Permanent Adhesives (14 page)

“That’s awesome,” I said, taking in what I was looking at. On the left-hand side of the brick wall, a bunch of giant eyeballs were painted. They were surrounded by various colors making them look like eyeballs that belonged to monsters or alien like creatures. To the right of the eyeballs was a giant banana guy. It looked like a man wearing a banana costume while holding a jumbo sized boom box on his shoulder. It was huge. It might have been one of the coolest things I’d ever seen.

“Maybe we’ll work up to something like this,” Elias said, studying the painted brick wall.

“These are awesome.”

“They are, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, somebody just came out here and did this?”

“Yeah, both of them have stuff all over the city.”

“What is this? Is this considered, what?”

“It’s street art.”

“Are they allowed to do this?”

“They mighta got permission. Sometimes some artists do, but usually they find a good spot to stick their art and put it up.”

“That is so cool. They don’t get caught or in trouble?”

“You just have to be careful not to get caught, and they usually remain pretty anoma, uh, anoma, ammony, you what I’m trying to say.”

I nodded. My auto correct filled in
anonymous
.

After taking in the eyeballs and banana, we went to Gimmieyourbucks Coffee. I was more than happy to go inside—my ears were starting to hurt from the cold wind that was rudely slapping into them.

“Thanks for everything,” I said, as we sipped our ultra strong coffee. I was never going to fall asleep.

Elias nodded in response. I smiled, and we eventually began talking about what we really were meeting up for—our English project.

It was a little warmer out, so for lunch we just went to the grocery store behind our school and went to the side lawn to eat it. I was actually attempting a handstand. Kate was doing cartwheels. Yes, I’m aware how old we were, but sometimes, well, many times, we had outbursts of weirdness.

“Elias,” Kate yelled across the lawn at Elias, who was walking down the sidewalk that ran along the street.

He looked up, and Kate waved him over. “Why didn’t he eat with us yesterday?” Kate asked me.

“I forgot to ask him.”

“Geez, you’re bad in pursuing the boy you like, and did you forget to invite him today?”

“No, he had to meet up with somebody, and I wouldn’t say pursuing necessarily.”

“Was it a tutoring session? I’ve heard about those,” Kate said, using her fingers as quotation marks around tutoring. “I might have to utilize them one day.”

Elias walked up and gave us all a wave. Roberto said
hey
, and Reynaldo and Dean waved back, and Brian grunted. Even though he didn’t have our lunch period he was there again. On some days, it was just Kate, Roberto, and me for lunch, but then on many days the cast varied and included a number of the club members. Kate did another cartwheel.

“Seven,” Brian called out.

“Nah,” Reynaldo said. “That was more like a six.”

Kate stood up with her hands on her hips. “I’d like to see you try.”

“Guys don’t do cartwheels,” Reynaldo said.

“Says who?” Kate asked.

“Says me,” Reynaldo responded, pointing a thumb at his chest.

“What about handstands then?” I asked, challenging him.

“Okay, fine,” Reynaldo said, getting up off the crunchy lawn. He walked away from the group a bit, tossed his hands on the ground, and pretty much collapsed in on himself.

Kate started cracking up. Well, we all did.

“How can you have such little arm strength?” Kate asked.

Elias threw his bag on the ground and sat down next to Kate. He had a huge grin on his face.

“Okay, Bickler,” Reynaldo said. “If you think it’s so funny let me see you try.”

Elias scratched the back of his neck and did not respond.

“Just what I thought.”

“Since when did you get all big and tough?” Kate asked Reynaldo. She then looked over at me. “These guys really are nerds. They’re challenging each other to handstands and acting like they’re macho cuz of it.”

Elias let out a deep breath, unzipped his jacket, and shrugged it off to the ground behind him. He got up, walked a few feet from where we were sitting on the grass, lunged forward, tossed his hands on the ground, and kicked his legs up into the perfect handstand.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Kate shouted.

Roberto clapped, a smile crept across Dean’s face, and Reynaldo shook his head. Brian looked pretty indifferent. Elias’ tee-shirt fell down dropping to his armpits. He quickly kicked his legs to the ground and pulled down his tee-shirt.

“Holy crap Elias,” Kate said. “You got some nice abs.” Elias’ face quickly turned red, and he headed for his jacket.

“I want to see them again,” Kate said, getting up and grabbing for his shirt. Elias ran backwards.

“Come here hotness,” Kate yelled, chasing him in a circle.

Elias got away and sat on the ground next to me.

“I bet you look great without your clothes on. Can I paint you naked?” Kate had this thing for painting people in the nude, meaning she loved it. She was planning on going to art school, so she could fully focus on painting and drawing naked people. I originally met Kate and Roberto in art class, but when we did figure drawing in class, the people always had their clothes on. Kate was constantly disappointed by this, so a time or two she had dragged me to an outside figure drawing class where she could get her naked person fix.

“No,” Elias said with his face a brilliant red.

“Stop being a perv Kate,” Roberto said. “We don’t need to hear about your naked person fantasies. It’s kinda disturbing.”

“You can paint me naked,” Brian said, volunteering himself.

“Really?” Kate said with a huge smile.

Brian nodded, raising his eyebrows up and down.

“It’s on.”

“Oh God,” Dean said, getting up. “I’m leaving.”

“That is one painting I don’t want to see,” Roberto said, pretending to dry heave. I was with Roberto on that one. One of Elias though…might not have been so bad.

Elias reached in his bag and pulled out a freezer bag full of Sasha Santiago stickers. I divided them up amongst my lunch pals and explained what exactly we were doing with them.

*************************

The next day at lunch Elias joined us again and had more stickers. Even though we gave them out just the day before I had already spotted a few around school. One particular one I saw was when I went to do my business in the bathroom. It was on a stall door right above
Naomi is a bitch, What does it feel like to be a whore Heather?
, and other such pleasantries that had been scrawled on the door over the years. I was also still receiving high-fives and such in the hall. My celebrity was still following me around. What a thing to be known for, but I figured I could use it to my advantage, so when somebody gave me a
hey
, or
what’s up
, or an exploding fist bump, I gave them a sticker.

*************************

On Saturday afternoon, Elias wandered over with two copies of the book we decided to read for our English project. He stayed for a few hours, but all we seriously did was read. Well, besides occasionally glancing over our books at each other, and I knew we were both doing the glancing thing because our eyes met for a second the one time I peeped over my book just to get a quick glimpse. A partial smile crept across Elias’ face. We both then looked back down into our books. We also exchanged some ideas for our project and then continued to read. He left to go to work, and I read until I finished the book.

On Sunday, Kate, Roberto and I ran around the city secretly slapping the Sasha stickers on anything we thought was fitting. At the rate we were going, the city was going to be quickly covered in our sticker art. We hopped on the ‘L’ near my house at one point that afternoon and rode it over a few stops where we got off in a semi-hipster neighborhood. While we were moseying about I found another banana man. Well, it wasn’t a banana really. Well, not at all; it was a person wearing a mint green bunny suit giving a left-handed wave. This one wasn’t painted on the wall though. It looked like it was glued on with paper or something. I went home that evening and did an internet search. I found the artists’ Photo Grab account and underneath some of the pictures, the captions read
Wheat Paste.
I then did another search with that term, and that’s how I found out all about wheat pasting.

I sat on top of a school desk with my legs crossed waiting for everybody to show up. It was Monday after school,
The Society of Prodigious Supberness
club meeting time. The classroom was pretty crowded. Elias was there, along with some new faces. The room was buzzing with excitement. It seemed everybody was really into the whole sticker idea.

“Okay, okay,” I said over everybody. “Before Reynaldo goes into detail about our little project, I wanted to go over a few things.” I paused until I had everybody’s attention. “First,” I said tapping the tips of my pointer fingers together. “Don’t speak of this to anybody. For all we know, some fan just started sticking up stickers. Keep telling yourself that, okay? Two, if you’re scared of getting busted, don’t do it at all cuz I don’t need somebody who’s all scared and intimidated by whoever busts them and rats us out or something, and with that said, Reynaldo will fill you in on all the specific details.” I could tell a couple were unsure what I was even talking about because there were some club members with their mouths partially open and a few looking generally confused, thus Reynaldo was going to delve deeper into what exactly our sticker campaign encompassed. Reynaldo stood up and took over. As I said, it was like I just made my appearances, spoke now and then.

Elias, who was sitting off to the side and staring at his fingernails like they held the answer to all that was holy, got up and left the classroom. Reynaldo started into the explaining of the rules for
stickering
as he was calling it, so I got up and followed Elias.

“Hey,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder when I caught up with him.

He just sucked on his lip and looked at the ground.

“Everything okay?”

Elias sighed. “Yeah.”

“I think you’re lying.”

He scratched the back of his neck. “So what if I am?”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Elias looked up at the ceiling. “Nothing, it’s stupid. I’m stupid. My mom’s stupid.”

“What, no, what are you talking about?” I grabbed his hand and led him over to some stairs. We both sat down. Elias put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. I put my hand on his shoulder and lightly squeezed it. He looked over at me and sat up.

“Well,” Elias whispered. “I had one of my sessions today, and it turns out I might sound like an idiot forever.”

“You don’t sound like an idiot,” I said, realizing in the short period that I had known him, he had put himself down a number of times.

“I do and since I am just now really receiving speech therapy, my speech might not be able to be fully corrected cuz I’m so old. If it was continued from when I first had it maybe, even then I started kinda late, and it was for such a short period.”

“You never know.”

“Why didn’t I just say something before?”

“Maybe you were scared to.”

“More like ashamed. Ashamed of myself really cuz how old am I? If I was scared of anything, it was of the response I’d get if I told somebody. Like they’d look at me like I was such an idiot for not doing anything, not saying I needed help. And I really am an idiot cuz I coulda done something about this before if I just spoke up. I’m so stupid.”

“Stop saying that about yourself, and I’m sure people have heard you speak before, like your teachers. I’m sure you have spoken at least a couple of times in class before, right, like answering a teacher’s question or something?”

“I dunno, maybe.”

“So why hasn’t anyone noticed before?”

Elias sighed and shrugged. “It just seems nobody has really paid much attention to me, but that’s partially my own fault.”

“But now somebody has paid attention.”

Elias rubbed his hands on face. I gave him a hug. He hugged me back—a nice warm full bodied one. I didn’t want to break the embrace, but I did after a few seconds when I heard someone down the hall clearing their throat. It was Kate. She threw me a big grin with a thumbs’ up.

“It seems I am needed,” I said, getting up.

Elias scratched his neck and nodded.

“Ya gonna come finish out the meeting with me?”

“Nah, I’m just gonna go.”

“Okay, but will you swing by my house later? I got some stuff that might help spread awareness of Sasha Santiago.”

Elias nodded, faked a smile, and waved bye.

I walked back to the classroom with Kate waiting in the doorway.