Grace Read Free

blue, the same color blue as the eggs Trevor found up in the eaves of the shed earlier that morning, the color of crushed-up sky. Mrs. D. gave it to him after the bell rang and almost everybody else had already packed up their stuff and headed out the door. He was messing around in his backpack, worrying about where he was going to sit at lunch, and didn’t know that she was trying to get his attention. But then she touched his arm, real soft, with her talcum-powder hands and said, “Trevor dear, can you wait just a minute, please? I have something for you.”
    Mrs. D. was the art teacher at Trevor’s school. A lot of kids were creeped out by her; some of the younger ones even thought that she was a witch or something. She did look a little bit like a witch, with the small hump underneath her moth-hole-riddled green sweater, with the threadbare black wig she wore. She smelled dusty and old too, like wet books. Some kids cackled whenever she turned her back, called her Nanny McPhee, but Trevor liked Mrs. D. So what if she was old and strange? She was a good artist, a good teacher. The fruit she drew always looked like fruit: bananas and apples and a pomegranate, its seeds spilling out all over the table like the insides of the buck that Trevor’s dad shot last year. Plus, Mrs. D. was always giving him things to bring home—a box of waxy oil pastels, some tubes of acrylic paint that she was about to throw away. One time she gave him a set of colored pencils that weren’t even opened yet. Besides, Trevor liked being in the art room. He loved the smell of paint and paste, the dusty, musty scent of it all. He liked the way the canvases looked like boys leaning against the brick walls. He liked the paint-splattered floors, the rough wooden worktables, the high ceilings, and the quiet. It was almost like being in a library here; and when the doors closed behind him, he felt suddenly secure, sheltered, at peace.
    He opened the box and pulled out a camera. A real camera, heavy and black with a glass lens: the old-fashioned kind. For the last few weeks, they’d been doing a unit on photography, and this camera was like the ones each student was allowed to sign out, but this one was brand-new.
    â€œHave you ever had your own camera before?” she asked.
    He shook his head.
    He thought of the slide show she’d shown them last week. Ansel Adams, that was the landscape guy. Some old lady who took pictures of flowers. But Trevor had liked the picture of people, the portraits, best. Faces. Mrs. D. had explained that photographers could be artists, that a good photographer uses the light to make ordinary or even ugly things beautiful. He thought about the kind of pictures he might take, about the faces he knew.
    â€œThe school will probably do away with the darkroom eventually. Move everything to digital. But for now, I can still teach you how to develop the film. How to make prints.” Her head shook back and forth like a bobblehead doll, her voice made of tissue paper. “I want to see the world the way you see it, Trevor.”
    He wasn’t sure why Mrs. D. took such an interest in him. He wasn’t a good artist. Not like Angie McDonald in his class, whose paintings always looked like what they were supposed to. The things he drew never matched what was inside his head. He couldn’t get what was up there on the page, and he wasn’t sure anybody would want to see that anyway. But since sixth grade, Mrs. D. had looked at him like she saw someone special inside there. Nobody had ever looked at him like that before.
    He’d been thinking a lot lately about the way people looked at him. He’d grown so much since last year, he barely recognized himself in the mirror. He’d outgrown every pair of pants, every pair of shoes he owned. He felt like the Incredible Hulk, busting out of his own clothes. Kids had always been mean to him, teased him, but now the same kids moved away