“May I have your arm?” Ms. Hancock asked.
Kobi glanced at Sally again. Sally smiled.
When Kobi stretched her arm out on the table, Ms. Hancock turned it so Kobi’s palm was up. She ran her fingers over Kobi’s skin as if she were inspecting a melon at the grocer’s.
She dipped a brush into red paint. With a few tickly strokes, she made five petals on Kobi’s arm. Then she dipped into the yellow paint and swirled the brush over the petals, and a lovely orange blossom appeared, showing a bit of yellow in places and a deep, dark red at the heart. Ms. Hancock blew on the flower, and Kobi shivered at the prickle of drying paint.
Ms. Hancock chose a fat pencil with a soft, crayon-like tip and outlined part of the petals. Then she patted a tiny sponge filled with purple paint around the blossom and began to send vines of leaves and flowers twining up Kobi’s arm. Kobi sat perfectly still.
It took a very long time. Insects and butterflies—even a swallowtail caterpillar—came out of the shadows to feed on the flowers. A beetle like the one Norman had given her crawled on a leaf. Ms. Hancock used a streak of paint from the gold vial to highlight his shell. Her touch made Kobi remember her mother brushing and braiding Kobi’s hair when Kobi was little—Grandmamma rubbing sunscreen on Kobi’s shoulders at the beach. Freesia, Kobi said silently, gazing at the top of Ms. Hancock’s head as she bent over Kobi’s arm.
Kobi relaxed so deeply her toes went limp and she felt like purring. Freesia. It was the first time she had felt that way in Des Moines. She was sorry when Ms. Hancock was finished.
“It’s beautiful,” Kobi said.
Ms. Hancock looked exhausted but also happy.
“It’s absolutely lovely, Mom,” Sally said.
“One of my smaller installations,” Ms. Hancock said.
And Uncle Wim, when he got there, praised the arm extravagantly. Only Brook ignored Kobi’s fabulous arm and turned her nose up so high she could have drowned in the rain.
On the way to Uncle Wim’s house, Brook asked Uncle Wim why he and Sally had so many books on gardens, chickens, and stuff like that.
He met their eyes in the mirror. “We’d like to start a communal organic garden someday.”
“Why?” Kobi asked.
“It seems like a good thing to do,” he said. “But don’t get me started. It’s in the future. Sally has her hands full. So do I.”
Kobi snuck a look at Brook. Because Grandmamma had dropped them here.
That night, Kobi took a one-armed bath so the paint wouldn’t wash off. She slept with her arm hanging off the bed so the paint wouldn’t smear. She wore a sleeveless shirt to school so the amazing arm wouldn’t be hidden.
“You’re going to get made fun of,” Brook said.
Kobi shrugged. Brook didn’t know Kobi got made fun of all the time.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
In Ms. Carlson’s room, Anna and Lily were hogging the bunny as always. And because Kobi’s desk was near his cage, Anna was the first to notice Kobi’s arm.
“What happened?”
Lily gawked. “Is that a tattoo?”
“No!” Grandmamma would never allow tattoos.
A couple of other kids wandered over to look.
“It’s body painting.” Kobi moved her arm, making the insects stir.
“It’s alive!” a boy cried.
“Why would you want that on your body?” somebody asked.
“It’s creepy,” a girl said.
“It’s art,” Kobi said.
Anna took a closer look. “Art?”
“It was painted by a famous artist.” The kids needed to appreciate Ms. Hancock’s beautiful work.
“What’s this famous artist’s name?” Lily asked.
Kobi gave Ms. Hancock’s name the weight of Amelia Ear-hart or Mother Teresa when she said, “Patricia Hancock.”
Everybody just looked at her, so she said it again. “Patricia Hancock?” She widened her eyes with a surely-you’ve-heard-of-her gesture.
After a beat, a boy snorted, “I thought you were going to say Picasso!” and nearly turned himself inside out laughing.
Anna looked skeptical. Kobi rushed on. “Patricia Hancock is known all over the world for creating things that are beautiful but don’t last. Like this.” Like the chairs in the yard, which had fallen down while they were eating dinner the night before. Kobi would have to wash off the art tonight because Sally said it could hurt her skin if she kept it on longer. “Patricia Hancock is a friend of my grandmother’s in Paris.”
That was such a huge lie, Kobi was surprised the floor didn’t open and swallow her.
But Anna was looking a tiny bit impressed.
Lily said, “If she’s a friend of your grandmother’s in Paris, how did she paint your arm in Des Moines?”
“She’s visiting her daughter, who is my uncle’s friend.” Kobi’s heart was pounding. Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . .
“Really?” Anna said.
Kobi nodded. She felt her story start to collapse under the weight of their silence.
“That’s awesome,” Anna said.
Kobi let out her breath slowly.
Anna turned to Lily. “Your mother should invite the famous artist to paint bodies for your birthday party. It would make the party more interesting.” She smiled at Kobi. “And you could come.”
Lily scowled. “We don’t have room for more guests. And my mother already has the event planned.”
Anna shrugged. “It’s your party.”
Ms. Carlson told them to take their seats.
Norman wasn’t in school that morning. Kobi hoped he got to see her beautiful vine before she washed it off. She felt so heady from her victory with Anna that she didn’t hear a word Ms. Carlson was saying. She was dizzy with relief that she hadn’t gotten caught in the lies, but she promised herself she would never ever lie again. Not the teeniest tiniest lie. She’d rather go without friends than have to worry about getting caught every second.
During computer time, Lily asked if they could go online and research the famous artist Patricia Hancock. Her voice sounded innocent, but the smile she gave Kobi was evil.
Kobi stopped breathing. She was going to get caught after all. Ms. Carlson would tell Uncle Wim she was a liar, and Uncle Wim would tell Grandmamma and Brook and Sally, and Grandmamma would tell Mr. Gyver and Madame Louise.
“Shall we do that, Kobi?” Ms. Carlson asked.
“Sure,” Kobi said, knowing there was no way out.
Anna and Lily and a few others gathered around Ms. Carlson as she put in her password. Kobi knew better than to try a magic word. And she was glad Norman wasn’t in school after all.
Ms. Carlson clicked away on the keyboard. She looked around. “Kobi, you should be over here, too.”
Mortification buzzed in Kobi’s head as she went to stand with the group.
Ms. Carlson clicked and scrolled. “Ah!” she said. “Here we are.”
The woman in the picture was young, with flaming red hair. She wore a tank top and bell-bottoms.
Who was that?
The woman stood beside what looked like a giant mud castle that had been hit by a wave. The Golden Gate Bridge, partly shrouded in fog, loomed in the background.
Ms. Carlson read aloud. “‘Patricia Hancock, born in 1946 in Monterey, California, studied at the Wilson School of Design.’”
Kobi leaned closer. That was Ms. Hancock?
Ms. Carlson kept reading. “‘. . . a protégée of Manuel Rivera . . . drew the greatest notice for her series of installations in the western United States and Central America . . .’”
As Ms. Carlson brought up more pictures of Ms. Hancock’s installations around the world, Kobi caught Lily’s eyes. Lily looked away.
Kobi touched her colorful arm. She really had been painted by the famous artist Patricia Hancock!
TWELVE
KOBI was full of the news when she got into the car. Ms. Hancock had her picture in newspaper
s and magazines and even Wikipedia. If Ms. Hancock knew what Kobi was talking about, she gave no sign. She looked tired.
But Sally kept smiling at her mother. “Back in the day, Mom was an event.”
When Brook got into the car she didn’t believe Kobi until Sally said it was true. “The beautiful things in our house—the weaving, the pottery, the paintings—most of them are Mom’s work. But her true passion is transient art. Things that don’t last long.”
“Does Uncle Wim know this?” Brook asked.
Sally laughed. “Of course. Remember, we grew up together in the Bay Area.”
“Does Grandmamma know?” Brook asked.
“Yes,” Sally said.
Kobi remembered what Uncle Wim had said about Grandmamma and Ms. Hancock being competitors.
“Was Grandmamma famous, too?” Wouldn’t that be something, if she had a famous grandmother and didn’t even know it!
Sally hesitated. Finally, she said, “In a way.”
“In what way?” Kobi pressed.
Sally waggled her hand as if to say Oh, a little bit this way and a little bit that way.
“Really, Sally, what is Grandmamma famous for?”
Sally brushed her hair behind her ear and asked Kobi if she’d like to deadhead marigolds. Kobi had no idea what that was, but clearly Sally wasn’t going to answer her question.
The shriveled-up blossoms made a satisfying pop when Kobi yanked them off the plants. They left her hands smelling spicy. Sally was on her hands and knees, feeling around in the dirt for sweet potatoes. A UPS truck turned into the drive, and a delivery guy dropped a package on the steps and waved to Kobi and Sally.
Sally wiped her hands on her jeans, found her phone, and called Uncle Wim. “They’re here!” she said. She listened, smiling, then said, “Okay.”
“Who’s here?” Kobi asked.
“The red wigglers.”
Kobi had no idea what Sally was talking about.
“You’ll see.” Sally laughed and shook her head. “Wim’s coming home.”
When he arrived, he and Sally carefully opened the package.
“May I see?” Kobi asked.
They made room for her. Uncle Wim said, “There are supposed to be five hundred. Does it look like five hundred to you?”
In a damp cardboard box a tangle of skinny, reddish worms with fine lines around their bodies writhed in brown stuff.
“Is that dirt?” Kobi asked.
“Castings,” Uncle Wim said.
“Worm poo,” Sally explained.
“Eww.”
Uncle Wim said, “They’re probably hungry.”
Sally nodded. “I don’t see any food particles left.”
She went to the shed and returned with plastic bins. She lined the bottoms with cabbage leaves, carrot tops, the marigold blossoms Kobi had pulled off, and other bits of garden refuse.
“Okay,” she said. “Ready for the wigglers. Want to help, Kobi?”
“Do we dump them in?”
“No,” Uncle Wim said. “We need to separate them from the castings; then we’ll make tea out of the castings.”
Kobi put her hands over her mouth and Uncle Wim laughed.
“People don’t drink it,” he said. “After it’s aerated and steeped, Sally will pour it around plants. Nutritional dynamite!”
Kobi saw Brook watching out the window. Kobi motioned to her, but Brook shook her head.
Kobi thought the brown stuff might stink, but it didn’t really. It smelled kind of like the earth. “They don’t bite or sting, do they?” she asked.
“Nope,” Uncle Wim said, picking up a handful.
Eventually, they had five bins full of worms burrowing into the refuse.
“The food goes in one end and castings come out the other end,” Uncle Wim said. “Except that what comes out is even better than what goes in because the worms clean out contaminants as they digest the food. It’s called vermiculture. Imagine that!”
Uncle Wim sound as excited about vermiculture as Grandmamma sounded about museums and the ballet.
“Wow!” Kobi said.
After they’d feasted on fried zucchini—organic and very, very local, Sally pointed out—and soup from a can that would have made Madame Louise cringe but was okay under the charm of scrambled, and after they’d gone back to Uncle Wim’s house, Brook announced she needed a desk.
“I need to keep my schoolwork organized. Isabel has a desk.”
“You’re only going to be here until Christmas,” Uncle Wim said.
“I don’t have my own room and Kobi moves my stuff.”
They had always shared a room. They used to share a bed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” Kobi grumbled.
Brook’s eyebrows rose. “I’m becoming more mature.”
“And selfish!”
“Girls,” Uncle Wim said tiredly. “Cut it out. Long day here. Brook, you can have a desk. You too, Kobi.”
If Uncle Wim couldn’t afford a big bed, he couldn’t afford two desks. Temporarily. “I’ll share Brook’s,” she said.
“You will not,” Brook said. “That’s the whole point.”
“I don’t need a desk,” Kobi said. “I don’t have homework.”
“And why is that?” Brook asked. She looked at Uncle Wim. “I think fifth graders have homework.”
“Well, I have some,” Kobi admitted. “Like the interview assignment. But I don’t need a desk.”
She had interviewed Sally and made careful notes, dividing her report into the categories Ms. Carlson had given them: childhood, young adulthood, adulthood, later years. Sally hadn’t had later years yet, but the other parts had been interesting. Sally had been an only child with two artist parents until there was only one artist parent—Ms. Hancock—because the other artist parent drifted off. When asked about her greatest adventure of young adulthood, Sally said it was almost being eaten by a bear in the High Sierras, where she was a junior counselor all summer, every summer. Then she changed her mind and said it wasn’t the bear, it was Uncle Wim, who had kissed her one starry night, which was against the rules because he was a camper and she was a junior counselor. She hadn’t been able to get rid of him since, Sally said, smiling at Uncle Wim when she told the story. She had gone to college at Santa Clara and waited for Uncle Wim to grow up. And she was still waiting. Uncle Wim had asked Kobi when she was going to interview him.
Kobi liked that kind of homework, and did a terrific report that Ms. Carlson praised, especially for the marginal illustrations.
Uncle Wim was looking at Kobi, his eyebrows going on a whole journey of their own. “Kobi, you’re not forgetting about some of your homework, are you?”
“I have an excellent memory,” she said. That was not a lie.
“Well, I think you’d both better have desks.”
“But you can’t afford two desks,” Kobi said. If he could afford desks, why didn’t he have dining room furniture or comfortable chairs for the living room?
“If something really needs to be done,” Uncle Wim said, “there’s usually a way to do it.”
“Grandmamma could buy our desks,” Kobi said. After all, it was Grandmamma who’d left them here.
“I don’t need Mom’s help,” Uncle Wim said coolly.
“Did the worms cost a lot?” Kobi asked.
Uncle Wim’s eyebrows twitched and he shook his head.
“Is Grandmamma famous?” Brook asked.
Uncle Wim looked perplexed.
“Sally said Grandmamma was famous in a way,” Kobi said.
Uncle Wim sighed. “Time for you girls to take your baths and get to bed. Morning comes early.”
Awhile later, as Kobi settled into warm water up to her chin, she watched the beautiful vine and beetles and butterflies vanish. The water turned a murky green and left a ring. She had to scrub with soap to get the outlines of some of the flowers and insects off her skin.
She felt sad, washing away Ms. Hancock’s lovely work, but Sally said Ms. H
ancock would want her to. To be alive was to change, Ms. Hancock taught her students. And to create art that lasted only a little while reminded people to eat soup while it was hot.
Kobi kind of got it. Everything was changing. She hadn’t seen Grandmamma for almost a month. She no longer expected to glance up and see Mademoiselle. Brook was turning into a different person. Kobi was expected to make friends and do math worksheets.
And she was becoming an awful liar.
THIRTEEN
THE next morning, rain came out of the sky as if a giant bucket were being dumped on the neighborhood. The wipers whipped from side to side. Uncle Wim said this was good, because central Iowa needed rain. But they were delayed because a traffic light was out. When Uncle Wim pulled under the overhang of Horace Mann Elementary, the silence boomed.
The first bell had rung, so Kobi hurried to her locker, then into the classroom and to her desk. The room was already quiet. Instead of walking around looking at math worksheets laid out on desks, Ms. Carlson was saying to fold them once vertically, then write their names and the date at the top and pass them to the front of the room. The worksheets would go in each student’s folder for the upcoming parent-teacher conferences.
“Why?” Kobi whispered to Alejandro.
He shrugged. “What she said yesterday,” he whispered.
Yesterday Kobi had been thinking about her painted arm during math.
She got out her worksheet. At a glance, it looked normal. Columns of numbers in straight rows with lines under them, plus signs, minus signs, times signs (she especially liked the X and used it a lot), equals signs, and then a label for whatever thing was being talked about in the word problem. Last night there had been a word problem about vegetables. Tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers were being planted in rows. She’d gone to the garden and used Sally’s plants as models. She’d drawn pictures on the back of the worksheet. The glossy eggplants were an amazing shade of purple. She had thought about coloring her drawing, but decided that was babyish.
She thought her worksheet looked nice. But was Ms. Carlson really going to read it? What would Uncle Wim say when he saw drawings of eggplants on her math worksheet? She didn’t want him to know she was a poor student. It would make him feel bad. She riffled through the magic words that so far had no uses.
27 Magic Words Page 7