Ask Me Read Free Page B

class line.
    The two boys were alike and unlike at the same time. Itwas easy to see why Jade could be interested in both. Will had perfect sandy blond hair; Alex’s curly hair was dark brown and unruly. But each had a physical presence about them that few other boys in school approached. Where Will’s manifested in a casual swagger, Alex was a big guy and comfortable with it: imposing and physically
there
. You felt that presence when either entered a room. Kings among men. Men among boys.
    As I watched, Alex managed to shove the bag into his locker and slam the door shut.
    He straightened and glanced up and down the hallway once as if he, too, was looking for someone. Maybe Jade? His eyebrows were drawn down and his lips pressed together in a thin line. It was hard to tell what he was feeling. For all I knew, he was constipated. He glanced in Will’s direction and straightened his back, pushing his muscular chest out at the same time, but the display was for nothing. Will didn’t even spare him a look.
    I had never really spoken directly to either of them. Still, I knew things about them that other girls would love to know. Random answers to overheard questions. Like how Will often slept in the nude and Alex’s favorite poem was
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
. Or how the smell of mint made Will inexplicably happy or how Alex felt deeply guilty for that time he’d played mailbox baseball with some other guys from the team. In the end, though, these snippets were just jagged pieces of a meaningless puzzle. I couldn’t put them together into a bigger picture any more than I could for the other kids who roamed these halls, Jade included.

    ALEX WAS IN MY final period art class. He always seemed out of place there; his big hands delicately grasping paintbrushes when they were genetically predisposed to handling a ball of some kind. He wasn’t as beefy as Tank, but he was well over six feet tall and solid, like a tree trunk. He dwarfed poor Kirby Williams, who sat next to him, one of those funny vagaries of alphabetic seating. Kirby weighed less than I did. Not that Alex ever did anything intimidating, and he never seemed to notice Kirby’s discomfort.
    The two of us were alike in one respect; neither of us talked to anyone else in class if we could help it. I knew why I didn’t, and I could guess why Alex chose silence, too. He was well-liked enough for his athletic prowess. You could tell the changing of seasons by the changing of his uniforms. Then his link with Jade had pushed him even higher. But he had a big reason to hide. It was no secret that his father, Frank—Dale’s older brother—was an alcoholic. But it wasn’t something you mentioned in Lake Mariah. Not given the circumstances. After a weeklong drinking binge a couple of years back, a fire burned down the Walker house, killed Alex’s younger brother, and drove their mother away. No charges were ever pressed—it turned out to be faulty wiring, nothing to do with Frank’s drunkenness—but everyone in town still knew, and everyone in town blamed Frank for how the family fell apart.

    MRS. ROGERS, THE ART teacher, actually allowed me to use my MP3 player during class so long as she wasn’t giving a lecture. Today I left it off to save my batteries. Lucy Monroe sometimes sat with me at our table in the back, but she was absent today and I didn’t really need it. Not that she talked to me anyway. She was a friend of Shelley’s. Besides, everyone was working on the mixed media self-portrait project Mrs. Rogers had assigned us last week. The quiet in the room was broken only by the scratching of pen and pencil and paintbrush.
    I had gotten nowhere with mine. My canvas was blank save for the background. I had spent two days so far covering the white with alternating layers of grey and green. It was a dismal mess with no form. Mrs. Rogers was always telling us art had to come from inside us, and as long as I was doing
something
, she would let me be.