The Suburban Strange

by Nathan Kotecki

  Liz opened her mouth and spoke a few syllables that didn’t add up to words. As if on cue, the Rosary began to walk again. Liz strugged to maintain their sedate pace as they stalked past the jock, who looked disappointed, but not surprised. Celia couldn’t decide what was strangest: that such an alarming thing had happened right in front of her on the first day of school, that this gloomy clique had been so aloof throughout it, or that a jock would feel as though he could engage Liz in a conversation.

  They reached the school lobby without further incident, and Celia listened for them to comment about what had happened outside. “What did you say about it being a good year?” Ivo said to Marco. “If that was any indication, this year is cursed already.” They traded wry smiles, but in the next moment this group to which Celia was both a stranger and a ward had moved on to more unfamiliar names and things she didn’t understand. She gave up trying to follow the conversation and looked around.

  Suburban High School wasn’t nearly as dark and glamorous as she suspected the Rosary would have preferred. The tile walls and textured plaster ceiling looked antiquated, and their colors were too drab to have names. When the group parted ways and Regine walked her upstairs, Celia found that the sophomore hall had all the sophistication of a strip mall or a jail. Against this backdrop Regine looked even more exotic than she had in the black sedan—even more exotic than she had in the summer drawing class where the two of them had met two short months ago. Celia glanced down and reminded herself she looked exotic now, too.

  “So you see how we are, right?” Regine said to Celia. “Some kids might give you a hard time, and some kids are going to want to be friends with you just because you’re friends with us, and all I’ll say is you should use your best judgment. You decide if they’re smart enough, and if they look good enough. You decide who is worth your time.” Celia had never thought about it that way. She always had been on the receiving end of those evaluations. She had a hunch that if anyone else at Suburban met the standards Regine had laid out, the Rosary would have befriended them already.

  “Do you know that girl?” she asked Regine, who looked at her uncomprehendingly. “The one who got stung?”

  “Not really,” Regine said.

  Celia’s concerns shifted away from sympathy and back toward herself. In a moment Regine was going to leave her, and the prospect of continuing alone floated up the same fears Celia had forced down several times already that morning.

  She said goodbye to Regine and turned to her homeroom door. The room was full of kids in jeans and sneakers and brightly colored shirts who all fell silent when she walked in, looking her over. The air seemed to change, becoming drier and hotter. No longer could Celia pretend to be exotic—she was simply out of place. She considered running back out the door, but she was sure Regine would disapprove of such a display of weakness. This new moment had all the substance of a nightmare, and the next moment would be even worse. What are they going to say? she thought, realizing she had stopped cold a few feet into the room.

  Celia knew her outfit was a little morose, and her dark eye shadow didn’t help. She knew she wasn’t making herself any more approachable than her sloppy jeans, faded T-shirts, and hunched shoulders had made her at her old school last year. She had spent all of ninth grade—all of middle school, even—trying to disappear but never quite succeeding, and that impulse still lurked just under the surface. During the summer, with no other kids around, Celia had been able to ignore the risk she was taking by making these bold changes to her appearance. Now she felt the risk like a blast from a hair dryer down her back. It was the same hot gust she had felt whenever more than one of her old classmates had looked at her at the same time. It was the precursor to something bad. If they were merciful, it was only ridicule: She was too tall. She wasn’t savvy enough to conform. She wasn’t strong-willed enough to defend herself. Her best friend was a sketchbook.

  Celia had hoped a new high school would somehow be different, but now she thought of course it wasn’t—at least, not in the ways she needed it to be. Had she made a fatal miscalculation with the new strategy she had chosen? These dark clothes? Her dark straight hair, carefully blown even straighter, which now reached midway down her back? The hours spent in front of the mirror learning to make her eyes look smoky instead of blackened? She might match the blackboard now, but she couldn’t expect to fade into it.

  The misgivings she had entertained at home less than an hour ago were nothing compared to the panic and despair she felt now. This was not at all like walking into the studio at the art institute. She was alone in a crowd of kids who looked exactly like the ones she had fled at the end of last year. Stork, she thought; pencil-girl. Ghoul—there would be new names for them to call her now: goth freak, vampire. The epithets careened around inside her head, and she waited to hear them.

  No one said anything to her. She saw a seat off to the side and willed herself to walk as deliberately as possible over to it. Her ankle wobbled a little, but she pretended everything was fine. She sat down and heard the conversations around her start back up. Then she pulled her sketchbook out of her bag, opened it to the first blank page, and wrote, What is going to happen? She looked at the question for a moment, then crossed it out and wrote another.

  What is happening to me?

  Celia summoned back the confidence she was trying to learn from Regine, and memories of the recent times she’d succeeded in feeling mysterious and exotic, qualities she never had possessed before. She pushed her shoulders back a little farther, hearing Regine’s voice in her head admonish her for slouching. She thought back to the summer drawing class where she had met Regine.

  THE ART INSTITUTE HAD BEEN the first and was still the only foreign place Celia ever had walked into without desiring to disappear. She was one of the youngest students in the class, and while she wasn't about to go up to strangers and start talking, this was a place where a battered sketchbook was a badge of honor and her felicity with a pencil would work in her favor. The drawing class had been her mother's suggestion. Celia had understood it immediately as a transparent attempt to find something she would do that included other people in the room. She had agreed, in the way someone who is fluent in French condescends to take a conversation class. For once she believed she was on solid ground, and she entered that studio full of strangers knowing that some of them might draw as well as she did but that it was unlikely any of them drew better. On the first day of class Celia enjoyed a rare taste of confidence, like the spatter of carbonation on her tongue that went to her head and made her a little giddy, though no one would have been able to tell from looking at her.

  The instructor had built a towering still life on a round table in the middle of the room, and after a cursory introduction he told the class to choose anything to sketch so he could assess their individual skill levels. Celia considered the depressing pile of props, but nothing inspired her. She always drew things that were alive, and the table had the look of a wake, somehow. Less than five minutes in and she panicked—was she going to fall flat in this place where she had dared to imagine she would fly? The others were starting to draw. She stared at them, and then at the still life, and then at her empty pad. She looked around again, and her attention was drawn to a striking girl on the far side of the circle who had pulled off a pair of dove gray driving gloves and was digging in her case for a pencil. Before Celia made a conscious decision, her hand captured on her pad the girl’s shiny black hair, which hung in a severe bob, framing her Latin eyes and heart-shaped face. Celia used a few crisp lines to describe the girl’s white collar, which lay atop her black cardigan, and a few more for the short-sleeved cuffs that peeked out from rolled sweater sleeves. She roughed in the plywood box on which the girl sat, and her black jeans, which tapered to oxblood penny loafers. Celia softened the girl’s pose, removing the tension in her frame as she labored over her own drawing. And there she was, alive on the paper: the intriguing girl at work on a drawing, her face serious and someh
ow meditative, the studio light slanting across her body.

  Celia was pleased with her work, but upon reflection she feared she had disobeyed the teacher’s instructions, and her blood raced when it was time for the class to pin their drawings up on the wall for the critique. Would he reject her, no matter how good her drawing was, because she hadn’t drawn the plastic fruit or the plaster column? Celia was tempted not to care, because she had found the joy drawing gave her—the joy of capturing a person on paper. But she couldn’t be sure. What if the teacher had wanted something else? She tried to think of something she might stammer in her defense.

  They spent a few minutes looking at each other’s work before the teacher began the critique. Everyone else had drawn something from the still life. Most of the sketches were amateurish, including the one Celia’s subject had pinned up, a timid cartoon of the vase draped with fabric. The girl with the black bob had noticed herself on the wall and was studying Celia’s portrait. Then the teacher took over and worked his way down the wall. His notes were brief, but Celia could tell he was good at his job. He talked about using one line instead of many, and about when it was right to show something with space instead of lines. When he reached Celia’s drawing, he said, “This is lovely. Someone is not going to learn very much from me. Whose is this?”

  Celia felt the hair-dryer blast of panic when she half raised her hand and everyone focused on her. But the instructor gave her a kindly look. To Celia it was the same as if he had dumped ten pounds of confetti on her. Then he moved on. Her pulse slowly returned to normal. She had survived.

  The subject of her drawing made a beeline for her after the class. “I’m Regine,” she said. “You are really talented.”

  “Thank you! I’m Celia.” Usually Celia did anything to avoid speaking with strangers, but this was the best possible scenario in which to attempt it. She felt herself in a position of strength, and she wanted to reassure this girl, Regine, the way Celia would have wanted to be reassured if the conversation had been about anything else. “You picked the hardest things to draw.”

  “You’re just trying to make me feel better.” Regine smiled. “I do not have the natural gift for this that you obviously do.”

  “I’ve been drawing for a long time,” Celia offered.

  “How old are you, sixteen?”

  “Fifteen.” Celia knew Regine was implying she was too young to have been doing anything for a long time, but in this case that was like doubting the sea legs of a child who had grown up on a boat. Every day of every summer Celia could remember, her mother had begged her to leave her sketchbook behind on the dining room table and go outside for just a little while, please. Once, years ago, Celia’s father had cajoled her into a girls’ camping group, but after a few drenched weekends he had admitted he was as miserable as she was, and her days at the dining room table were restored. She spent them copying the faces of models out of advertisements in her mother’s magazines. For Celia drawing wasn’t an escape. She didn’t populate alternate universes with fanciful characters. Drawing was her way of knowing the world. She studied the people around her, imagined how they felt, what they thought, what they dreamt, and then she tried to capture these ephemeral things in a portrait. In a way, people weren’t real for her until she had drawn them a few times, from different angles. They were safer on paper, too—no sudden movements, no betrayals. Regine couldn’t know it, but by rendering her on paper, Celia had welcomed Regine into her life in her own timid way that first day of drawing class.

  “Where do you go to school?” Regine was composed and not intimidated even after she had conceded her lack of talent. Celia admired her for it.

  “Suburban. I’ll be a sophomore.”

  “I go to Suburban! Wait, were you there last year?”

  “No, we moved across town a month ago.”

  “I’ll be a junior. We are going to have to be friends in this class. I’ll tell you all about Suburban, and you try to show me how to draw something—anything.”

  Celia had agreed, a little surprised by how easily it was happening. From the next class on she had sat with Regine. Regine’s drawing skills would not improve much over the summer, but she didn’t hold it against Celia.

  “My first love is making collages,” Regine explained as they settled in next to one another the following week. She reached for her bag and pulled out a little album designed to hold a single photograph in each of its page sleeves, with an oval window on the front to let the first image show through. Instead of photographs, Regine had filled the book with a series of twenty-four tiny collages that told a dark story of unrequited love, assembled from fragments of text and images clipped out of magazines. A beautiful woman sat next to a beautiful man with smooth white hands as he drove a luxurious car. She stood in the background, watching him drink from a fluted glass. She peered out from under a curved staircase while he looked up at a stained-glass skylight, a tear on his cheek. A cluster of mismatched words cut from different advertisements read, He caught me staring but soon his eyes moved on.

  “It’s beautiful,” Celia said, turning back to study each page again.

  “Thank you. But I couldn’t have drawn any of it to save my soul. It’s all other people’s things that I’ve stolen.”

  “Still, it’s so creative, so delicate. And collage—” Celia was going to say collage was difficult. She had tried it on a few occasions and always made a mess with the glue. But Regine cut her off.

  “I know—Schwitters, Cornell, Picasso—everybody does it,” Regine said dismissively. “I still wish I could draw.”

  Celia didn’t recognize the first two names, and she had thought Picasso was a painter. She heard both pride and insecurity in Regine’s voice, and she didn’t know what to make of it. She let it go and admired Regine’s latest outfit. This week it was a sleeveless black sweater and a pleated gray skirt. Regine had knotted a gray and cream silk scarf at her throat, tucking the ends into the neckline of the sweater, and Celia thought this girl had such a flair for wearing black and gray, she must have been dressing that way since she’d begun to walk. To Celia, Regine was a cross between a silent-movie star and a creature from a foreign fashion magazine. Regine brought a fan to class with her on hotter days, waving it in a short arc below her face during critiques, and Celia wondered how someone could do something like that and not be ridiculed. But Regine made it look so natural, so glamorous; no one possibly could mock her for it.

  Celia felt like a different kind of foreigner in her own barely considered clothes—compared with Regine, she might as well have arrived on a boxcar of a freight train, using a flannel shirt interchangeably as a hobo’s bindle. Celia glanced down at her loose T-shirt and cutoff jeans and hoped Regine was looking only at her drawings. In that moment Celia discovered a new desire to dress like Regine, but she had no idea how to go about it. Celia’s frizzy hair escaped from behind her shoulder and she pushed it back, wondering if it could be as smooth as this cool girl’s.

  “Are you excited about a new school?” Regine asked her.

  “Curious, I guess. I hope it’s better than my last one,” Celia said.

  “It’s all right. Some parts are better than others, but that’s true of any place, isn’t it? Having good friends can make any place bearable. What kinds of things do you like?”

  “I don’t know,” Celia said, wondering how one was supposed to answer such a question.

  “Well, what kind of music do you like?”

  Celia never had considered her musical tastes. “I don’t know . . . I just listen to whatever’s on the radio.”

  Regine scoffed, “That’s not good music. There is so much amazing music that isn’t on the radio. None of my favorite bands get played on the radio.”

  “Then how do you know about them?”

  “My friends told me about them, and gave me things to listen to,” Regine said, and then she smiled conspiratorially. “Like I’m going to do for you.”

  It was a thrilling thing f
or Celia to hear, not so much because something hidden would be revealed to her, but because Regine had just implied she wanted to be Celia’s friend.

  That day after class Regine had retrieved a compact disc from the glove compartment of her sleek black car to lend to Celia. Celia’s mother pulled up as the transaction was taking place, and when Celia got into the car she asked her who the girl was. “Regine. She’s in my class,” Celia said, unsure what more she could explain to her mother, since Regine still was a mystery to her, too. Celia turned her attention back to the CD and studied the old black-and-white photo of a tornado on the cover. She had no idea what to make of the title—Tinderbox—or the name of the band—Siouxsie and the Banshees. The tornado in the photo was not the theatrical type that carried Dorothy away and only killed witches. It writhed against the sky like a poisonous snake, and the weather-beaten barn in its path would not be going anywhere in pieces larger than splinters. In Celia’s hands the CD seemed like an artifact from a country worlds away from Oz—ominous, yet oddly beautiful. It felt like a piece of Regine, which she had sent home with Celia.

  Celia could remember as if it were yesterday the miraculous afternoon when she had lain on her bed and listened to Tinderbox for the first time. She wished to never forget that feeling. Hearing that music had been like seeing a color she never had seen before, or finding a new room in the house where she had lived for years. Celia hadn’t realized pop music could sound like that: prickly and ominous but passionate and smart at the same time. She pored over the photograph of the band and wound up reproducing the image in her sketchbook while she pondered these severely beautiful people, who wrote songs about the temperature when the most murders are committed and the destruction of Pompeii by volcanic explosion. She listened to Siouxsie’s throaty voice singing about fearing someone but calling his name, and she wondered what that felt like and how someone could find herself in that situation. These songs weren’t something to distract her for three minutes, like the songs on the radio. This album challenged her. It made her think about things she hadn’t considered before. And it was beautiful in ways Celia hadn’t known things could be beautiful.