Art & Soul (9 page)

W
hen I was
eleven years old, I came to visit Dad during the summer. One of the first days there, he took me out to Fisherman’s Creek. We rented a wooden boat from the dock and sat in the middle of the creek all day long, baking in the sun. Our fishing hooks sat at the bottom of the water, no fish seeming interested at all in being caught. Dad bought himself a six-pack of cold beer and me a six-pack of iced root beer.

He scolded me for not wanting to put real worms on our hooks, saying that the plastic worms didn’t ever work, but Mom told me that we were supposed to respect nature. She said if we didn’t need it to eat, then we shouldn’t harm it.

We sat chugging our beers and getting bad sunburns.

The silence of the creek was something I always remembered. How we hardly moved in our boat, how the water only waved every now and then when a bird dipped in looking for a quick meal. After five hours of sweat, my fishing rod moved, and Dad jumped to my aid, helping me reel in the biggest catch of my life. “Pull!” he ordered, and I did. I pulled, pulled, and pulled some more.

The moment of truth came when the fish emerged from the depths of the water and we laughed. We laughed so hard I thought my stomach was going to explode and root beer would come out of my nose. Turned out, my fish was less of a fish and more of a big hiking boot. When Dad laughed, I laughed. Dad leaned against the side of the boat. “Dinner might be a little leathery tonight, Levi.” We kept laughing, me clutching my gut and him chuckling at my howls.

That was the last time we’d laughed together. It was the last time we were happy together.

I wondered what had happened.

What had changed and made him stop loving me?

Now the closest I got to hearing him laugh with me was when he watched old black and white comedies on television in the living room each night. He never asked me to join him, and I could tell he was a bit annoyed when I sat with him. So, I chose to sit in the foyer each night, around the corner so he couldn’t hear or see me. When he would laugh, I would laugh.

It almost felt like we were recreating a father-son relationship that was lost in time and space.

I’d never loved black and white comedies so much in my life.

p
opular
| adjective |
pop
·u·lar | \ˈpä-pyə-lər\

liked or enjoyed by many people.

suitable to the majority.

frequently encountered or widely accepted.

I didn’t know how to fit in with the popular kids. I sat at their lunch tables, listened to their talk about parties, and tried my best to always smile, but the truth was we didn’t have anything in common. They came from families who had a lot of money and lived lives of luxury. I came from a cabin in the woods. They all played sports and had other after school activities. I had my mom and wasn’t allowed to join any clubs outside of the forest. I only had the violin, and Mom taught me the lessons.

None of these guys played any instruments, and even though the girls said it was sexy that I played the violin, they never went into deep conversations about the best violinists or the interesting idea of mixing classical sounds with modern music.

They mostly talked about sex, drinking, and the next party.

High school annoyed me. Since I’d arrived here I’d been labeled and tossed into a box due to characteristics that were none of my doing. I was placed with a group who had no desire to know me because they were only concerned with the outside. On the outside I fit. On the inside, I was an abnormality.

It was kind of disturbing how they all sort of slept and hooked up with each other like it was normal. Stacy dated Brian who made out with Jessica who had sex with Jason who sucked Victoria’s toes, who gave Eric a blow job after he slept with Stacy who was still dating Brian. It was like a weird, tangled up inbreeding group that only kept it in the family.

Plus, based on the definition of popular, these people were the exact opposite of the meaning. They were mean just for the hell of it. They were such a close-knit group compared to the majority of the school. Sure, they all loved each other, but the majority of the people at Mayfair Heights high school hated their guts.

unpopular
| adjective
 | un·pop·u·lar | \ˌən-ˈpä-pyə-lər\

not popular: viewed or received unfavorably by the public.

When I looked across the cafeteria room, I always noticed Aria and Simon laughing with one another. Aria didn’t smile often, and her laughs were few and far between, but her friend had a way of bringing them out of her.

I’d been thinking about her laugh since the morning we’d stood in the forest talking about oxymorons, cancer, and other nonsensical things.

I liked that morning so much more than sex talk, drinking, and parties.

I liked nature, and deer, and Aria Watson—who was a girl who was somehow happy and sad all at once.

Sometimes we would lock eyes across the room and we wouldn’t look away. It was a full-blown staring contest.
Who will look away first
?

I never lost. She always turned away.

O
ne night at 3
:45 A.M. my cell phone started ringing. I groaned, reaching across my bed to answer it.

“Hello?” I drowsily said, my voice cracking.

“I have this idea that I want to run by you. I’ve been thinking about opening a record store in town and I want you to come home and run it with me. It can be our thing, Levi. We can have all of the best vinyl tracks and stuff. I bet there’s an old broken down warehouse or something we could use. And—”

She sounded so distant through the phone—so far away from reality. I’d wished the sound wasn’t familiar. But it was those same sounds and those same thoughts that pushed me away from Alabama to Wisconsin.

“Mom. It’s almost four in the morning.”

“Oh. Were you sleeping? I’m online now looking up to see if there are any abandoned shops in town. I even been making logos and stuff on Photoshop that we could use for the store. What do you think about blue and fuchsia? We need to come up with a name for the place. I know the people in town are always talking about how I’m a failure and won’t be successful—”

“Nobody in town thinks that, Ma.”

“I know what these people think, Levi. I can always hear them. Oh! And I recorded a new song. Do you want to hear it?”

She didn’t give me a chance to reply that I had school the next morning. She kept talking and talking. I placed the phone down on my stomach after an hour of listening to her nonsense gibberish talks, and I closed my eyes. I bet she wasn’t taking her medicine anymore.

Her late night phone call was the exact reminder I needed to why I decided to come stay with Dad instead of with her for the year.

I needed the break from her.

I
’d missed
school for a week due to morning sickness and feeling like complete garbage. After finally returning to school on Thursday, I asked my history teacher, Mr. Fields, for the bathroom pass after thirty minutes of him talking about boring things that happened hundreds of years ago. I’d been having bad heartburn from the taco bar lunch. It felt like someone was reaching into me and lighting my insides on fire while they proceeded to put my heart in a chokehold. I knew if I sat in class and had to listen to Mr. Fields’ monotone voice speak about Napoleon for one more minute I would probably pass out from boredom.

Walking down the halls, I saw my locker was once again covered with something. This time it was pregnancy pamphlets and condoms. I had to admit it was a great warning, but it was just a tad bit late.

“I hate my life,” I muttered to myself, taking off the garbage.

“High school sucks.”

I turned around to see Abigail standing inches away from me. Everyone in school called her Awkward Abigail because she was pretty much a social outcast. I knew that I too was an outcast, but as far as weirdos went, Abigail was at the top of the line.

She wore wind pants each day with an old sweatshirt that had a picture of Pink Floyd on it. Her feet were always in a pair of high heels that looked very painful. Whenever she walked, she walked hastily, which led to her making a swishing sound as her wind pants rubbed against one another. Her high heels clicked, her swishy pants swished. If she wasn’t speed walking through the hallways in a hurry to get to her next class, she was quoting some random person. Her eyebrows and hair looked bleached blond, and she was awfully pale, too. She didn’t believe in personal space, and I knew this firsthand because she was currently helping me take the condoms off of my locker, pretty much breathing down my neck.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It does.”

“Don’t let them get to you, though. It’s not a forever thing. ‘
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
’ You know who said that? Marcus Aurelius said that.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“
Google
, Aria. The internet is swirling with people just telling you stuff that you didn’t know. Don’t take it all in, though. A lot of it is just government propaganda trying to scare you shitless so they can steal your money.” And with that she was off, swishing away.

I didn’t know Awkward Abigail cursed.

T
hursday afternoons were
my new least favorite thing. Mom wanted to know that I was okay, but she wasn’t sure how to get me to open up to her. I wasn’t planning to open up to her, so maybe that was part of the problem. Since I wouldn’t talk to her about the incident that led to the pregnancy, she believed I should at least talk to someone.

Dad was more into the pretend-Aria-doesn’t-exist parenting tactic.

I wished Mom was a little more like him.

Dr. Ward’s name reminded me of an asylum ward. Three of the walls in his office were bright white and the last one, baby blue. His furniture was all made out of polished dark wood, except for the powder blue couch against one of the walls, the blue candy bowl filled with jelly beans, and the blue pens that lay perfectly straight on his desk. I bet he learned that in psychology 101, the use of colors. Blue was supposedly a calming color that many often used to make people feel at peace, comfortable.

Personally, it reminded me of Picasso’s Blue Period, which was a pretty depressing time period for him, though some of his greatest masterpieces came from that dark place.

Another oxymoron: Picasso’s Blue Period of Brilliance.

“What’s on your mind, Aria?” Dr. Ward asked in his very therapist-toned voice. He was old, yet somehow still young, probably in his early thirties. Old enough to be a therapist, but young enough to still seem unworthy. I didn’t have a clue why Mom had picked him to try to crack into my brain. Dr. Ward didn’t talk much, but when he did, he was always asking me about my thoughts, my feelings, and my current state of being.

“Picasso,” I said, reaching for the jelly beans in his blue bowl.

“Picasso?” he questioned, a hitch in his voice.

“During 1901, Picasso went through a blue phase. He only used blues and a few shades of green in his paintings. It’s said that during those times he was highly depressed, but he also made some of his best work during that period.
The Old Guitarist
, for example, is one of my all time favorite paintings. It’s strange that during the darkest times of his life he created some of his best masterpieces.”

“Hmm,” he hummed, tapping one of the many blue pens against his lips. “And what made you think of Picasso right now?”

“Your office.”

“My office?”

“Yes. It’s depressing and stuffy.”

“Do you think it’s because of the actual room, or because of your current state of mind?”

I didn’t answer; I wasn’t sure what the answer was.

Maybe I was going through my own blue period.

“Do you feel depressed, Aria?”

I didn’t reply. I played the angsty teenager role. He didn’t seem to mind.

“
H
ow was the meeting
?” Mom asked me, driving away from Dr. Ward’s office.

“Great,” I lied. “He’s really great.”

“Good.” She smiled, nodding. “Good, good, good. I’m glad you have someone to talk to.”

Yeah, totally.

A
fter my therapy appointment
, Mom had to go back to the hospital and Dad was working late, so it was my responsibility to grab Grace and KitKat from our neighbor’s house and make sure they had dinner. Boiled hotdogs and fries were as fancy as I was getting tonight, and the two of them didn’t seem to mind at all. There was nothing my two sisters loved more than fries and whatever the heck a hotdog was made of.

We sat at the table eating together, and Grace kept staring down at my stomach. “You’re really getting fat,” she said, stuffing her mouth with her hotdog, which was drowning in ketchup.

“Shut up, Grace.”

“You should think about going on a diet. Otherwise you’ll have a two hundred pound baby. Mrs. Thompson’s baby was pretty fat.”

“No one cares about Mrs. Thompson’s baby.”

“That’s not nice,” she hollered, ketchup landing on her colorful shirt. Grace’s outfits always looked like she’d walked through a Skittles factory and swum in rainbows. From colored bracelets to rainbow socks, you would think she would be as sweet and bright as her clothing. Not so much. “You’re not really nice anymore.”

“Well, calling your sister fat isn’t that nice either.”

“You’re so grumpy.”

I’m just tired.
“Just eat your food, twerp.”

“So does your baby have a dad?” Grace asked, apparently not in the mood to give me a break.

“Grace…” The tone of my voice had an edge to it, warning her not to continue.

“He has a right to know probably that his girlfriend is knocked up with his baby.”

She had this crazy idea that only people who were married or at least dating could get pregnant.
If only that were true.
I refused to reply to her statement. Instead, I picked and stabbed the food on my plate.

“I bet your baby’s going to come out and his face is going to look like a butt. And it’s going to be all like this.” She made the ugliest face known to mankind, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

I also cried.

Emotional freaking rollercoaster.