My Not-So-Still Life

by Liz Gallagher

  Also by Liz Gallagher

  The Opposite of Invisible

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Liz Gallagher

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gallagher, Liz.

  My not-so-still life / by Liz Gallagher. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89974-4

  [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Art—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G13556My 2011

  [Fic]—dc22 2010038546

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To all the friends

  who waited for this book,

  especially Bruce Wylie,

  who lived so beautifully

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  It’s time for a new color.

  I drape my Smurfette towel over my shoulders and yell, “I’m ready for pink!”

  Nick joins me in my bathroom. He unpacks the bleach kit, the bottle of dye.

  We do this so often, we’ve got it down to a science. Nick gets everything prepped, using the back of the toilet as his work space.

  An hour later, I’m blowing my new hair dry while Nick plays with eyeliner at my desk.

  “The pink looks hot,” he says when I come out of the bathroom. “It’s so bright.”

  “I love it,” I say. It reminds me of cherry blossoms, my favorite.

  Here’s why I change my hair color so much: All the talent in the world doesn’t equal an actual personality. It’s not enough to only make the art. You have to be the artist.

  Since sixth grade I’ve been all sorts of other colors. They were all starting to blend on top of each other, though, so it was a mess. Now that we’ve bleached it out and started over with the pink, I feel like myself, like a good version of me, like something worth looking at, twice. And that’s what I want. If people don’t notice me, why should I do anything? Why even exist?

  “Nice job coloring in the lines,” I say to Nick.

  “Coloring in the lines” is all about comics. Nick likes to draw, but he’s better at doing color than outlines. He and a boy called Jewel started a strip together freshman year, before I was close with either of them. Not that I’m close with Jewel anymore.

  Their strip lasted for only a few months. They’d get color copies at the copy shop by school and put a stack on a table during each of their lunch periods, all nonchalant, like they didn’t care if anyone picked it up or not. People did. I’m not totally sure why the guys stopped, except that neither one of them seems to have a long attention span. Not for projects, and not for relationships.

  In comics, there’s the penciler, the inker, and the colorist. Sometimes they’re all the same person, and sometimes people are great at one or two parts, so they specialize. The penciler sketches the general feeling of each panel. That was Jewel. The inker does the outlines, the black, the final artwork. That was Jewel, too. The colorist does the color, the lighting, the shading. That’s Nick, prettying up everything around him.

  That’s me, too, in general. A colorist. Giving life to a black-and-white world.

  Nick’s pretty colorful himself, at least in his clothes. Jetblack hair works on him, so he’s kept that up since the fall, and it looks especially good when he wears his neon tank tops and tees. He loves his eighties hoodie with the electric-blue star on the back, outlined in silver glitter.

  He’s actually dialed it down, adding jeans and sneakers to the mix, but for a while there in the fall, he always looked like he was on his way to a rave. He’s the sweetest guy you’ve ever met, though, and he doesn’t go to raves.

  Tonight, he’s wearing my black T-shirt with the metallic stars, his favorite Euro-style jeans, and his silver adidas Superstars. He dresses the same whether he’s at school, hanging out in my bedroom, or going out, which for us usually means taking the bus to grab coffee or food and watch Seattle go by while Seattle watches us.

  I’m in my black cotton tank dress. It’s stained with paint splotches and drips of bleach from various hair experiments, and those stains are the reason it’s my favorite thing to wear around the house. At school, I dress in a way my mom considers “wild,” but really it’s not that crazy. When I go out, I wear school-type clothes with more intense makeup.

  “I nuked you a snack,” Nick says, nodding toward the plate on my bed. My mom and Grampie always stock our freezer with microwave burritos, the healthy ones with the whole-wheat tortillas. Except for the weeks after they do their big salmon grab.

  They love salmon, the ocean, and Puget Sound. Grampie was a lifer longshoreman until he retired last year, and Mom still works at the docks. Grampie jokes that they have water in their veins.

  They go out fishing with a friend on his boat, leaving the port in Ballard before sunrise, and they fish salmon till the sun goes down. They do this for a solid week. Then they host this party in our tiny backyard for everyone we know, and they smoke the salmon.

  Burritos are more to my liking. I sit down to munch. “Thanks.”

  Nick’s eating at my desk. He went minimal with his eyes, just a touch of brown liner at the outside corners.

  He picks up my phone and snaps a photo of me when I’m off guard. “To show Holly your hair,” he says. My friend Holly doesn’t usually leave her house on weeknights, except for orchestra practice.

  “Send it,” I say, so Nick does.

  Mom pokes her head in the door. Her curly brown hair is in a messy ponytail as usual, and she has zero makeup on. At least she keeps a decent tan from working outside. It’s not the kind of tan you’d get in a sunny place, of course, but the sun does break through, even in Seattle, and she does ten-hour shifts at the docks. She’s in her gray sweats. You can tell how strong she is from her hard work. Still, she’s feminine. Her voice is so warm. “Pink. Hmmm. Not bad.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Mom looks at Nick before going back to the family room to watch TV with Grampie. “Ten o’clock, hon.”

  “Time flies when you’re coloring Vanessa.” He grabs his backpack and I walk him to the front door, give him a quick hug goodbye. “Art walk tomorrow night?”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “Holly might be able to come too.”

  “Superb.” He heads out the door.<
br />
  I’ve slept in the same bed my whole life, and it was my mom’s before it was mine. We still live in the house where she grew up, with my Grampie. I sleep in my mom’s childhood bedroom; she sleeps in the master bedroom; Grampie sleeps in the converted basement.

  On weekdays, when I wake up, Mom’s already at work at the docks. She’s up before dawn. Grampie’s usually at the kitchen table with the crossword. I’m almost always running late for school.

  My dad’s never been around. I think of Grampie more as a dad. My actual dad is Paul, my mom’s high school boyfriend. He lives near San Diego now, and has a wife but no other kids. His parents feel so guilty about him getting Mom pregnant, they help out with raising me. Financially, that is. They paid for me to go to Ocean Tides for middle school, and they’d happily have kept paying for me to go to private high school, but I didn’t want to. No way was I wearing a uniform. I think what they really feel guilty about is that Paul got to go off to college and build a normal life, while Mom stayed here, stuck to me.

  Every day, I wear a string around my wrist—different colors representing how I’m feeling. My string scale follows the spectrum—purple is the best, then blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and then black. Last fall, when my heart got mashed, I wore black.

  I started the strings during middle school at Ocean Tides, in the art room on a day that must’ve been one of the first times I ever really thought about personal expression. The art room had this green shag rug in one corner, and we’d sit there to have “verbal exploration,” as our art teacher, Bobby, called it. That day, we were talking about the color wheel and how colors can bounce off each other. He wanted us to do a self-portrait with a focus on color. I froze. I just could not decide what color best represented me. I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since.

  Today, I go for a blue string.

  After I pick out the string every day, I pick out an outfit, usually a skirt that my mom will say is too short, and a top that’s either black or super-bright. Today: denim and black.

  I pile on jewelry. I’ve made most of it myself. Lots of paper-clip bracelets and pop-top necklaces. Grampie lets me use his drill when I want to make beads out of found objects like the pop-tops, a guitar pick from a show at Vera Project, a little star I whittled in Mr. Smith’s art workshop at school.

  I consider where I would get a tattoo. Correction: where I will get a tattoo. Some days, I want one on my ankle. Or the inside of my forearm. I think about my lower back and my rib cage. I want to cover my whole body with ink and become a piece of art.

  Mom says no, that I’m too young to know what I want. I’ve agreed to wait till I’m eighteen. Two more years. Not that I expect much to change by then.

  I do my makeup. Usually some purple on my eyes, and lots of liner and mascara. My lips explore a range from shimmery nude to black. When Nick does my makeup, he might choose pinks, but I almost never do. Sometimes, he does each eye in different colors, so they don’t match.

  Then I go out to the kitchen, to the little round wooden table with the mismatched Goodwill chairs, and have my cereal. Grampie eats oatmeal with brown sugar. He has gray hair that used to be chocolate brown, and brilliant blue eyes that hide behind his reading glasses. He’s always been on the skinny side, but he’s developed a gut since he stopped working. His retirement uniform is a pair of Carhartt pants and a white tee. His voice is scratchy from smoking for so many years.

  We always tell each other to have a good day, and then I go outside and jump on my bike.

  Gates High School is a cage full of zombie kids. I’m forced to go in there every day and pretend to be one of them. But even being the artistic rebel girl is a role I’ve gotten sick of.

  It’s like someone has to be the outsider, and it’s me, but most of these people don’t really know that I’m not solely defined by pink hair and rainbow eye shadow.

  Thank the Goddess for Nick, who waits for me every morning at the door by the cafeteria. He knows what my home is like, what my heart is like.

  Let’s get one thing absolutely clear: I am not a girl who thinks that high school is the best time of my life. My real life hasn’t actually started yet. I can’t wait to get out of here.

  My hair defined me on the first day of high school. It was dark brown with blue bangs. On my neck I had a Sharpie rose tattoo, which took me hours to do in the mirror.

  That first day of school, someone wrote “freak” on my homeroom desk while I was in the hallway and the teacher was busy handing out locker assignments.

  At my private middle school, Ocean Tides, I hadn’t felt like a freak. I hadn’t been bored, either. We’d all been encouraged to be who we felt like being. I thought that was normal. I thought everyone had talents and interests and points of view. My Ocean Tides pal Holly is all about music the way I’m all about art.

  So when I saw that word, as much as it burned me—and it did—I was thankful for it. It meant they knew I was different.

  I’d rather be a freak than blend into this world, where everyone goes around acting as if it’s normal to all be the same.

  A lot of people are just spinning time. Just wasting it. I’m trying to live.

  Two

  Nick has mastered this way of standing so that it looks like he’s smoking, but he’s not. Real chilled out.

  After I lock my bike to the crowded rack, I walk up to him. “Do we really have to go in there? When will the torture end?”

  “June, two years from now,” he says, meaning graduation. As he shifts his weight, he exhales imaginary smoke.

  “Yeah, but then what?”

  We walk into school.

  “Then we’ll be free,” Nick says.

  But I want to be free now. Why not? What’s holding us back?

  “Hope so,” I say. “At least it’s Friday.”

  We have a few minutes, so we stand there looking around. I watch the yearbook photographer, a junior in a Gates High sweatshirt, as she circulates. A group of girls walking toward us all stop and put their arms around each other. For the second that they’re posing, they look really happy. Then the moment’s over and they just look bored.

  I take Nick’s hand and we walk inside. The hallway is our runway and people notice my new hair. They’re used to it changing, but they still look.

  The yearbook photographer snaps a couple of shots. I curtsy to her before giving Nick a hug and heading into homeroom.

  After school, Nick and I hang out in my garage, where I have a little art studio and Grampie keeps his Chevy. Nick sits cross-legged on my drop cloth with his sketchbook, playing around with new comic characters. He’s trying to draw this guy who’s like a cross between Prince Charming and an outlaw. “If I can get him right, I might start another strip.”

  “Cool.” I stand at my easel and paint cherry blossoms on a bent branch. There’s this scene in my head. A memory? A dream? Cherry blossoms float all around me as I lie flat on my back on the sidewalk. Pink petals swirling through the blue-sky air, a surreal, fantastic snowstorm.

  Nick works. I work. This is so much better than school. Eventually, we head inside for burritos and to get ready for the Fremont Art Walk.

  Mom and Grampie are already at the table eating dinner: tuna fish sandwiches.

  “You two are going to turn into burritos,” Mom says as I pop them into the microwave and Nick pours us lemonade.

  “There are worse things to turn into,” I say.

  Nick says, “At my house, we have all these fancy-pants preprepared gourmet meals. Microwaves were made for things like burritos. Not shrimp in a delicate wine sauce. These burritos keep me sane.”

  “Popcorn,” Grampie says.

  Nick and I sit down. “Popcorn?” I ask.

  “Popcorn was the first thing to be cooked in a microwave. By a guy named Percy Spencer and his team, in 1945. The second thing they cooked was an egg, which exploded into one of their faces.” Grampie takes a bite of tuna.

  Nick looks impressed. “No wonder you
’re so good at those crosswords, Mr. Almond.”

  “I keep telling you,” I say. “Grampie is a genius.”

  Mom nods. “Popcorn sounds good tonight. Have some with our movie later, Dad?”

  “Air-popped,” Grampie says. “Nothing good comes out of microwaves.”

  “I beg to differ,” I say, taking out the burritos.

  We all eat, and it feels like the night will be just right.

  Then I put on the shortest of my three black minis and a black tank. A constellation of silver glitter stars on my black bra peeks out.

  Nick pops into my room and looks at my wrist string. “Still blue. Good.”

  Blue is second only to purple, the best.

  He shakes an eyeliner brush at me and I sit down at the desk chair.

  “I really, really hope you decide to stick with this.”

  “With what?”

  “Makeup.”

  “Like, for a career?” He roots around in my toolbox-style case.

  “You’d do the most fabulous celebrities. Only the quirky ones.”

  “Oh, of course. Including my world-famous friend, Vanessa Almond …”

  “Of course!”

  “Remind me. What are you famous for again?”

  “Art!”

  I close my eyes and let him create a new face for me.

  What would it be like to use a living canvas for more than makeup? To color someone’s whole body?

  When Nick’s done, I look pretty and bright. Not too wild. Intense colors, but no lightning bolts or sparkles. Just deep purple on the eyelids and super-black lashes. Pale lips. Rosy cheeks.

  “Okay?” he asks.

  “Perfect.”

  He closes up the box and walks out to the family room. Grampie starts talking to him about the Mariners game, how many outs.

  I wiggle into and zip up my favorite-Christmas-present white twenty-eye Doc Martens. Zippers are a wonderful invention.

  In the family room, Nick is hovering behind Grampie, who’s on the couch with a crossword puzzle on his lap, a pen in his hand, and the game on across the room.