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continues to ignore me, which is highly annoying. He is busy with his pen and that little black book.
    Now
I’m
interested in what he’s doing.
    “What are you doing?” I say.
    “Drawing,” Max says. “I study people. I draw them and take notes like an ethnographer.”
    I lean over and look at the black ink sketch he’s made of my profile. There is a bubble under it that says,
Quick to anger, thinks she knows everything.
    It’s a good rendition of me and he’s made me look prettier than I really am, but I don’t want to be in his book. I don’t want to be collected.
    I shoot my hand out to rip the page from its place. In anticipation of my move, he pulls the book away from me.
    “Give it,” I say.
    “Nuh-uh,” he says. “It’s a social record.”
    “Look, I’m superstitious. You’ve drawn me. It’s like you’re stealing my soul or keeping my toenail clippings.”
    I throw him the evil eye.
    “What are you trying to do?” Max says. “Get me with your superpowers?”
    “You’re an asshole,” I say.
    He laughs and continues sketching.
    “Ars longa, vita brevis,”
Max says.
    “What?”
    “It’s Latin,” Max says. “It means ‘Art is long, life is short.’ This is art. This is forever.”
    He taps the drawings in his book adoringly.
    “This,” he says, drawing an imaginary circle around my face, “is not art. This does not have to be forever.”
    Mrs. Perez walks down the aisle toward us, passing back our environmental poems. She hands mine and Max’s back. I hold it up for him to see: A+.
    “Why don’t you draw this?” I say.
    “Why don’t I draw
this
instead?” Max says, and holds up his poem: A++.
    I grab for his paper and this time he lets me take it. I scan the poem for flaws, and my eyes fall upon these lines:
    Silent is the ruined land.
Man is brutal
and the rain does not wash away
the pain
or rid the distant memory.
It makes it glisten.
    I thought he was stupid. Now I know he’s gifted, just like me.

    An eyeless head is ogling me. I look over at the cemetery set from
Blue Hill Wyoming.
Skeletons are pushing up from the graves. On the walls are apes, monkeys, aliens, mummies . . . you name any creepy thing and it’s there.
    On a shelf to my left is the wall of blood. Jars and jars of fake blood and the ingredients for each kind.
    My father, Sam Jurgen, master mask-maker, animatronic freak, monster and alien specialist, special-effects makeup wizard, is hunched over his worktable constructing the perfect eye.
    I plop my bag down on a stool and remain quiet until he is finished. From years of experience, I know not to interrupt him while he’s concentrating this hard.
    Once, when I was about nine, I was bored and I wanted him to pay attention to me. He turned purple and shoved everything off the table onto the floor, then he yelled at me for getting in the way of the flow and ruining the lizard alien he was making. It’s better to remain invisible until he turns his eyes on you. Once he does, he gives you all the careful attention you deserve. You just have to wait your turn.
    “There,” my dad says to me, holding up the eyeball.
    Now it is okay to talk.
    “Looks good,” I say.
    “No, really look at it,” he says, and holds it under the work light. I lean forward and notice that the pupil dilates.
    “Cool,” I say.
    He’s like a little kid.
    I can see pretty clearly why he and my mom didn’t work out.
    I try to imagine them falling in love while he applied foam latex appliances and makeup to her on the episode of
The Nemesis
when she gets some weird skin radiation sickness and her whole face is peeling off.
    Mom got kicked off the show when she got pregnant, and then Dad was doing his first big feature, a low-budget sci-fi film called
Star King,
which won him his first Academy Award. Soon after that, they split up.
    She was mad about him applying lizard scales to all the naked models on the film, and he was mad that she wouldn’t let him mix up the latex in