Dark Blue: Color Me Lonely with Bonus Content (8 page)

This makes Edgar blush and look away.

“Ms. Clark probably wouldn’t be too thrilled about that,” says Felicia. “Rollin Abrams tried it last year and things got a little ugly. He ended up being excluded from the spring art fair.”

“Stupid hypocrites,” says Amy, shaking her head. “They expect us to be creative and open-minded, then they censor half the thoughts that come out of our heads.”

“Yeah,” says Felicia. “Not only that, but they make it illegal to pray in school.”

“Oh, no,” says Amy. “Sounds like Felicia’s getting up on her religious soapbox again.”

Felicia smiles in a somewhat apologetic manner. “Not really. But if you think about it, it’s no different than what you’re complaining about, Amy.”

“How’s that?” asks Amy without looking up from her pen-andink project.

I suddenly realize that I’m not even drawing now. I am simply sitting here, like a dummy, mesmerized by their banter. I suppose I have missed being involved in conversations. Still, I don’t want to appear too desperate. So I quickly pick up my charcoal pencil and pretend to turn my attention back to my drawing. It’s an old house, but I’m having a hard time getting it to look right. It seems flat and dark to me, and definitely less interesting than their conversation.
My pencil hovers as I listen.

“Well, freedom of speech shouldn’t just apply to the arts,” continues Felicia. “But also to religion.”

“We have freedom of religion laws,” says Edgar.

“Duh!” Amy looks up and scowls at him.

“But they get misinterpreted,” says Felicia.

“Well, I sure don’t want anyone telling me I have to
pray
in school,” says Amy. “That’s totally fascist.”

“Right,” says Felicia. “I don’t think our government should tell us to pray either. But I don’t think they should tell us that we can’t. I also don’t think they should go around stripping words that refer to God from things like the Pledge of Allegiance or songs or even our money for that matter.”

“There she goes,” says Amy with a big sigh. “Sorry about this, Kara. But welcome to the lunch club. We love discussing anything controversial.”

Felicia laughs. “Yeah, that’s probably why we wanted you to join us. You look like you might have an ax to grind.”

“That’s right,” says Amy, pausing from her drawing to look at me with curiosity. Then she holds her pen like it’s a microphone and she’s the interviewer. “So, tell us, Kara Hendricks, what do
you
think of this year’s Jackson High cheerleader squad?”

I make a face at her then notice Edgar is getting up to leave. “Where’s he going?” I ask.

“To pick up the pizza,” says Amy. “They’re not allowed to deliver it on school grounds. He has to go meet them in the street.”

“Oh.”

I reach for my backpack and wallet. “I should probably chip in.”

“Nah,” says Amy. “Edgar really gets a jolt out of treating us girls to pizza. It’s probably the closest thing he’ll ever get to a date.”

“Oh, don’t be hard on him,” says Felicia. “He’s really sweet.”

Amy leans over and looks Felicia in the eye. “Sweet enough that you’d let him take you to, say, the prom?”

Felicia shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe. I happen to have great respect for Edgar.”

Amy laughs. “So do I. But you won’t see me going out with him anytime soon. At least not in this lifetime.”

“For someone who’s so
forward thinking
, you can sure be pretty shallow sometimes,” says Felicia.

I feel a sense of relief that Amy’s irritating question about cheerleaders got lost in the shuffle as the two of them banter back and forth for a while.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Amy. My relief vanishes as she sticks her pen back in my face now. “But let’s get back to my question for Kara here. And I don’t expect you be so evasive this time. The press wants to know your opinion on this year’s cheerleaders. And is it true that you used to actually be friends with one of them?”

Just then Edgar reappears, flopping the big pizza box down on the table and giving us all napkins. “Jump in!”

As we’re eating pizza, Amy turns back to me. “Don’t think you’re getting off the hook that easy,” she persists, grabbing up her pen and pointing it to me again. “The press wants to know what you think of this year’s cheerleaders.”

I roll my eyes at her then speak into her mike. “I think I know what the press is getting at, and, as a matter of fact, I used to know one of the cheerleaders personally. But she and I have parted ways.”

Amy nods and reaches for another slice of veggie pizza. “Uhhuh. And would the fact that she’s suddenly a
popular
cheerleader and running with the, uh”—she makes a gagging sound—“
cool
kids have anything to do with this, uh, unexpected split?”

I sigh and consider an answer as I take a bite of pizza. Which route to take here? Honesty, and risk more public humiliation? Or sarcasm, and hope for an escape from this line of questioning. I finally decide to take the safer road. I sit up straighter and try to appear somewhat intellectual. “Actually, Ms. Weatherspoon, I feel that I have outgrown the ridiculous Jordan Ferguson and her never-ending need for fans and approval. I say if girls have to jump up and down, giggling and jiggling like a bunch of bimbos, and if they have to bare their flesh and flash their smiles just to win their popularity, well, I’d rather not have anything to do with them in the first place.”

“Here! Here!” yells Amy as she lifts up her water bottle in the form of a toast. “Way to go, girl.”

Felicia is frowning slightly. “Sounds like you really hate your old friend.”

I shrug. “It’s a two-way street.”

“Ah-hah!” says Amy as if she’s finally struck the mother lode. “So she did dump you after all?”

“Aw, come on, you guys,” says Edgar. “Let’s drop it. It’s obvious that Kara wants to move on.”

I glance at this strange kid and feel an unexpected wave of gratitude. For a nerd, he seems pretty thoughtful. “This is good pizza, Edgar,” I tell him, eager to change the subject. “Thanks.”

He grins. “We really didn’t invite you to join us just so that Amy could torture you. She’s just like that, you know. She gets her kicks from making other people feel uncomfortable.”

Amy points at him now. “You should be thankful for the distraction, Eddie. I could be going after you today.”

“Not when I treat for pizza,” he says with surprising authority. “Don’t we have some kind of unspoken agreement that you lay off on pizza days?”

She nods. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Besides, we needed to initiate Kara.”

“Don’t let Amy scare you, Kara,” says Felicia. “We’re not always like this. Some days we just sit in here in absolute silence and eat and do art.”

“Yeah, and some days I make an effort to wake these guys up,” says Amy. “Someone has to.”

Well, I feel more awake today than I’ve felt all week. But I’m not sure which I like better—sleepwalking or being jolted back to my unfortunate reality by someone like Amy Weatherspoon. The truth is, Amy scares me a little. She’s like this loose cannon and you never know who she’ll blast next. Felicia, on the other hand, feels much more even-keeled. I’m guessing she keeps the lunch bunch balanced and from killing each other. I’m not quite sure what to think about Edgar anymore. At first, I’d written him off as a nerd and a goofball. Now, I think I may have been too hasty and misjudged him. I’m curious as to who he really is and what he really thinks.

As I walk home from school, by myself as usual, I try to imagine what Jordan would say about my new friends. Okay, calling them
friends
is probably stretching it. But at least they included me today. Or sort of. But I can just imagine Jordan’s take on Amy. She’d probably chime in with her new friends: “Goth Girl,” “fashion disaster,” “garage-sale geek,” “witchy wannabe,” and all sorts of other mean and unflattering things. More interestingly, I wonder what Amy would say to them—especially if she knew the kinds of things they say about her. Maybe she does know. Maybe that’s why she is the way she is.

And then there’s Edgar. Oh man, I can just imagine how Jordan would react to him. “See, Kara,” she would say to me (if we were talking, that is), “I told you those art kids were nerds and geeks and
freaks. And that Edgar Peebles, give me a break! He’s the nerdiest geek of them all. I’ll bet he even picks his nose.”

Of course, I take some satisfaction in linking myself up with the kind of kids that Jordan would
not
approve of. I almost wish the art lunch bunch would consider me their friend now, just so I could flaunt them in front of Jordan—perhaps even embarrass her in front of her shallow new friends. Amber would probably say something like, “I can’t believe you used to hang with that loser girl, Jordan. Just look at her and her weird little friends. What a bunch of geeks!”

Even the neatly dressed and academic Felicia Wong would draw their poison darts—perhaps even more than the others, I think as I approach my apartment. They would pick on her the most simply because she is closer to being like them than Edgar or Amy. It hits me as I go up the stairs that this is really true. The “cool” kids can laugh and joke casually about kids who are “out there” so far that they’re not anything close to a threat. But when other kids wear clothes that are similar, or heaven forbid,
the same
as the popular kids—watch out! It’s weird really. And I wonder if the bigger world is going to be anything like this. And, if so, what’s the use? If people are going to be so hard on each other, so mean, so superficial, why put up with all the pain? Why not just go off to some deserted island or a cabin in the woods and become a hermit?

I’ll tell you why. It’s simple. I couldn’t stand the loneliness. I can’t. It’s eating me alive.

O
KAY
, J
ORDAN WOULD SAY THAT
I’
M DESPERATE AND PATHETIC, AND
maybe I am, but I have stayed with the art bunch during lunchtime every day of this entire week. First of all, I think it was amazing that I survived the previous weekend. I was so lonely and blue on Friday night that I wanted to go jump off a bridge somewhere. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), we don’t have any good bridges in our town.

So that’s when I decided to read a book that my grandmother had sent me last summer. “For your summer reading,” she’d written on a sweet little card with daisies on it. Like I actually read books in the summertime. At least not last summer, when I had a friend to hang with and places to go. (Well, when I wasn’t babysitting for the neighbor’s two grade-school-aged kids.)

Anyway, I’m not even sure what made me pick up this paperback in the first place. Boredom I suppose. I could tell right off that it was a “religious” sort of book. And I know that my grandma is really into her church these days. More so than ever since my grandpa died last winter. But this particular book was about a teenage girl who became a Christian when she was sixteen then died in a car wreck exactly one year later (she was wiped out by a drunken driver). Okay, to start with, I was thinking,
Now this is a
cheerful little book. Not!
But I must admit that something about it was intriguing. And I found myself getting caught up in the story and this girl’s life and I actually cried when it ended.

Plus it gave me a lot to chew on and think about. And I’ve been wanting to share some of these thoughts with my new art “friends.” Okay, I’m still not sure that I can call them friends. For one thing, we don’t spend time together outside of art. Also, they all seem to have their own circles of friends. Amy has her pot-smoking Goth group. And Felicia has a couple of academic chums that she’s hung with since middle school. Even Edgar has a life. He’s in chess club and goes to some kind of youth group. So calling myself their friend is still really stretching it. Just the same, I’ve stayed in the art room during lunch every day this week. I’ve been the brunt of Amy’s attacks, been defended by Edgar, and listened to Felicia’s soapbox lectures. I’ve watched as a couple of other kids have dropped in and out during the course of the week. But I can tell that the core art lunch bunch consists of Amy, Felicia, and Edgar. And on Friday it’s just the three of them and me again.

I had already offered to spring for pizza today, and Edgar called it in and went out to meet the pizza van on the street. I had saved up a week’s worth of lunch money by packing my own lunches, and I thought it’d be good to spend it on this. No one argued with my offer either. Not even Edgar, although I’m sure he knows this means Amy has open season on him.

I’m into my second slice when I decide to bring up the subject that’s bugging me. I sense that Felicia will have something definite to say about it. Maybe Edgar too. For that matter, I’m sure Amy will have an opinion.

“I read this book,” I begin. “About a girl who’s about our age, but she gets killed by a drunken driver.”

“Nice,” says Amy with sarcasm. “Guess we don’t need to read it now that we know how the story ends. Thanks.”

“Actually the book cover makes that perfectly clear,” I continue. “The thing is, this girl supposedly has a personal relationship with God during this year. She writes about it in her journal, and her parents find it afterward, and that’s mainly what the book’s about.”

“I think I read that,” says Felicia eagerly. “Is it called
Last Dance?
”

“Yeah.”

“I totally loved that book!”

“Really? It left me feeling kind of confused.”

“Confused?” says Amy. “Sounds more like it would leave you feeling depressed.”

“Depends on how you look at it,” says Felicia.

I frown. “Maybe it’s just me. But I found it pretty hard to believe. Do you think it’s really true?”

“True?” echoes Felicia. “True as in did this really happen? Did that girl become a Christian, keep a journal, and then get killed?”

I shrug. That’s not exactly what I meant.

“Yeah, I think that’s true,” says Felicia. “Why would they make it up?”

“Not that so much. I mean do you think it’s true that you can really have a close relationship with God? That you can talk to him and have him talk back to you and everything? That just seems pretty far-fetched to me.”