Fans of the Impossible Life (6 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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The day of our first Art Club meeting, Peter assured me that he would meet me in the studio as soon as he finished his after-school department meeting, but he insisted that I prepare the room myself and greet my new club members. I was still not convinced that anyone was actually going to show up. I had gotten a few “thx” responses to the email, but I couldn't imagine a world in which I was about to spend the next hour doing anything other than sitting alone in the art studio. Of course then at least I wouldn't have to talk to anyone.

I was sitting in the corner with my sketchbook when three freshmen came in. They seemed to have emerged from some sort of St. F emo subculture, two girls with black nail polish and a boy with his tie loosened and shirt half unbuttoned to reveal a vintage Morrissey T-shirt hiding underneath.

“Is this the club?” the boy asked.

“Yeah, yes,” I said, realizing that there was no getting out of
it at this point.

“Cool,” the boy said. He chose one of the drafting tables and the two girls sat down on either side of him.

I knew what Peter was trying to do, force me into human contact like some kind of immersion therapy for loners, and I was half annoyed and half flattered. That was how Peter got things done. It was impossible to be too mad at him for meddling because you were so busy feeling grateful that he cared enough to meddle in the first place. But I was still silently cursing him when Mira and Sebby walked in the room.

I felt my heart start to race at the sight of the two of them together. I wasn't sure how to prepare myself for the return of the tornado of energy that Sebby brought with him. I had not forgotten his playful good-bye from the week before, the feeling of his lips on my hand as he planted a kiss and then dropped it. The casual ease with which he seemed to navigate the world.

“Hi, Jeremy,” Sebby said, smiling.

“I'm so sorry,” Mira said. “He insisted on coming.”

“Oh, that's okay. It's good, uh, that you're here,” I said, having trouble looking directly at him. He was like a light that was too bright. Like the sun.

Sebby smirked at Mira. “See? I told you. He wants me here.”

“My friend has a huge ego, Jeremy. Please do not encourage him.”

Peter came in the room behind them, and Mira pulled Sebby over to a drafting table in the back of the room.

“How goes it?” Peter said, coming over to me.

“Okay, I think,” I said.

“Looks like some people want to be in your club.”

“I guess.”

“Should we get things started?”

I nodded.

“Great.”

He turned to the two occupied tables.

“Hi, folks,” he said. “I'll just introduce myself. I'm Peter. I think I know most of you already.” He greeted each of the emo kids. “Liz, Greg, Courtney. Nice to see you here.”

Courtney blushed through her long bangs.

“And?” He turned to the back table. “Mira. And I don't think I know your friend.”

Sebby, thrilled to be given an opening, stood solemnly.

“Sebastian,” he said, gave a regal nod, and retook his seat.

“Nice to meet you, Sebastian,” Peter said. He looked at Mira with a squint that stopped just short of being a wink. She attempted a polite smile in the interest of not being busted for bringing her nonmatriculated friend.

“I'm going to serve as the faculty advisor for this club,” Peter said. “Mostly I'll just be available to you for any questions you have. For now I will turn the floor over to Jeremy.”

He sat down on one of the desks with characteristic breeziness and looked expectantly at me. I was saved by some new arrivals, Rose with Talia trailing along closely behind her, mid-sentence.

“Oh, are we late?” Talia asked, situating herself as close as
she could to Peter while trying to look causal about it, laying a notebook and pen set out carefully on the table in front of her. Rose took the opportunity to escape and make her way to the back of the room.

I watched as Mira introduced Rose to Sebby, wishing that I could be sitting there with them instead of stuck at the front, ready to completely embarrass myself at any moment.

“Jeremy?” Peter said. “Ready to address your club?”

I took a deep breath, took a last look at the notes I had in front of me, bullet points rehearsed to the point of absurdity, and began.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Mira had finally agreed to bring Sebby to Art Club after enduring a torturous required meeting with one of the school guidance counselors in which she was informed that she should have started working on her college application essay when she was in kindergarten. Because of her “unusual circumstances in coming to St. Francis,” they were evidently “worried about her progress” and “ability to successfully work her way into the social and academic world of the school.”

In trying to cut short a worried comment about the number of hours she was spending in the nurse's office, she brought up the fact that she was helping to start a new club that was meeting for the first time that week. This seemed to show enough interest in waking life that she was let go without further insult. And now here they were.

At least Rose had showed up too. Mira had gotten to know Rose, the girl with the cropped hair and severe glasses, a little
over lunch since the first day of school. She had a kind of twitchy rebellious streak in her, revealed in moments when a regular laugh would morph into a wicked cackle. Mira wasn't always sure what was so funny, but something about Rose made her want to know.

Rose joined Mira and Sebby at the drafting table in the back, and Mira made the proper introductions.

“Rose, this is Sebby,” she said. “Sebby, Rose.”

“Oh yeah, Sebastian, right?” Rose said. “I've heard about you.”

“Only terrible things, I hope.”

“The worst.”

They were waiting on Jeremy to actually get the Art Club meeting started. He was mostly keeping his back to the room, flashing a terrified look at their table whenever he was bold enough to turn around.

“Thanks, everyone, for coming,” he said finally, sounding like a person speaking above a whisper for the first time in his life. “It's, um, really great that you're all here.” He glanced quickly at Mira, Sebby, and Rose's table, then turned back to his papers.

Sebby raised an eyebrow at Mira.

“So today we need to work on our mission statement.” He nearly yelped out the words. “I . . . I know it's kind of boring. But if we're going to be an official club and get some money from the school for supplies we need to have one.”

“I love this,” Sebby whispered. “You guys pay a fortune to
go here and then have to beg them to give you twenty bucks for construction paper.”

Rose gave him a look that said “no kidding.”

“Mission statements are a great way to focus the energy of a group,” Peter offered to the room.

Talia was actually taking notes, scribbling furiously in her notebook as soon as Peter opened his mouth.

“Isn't this club just for us to have extra time in the studio after school?” the girl named Courtney sitting at the front table asked.

“Yes, but . . . we have the opportunity, if we want, to do other stuff as a group,” Jeremy said. “Like, have an exhibit of our work. Or go on field trips. If everyone wants that . . .”

“Is he sweating?” Sebby whispered.

“Oh man, keep it together, Jeremy,” Rose whispered.

Talia raised her hand.

“Yes?” Jeremy said.

“I vote for an exhibit,” she said. “At the end of the year.” She looked around the room to confirm that everyone agreed with her.

“Well, we're not really ready to vote on anything yet,” Jeremy said.

“It's the best choice in terms of college applications,” Talia said. “We'll each make a portfolio with documentation of the exhibit. Field trips are a waste of time as far as colleges are concerned.”

“Who is this girl?” Sebby whispered to Mira.

“You do not what to know.”

Peter came to the rescue. “Some great ideas there, Talia. Thanks for getting the conversation started. Jeremy, why don't you pass out paper to everybody and you can all write down your ideas about what you would like to get out of the club.”

Jeremy, grateful to be given instructions, passed a stack of blank paper around the room and then retreated back to the corner.

Sebby turned to Rose. “Okay, what's this kid's story?”

“Who? Jeremy?”

“Mira and I have been fighting over him and we need this settled now.”

Mira rolled her eyes. “We're not fighting over him. You're just a huge flirt.”

“I think you have a better chance of winning that fight,” Rose said, pointing her pencil at Sebby. “That's just my educated guess.”

Sebby smiled at Mira, victorious. “I win!”

“Yes, you win. Mission statement, people,” Mira said, tapping her pencil on the blank page in front of her.

“I was at St. F Middle School with him,” Rose said. “He's actually had kind of a hard time since we moved up here. There was this crazy thing that happened with his locker last spring. Someone wrote something really evil on it about a month before the end of the year. It was a really big deal.”

“What did they write?” Mira asked.

Rose drew something in the corner of her paper and showed it to them. It said
Jeremy
s 2 suk dix
.

“Are you serious?” Mira said.

“In spray paint,” Rose said. “Really big.”

“Why would someone do that?”

“I guess if you're an asshole in the mood for a hate crime, you don't really need a reason.”

“They don't teach you people to spell here?” Sebby said, examining the paper.

“Evidently not,” Rose said, scribbling out what she had written. “But they do teach us how to make a huge deal out of things like that. Not that it wasn't a big deal, but we had to spend the rest of the year doing special ‘sensitivity workshops' for, like, hours a day.”

“But that's better than just ignoring it, isn't it?” Mira said.

“Sure. But the whole thing became a big joke. The rest of the year you would see ‘J Sux Dix' written everywhere. It was a huge mess.”

“What happened to Jeremy?” Mira asked.

“He didn't come back. I hadn't seen him until school started again this year. He's always kind of been a loner, but since he got back he barely even speaks.”

“See, this school needs me,” Sebby said to Mira. “I'll start all kinds of secret societies pledged to destroying assholes.”

“You do have your own school, you know,” Mira said.

He picked up a pencil and wrote on the blank page in front of him:
My school sux dix.

Rose laughed.

After the meeting, Mira and Sebby took the bus to his house. She wanted to avoid whatever her mother was cooking for dinner, and Tilly wouldn't care if they ordered a pizza.

As soon as they came in the front door they heard the screaming. At least three children seemed to be waging some kind of war in the kitchen.

“Okay, maybe not,” Sebby said.

“We'll just go in your room,” Mira said.

Tilly stuck her head out of the kitchen. She had one baby in her arms and another one strapped to her chest. Crayons were flying through the air behind her.

“Oh, good. Sebastian, I need you to run some errands for me, okay?”

“I have homework.”

“Well, when you finish your homework, then.”

Sebby pulled Mira in the direction of his room.

“I'll be doing my homework all night,” he called back.

“Sebastian, I need your help. This is nonnegotiable,” she was saying as he closed his bedroom door behind them.

His room had changed since the last time Mira had been over. Until three weeks ago he had shared it with his foster brother Jonathan, who packed up his stuff on his eighteenth birthday and left without saying good-bye. Now Jonathan's side of the room was stuffed full of everything pink and glittery that little Stephanie had managed to get her hands on in her nine years of life. Tiaras, feather boas, posters of pink ponies, and a fairy princess dress were some of the main attractions.

“How is it that you are not even close to being the gayest thing in this room?” Mira said.

“I know. It's impressive, right?”

He sat down on his never-made bed under the watch of the few posters he kept on the wall. The Velvet Underground's Warhol banana was Sebby's way of being both retro and inappropriately phallic at the same time. One thing Mira could say for Tilly, she let them keep their rooms however they wanted. In the last place Sebby had lived he and the couple parted ways when the father realized that Sebby wasn't so keen on the baseball-themed bedroom that had been carefully decorated for a child who had never been born.

“Why is Tilly under the impression that you have homework to do?” Mira asked, falling back onto his bed.

He rolled his eyes. “She just assumes I'm back at school, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I make sure I'm out of the house between eight and three.”

“Don't you think someone is going to notice that you're not going?”

“I go sometimes.”

Mira raised an eyebrow.

“Fine, I'm going to go. Everything's fine, okay? Don't worry about it.”

“I wish you could really go to St. F with me,” she said.

“Yeah, in what universe is that even a possibility?”

“They have scholarships.”

“For kids with amazing grades. Not loser dropouts.”

She shook her finger at him. “No self-shaming talk, Sebby,” she said. “What would Dr. Samuels say?”

“Dr. Samuels liked you better than me. Dr. Samuels thought I should shame myself more.”

“Ha ha.”

“Do you believe that story Rose told us about Jeremy?”

“Oh god, that poor kid,” Mira said. “No wonder he's so quiet.”

“And I love that all their overdone liberal bullshit totally backfired,” he said. “Of course it did. People are assholes. End of story.”

“The world according to Sebastian Tate.”

“It's a philosophy that has gotten me far in life.”

At that moment the door slammed open and Stephanie stood in the doorway, glaring at them.

“Can you learn how to knock, maggot child?” Sebby yelled at her.

She was standing with her hands on her hips, wearing a pink Barbie T-shirt stretched tight over her round stomach.

“Were you looking at my stuff?” she asked, seeming to already know the answer.

“Oh, yeah.” Sebby turned to her side of the room and stared at her wall of pink paraphernalia. “We've spent the last hour entranced by the sparkle coming off of your tiara collection.”

Stephanie looked at her possessions with alarm.

“We weren't messing with your stuff, Stephanie,” Mira said.

She had always felt a little bad for Stephanie. Sebby had to be the most annoying big brother in the world. And Stephanie had lived in this house her whole life, years before he had shown up. She had once been one of those adorable babies that Tilly had fawned over with such devotion. Mira hoped that Tilly had managed to hide her disappointment in the fact that Stephanie had grown up into a walking, talking person of her own. And Sebby's arrival three years ago must have seemed even more unfair to Stephanie than accumulating younger siblings. He was much more difficult to boss around.

“We were just talking,” Mira said.

Stephanie marched over to her bookshelf, grabbed a locked diary with a unicorn on it, and clutched it to her chest.

“You shouldn't be talking with the door closed,” she said.

“Well, we weren't just talking,” Sebby said, “we were also doing it, so we figured we should shut the door.”

Stephanie's face shriveled up in a look of exaggerated disgust.

“That's not true,” she said, not quite sure.

“Oh, yeah it is.” Sebby jumped on top of Mira and started tickling her.

“Get off of me, you idiot!” she squealed.

She kicked him across the bed and he laughed, pretending to zip up his fly.

“See.” Stephanie looked horrified but vindicated. “She wouldn't do that with you.”

“You don't even know what sex is, troll girl,” Sebby said.

“I do too.” Stephanie clutched her diary tighter.

“Well, the next time Mira and I hook up we'll leave the door open so you can watch, okay?”

Stephanie seemed to be weighing whether or not she was going to try to come up with a retort to this or storm out on her little pink Keds. Her face was scrunched up into a scowl that made her look like an old man with pigtails. She finally decided on storming out, slamming the door behind her as she went.

“See?” Sebby said. “Privacy.”

“You really are traumatizing that poor girl.”

“Well she put Jell-O in my bed two nights ago, so I like to think of it as just engaging her sense of competition.”

He lay down on the bed, put his head in Mira's lap.

“So, what do we think about little Jeremy?” he said.