hour away.”
“Wow. That sounds great, I haven’t been there before.”
“I’m going to be an artist someday, I remember people really well, so I can draw their faces- someday,” Sophie looked out the window, “I’m going to paint everyone exactly as they are, not how they look. I’ll use all the colors I need to.” James added as he looked down at the child-torn holes in the blue plastic of the bus seat in front of him.
“James, you know my dog died, right?” James put a quick arm around her,
“No Soph, how long ago?”
“A couple of months.”
“What happened?” Sophie looked at James from behind her blonde hair so that only he could see the look of fear in her eyes,
“I don’t know.” she said clearly and quietly, each word on its own.
Mrs. Hopcke stood up at the front of the bus,
“Stop horsing around back there!” everyone on the bus turned to look, including James and Sophie. What they saw was Sonny holding Paul by the front of his shirt, as well as his arm frozen midair. Sonny looked up, and before Mrs. Hopcke could move, he looked back at Paul and let his fist fall on his face.
“That’s it!” a voice that had the power of God came out of Mrs. Hopcke, “Sonny, to the front of the bus, now.” Everything was still. She turned to James and lowered her voice, “can you stand up, please?” He did as quickly as he could, hoping not to conjure up any more of her wrath. No one on the bus had seen Ms. Hopcke angry before, and now even the bus driver was intermittently looking over his shoulder to watch her as if she were going to explode. “Sonny, take James’ place, you’ll be Sophie’s bus partner, you can learn a thing or two from her.” she looked at James, who had a sullen pull on his face, “Go ahead to the back for now, James.”
James and Sonny walked towards each other in the narrow isle of the bus. They each started walking sideways steps before they collided, and as they passed each other carefully, Sonny smiled slyly at James.
From where James sat down he could see Sonny, suddenly a giant next to Sophie, lean closer to her and talk quietly. She laughed.
“James, you have to help me get him,” Paul said so just the back of the bus could hear.
“No,” James shook his head, “sorry, man.” He was looking ahead, trying to see what was going on with Sonny and Sophie.
“James, he’s just going to keep it up, until someone stops him,”
“Well-” craning his neck to see over the kids in front of them, “I won’t be the one to stop him.”
“But he’s got your girlfriend!” James turned to Paul,
“She’s not my girlfriend, she’s just my friend,” Struck by the serious adult tone that came over James, Paul changed the subject,
“I didn’t even want to go on this trip.” Paul crossed his arms, “I told my mom I didn’t want to go, but she said it was a great opportunity for me. What do I want to look at stupid pictures for?” They were quiet for the rest of the bus ride there.
The bus pulled up behind a few other school busses in the great round parkway in front of the museum. James leaned over Paul to look out the window. The art museum was not old and stuffy like he thought it would be. Each of the exterior walls was a different color, and the whole building shone like clean silverware. It was constructed in a way that made it look like a house of cards caught mid-collapse. No two windows were the same, and the doorway was not a perfect rectangle, because one side was higher than the other. The bus began to get louder with excitement. Mrs. Hopcke had everyone line up outside, all eyes on the building, and tried to get their attention to go over the safety rules.
James was still looking at Sophie when they entered into the giant lopsided main doors of the art museum. There were other kids from all around the area from different schools. James thought about how strange school was, how all these kids who would never otherwise meet each other were lumped together. If it was one hundred years before and everyone lived on farms, he never would have met Sophie. His mom never would have met Sophie’s dad.
The class slipped into the art museum winding around the front desk like a snake. The class was a lot quieter than the other kids in the museum, who seemed to be taking any chance to act out and send their echoes into the bowl of the entryway.
Mrs. Hopcke checked in at the front desk, she said her name and asked,
“Is our tour ready?” The attendant, a beautiful woman wearing a green flowered dress with a suit-coat plastered over it looked through a clipboard.
“It looks like you are a bit early. The guide should be here in about fifteen minutes,” Mrs. Hopcke stared at her, “You can look at what we have in the lobby if you’d like to pass the time.”
“Thank you,” Mrs. Hopcke turned to the kids, “You are all behaving very well, if you could sit with your bus partner and just talk quietly by that wall for a few minutes, we’ll start learning soon.”
The kids walked neatly to the benches and an open space in the lobby and quietly watched the faces of children they did not know pass by. They could hear the echoes of laughter and arguments from the other kids bouncing off the walls throughout the museum like the sighing of ghosts. James felt like even a whisper in the farthest part of the museum
would reach his ears in the lobby.
When the tour began, James and Paul were in the back of a crowd of kids around the tour guide. They both tried to stand up straight to see over the other kids, but they had a hard time even hearing the tour guide as they began going through the art museum.
James could see the kids goofing off and whispering in the front. He wanted to see what they saw when the tour guide talked about the art, but he could not because he was so far away.
“Woah! Real swords!” Paul nearly shouted when they passed a group of highly decorated swords and daggers that were hundreds of years old. The kids in class were quiet when they passed through the room of cherub-like portraits of colonial children. There was a wedding chest that held a dowry for some long dead bride in Italy over five hundred years before. James tried to crane his neck over the other kids’ ruckus, and he only caught a few words from the tour guide’s mouth.
“. . . a scene from Pandora’s box. . .” James heard before the noise overtook her words.
They broke for lunch in a great lobby under a glass sculpture of the moon that he knew must light up at night and look beautiful from the road. He found Sophie,
“Hey Soph, let’s not eat here, it could fall-” she quickly moved off to the side with James and they started eating the trays of food Mrs. Hopke handed out. They each got a square of a sandwich, carrots, and either an apple or an orange. James could hear the rising voices of Sonny and his entourage halfway across the lobby. They must have been arguing about the fruit, because when it quieted down, Sonny walked over with his hands behind his back.
“I saw you only have an apple,” Sonny said looking only at Sophie. James stuffed his whole sandwich in his mouth and stared at Sonny. “I got you more options,” he pulled his right hand from behind his back to show a cup of strawberries, and he showed Sophie red grapes in his left hand. James could smell their nectar from where he was sitting. “You can have all of them if you want,” James looked across the lobby to see two of Sonny’s friends pouting and eating their carrots. He looked back at Sonny and Sophie.
“No. Thanks, this apple is just great.” At hearing Sophie, Sonny slumped his shoulders and started to walk away, “-but you can sit here and eat your lunch with us! If you want,” she trailed off.
“All right. You don’t mind, do ya’ Janson?” Sonny was not asking.
“Sure man, there’s plenty of ground to sit on.” Sonny ignored James’ sarcasm and walked back to his group of friends to get his tray of lunch. He put the fruit on his tray, smiled at them, and walked back.
“Are you going to eat all that fruit?” Sophie asked, looking at the mountain of food on his tray, realizing he somehow had two sandwiches and potato chips instead of carrots.
“No- do you want some after all?”
“Nope, maybe you could give it back to your friends, they look like they are missing it,” Sonny turned around and saw his friends quickly look away at their empty trays.
“Well, why not, Jansen!” James looked up, “Why don’t you bring the grapes and strawberries back real quick for me, that’d be great.” James knew better than to decline Sonny’s invitation to help, so he took the fruit and walked over to Sonny’s friends to give it back.
Walking towards where they were sitting, James noticed Sonny took his place next to Sophie. Instead of at his spot, he sighed and sat down next to where his tray was: a few feet in front of them. He noticed the different classes were eating in shifts. There were only two classes in the lobby, Mrs. Hopcke’s and another. They sat on different sides, like opposing sports teams.
After lunch, the class went to the gift shop. Everyone saved up the quarters they found on the ground, or had their parents give them a few dollars to spend. They shuffled into the momentous gift shop all at once, and began perusing the racks. James made his way to the corner, where there was a big box of prints on cardboard. He moved each one slowly away from him on the stack to see what was on them. One was a vase with sunflowers. Another was a bunch of chairs and tables outside at night on cobblestone streets. There was a man and a woman sleeping on a haystack. There was one with men in worn clothes walking in a circle surrounded by bricks. James stopped. He saw something.
There was a family of five in peasant’s clothes sitting around a square table. The room was mostly dark except for a minuscule lamp above their heads. None of them were looking at each other in the eyes, not one of the five. James pulled it out and hoped the seven dollars was enough. He turned it over and above the bar code it read:
‘The Potato Eaters,’
Vincent Van Gogh
$4.99
It was his. He walked up to the counter, passing Sonny in the process of slipping a pair of earrings that were made locally and looked like the shining leaves of a vine into his oversized grime-encrusted pockets. James was up to at the register buying his poster when the class discovered it. They all found the whistles, exact reproductions of those used by police officers in the United Kingdom before stop lights and during horses. They were two dollars and most of the class bought one. James waited outside of the gift shop with Mrs. Hopke, some other kids, and Sophie. It was taking a long time because all the kids were paying in quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies.
“What did you get, Soph?”
“Nothing,”
“Oh, I still have a couple of dollars. I can get you something if you want-”
“No, I had money,”
“Why didn’t you get anything?”
“I read that suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things.”
“Oh,” James paused, “what does that mean?”
“I looked it up, because I had no idea, either,” she chuckled, “it means, basically, we all feel bad because we lose things that don’t last anyway.”
“Like people?” James asked,
“Yeah, so I’m trying to circumvent suffering by not getting more than I need.”
“Circumvent?”
“It means to stay away from.”
“Oh. What did you get?”
“The Potato Eaters, a poster, by Vin-sant Vans Gog-H.” Mrs. Hopcke, at the edge of her mind because of the chaos her class was creating corrected him,
“Oh Christ-” she lowered her voice, “James, they pronounce it Vin-Cent-Van-Go.” she was wringing her hands and looking at the gift shop, “And he didn’t specialize in posters- that’s just a copy of one of his paintings.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hopke,” He looked back at Sophie, “The potato eaters, all of the potatoes, the family, it’s just like us.”
“Let me see,” Sophie asked, and upon inspection, she nodded. “The Potato Eaters.”
When the whole class was done in the gift shop, Mrs. Hopke yelled,
“Everyone get back with your bus buddy!” James found Paul and Sophie was pulled away from him towards the back of the line. They got back on the bus and sat in the exact same seats that brought them there. James set the poster pressed against the back of the seat of the row in front of him so it did not take up too much room. Everyone who had a whistle pulled it out in one quick glimmer and began shrieking out the theme to common circus music the entire way back to school. Mrs. Hopcke buried her face in her hands or looked out the window the entire way, not even scolding them. Sonny sat facing Sophie for the entire ride and put his arm on the seat behind her.