The Incident on the Bridge (14 page)

I am the angel of reality
, he typed.

It was like being kissed on the cheek by Señora Moorehead. Sexier, though. God, he was deprived.

To keep things going, he said,
So that's the painting, huh? The picture you posted.
He could see the vases and blobs better on the computer than he could on Clay's phone, but it was still nothing like he'd thought the painting would be when Mr. Shao said the poet was writing about some picture he'd bought. Jerome thought a painting called “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” would at least have an angel in it, something you'd see in church over the altar, where flat-faced women held flat-faced babies under flat-winged doves.
I don't get it
, he said.

The bowl on the left is the angel
, she said.

He wanted to say something about what he liked so she wouldn't think he was stupid, but it would take too long to do that and he wasn't sure what he liked except for the part about being one of you and knowing what you know.

I don't get the poem at all
, he said.

She didn't say anything back, and he didn't want to go on and on about his inability to understand poems that were like a cross between the Bible and Dr. Seuss, so he changed the subject.
Did you get the notes in history? I had early release today.
He already had the notes from Gabe Friesen but she didn't have to know that.

A photo appeared. Her notes were a billion times more detailed than his, and her handwriting, dark and limber, could be a type font called Thisbe. Her fingertips showed at the edge of one page, the little half-moons white above her cuticles. He printed the pages even though he could see the words better on the screen, where he could (and did) zoom in and out (feeling more deprived and depraved), and said,
Thanks. I owe you.

Yes, you do
, she said, and he floated on that all evening, pathetically.

For the next four school days, he looked at her empty chair in English and his empty in-box at home, slowly accepting that she thought he was too stupid for further communication, and then a message came during dinnertime, while his mother was reading the newspaper and he was reading an old
Entertainment Weekly,
a routine they'd developed because she was so tired of pretending to be cheerful with her dying clients that she didn't want to talk at dinner.

His mother was engrossed in some article about vacationing in Greece, her glasses low on her nose, her Stouffer's lasagna half-finished and cold.

Standing up got his mother's attention, and she studied the look on his face (he knew he was grinning but he didn't care) and, to his surprise, she smiled. A big, wide, happy smile. “Huh,” she said. “You never look like that when you're making plans with Clay.”

He just waited and held on to his phone.

“What's her name?”

“May I be excused?” His lasagna was all gone and his glass was empty.

“Sure. Tell her I said hi.”

He sent Thisbe his clumsy picture of his crappy notes, and she wrote,
Um…….

He waited a few seconds and then said he knew they were confusing but he could get together with her in a few minutes, if she wanted, and he could explain it better in person. There was such a long pause he thought he'd been a fool. Then finally she said her stepdad wouldn't let her meet guys at Panera or anywhere like that, to which he said that was cool, no problem. Probably she didn't want to meet with him at all, it was just an excuse, but then she said it had to be at her house, sorry, it's so embarrassing. Would he like to come over?

An invitation. To Thisbe's house. Would he like to come over? On my way.

He already knew where she lived. Five blocks away, but a much nicer street, where it was all wide houses and wide yards and little picket fences. Hers was a two-story reddish-brown wooden house, tall and serious, just like her, with black shutters and a wicker sofa on the front porch and a Ping-Pong table in the side yard. The front door had a black iron thing on it he remembered from trick-or-treating years ago: a disembodied hand holding an orange, which was the door knocker. Coolest Halloween decoration ever, he'd thought then, but it was still there, so obviously it was not for Halloween. He stood in the dark beside the wicker sofa and an empty stone bowl full of water. Did they have a giant dog?