Struts & Frets Read Free Page B

things worse because not only would I have all my old thoughts from the day to settle down, but I’d be getting new ones also. So now I just stare up at the ceiling and wait.
    The thing that kept floating through my head was Jen5’s question:
What would you do with the rest of your life?
    But of course, I already knew the answer to that question. I’d just make more music. Despite its name, Tragedy of Wisdom was going to become famous. Not lame famous, like those sellout bands that play in football stadiums and can’t even relate to regular people anymore. No, we were going to be cool famous, like those bands that hardly get any radio play, except on college radio, and if they have a video, it’s only played late at night because it isn’t commercial enough for the soulless marketing people. We were going to have one of those small but intense fan bases that would swap bootlegs of our shows online but buy the CDs anyway and totally obsess over my lyrics and what they meant. Cool writers would make references to us in their novels. Hot artsy chicks with nose rings would stalk us at concerts. The works.
    That’s what I planned to do with the rest of my life. Not bad, huh?

said Mr. Sully, our art teacher. “Fruit is soooo dullsville.” He was an older guy with a long beard and long hair pulled back into a ponytail. Or at least, the hair he
had
was long. He was mostly bald on top. He looked more like he should be guarding a pot farm with a couple of Rottweilers down in southern Ohio than teaching art in a high school. But he was nice enough and kind of funny—at least, when he didn’t mean to be.
    â€œBut I want tell you,” continued Mr. Sully, nodding his head up and down rhythmically, “that painting a fruit still life can be awesome if you approach it the right way.”
    We were all standing in a big circle facing inward, each with an easel. In the center of the circle was an apple, a banana, and an orange on a table.
    â€œI want you to think back to last year,” said Mr. Sully, “and just muse on all the different styles of painting we talked about. I want you to meditate on them until you pick the one that speaks to you.” He lowered his head, as if to show the proper posture for meditating, then he jerked his head back up, blinked, and said, “Then I want you to paint in that style. Okay. Begin.”
    â€œFruit,” said Jen5. “I hate painting fruit.” Today she was decked out in a gray tweed sports coat over a black lacy tank top and torn-up flared jeans. Her massive tangle of frizzy, nearly dreadlocked blond hair was pulled back in some kind of leather-thong-and-chopstick combo.
    Jen5 didn’t really have a specific look or style. You couldn’t pin her into a group like goth or geek or punk. Sometimes she looked like an art chick, sometimes like a skater chick, sometimes even a little like a college professor. But most of the time she looked like all three at once. The first thing that people noticed about her was the color of her eyes. Just like her style, you couldn’t really tell what they were. Sometimes they were blue, sometimes green, sometimes gray or hazel. On official forms where you had to fill in stuff like your height, weight, and hair color, in the eye-color line she usually wrote “paisley.”
    â€œFruit, flowers, sunsets,” I said with a shrug. “What’s the difference? It’s all painting.”
    Jen5 scowled at me. “Sure, for you. Because you don’t like painting. If you did, you’d know that there was a huge difference.” Then she turned her scowl on the fruit. “Maybe if it was organic fruit or something . . . then it would have shades and variations. Stuff you could play with. But the stupid Frankenfruit they pump full of chemicals now, combined with all the wax they pour on it . . . we might as well be painting fake plastic fruit. There’s nothing real