My Kind of Crazy - Robin Reul Page 0,41
if I didn’t say she still seems pretty fantastic.
I’m sitting in the back of bio, doodling in the margins of my notes and stealing glances at Amanda, calculating my chances for being her escort to prom, when the fire alarm goes off. There is a mix of cheers and grumbles as our teacher jumps into emergency response mode and hustles us single file out the door.
The faculty shepherd us through the halls, while a group of freshmen whisper back and forth about two fire alarms in two weeks. I smile, sensing this is most definitely not a coincidence.
I shove my hands in my pockets, and on a hunch, I casually make my way toward the faculty parking lot. Lying right in front of the gate is a matchbook, the cover folded neatly back and tucked in on itself, a single unlit match sticking up like a middle finger. I pick up the matchbook, closing the cover. This one is from Purple Haze Hookah Lounge. I laugh and shove it in my pocket, then slip through the gate into the parking lot.
I find Peyton sitting cross-legged on the asphalt next to Vice Principal Jergensen’s Volvo wagon, which has the bumper sticker “Are you following Jesus this close?” As I get closer, I see that she is reading the Freeze Frame pages that I left on her pillow. She has not set them on fire, so I’m hoping that means she thinks they’re decent.
When she hears me approaching, she looks up and actually has tears in her eyes.
“Hank, this is amazing,” she says, shaking her head and thumbing her way to the next page.
Admittedly, it’s what I’ve been waiting to hear, and it fills me up. “I’m glad you liked it. I wanted to show it to you because I’m pretty proud of it actually, and I’m excited to hear what you think. But…we could have met up after school or something. You didn’t need to pull the fire alarm.”
She laughs. “No worries, I only burned a few paper towels in the girls’ restroom. It’s all tile and toilets. I’m sure it was out before the fire engines got here. Though all that hair spray residue does up the flammability factor. Hmmm.”
As much as I want nothing more than to get her feedback, and I’m flattered that she couldn’t even wait until lunch to talk, I’m also unsettled by how flippant she is about what she’s done. She throws caution to the wind. Like she doesn’t care if she hurts anyone because she’s got nothing to lose.
“Seriously, what if someone got hurt? Or the fire got out of control? You should stop. What if someone catches you? You’d get kicked out.” I glance nervously toward the school, afraid that at any minute one of the teachers will sweep the parking lot for stray students and find us.
“Can we please talk about this instead?” She grabs my wrist and pulls me down next to her. “Hank, you are very talented. I’m not kidding. You have to do something with this.”
“Do what with it?”
“I don’t know. You need to show this to someone. I imagine all the art schools in the country would beg you to come if they saw your work. Or you could send it to a publisher. There have to be special publishers for this kind of stuff, right? We could write to them, and maybe they would take a look at it.”
She seems genuinely excited. Having Peyton look at my pages and judge them was hard enough; I’m not sure I could handle a college or publisher telling me my work is no good.
I bite my lip for a moment. “That would be pretty amazing. But the reality is that colleges have already closed applications for the fall. I have greater odds of being hit by lightning than getting in, not to mention being able to afford tuition. And I don’t know squat about how to find a publisher.”
Peyton rolls her eyes. “There’s this amazing thing called the Internet, Hank. It’s like a genie. You ask it questions, and it gives you answers. Also, there’s this awesome school called the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They have rolling admissions, so you can still apply. It’s not too late. Their admissions people look at your stuff and let you know their decision in a month or so.”
“How do you know so much about their admissions policy?”
“Again, Hank, the Internet. Are you listening to me? You owe it