After being there and seeing her drink champagne and talk with this low voice to a bunch of impressed people, I could just feel how lame we all must have seemed to her. All of us except Ingrid, who was actually talented. Like last year, we had an assignment to photograph something that was meaningful to us. I guess she expected us to turn in pictures of really profound things—I can’t even think of what—because when she started coming by our desks to see what we came up with and saw a jock’s picture of his baseball glove lying on the grass, and a girl’s pom-pom against the gym floor, she just about lost it. That smile vanished. She walked back to her desk and put her head in her hands and didn’t speak for the rest of the class.
She looks more optimistic today, calling kids over to her desk, one by one. I’m in the far right corner, alone, of course. She starts with Akiko, who is sitting in the front left of the room. I assume that she hopes she’ll run out of time before my turn comes. I lay my head on my desk and shut my eyes.
Forty minutes later I wake up.
Everything is muffled, but it only seems like that because I’m disoriented and kind of embarrassed that I actually fell asleep. When I lift my head and see that nothing new is happening, that everyone is still sitting together at their tables and Ms. Delani is meeting with Matt, I just close my eyes again and listen to people talking. Meghan and Katie are writing notes to each other and whispering, Oh my God! and No he did not! Dustin and James are talking in low voices about some new skate park.
I hear Katie saying, all importantly, “Henry’s mom is the real estate agent who was showing the house they bought, and she told Henry that the family was nice but just not the kind of people who belong in our community.”
“I heard she’s a lesbian,” Meghan says. To judge by her tone, she might as well be saying, I hear she digs garbage from trash cans and eats it.
“I heard that, too,” Lulu whispers. “I heard she got kicked out of her old school for making out with a girl in the bathroom.”
I realize they’re talking about Dylan, and for some reason it really pisses me off.
“Excuse me, but some of us are trying to sleep,” I say, glaring at them.
They look at me, then at each other. They stop talking for a moment. Meghan runs her hand down one side of her neatly combed brown hair. Katie buttons a pearl button on her sweater. They look like miniatures of their mothers.
“Caitlin?” Ms. Delani says. She’s scanning the classroom, like she called my name off a random list and she doesn’t know who I am.
“I’m over here,” I tell her.
“Will you come to my desk, please?”
I look at the clock. There aren’t even two minutes left.
I get up and walk to her desk. She has a folder of my photographs from last year and she’s looking at them through her little glasses. She sighs, tucks some of her straight black hair behind her ear.
“You definitely need to work on your use of color this semester. Look at this one,” she says, but I don’t.
I look straight at her face. She doesn’t even notice.
“Do you see how there is no contrast here? If we were to convert this image to black-and-white, you would see that all these colors would be the same value of gray. It has a dulling effect.”
I keep looking at her and she keeps looking at my photo. Last year she wasn’t like this. She may have paid more attention to Ingrid, but she talked to me, too.
She sifts through the stack. “Your compositions are sometimes good, but . . .” She shakes her head. “Even they need quite a bit of work.”
I want to say, Fuck you, Veena. They were obviously okay with you last year, because you gave me an A. But I don’t say anything. I’m just waiting for her to look up at me so she can see me glaring. The bell rings. She looks up at the clock, back at the stack, and says, “Okay?”
“Okay, what?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I shake my head.
“But what are my goals?” I ask. I just want her to look at me.
“Color,” she says, staring at my pictures. “Composition.”
I’m about to ask her what she means, how I can just get better, where I should start. But she’s already turned and walking to her back office. The door shuts.
12
I’m headed up to the science building, holding a cold slice of greasy pizza. On my way through the quad I see Jayson Michaels. There are only a few black kids at our school, so he stands out. Plus he’s really popular—track star, runs the mile in 4:20 flat. We went to the same junior high and had homeroom together in sixth grade, and the only thing that I really remember about it was that when we were discussing segregation the teacher randomly asked Jayson how he felt about it. She asked him right there in the middle of everyone. As if a sixth grader who had lived his whole life in this practically all-white town would feel like being a spokesperson for Black America. And anyway, what a dumb question. What’s he gonna say? Well, actually, I feel pretty good about it. It’s pretty uplifting that people like me couldn’t get served in restaurants or use public bathrooms.
Now he takes a step toward me. I haven’t seen him this close for years. His eyes are lighter brown than I remember. His face is smooth and he has a nick on his right cheek, at the jaw.
I can’t remember a single thing that Jayson and I ever said to each other. Still, I know these personal things about him because he told Ingrid and she told me. Like he has a sister who’s in college, who he talks to on the phone a lot. And he lives with his dad alone. He loves to run because it makes him forget about everything else. When he trains, he listens to old groups like the Jackson Five.