The Princesses of Iowa (19 page)

A couple kids shouted out in unison. “Monet!”

Mr. Tremont smiled. “You guys are awesome. That’s right, Claude Monet.” He put up another haystack and turned to us. “So here’s the deal. In order to capture the truth of a moment, you have to work fast. The painters used big brushstrokes. We’ll use pens. For the next twenty minutes, I want you to find a spot in the school, anywhere on campus, and capture the truth of your setting as well as you can. Write fast. Write big. Get every single moment. Notice the details: not
a kid walks down the hall
but
a dog-faced boy with red high-tops and a Lisa Frank binder swaggers down the hall.
”

We laughed.

“See?” he asked. “Original details tell the truth. That’s all we’re trying to do here, folks. We’re just trying to tell the truest truth we can. Push through the voice in your head that says, ‘You can’t write that! It’s not allowed!’” He smiled at us. “I’m giving you permission to write whatever you want, as long as it’s true. Okay? And really, don’t think too hard, just write.”

He clapped, and the class started gathering notebooks and pens. “Oh, and one more thing — as you grab the truth and splash it on your page . . . do so quietly, okay? Don’t get me in trouble.” He smiled. “Twenty minutes! Go!”

I settled myself on the floor in a quiet corner of the school, at the intersection of the English and history hallways. The floor was cool under my legs. A freshman girl walked past, her boots squeaking against the polished linoleum. I thought about the painters, slapping on their paint to capture the truth of a moment. I thought about Mr. Tremont, encouraging us to write what we saw, what we heard, what we felt.

The pen paused in the middle of the line, hovering. Down the hall, they were both in film appreciation together, watching some art film as Lacey flipped her hair around and flirted with Jake until he agreed to rub her shoulders in the classroom’s cool darkness, as she planned the next step in her campaign to make him forget me entirely.

Slowly, methodically, I drove long lines through the sentences, one after another.

After class, Jake was waiting for me. “Paige.”

“I’m late.”

“You don’t even have a class this period,” he said, and smiled, as if pleased with himself for proving how well he knew me.

“Well, you do. You should go.” Jake didn’t move. I sighed. “I have homework.”

He pulled a gift from behind his back, a slim rectangle wrapped in his mother’s signature silver paper. “Well then, you’ll have to open this later, I guess.” When I didn’t reach for it, he slid it onto the stack of books in my arms. “Paige, about Friday —”

“I really need to go.”

“I’ll walk you to your locker,” he said, catching up with me. “A little bird told me you went to a poetry reading this weekend?”

“It was homework,” I said. “For creative writing.”

“You like that class, huh?”

“You’re going to be late for gym.”

He stepped in front of me, cutting me off. “Hey.”

I stopped.

Jake reached out to put a hand on my arm. “Look, I just want you to know, okay, that even though everyone else says that that class is really gay, I know you’re a really good student, and I totally respect that. And maybe it’s a good thing you ended up in creative writing, you know, because you are a good writer, like when you helped me with my history paper last year. And I just —”

“Who told you where I was this weekend, anyway?”

“Your mom.” He said, and laughed, like it was the punch line to a raunchy joke.
God.
I pushed past him and headed toward my locker.

“Paige, wait. I’m sorry. It actually was your mom. When you wouldn’t answer your cell, I called your landline, and she said you went to Iowa City with your sister.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Nothing happened, babe. I know what it looked like, but I swear, I was just . . . Lacey just needed a friend. The divorce . . . And her mom is still really screwed up about the accident. . . .”

I bit my lip, wanting so badly to believe him. He
was
a good guy, and he and Lacey had basically grown up together. Was it possible that he was just being a friend? Just trying to do the right thing?

“Hey,” he said softly. “I missed you.” He moved in and kissed me on the cheek. His scent washed over me, the familiar blend of warm and clean and skin, and I closed my eyes, wanting to erase everything else.

And then the bell rang, and the hallways were full of running kids and closing doors. “I have to go,” I said, and turned away, leaving him standing in the middle of the hallway.

It was a book of poetry, a slender edition of the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare. Even though I was fairly certain that Stella had picked it out for him — and obviously had wrapped it for him — I was still touched. I opened it in my car in the parking lot, idly flipping through it and trying to make sense of the sonnets. They didn’t have much to do with the kind of writing we were doing in Mr. Tremont’s class, but still. Jake had noticed, and he made an effort. That counted for something. It wasn’t enough, not nearly, but my anger, like the pain in my ankle, had faded over the weekend. He was a good guy. He was probably just trying to be nice when I caught him with Lacey. It wasn’t his fault, it was hers: she was the one manipulating him. We’d talk later, get everything out in the open. Work through it. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I didn’t drive out to my secret springs hoping to run into Ethan. I went because I craved the peace of the lapping lake and the silence of the afternoon woods. It was the only place I could escape from everyone else in my life, the only place I could think of where I wouldn’t be watched, scrutinized, studied. Judged.

Somehow, though, I didn’t mind when his feet appeared at the top of the path, hesitating before scrambling down the hill to the tiny clearing. “Am I intruding?”

I was perched on a thick tree root, dangling my feet in the water. My notebook sat closed in my lap. “No.”

He half ran, half jumped the last thirty feet. “You
have
to tell me how you do that gracefully.”

“I’m very talented.”

“Obviously.” He stretched, turning to crack his back. “Are you sure I’m not interrupting you? I was just running, and I thought I saw you down here — or I thought I saw someone, and since the only person I’d seen before was you, I guessed it might be you again. And — well, it is.”

I surprised myself by gesturing to the roots of the tree next to me, an invitation. “It’s okay. I wasn’t doing anything to interrupt.”

He stepped from rock to rock, making his way across the pool to the far shore where I sat. “Sometimes you need to do nothing, just to recharge. Especially writers. We really need to do nothing.”

I ignored the comment about being a writer. “It’s hard,” I said.

He nodded, hoisting himself onto the protruding roots of the tree next to mine. “It’s an art.”

“I mean, it’s not hard. It’s just — it’s hard to find time when you can just be yourself, away from everyone —”

“Are you
sure
I’m not intruding?” he asked, and I surprised myself again by insisting.

“No, seriously, it’s totally fine.”

And it was. It wouldn’t have been fine with anyone else — Lacey would have judged, Nikki would have gossiped, Jake would have wanted to make out — but Ethan and I just sat there peacefully, talking about nothing much, kicking our feet in the water, listening to the birds, until the shadows overwhelmed the sunlight and I had to leave. He stayed on the tree, leaning back against the trunk, eyes closed in the last of the afternoon light. I paused at the edge of the clearing, hesitating before I headed up the hill. “Hey, Ethan?”

He opened his eyes. “Yes?”

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For, um.” I gestured to the pool, the trees, the birds dipping from tree to tree. “For this.”

“For doing nothing?”

“Exactly.”

“I’m a do-nothing champ. Anytime you need someone to do nothing with, I’m your man.” He smiled. “Anytime.”

On Tuesday, I avoided everyone. Again. The only thing on my mind was my piece for creative writing, which I had to turn in first thing the next day. At lunch, I secluded myself in the farthest library carrel, opened my notebook to a fresh page, and . . . stared at it. For the entire period. I probably picked up my pen fifty different times, but when the bell rang at the end of lunch, all I’d managed to write on the page was
September 21. Library.

God. I was so screwed.

In class Mr. Tremont showed us these slides of modern art, including a urinal hung upside down and labeled as a sculpture, and something called
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,
which he was so excited about that he got the whole class talking about it, just this one sculpture, for almost a full half hour. Of course, in Mr. Tremont’s class, every discussion became a lesson in how enough tangential lines can eventually create a circle around something, and after touching on physics, math, what a chocolate grinder is and why it was part of a sculpture, space, robots, World War I, the French, labels, what is art? and how do you define it? the power of words, surrealism, Dadaism, New York, the 1930s, and who gets to decide what is or is not art? — all in less than an hour — by the end of class, it was clear to everyone that we’d gone pretty far in depth about . . . something. When Mr. Tremont talked I kept having flashes of something bigger than me, bigger than Willow Grove, and when I looked around the room I could see it on the other faces, too. It was like prom, where the same kids you see every single day put on tuxes and ball gowns and suddenly become something more, and the people they’ll be as adults cling to them like shadows all night long. The room was full of the same faces I’d seen a thousand times, bored in algebra or laughing at lunch, but as everyone nodded with Mr. Tremont and jumped into the discussion, I could see what they’d look like in a year or two, taking notes in a lecture hall or struggling with a paper in the student union. We’d all been getting shiny college brochures for months, ever since the PSATs, but for the first time it actually seemed real, and I understood that when the year was over we’d all leave home and go our separate ways and become the people we were meant to be all along. And the spell wasn’t broken until after the bell rang and we stumbled out of class into the fluorescent hallways and turned into the same shallow teenagers we’d been before class. Leaving class was like walking out of a movie theater after an amazing film, when part of you still thinks you’re in Denmark or Mexico or a Nazi war camp or on a Southern plantation, and you resent the popcorn smells and the car noises and the cold night air of the real world for intruding on your dream.

Disoriented, I wandered off toward the library again to work on . . . whatever. When the bell rang, I had a page covered with doodled daisies and little stars, but still nothing I could turn in. I lectured myself through the crowded hallways. “Okay, Paige. Focus.” I pushed through the doors into the cloudy afternoon, still muttering to myself. The sky was white and textureless, hanging right behind the contours of the lampposts and trees. Halfway to my car, I heard a shout behind me. “Paige! Wait up!” I closed my eyes, briefly, and thought about pretending I hadn’t heard. I couldn’t deal with Nikki or Lacey right now, I didn’t want to make flyers for homecoming or meet with Dr. Coulter or answer questions or pretend to be friends. I just wanted to go somewhere nice and quiet and write my piece for creative writing so Mr. Tremont wouldn’t think I was an illiterate moron. “Paige!”

I turned around, slowly, preparing myself to explain as nicely as possible that I couldn’t do anything but WORK until I was finished with this assignment.

It was Shanti. Nikki would have been hunched over, panting and swearing that she was going to quit smoking, Lacey would have been rolling her eyes and looking supremely irritated that I would even think of making her call across the parking lot after me, especially now that she was crippled, but Shanti caught up to me easily and smiled. “Are you done with your thing for workshop?”