“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” Trixie cried, bounding into Charlotte’s room.
“What?” Charlotte groaned.
“Wake up!” Trixie repeated, throwing open the curtains. Flaxen rays of sun flooded the room, blinded Charlotte, made her pull her comforter up over her head. “It’s the first day of class! Get up!”
“No!” Charlotte whined.
“Yes!” She whisked the comforter off of the bed like a magician pulling a tablecloth out from underneath a place setting. “Oh…you sleep without pants? Good to know.”
“Trixie, get the hell out of my room.”
“And let you be late for…er…” there was a brief shuffling sound in which Trixie grabbed Charlotte’s schedule off of her nightstand, “…Art? Wow, I didn’t know you were an artist!”
“I’m not,” Charlotte yawned grouchily, “but my therapist thinks painting might be therapeutic for me. Now seriously, leave.”
“Really, Char, it could be worse. I have Chemistry first period. You get to start off easy.” She frowned as she skimmed the rest of Charlotte’s schedule. “Oh, hey, we both have Physical Education fourth hour! …And Algebra seventh hour! Ugh, I hate math.” She peered at Charlotte form overtop the paper. “You gonna get up now? Or am I gonna have to make you?”
Charlotte didn’t respond.
“Alright, I’ll make you.” Trixie grabbed Charlotte’s size nine feet and gave them a firm tug, expecting Charlotte to slide off the bed, but Charlotte grabbed on to the top of the mattress and clung. She was stronger than Trixie was and after a few seconds of futile pulling, Trixie gave up with an air of great exasperation.
“Whatever!” she sighed, hands raised like a convict held at gunpoint, before she stormed out of the room.
“Shit,” Charlotte muttered into her pillow. She slowly rose from the tangle of sheets like a mummy rising from a tomb, hair in a wild state of disarray and matted with sweat to the back of her neck, black Jack Daniels tee shirt twisted around her torso. A white line of crusted drool ran from the corner of her puffy pink lips to her upturned chin. Sleep had not done her well.
She padded over to the bathroom across the hall, splashed some water on her face, brushed her teeth, yanked a brush through her hair. According to the schedule, class began at 8:30, giving her…eight minutes to get ready. She pulled a pair of skinny jeans up over her lacy white panties, stuffed her feet into a pair of Converse, grabbed her bag, and left.
The Art room was a lofty, airy studio, bright with track lighting and lined with rows and rows of easels and tables. Charlotte was the last one in the room and was forced to sit in the back right corner next to a maxi dress-wearing girl who introduced herself as Harmony Abbott.
“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” she chirped, staring over Charlotte’s head and out the window. “Just beautiful.”
Charlotte turned to look out the window and noticed a large fly caught in the screen. Its wing was bent and one of its legs had been snapped off. “Yeah, sure.”
“Alright, class!” said a crisp voice from the front of the room. “I’m Mrs. Elliot, and welcome to Art.”
Charlotte looked up and double taked. She had expected the art teacher to be a Molly Weasley type, a dumpy old woman with kind eyes and an apron smudged with paint, but Mrs. Elliot was anything but. Though she had to be about fifty, her honey blonde hair (and you could just tell, somehow, that it had never been colored) was perfect and without a single strand of gray, clipped back in a low bun. There was hardly a wrinkle on her tanned skin, and her linen pant suit was crisp and perfectly tailored.
“Today, we will be doing self portraits in charcoal.” She walked between the rows, handing everyone large drawing pads to set up on their easels. “You will be given forty-five minutes to finish. Enjoy.”
“Oh, isn’t this great?” Harmony sighed happily, grabbing a stick of charcoal from the tray between their easels.
“Er…what is?” Charlotte grabbed a stick, too, and turned it over in her hands, wondering how to use it.
“This!” Harmony cried, gesturing to everything. She drew a bold line down the center of her paper. “It’s wonderful!”
“Uh, yeah, I guess.” Charlotte drew a lumpy oval for her head and frowned.
“So what’s your talent?”
“Piano,” she said dryly, with a heavy sigh, for she had just drawn one eye and then the other and they looked nothing alike.
“That’s so awesome! I play guitar and I love to draw and express myself,” Harmony prattled on, a low incessant buzz in Charlotte’s ear, similar to a mosquito. In that moment, Charlotte really considered quitting therapy (and then art class), because there was nothing calm or relaxing about this at all.
“Uh huh,” she muttered.
“…And I have a bunny and her name is Marigold but I call her Mary, or Goldie, depending on my mood…”
Charlotte drew a quirked line for the mouth, pressing down so hard that the charcoal snapped in half. “Shit.”
Harmony stepped back for a moment to admire her drawing. It looked a lot like a flower - no, it was a flower. “Done!”
“Er…Har? This is a self portrait -”
“And this is how I see myself,” she said simply. “A flower. A piece of the Earth, growing from the ground, swaying in the breeze, providing for the insects…”
“It could be worse,” Trixie had said, frowning at Charlotte’s schedule, “you get to start off easy.”
Yeah, right.
***
Meanwhile, in Chemistry, Trixie turned to her lab partner and frowned. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“Not at all,” he replied. His name was Evan and while he was kind of adorable, he was dumber than horse shit.
“Me either. Damn. I thought if I didn’t have a clue, maybe my partner would.”
“This is bullshit,” Evan grumbled, slamming his book shut. “Giving us an experiment on the first day.”
“Well, we are supposed to be geniuses,” Trixie reminded him, waving a hand to indicate the rest of the room, where students were bent over test tubes, scribbling equations in varying degrees of difficulty, and doing other science-type things with which Trixie was so unfamiliar.
“We’re not, though! I don’t know about you, but I got in for writing! I can‘t believe they put the two bad people with each other -”
“I got in for river dancing,” Trixie lied dryly, “not science, but do you see me complaining? So shut the hell up and pass me the instructions.” She snatched the paper out of his hands and skimmed it. “Okay, it seems we take two drops of this stuff -” she dunked the dropper into a beaker of something blue and squeezed the top, drawing in the mysterious liquid, “- and put it into this stuff.” She did as was instructed and immediately shut her eyes tightly. When nothing exploded, she took it as a good sign and handed Evan the instructions. “Now you try!”
He sighed heavily. “Trixie, you can stick that paper where the sun doesn’t shine!”
“Wow, who took a piss in your Cheerios?” She frowned. “Well, I’m not gonna do all the work.”
“Well, I’m not gonna do any work.”
“Then you can fail, for all I care!”
“Hey, when do we get out of here?”
“Nine fifteen.”
“Great, five minutes left.”
“Five minutes left and you haven’t done shit the other forty!”
“Well, why start now?”
“Because!” Trixie wailed, stomping her foot.
“Forget it, Trixie. Look, I have an idea.” He pulled his book towards him and crossed his arms over top of it. “I go to sleep -” he laid his head in his arms and when he next spoke, his voice was muffled, “- and you do the experiment.”
She scowled. “Do you want me to dump this on your head? And I’m not talking about the head on your shoulders.”
“Mmmmph,” he muttered.
“Time to clean up!” Mr. Swanson called.
“Okay, now I have an idea. You clean up -” she jerked the book out from under his arms and his forehead banged against the table. “- while I sleep.”
“Hey!” he yelped angrily, rubbing his wound. “What makes you think I’m gonna -”
Just then, the bell rang, and Trixie slung her bag up onto her shoulder and said, while walking out the door, “Oops, sorry, Evan. I have to go.”
Her second class of the day was photography, and she was highly anticipating it. After all, maybe taking pictures was her true talent. How hard could it be? You just point the camera and click!
The photography studio was huge, and everywhere she turned her head, she found something new to marvel: the backdrops propped up against the wall…the table full of more cameras than Trixie had ever seen at one time before, with everything from ancient Polaroids to sleek silver Nikons to chunky black SLRs…the many tall lights standing in the corner. The walls were concrete, dank and gray, like those of a basement or cellar, but the ceiling was completely glass, to (Trixie was guessing) let in as much natural light as possible. Everything had been pushed up against the walls to leave a clear space in the center, where a small square of desks was located.
“Come in, come in,” a twenty-something woman with a brunette bob said crisply, ushering them forward. Trixie hurriedly slid into a seat and let her bag clunk down on the desk.
“Welcome to Photography,” the woman said. “I’m Hollis Vanderbilt and I expect you to refer to me as such.
“You are here because you all share the same passion. You are here because you strive to capture the world in a frame. You are here because you want to express your feelings with a camera similar to how a poet would do with words. And I am here to teach you.”
Goosebumps pricked up on Trixie’s skin that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. This place was seriously cool.
“I’m sure you all brought portfolios -” students around Trixie began pulling folders out from in between stacks of books, and Trixie stared blankly ahead, “- but you won’t be needing them. I don’t want to see your work. This class is about improving, and anything you’ve done up until this point is unimportant.”
They returned their folders, looking slightly crestfallen, but Trixie sighed with relief.
“But your work has not been a waste. Your practice has obviously made you decent enough to get in this school, and now it’s time for me to make you even better.” She smiled for the first time, her lipsticky lips pulling away from her slightly coffee-stained teeth. “Let’s begin. Today, we’re going to talk about the history of photography. Take notes.”
Trixie pulled out her notebook and widened her eyes, shocked at herself. Obeying a teacher? Paying attention in class? Man, what kind of school was this?
***
It was towards the end of Calculus, and Carl was finally ready to make the decision he’d been agonizing over all class period.
His worst fear was blending in; he’d gotten his ears pierced and his forearm permanently inked partly for that reason (though the piercings were also part of a drunken dare during one of Frankie’s antics, and the tattoo was also a homage to Oscar). And at a school where students were shipped in from all parts of the country, one couldn’t just look differently in order to stand out, one had to act differently.
However, acting out in class instead of being his normal dark, brooding self would ultimately turn Carl into the thing he hated most: those assholes commonly referred to as “class clowns.” Might as well call them “ass clowns.” But that didn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.
Anyways, Carl realized that he also had to test the waters, see which teachers he could mess with and which teachers he couldn’t. Acting out would help establish this and if he thought of it as “collecting data” instead of “being a douche,” then…maybe it wouldn’t be quite so bad.
Besides, you never do anything spontaneous, said a small voice in his brain, a voice that sounded a lot like Frankie’s.
Shut up, brain! Carl thought back and then angrily sighed. Great, now he was talking to his internal organs, and moreover, they were actually answering him. It was this more than anything that made him raise his hand into the air.
“Yes, Mr. Foster?” Coach Miller asked, interlocking her fingers on top of her desk.
“I was just wondering why you’re called Coach Miller if you teach math.”
“Because I also teach P.E.”
“Why didn’t they hire two separate teachers?”
“There were two separate teachers, but the old Calculus teacher quit her job. I’m good with math so they gave the job to me.”
“But why didn’t they hire another Calculus teacher?”
Coach Miller sighed nasally, and Carl used this pause to look around. Some people in the class looked annoyed, while others (mostly female) looked amused, but most everyone seemed to be looking at him. The experiment was having its desired effect.
“I guess it was easier to just hire me instead of having to interview a bunch of people.”
“But should it really be about what’s easiest? Or about what’s best for the students?”
Coach Miller closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath (to calm herself, Carl was assuming), and opened her mouth to reply, but the bell rang and students began to gather their things and leave the room. A few girls, though, had paused to cast one last intrigued glance in his direction, and Carl felt compelled to do something more.
“Byeeee, Coach Miller!” Carl singsonged, slinging the strap of his messenger bag over his shoulder, and he heard giggles behind him as he exited.
“Good bye, Mr. Foster,” Coach Miller responded and he faintly heard the sound of a desk drawer being opened followed by rattling, as though she had just extracted a bottle of Tylenol.
So, girls liked “class clowns.” Well, Carl hated being one. He was forcing his way through the crowded hallway when he heard someone call his name.
“Hey! Carl!”
He turned around and saw Frankie standing in the middle of the hallway, disrupting traffic, with his hands around mouth to amplify his voice. Now he knew how to make an impression.
“What?”
“What class do you have now?”
“Free period!” Carl yelled back, wondering why they weren’t getting any closer to each other and instead were shouting over peoples’ heads.
“Hey, me too! Wanna walk to the house with me?”
“No!” Grinning, Carl pivoted on the heel of his Converse high top and began to walk in the other direction.
“You son of a bitch!” Frankie cried, charging after Carl, pushing through the annoyed people.
“Oh, shit!” Carl said, breaking into a run. They burst through the double doors, streaked across the campus, slipping and sliding in the grass made wet by state-of-the-art sprinkler systems, then past a Starbucks where hipsters frowned out the window at them for disrupting their reading time.
When they reached house ten, Carl stumbled through the front door and collapsed onto the couch face-first, back rising and falling with each heaving breath, limbs dangling limply over the edge.
“I-I beat you,” he managed to say through a face full of pillow.
“This time.” Frankie sank heavily into the brown leather recliner. “When I catch my breath, I’m gonna…I’m gonna kick your ass.”
“Man, we’re in horrible shape.” Carl pushed himself upward and rubbed at the stitch in his side.
“Speak – speak for yourself,” Frankie said, flexing his arm with a weak smile. They locked eyes and then burst into laughter.
“Whatever, man. You’re full of shit.” Carl sank back into the couch, enjoying the A/C, and decided that, standing out or not, he was just gonna have fun. And if that meant making a complete ass out of himself…then, well, at least he still wouldn’t look as stupid as Frankie.