Where It Began

But I am stuck in my Before and I have no idea, not a clue or an inkling, that I am even going to get an After.

VIII

I AM SO DEEP INTO GABRIELLA GARDINER PRESENTS Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s, trawling through it looking for some faint clue as to how I ended up like this, that it is seriously a

Ponytail Doc, possibly because she can’t stand the pressure of trying to keep me from getting a look at myself in the crystal of her watch or the lenses of her big retro Italian glasses, has sent in reinforcements. An occupational therapist named Wendy shows up in my room pushing a green metal cabinet on wheels through the door, gri

“This is a mistake,” I say. “I don’t need an occupational therapist. I go to high school.”

But Wendy, it turns out, is a pediatric occupational therapist whose goal in life is to help little damaged, hospitalized children play. This is so sad that I can hardly stand to think about it.

“I’m a playologist!” she says.

There is some possibility that I am the oldest person Wendy has ever dealt with. To prove it, she hauls out coloring books, glitter markers, peg boards, and stickers with Elmo in a wheelchair. She has faded clay that is squishier than Play-Doh. She is so chirpy and perky that you have to figure even someone a lot nicer than I am would want to poke a glitter marker in her eye.

Wendy tries to find some space to unload her stuff on the counter between the botanical splendor and the shopping bags of beauty supplies, but I end up with tacky kindergarten art supplies piled on my stomach.

“You’ve got Barbie and Midge paper dolls,” I say.

Wendy is over the moon that I can name Barbie and Midge. When I ask her if she’s got Ken and Skipper, she is one orgasmic playologist.

It is so weirdly easy to please these people.

She hands me a pair of blunt scissors and admires the way I cut things out. I ca

“Do you have any actual art supplies?” I say after what seems like hours of this, when it seems like my right hand at least is somewhat functional and I could actually draw something. “Like real paper and good pencils or charcoal or anything?”

Wendy admires how precisely I have cut out Barbie’s tiny high-heeled shoes, which I am kind of seeing quadruple but are nevertheless perfect.

“I mean it,” I say. “I’m an actual artist.”

“Of course you are, dear,” Wendy says.

“Seriously,” I say. “I really am! Werner Rosen is my art teacher!”

Wendy looks deeply impressed, but when I think about it, I remember how deeply impressed she was about the Barbie shoes, and I can’t even tell if she knows who Werner Rosen is. But she does go scuttling off to get more stuff.

So I can sit there by myself with my auto-closing eyes and miss the art rooms at school. I miss Miss Cornish’s and Mr. Rosen’s art rooms, all right?

Look:

Me and Lisa and Lisa’s semi-boyfriend, Huey, hanging out in Miss Cornish’s art studio at Winston. Back when I think Huey is the artist and not me. Because photography counts but I am mostly good at throwing pots and glazing ceramics, which I kind of think doesn’t count much.

Close-up of Huey ru

If Huey had given off the slightest hint that he cared what other people thought, the jocks would have ripped him to pieces before he had a chance to finish middle school. But what Huey wants is to take spectacularly weird pictures that fill the spectacularly uncool Winston School Wildcat yearbook and that hang in the Winston School gallery (aka the hall outside of the gymnasium) and that win prizes.

We are all in the art room because Huey is briefly interested in making big papier-mâché animals out of computer-enhanced photographs. Lisa finally has a buddy who can’t paint either to hang around the easels with. Then they both start standing around watching me paint and throw pots, which is somewhat creepy. I am perfectly fine with Lisa hanging on my every brushstroke. I understand the part about not wanting to disappoint your parents so much it makes perfect sense to watch somebody else drag their paintbrush up and down a canvas for hours at a time. But Huey is taking pictures.

“Jeremy Hewlett,” I say. This is Huey’s actual name. “This is creeping me out. You have to stop it.”

“I’m recording the creative process,” he says.

“Well, go record somebody else’s creative process.”

“Maybe you didn’t notice,” Huey says, “but this is Winston School. Nobody else has a creative process. Except Lolly Wu, and the shutter clicking messes with her concentration.”

Lolly Wu plays the cello. Why she isn’t going to school at Crossroads, where they have an entire orchestra of kids who know how to hold their instruments right side up, is just another mystery of life.

“Yeah, well, when I become an art goddess, you can compare me to Wu.”

But I let him keep taking pictures. Leading Vivian to tell me that I can’t be a complete social leper if I have so many pictures of myself in the yearbook.

“Right,” Huey says. “I’ll just sit here and finish up my swan until you change your mind.”

This is the first time I see Mr. Rosen up close and personal, when he shows up in Miss Cornish’s art room in search of turpentine and a rag at that exact moment. He is like a hundred years old and a real artist, paintings in museums, the whole famous artist thing, who lives down the street from Winston, and somehow they convinced him to show up three times a week to Mentor the Next Generation. It is hard to imagine how a famous guy who deserves all his glory like Mr. Rosen—who, the headmaster keeps telling us, is some kind of official German national treasure—could fall for that, but he did.

When Mr. Rosen spots Huey turning his hundreds of black-and-white photos of women into that papier-mâché swan, the camera swinging perilously close to the bowl of liquid paste, he marches up behind him and sucks in his breath.

Huey just sits there frozen, holding a paste-soaked photo, gazing over at Mr. Rosen, with his googly green eyes open wide, as if he is waiting for spiritual enlightenment to come his way in a German accent.

“Did you take these photos?” Mr. Rosen asks, thumbing through the stack.

Huey says, “Yessir.”

“Well, they’re very good.” Mr. Rosen waves at Miss Cornish. “Look, Elspeth, see what nice composition?” he says, blurring his w sounds toward v’s, pointing at the black-and-white grainy picture of a freakishly large woman getting on a bus.

“You should take more photos,” he says to Huey. “Forget this duck.”

“It’s a swan,” Lisa says.

“Werner,” Miss Cornish says, visibly steamed, her skin getting whiter and her freckles standing out. “Jeremy has important things to express about beauty and metamorphosis in three dimensions.”

“Huey,” Huey says. “For Hewlett. Jeremy Hewlett the Third.”

“Cheremy Hewlett!” Mr. Rosen says. “Your mother took the raccoons out from my attic.”

Huey nods as if this were normal. He doesn’t even seem to be embarrassed about his spectacularly embarrassing mother, Bel Air’s bizarro answer to Saint Francis of Assisi, who is constantly coming to pick up Huey in the carpool line with an animal-rescue goat or a couple of ratty chickens and a three-legged pit bull in the backseat of the Bentley.

“You take maybe five hundred shots. Maybe six hundred. Then you bring me ten. Only the best.” Then he marches out with his turpentine and Miss Cornish’s blue rag.