The Opposite of Invisible (2 page)

I widen my eyes at Jewel. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m serious. He seems harmless, but he could be sketchy.”

“Jewel. He’s a bum. He’s definitely sketchy.”

We turn and start down our street.

Jewel reaches for my arm and hooks it on his own, fancy like he’s my escort. I stop at the corner and let him wrap his arms around me.

He rubs my back with his fingers, tiny circles.

My best friend, the best hugger.

  I found my Dove Girl one Saturday when I was thirteen, helping my parents clear out the garage so they would have space for a T-shirt sale to raise money for endangered animals. My dad had just taken early retirement from teaching at the University of Washington. Since then, my mom hasn’t worked full-time.

The amount of stuff we had heaped in the garage was unbelievable and none of it was mine, except for the rusted red pogo stick destroyed from too many nights left out in the rain. Jewel’s Little League mitt was behind the garbage cans.

We mostly just moved boxes to the basement because we couldn’t stand to part with anything. There were term papers in there from when my dad was in college, and stacks of lesson plans from his teaching days. And my mom’s first poem, written on this flimsy paper from, like, the sixties. Cool relics, I guess.

I showed my mom the poem. She squelped. “My cherry tree poem!”

She kissed it; she actually kissed it. “Uh, that’s dusty,” I said.

She held it to her chest. “I’m going inside to put this in a special place.”

I held up an eighties boom box. “Dad? Does this work?”

He looked up from a stack of old
Life
magazines. “I’m planning to fix that.”

I put it in the basement pile.

I was going through this box of postcards that Dad wrote to Mom when he was in Barcelona studying language. He wrote messages in Catalan, which I can’t read and Mom can’t either.

At the bottom of the cardboard box was my Dove Girl.

Something in her eyes got to me.

Peaceful. Settled. Sure.

Her face is at rest, her lips like the top and bottom of a round heart. And instead of hair, her face is surrounded by a dove. A dove, the sign of peace.

I pulled her out of the box.

“Dad, what’s this?”

“Brought that back from the Picasso museum. Actually, it’s a shame for her to be in a box,” he said. “Let’s hang her in the downstairs bathroom.”

I had another idea, so my Dove Girl has been hanging above my pillow for years now, listening to me.

It’s not like I expect her to talk back.

The bus is loud with people from my class chattering at that full-volume field-trip pitch.

I’m glad for the time out of school and the museum visit. Mr. Smith, my art workshop teacher, is so excited that the Philadelphia Museum of Art sent Marcel Duchamp’s work out here, he has me kind of pumped. Too bad Jewel’s class isn’t part of this trip. I’m in my own little bubble today.

Mr. Smith is trying to count us. He runs his fingers through his thinning hair.

He’s making sure none of us ran off to make out or to steal cigarettes, general delinquent behavior feared by the school board but probably not all that much by Mr. Smith. Of all my teachers, he’s the most relaxed.

In workshop, he does his own stuff until we interrupt him with a question. Seeing him work is inspiring, or at least proof that art is worth something: when he’s concentrating, he looks completely at ease. He reminds me of my Dove Girl.

I look for Clara, the girl I usually sit with in art and sometimes at lunch. Occasionally we hang out on the weekends when Jewel’s off visiting his dad. She’s at the back of the bus with her boyfriend, Jeremy. As per usual, these days.

They’re a good fit for each other: both kind of hippies, both decent painters obsessed with surrealism. She painted a Dalí-style mural on her bedroom wall. Jeremy wears a Dalí melting clock T-shirt almost every day.

The only seat available is next to Vanessa Almond. As I sit down I feel my shoulders hunch up.

“Cool shirt,” she says. I’m wearing one of my mom’s designs, an oak tree in outline, with roots.

“Thanks,” I mumble. That’s the extent of our conversation.

Vanessa is chanting something, just loudly enough for me to hear. I stare straight ahead. This Vanessa is so different from the girl I was friends with in elementary school. We both liked to draw; we used to watch MTV together; then her parents sent her to a private middle school and we lost touch. That’s when Jewel and I got so close. Becoming best friends with Jewel was so easy, like talking to myself but having myself talk back.

At the end of fifth grade, Jewel’s parents got divorced and his dad moved to Bellingham. His dad was a Micro-softie who decided to do an Internet startup away from the city. He’s still single, and he and Jewel’s mom are even friendly when he visits at Christmas. When he left, for me it was all about my best friend kind of falling apart. Jewel was majorly freaked out by the whole thing.

I made it my sixth-grade mission to cheer him up. I’d send him little notes with nonsense jokes I made up. We acted like younger kids together; I built LEGO castles with him at his house. I taught him how to make hemp friendship bracelets.

Soon it stopped being about Jewel needing cheering up and started being about us just having the most fun together.

When Vanessa came back for high school, I barely recognized her. She’d gone from the girl I played puppies and kitties with, wearing little dresses, to this rock-star type. She wears leather miniskirts and fishnets to school. I didn’t know what to say to her. Still don’t, really.

She took up Zen meditation about a month ago, wearing an Om symbol on black yarn around her neck. She bent the Om from a paper clip. Right now, she’s probably trying to cure the bus’s chi or something. I give her another one to two weeks of dedication to the ancient practice of spirituality.

She’s like Madonna at school, respected for what people think is “edgy.” And also a little bit feared. No one would admit it, though. She’s in the public eye like Madonna, but people are too scared or something to say she’s cool. Mostly they make jokes about her style being so out there. The best part of her reputation pins her as the Queen of Goth; the worst part marks her as an outsider. Someone permanent-markered the word
freak
on her desk in homeroom.

Jewel’s closer with her than I am. They’re not super-tight, but they are the two best artists at school, and they value each other’s opinions. Plus, Jewel likes people who get pegged as freaks. They remind him of himself, or something. He had Nicolai Gregory over for dinner once, and they started to draw a comic together.

Of course, even if people think Nicolai’s a freak, he’s accepted. Probably because he’s hilarious and nice to everyone. He’s been out since eighth grade, and he’s the closest match to Vanessa style-wise. He wears black eyeliner and club-kid clothes. People like him. Or are afraid of what other people would think if they acted like they didn’t like him.

We file off of the bus and into the drizzle, clutching brown-bagged lunches. Mr. Smith corrals us into the lobby and pays.

Nicolai is chatting with Clara and Jeremy. He has a pink Mohawk. Tomorrow, it might be purple or blue.

I keep quiet, and so does Vanessa. She’s got this bright, excited look in her eyes today. I wonder what that’s about.

The first piece we see is the artist Marcel Duchamp’s painting of his family. It’s just a portrait. It doesn’t seem like anything special, even though Mr. Smith is all excited about this collection.

“Duchamp,” Mr. Smith says, “was average as a classical painter. Average at best. But he had to know how to do form so that he could disrupt form.”

“Whatever,” Vanessa says behind me. I can practically feel her rolling her eyes. “His ready-mades are so much more interesting.”

We shuffle down the white hallway and see a painting that could be from Picasso’s cubist period. It’s like someone took all the cels of an animated scene and showed them at once.

Mr. Smith stands next to it, pointing out the shades of
brown and the shape of the figure in it. “Year,” he says, “1912. Oil on canvas. Title:
Nude Descending a Staircase, Number 2.”

The nude looks more like a robot to me, all shapes and no heart. Vanessa moves next to me, getting a closer look.

“The first exhibition of modern art in America happened in New York City. This piece”—Mr. Smith gestures toward
Nude—“was
utterly controversial. It was the beginning of cubism and of futurism.”

Score one for me on the cubism thing.

We move on, toward something on a platform. I think it’s a urinal.

“Oh my God, there it is!” Vanessa shrieks. The other museum patrons are so not choosing today to develop high esteem for the teenage population of Seattle.

Yep. A urinal. I should be grossed out. But it’s pretty cool in an ironic sort of way: the most basic everyday thing, which is also totally private, out there for everyone to see. To admire. Or at least think about.

Vanessa practically skips across the room to the urinal.

“Vanessa,” Mr. Smith says once we’ve all caught up. “You’re obviously familiar with this piece. Would you like to introduce it?”

“The story goes like this,” says Vanessa. She looks more like a teacher right now than Mr. Smith does. Authoritative, even with her punky hair. “Some people were putting on an art exhibit and Duchamp offered the urinal. He did it as a prank. But they didn’t show it.”

Mr. Smith gives us the details. “Ready-made, 1917. Title:
Fountain
.”

“Totally scandalous,” Vanessa says. “Totally different. I adore it.”

She stands, breathing at the thing.

“Because being different,” she says, and I swear she looks at me, “means being interesting. And that will always be hot.”

“Hey, Clara,” I say. “Jeremy.”

I find them in the museum’s basement lunchroom.

They haven’t even opened their lunch sacks. They’re too busy holding hands. I stand by their table.

“Hi,” Clara says. “Sit down!”

I do, and take out my hummus and crackers. “What’d you think of the Duchamp?”

“Pretty cool,” Clara says. “I liked
Nude Descending a Staircase
.”

I spread some hummus with a plastic knife, smell the garlic. Nod.

“Me too,” says Jeremy. “It kind of reminds me of Salvi.”

“Totally.”

Clara and Jeremy have a nickname for Salvador Dalí?

They get into a discussion about the Dalí museum in Barcelona, where they’re planning to go this summer. “My dad was there,” I tell them.

They don’t seem to hear me. They go on about finding jobs to save money for the trip and I get distracted.

Vanessa and Nicolai Gregory are at a table laughing together. At least someone’s having a good time.

There’s a Seattle Art Museum pamphlet on the table, so I open it. The page I open to features a piece by Dale Chihuly: a glass hummingbird is flitting around a cherub. They’re atop something that looks like an upside-down mushroom with a pumpkin stem.

I can’t believe the detail on the hummingbird. This can be done with glass?

“Later,” I mumble to Clara and Jeremy, gathering the rest of my lunch and heading out of the room.

“Bathroom,” I say as I pass Mr. Smith.

I find the Chihuly exhibition. I read a plaque telling me that he’s from Tacoma and he’s been working with glass since the late sixties. He’s a master. The collection here is “Putti,” which means
cherubs
.

I find my hummingbird. Its colors are so vibrant. Red-orange mushroom like a sunset. Golden Putto. Absolutely clear hummingbird. I want to call it crystal clear, until I realize that it’s maybe clearer than crystal. It’s glass.

Other podiums in the small room housing the collection feature putti with other types of birds, a slug, a sea horse, an octopus, a jellyfish, and riding on a dolphin. They all have the mushroom cap-like orbs, in so many colors. The only word I can think of to describe the colors is
pure
.

Looking at them, I realize there’s a whole world I want to step into. A place away from Vanessa and away from
perfect couples, and away from school. Even away from Jewel, maybe. Toward … just me.

It makes the world of Mr. Smith’s class, worrying about not being as good at art as Vanessa or Jewel, or as obsessed as Clara, seem so unimportant. I feel free.

I’m going to take that glassblowing workshop.

We’re back at school in time for eighth period. My
clase de español
breaks into its conversation groups.

Jewel sits across the room with Vanessa and a girl named Sam, who is chewing on her blond braid. Vanessa has that excited look again as she watches Jewel. Is it possible she has a crush on him, or something? He says, in perfect Spanish, that the tree is growing eight red apples.

Vanessa winks at him. Winks.

I can’t see his face.

“Excelente
, Julian,” says Señora Rodriguez as she walks between the desks. Only teachers call Jewel by his real name.

Simon Murphy, who by some miracle is in my group, tries it. “Heh.
Julian
.”

Simon’s green eyes are shining. He’s like one of those Greek statues, carved out of fine materials. I think of Mr. Smith introducing the pieces at the museum. Title, I think,
Secret Crush
.

Simon came to school here last year, from Portland. He was a sophomore then, but he went out with a senior girl. That means she’s a college girl now. He can get a college girl. I have to stop crushing on him.

Molly, the third member of my group, is a sophomore like me. She pokes me. “I thought that guy’s name was Jewel.”

“It is.”

I try to say to Simon telepathically, “And don’t you forget it.” I would never say it out loud.

Molly actually twirls her hair around her finger.

“Anyway.” Simon looks at his book. I wish I didn’t notice him so much. He’s a football player. And he’s hot. I don’t like football players as a rule, but … he’s so hot.

Our group studies the picture of an elephant in a zoo.
“Soy un animal grande y gris,”
Simon says: I am a big gray animal.