he like someone as thick and clunky as me?
Could he look past my rough exterior to see that I have a heart too?
When you’re like me, when you’re a dude who plays baseball and hangs with his bros, you aren’t supposed to have a heart.
But here’s the secret: I like tender. Maybe more than I should.
I wish I could show him my heart. That’s dangerous, though. You show it and people laugh. Nothing is worse than people laughing at your open heart, which is why I think guys don’t do that so much. Which is why I can’t believe Jordan trusted me enough to show me that.
I want to be worth that.
So when I get home, I close my door and make sure it’s locked. I don’t know why. I just don’t want Mom walking in and seeing this. Not that she’d mind, but this feels … private.
I sit down at my desk, and I close my eyes and think about Jordan’s lonely poem.
A shovel, digging upward. Wow. And the oxygen is running out. Wow. I close my eyes and I picture Jordan digging up, and suddenly I’m hoping someone is digging down to meet him.
I pull out my supplies from the bottom drawer. I haven’t done this since ninth grade, when Mr. Zimmer saw my saguaro tree and used it as an example of what not to do. “Maybe you’re more of an athlete, Morrison,” he said, and I smiled as everyone laughed.
It’s a black, zipped container with about fifty pencils in various colors and various textures, from hard to soft, and a kneaded eraser that’s good not just for blotting out mistakes, but also pulling apart. I used to have a nervous habit of doing that, like I couldn’t go two seconds without rolling a ball of gray eraser around in my fingers and then pulling it apart and stuffing it back together.
I open my old notebook and flip through the pages. Sure enough, the last page is the saguaro tree. It looks pretty good to me, with about six arms of varying height, all with that prickly texture of the one in our front yard. The shade of green looks just right. I don’t know what Mr. Zimmer saw; maybe he was just trying to be funny. But yeah, it definitely stopped me from drawing. I dropped the class, even. But right now, I don’t care.
I look at the page and I see a pit, like one someone might dig. Then I imagine it from different angles. Am I at a side view? I find myself scrunching and pulling at the kneaded eraser as I think. I see a guy tangled in tree roots underground.
I settle into a side view. I take a small piece of charcoal and rub it across the page, creating a place for Jordan’s loneliness to be. I don’t know what’s above and below the ground; I just need to get rid of the blank paper. I remember that from when I used to draw all the time. It was like, getting rid of the blankness gave me permission to get started.
I rough out the side of Jordan’s face. He’s underground, confined. He’s partially digging, and partially pushing against the surface. Suddenly he has a hand clawing at the surface, his thumb on the outside, which means his arm is tucked at his side. I lose my breath seeing the outline of that skinny arm, confined. Then I add his left arm, pushing up at the surface. I create the sinews in his clawing right arm, the dirt falling on his face as he tries desperately to remove the earth.
I want the edge of his face to show, just his jawline, as if he’s turned away, avoiding the falling dirt. It’s all charcoal still, sketched on the page, erasable, which is good because so far it sucks.
A hack. I’m a hack. I have no idea how to —
I shut my brain off and trace some gnarly roots that run down into the ground, like from a tree above. The roots entwine his wrists like handcuffs, and again, I’m finding it hard to breathe, staring at this thing I’m creating.
I smear some charcoal along the roots to create a shadow quickly.
No. His body should be under the roots, under the tree.
I deepen his hands, the claw feature. Then I go into the claw hand with the eraser as it’s getting lost in there. And what’s going on above the earth? This is the hard