Still Life with Tornado Read Free

and I shove food into my face as if I’m starving, because I am starving. I didn’t eat lunch today. I don’t think I even ate breakfast.
    Dad says, “I heard you didn’t keep our deal.”
    Mom turns to me and says, “The school called.”
    Dad says, “Just
one day
, Sarah. For me?”
    Mom mumbles something under her breath and I don’t hear it. Dad does. He gives her a look I know all too well. It’s like someone scraped his face off and replaced it with a guy who hates us all. Her, me, even himself.
    I imagine I will go to school tomorrow.
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    Last week, on the third day of bus riding, I decided to transfer every time I saw the same bus shelter advertisement twice. It seemed like an original game. Eventually, I ended up in a neighborhood I’d never been in, in front of a boarded-up high school. It was an old building with graffiti-covered columns at the front entrance and the name of some dead educator carved in stone over the doors. I decided this would be my new school.
    A guy in skinny jeans, curated high-tops, and chunky, hip glasses was standing on the sidewalk across the street staring into a camera on a tripod. He kept pulling his face away from the eyepiece and looking around. I could tell he was nervous. It wasn’t the nicest part of town. I decided he had to be an art student. They infest this town like hipster cockroaches. Every one of them thinks they’re original.
    This guy looked like he was into ruin porn—breaking into abandoned buildings, climbing bare girders, and taking pictures of collapsed ceilings and piles of rubble. This was a thing now.
Ruin porn.
But this guy hadn’t even broken into the building; he was just taking pictures of the outside. First, from the tripod and then he walked around and tilted his camera in different directions and did close-ups of the usual things: graffiti, rust, broken windows. I knew if I looked hard enough I could find his page on The Social and look through his online portfolio. Maybe he went to the University of the Arts. Maybe he could sell me heroin. I didn’t look him up, though. Totally unoriginal. Plus, I don’t actually want to do heroin. I want to go to Spain or Macedonia. And I have more guts than to just see a thing from the outside.
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    When I wake up to my alarm, I smooth out my clothing and I don’t even change my underwear. I hear Mom getting in from her night’s work and I hear her collapse into her bed and turn on the sound machine that she needs to sleep all day. White noise. It sounds like someone left the TV on static.
    I get my favorite umbrella and put it in my backpack even though there is no rain predicted for the day. Dad is in the kitchen making me breakfast, but I walk straight out the door and up to the vendor who makes the best egg, cheese, and ham breakfast sandwiches, and when he asks “Salt, pepper, oregano?” I say yes to all three even though I don’t like oregano. Then I sit on the curb and slowly eat every bite.
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    I’m late to my new school, because I don’t exactly remember the buses I took to get here before. There are no ruin porn photographers this time.
    The minute I step into the building, I pretend this is my old school on any normal day. I open my umbrella. Superstition abounds. Students act as if I’ve brought a curse upon the building, but that’s only because they don’t know that there is already a curse upon the building. The curse is: Nobody focuses on the now.
    In first-period English, the teacher asks me to close my umbrella and I comply. She says, “It’s nice to see you again, Sarah.” I smile. It feels like I have a disease.
    By lunch, I’m ready to leave and take the bus to anywhere, but I decide to stay. I sit in the cafeteria at a table of the other sophomore art