I don’t know, knows her own mind. She’s got her own opinions. She—”
And then I stop, because it hits me that I’m not sure if I’m trying to convince Verbena of Sarah’s greatness, or if I’m trying to convince myself.
Chapter Thirteen
Future Shock
Riding the bus back to Farm World this afternoon, it occurs to me that I’m on the verge of having an almost normal life, one with friends and activities and everything. When I got on the bus after the last bell, not one single person yelled out, “Skunk girl!” I looked around for a few seconds waiting for it, and then Steve told me to find a seat before he found one for me. So I did.
Even before that, it had been an interesting day. For instance, in art, pale Meg finally spoke to me. Well, first she dropped a rock on the table in front of me, and then she spoke. “This might help,” she said before heading to her corner. “Stones are elemental and beautiful. They’re everyday objects and they’re art.”
I had to admit, for a rock, it was pretty darn cute. And frankly, I could use all the inspiration I could get. The collage thing was not happening for me. I was trying. I’d ruined three canvases gluing stuff to them, No. 2 pencils and gum wrappers and a used-up tube of lipstick I’d found in the bottom of my backpack. But the junk I stuck on the canvases just sat there, like it was wondering why it wasn’t in a trash can where it belonged. I couldn’t bring myself to take Sarah’s words out of the envelope in my backpack, or the picture of the Pritchards. I didn’t want to ruin them.
I put a fresh canvas on the table in front of me and put the rock in the middle of it. I was pretty sure the rock was quartz, if my seventh-grade earth science knowledge still served; it was white with pink streaks running through it. One side was perfectly smooth, as if the edges and points had been sheared off. I liked how it looked feminine and masculine at the same time.
I walked over to Meg’s corner. “Thanks for the rock,” I told her. “Unfortunately, I don’t know what to do with it.”
“If you like it, live with it a little while,” Meg suggested. “Look around for other things that remind you of it, or have some sort of intuitive connection for you.”
I glanced at the collage she was working on. She had glued jar lids and bottle caps over a large canvas—I noted a Gerber baby food jar lid and a Duke’s Mayonnaise jar lid and at least five Pepsi bottle caps—and had drawn orange and red concentric circles around each one so that her collage was practically pulsating.
“That’s really cool,” I told her. “I wish I could think of something like that.”
“You will,” said Meg. “You just need to relax a little.”
So I spent the rest of the class trying to relax, which was hard to do, as Chester and Lynnette were deeply involved in a thumb-wrestling tournament, but nothing came to me. The rock was pretty, but what could I do except maybe glue some more rocks next to it? Turn it into a science project? Drill holes and make a necklace?
And then, on my way to Great Girls and Women, I spotted a tiny paper parasol, the kind you get in fancy drinks, underneath the water fountain outside of the girls’ bathroom, the fountain that spits out warm water and is always clogged with gum, so nobody ever uses it. The parasol was pink and had tiny violet flowers painted on it. I took Meg’s rock out of my pocket and held it next to the parasol.
It was a match made in heaven. For the first time since Ms. Ashdown had introduced me to the insanity that was a Robert Rauschenberg collage, I thought maybe I could make this art thing work.
And this afternoon I had another glimpse of what having an almost normal life might be like, after the last bell, walking toward the bus line with Monster while he explained the contents of the CD he’d just handed me (“Lots of simple stuff—easy Strokes, some Rage Against the Machine, a couple of early Police tunes—just listen and try to play it by ear”). It seemed like every other person we passed had something to say—a “Yo, Monster-man” or a “Hey, dude,” and even one “Yo, Monster and