Part 17 (1/2)
”I feel the blue 4th aura of a goodly ghost here. It has touched you.”
I gulped, and tried to hide the fact that my heart thundered like the hooves of a team of Clydesdales at a trot. I hadn't allowed myself to so much as think about my night yet.
”Have you read the story I gave you?” she asked.
”No, not yet. I'm sorry.”
”Soon,” she said, thoughtfully. ”You should. Imperative.”
Then, as quickly as she'd honed in on me, Yazzie moved on, handing out the final exams as though she were a flower girl at a wedding, laying rose petals upon the floor. I was grateful for the silence that fell over the room, because it meant I didn't have to notice my former friends gossiping about me. Unfortunately, the test was a Yazzie creation, and as such it was very easy, with no right or wrong answers. Too easy. We all finished in about fifteen minutes, leaving us with nearly two hours to kill. Yazzie informed us that we'd be spending cla.s.s in the Lucero Library on the other side of campus, researching photorealism.
”I want you to think about the controversy this style ignited. People began to paint from photographs, with technical prowess, and their paintings looked like photographs, but weren't photographs,” she said, pacing back and forth at the front of the room. ”Ask yourself, is this art? The people in the high art world in Europe and the States did not think so at the time. They felt that art had to be purely imaginational, spiritual, that it had to come from within and be expressed in a highly stylized and original way. The question is one of great significance to a world steeped in science and technology, though, isn't it? If a thing looks like a photograph, and serves the same purpose as a photograph, but came into being through the attention and love of an artist who saw something in it that might not have been seen before, is it a photograph? Is it a painting? What is it? And does it matter? And aren't both photographs and paintings both just approximations of life? Who is to say one is art and the other is not? Who is to say one is real and the other is not? Who, but the creator, can make such determinations?”
I thought about this, and was struck by the parallel with Demetrio. He looked like a human. He felt like a human. And yet he wasn't a human. Or was he? Was he a spiritual work of art, somehow, or something? Were things always a matter of perspective? As Yazzie spoke, she watched me, and only me. I knew she meant this lecture for me, for this reason. I didn't know how I knew this, but I knew it - just as I knew that she knew things the way I did now. With a start, I realized Yazzie wasn't actually as crazy as everyone thought.
We gathered our things, and began to walk across the cold campus toward the spectacular structure that was Coronado Prep's Lucero Library. It was better endowed, as libraries go, than many college facilities. Coronado Prep had ridiculous amounts of money floating around. I braced against the cold wind, and tried to get Kelsey onto a new topic.
”Have you picked a dress for the dance yet?” I asked her, ignoring the group of girls who laughed at me from across a courtyard, and the other group of girls who gave me a fist-pump and shouted ”team Maria all the way!” Great. I was a team now, all on my own.
”Nah,” she said. ”I was hoping maybe we could hit the mall next weekend, or sometime over break. If you're still going.”
Right. I'd forgotten that when I broke up with Logan I forfeited my rights to the dance.
”How about we go stag?” she asked. ”We can go as a group, me, you, Victoria and Thomas.”
”Sure. That's a good idea. I'm a.s.suming you'll go for black?” I tried to smile as though I hadn't a care in the world.
”Dunno.”
”You should try blue,” I told her, as a flock of crows alighted from a branch in a tree above us, one of them swooping so close we ducked. ”Or turquoise. It would really set off your eyes.”
Kelsey looked at me now, hard, at the door to the library. ”What's wrong with you today?” she asked me. ”I mean, besides all this c.r.a.p with Logan on the Internet.”
”What? Nothing. Why?” I grabbed the handle to the door, and held it open for her to pa.s.s. She didn't budge.
”You don't seem like yourself. You are so not the girl who says 'wear blue to set off your azure eyes.'”
”That's not what I said, exactly.”
”Close enough. Out with it. What's eating you?”
”C'mon. It's freezing out here. Continue your inquiry inside.”
”Fine.” Kelsey stomped past me, unsatisfied with my answer.
Members of the cla.s.s paired and grouped up, or went off alone, to find information. To my dismay, I saw Logan here, too, with his calculus cla.s.s. He sat with a group of kids and they all looked at me when I walked in, and burst out laughing.
”Morons,” said Kelsey, putting a protective arm around me.
”What are they saying, you think?”
”It's all about Demetrio. Logan put up photos of prisoners and thugs and various other creepy men with metal teeth that he randomly found, and said you're dating them. His team is saying you're slumming it with a hoodlum and that you're under his spell because you like drugs.”
”What?”
”Logan's pretending he wants to help you, but it's all about how mentally unstable you are and how you're a danger to the school now that you're bringing gang members on campus.”
I felt my eyes fill with tears. I tried to avoid everyone's gaze as Kelsey and I settled in at a table on the north side of the building, near the windows that faced out to the expansive playing fields. The fields were covered in snow at the moment, flanked by stark, hibernating deciduous trees, and their perkier - and to my eyes at this moment, arrogant - evergreen cousins.
”Me, I like photorealism,” I said dismally as I plopped down in my chair across the table from her. My eyes strayed across the field, in hopes of enticing Kelsey to follow my gaze. It did not work. She continued to stare at me, interrogation-style.
”Did you kiss him?”
”No.”
”Lame,” she said.
”He never wants to.”
”Gay?”
”Negative. I asked.”
”Maria.” Still staring.
”What are you hiding? You won't even look at me.”
I finally met her eyes with mine, and sighed, hoping she'd notice how weary and unhappy she was making me.
”He told me a lot,” I said, sincerely, in a half-whisper. ”I'm dying to tell you. But he also told me he'd kill me if I told anybody.”
She looked hurt and shrugged, and totally missed my subliminal messaging technique. ”Okay. I'm used to it. He'll just be the new guy who comes between us, is that it?”
”It's not that I don't want to tell you, Kelsey. I do. I want to so badly it hurts. But I can't.”
”I understand,” she said, seeming to be hurt by my words.
”Don't take it the wrong way. Please?”
The good thing about Kelsey was that she had a singular ability to consider things before reacting to them. This was one of those times. ”Can I think about this a while?” she asked me.
”Of course.”
”Okay.”
I turned my eyes to the playing fields once more, hoping to calm my brain down enough to slip into a cozy denial once more, but this was not to be, because tied to one of the aforementioned deciduous trees, a tree that moments ago had been reaching in solitary determination to the sky, was a small black dog.
Buddy.