“Gregor Maravilla!”
Of course it was her, standing above me. Ashley Woodstone crouched down, her face scrunched up as she scanned me. “You’re resplendent!”
“Huh?”
She lifted my limp forearm, and I could see that my skin was sprinkled with purple glitter.
“This is upsetting and beautiful,” Ashley said. “Are you okay? What year is it? Who’s president? Who holds the record for most Oscar acting nominations?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s Meryl Streep! Somebody send help!”
I sat up quickly. “I’m fine.” I looked around the room now that the glitter had settled. It was almost cartoonish how quickly all of the supplies had gone.
“You didn’t get any supplies,” Ashley said.
I walked over to the table. All that was left was a red marker and a loose pile of googly eyes. I pocketed it all. It would have to do.
“You don’t have any supplies either.” I turned to Pika to make sure he wasn’t holding bundles of art stuff. He wasn’t.
“Oh, I already finished my picket sign. When I heard what the competition would be last night, I called in a favor from a friend and she ca—”
I stopped listening when I saw Poe through the open doors. “Cool story good luck bye!”
I jogged out the door and sidled up next to Poe, walking in stride with her. “Looks like you scored some good supplies.” She had a whole box full of paints in her arms. “How’d you manage that?”
“I just asked I Like Paint if he was willing to share from his personal stash. I mean, I asked him, and he couldn’t answer, obviously, and he didn’t seem to mind when I walked off with this stuff.”
“That’s nice of him.”
“It’s really a travesty that the camp hasn’t managed to get him a translator yet. I’m thinking of staging a protest on his behalf.”
“I totally agree. I can help if you want.”
“Sure,” she said. “Either way, I think he’s set for this comp. I don’t think he’s threatened by any of us. He’s obviously going to win this one.”
I hadn’t thought of it before, but Poe was right. ILP would probably submit his mural as his picket sign. And he’d had a head start, working on it all this time in lieu of partaking in any of the activities.
“You think you could help a guy out, share some of your supplies? All I got were some eyes.” I fisted a few of the googly eyes in my pocket and swished them around in my palm to show her.
“Sure. But you’d have to do something for me in return.”
“Like what?”
“I need a subject. Care to pose for me?”
“You going to paint me like one of your French girls?” Titanic was my mom’s favorite movie. I mentally thanked her for indirectly helping to provide this perfect line.
“How do you know about my French girls?”
* * *
I’d only been at the camp a few days, but I’d already gotten a care package from home. My dad sent me a book, and in his letter he wrote, Anton says this is what you might call a “gag gift.” And while I do hope it makes you laugh a little bit, I also thought you might appreciate it, on a more serious level. I hope this helps with your crush on Ashley Woodstone.
The book was called How to Get a Girlfriend.
It was definitive proof not only that I was a loser but that my own father was aware of it. I thought about burning the book immediately, lest anyone catch me with it. But then I tucked it under my pillow when I was sure no one was looking. Gag gift or not, it might prove helpful at this camp. And sitting here now, under the shade of a tree as I drew on my placard while Poe painted me, the book was finally coming in handy. Chapter two was all about the importance of listening. So all I did was listen as Poe told me about her life in Paramus, New Jersey. She was an only child. She was a second-generation American. Her grandparents were from Kaiping, a city that was about ninety miles from Hong Kong. Poe got to visit when she was eight, but she hadn’t been back since. She couldn’t wait to graduate so she could move to New York and attend the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she would major in fine arts. She already had a thesis project sorted out in which she’d paint the portrait of every LGBTQ person who came into her life. Watching her paint, it was easy to see she really was an amazing artist.
Listening was important, of course, but as chapter three of How to Get a Girlfriend said, I also needed to find some common ground for me and Poe to bond over. But that was proving difficult. I was not an amazing artist, I hated poetry, my favorite band was not Radiohead, and while I could understand it, I did not want to escape New Jersey. I threw out a lifeline, hoping she’d catch it. “Do you like superhero movies?”
“Superhero movies?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They’re kind of my fave brand of movie. I know everyone loves Marvel right now, but I’m much more of a DC fan. I prefer my superheroes gritty and kind of broody—the last Superman movie notwithstanding, of course. That movie was a joke.”
“Superhero movies?” Poe said again, as if she hadn’t heard anything I’d just said. “I don’t really go to the movies unless there’s a new Whit Stillman playing at the Angelika.”
Poe from Paramus still managed to see cool movies in cool indie theaters in New York by cool indie directors I’d never heard of. The more she told me about herself, the more I realized just how different we were and how little hope I had of getting her to look at me the way that I looked at her.
“Isn’t Ashley in that new Superman movie?” Poe asked. Something changed in her voice suddenly; something happy and light caught on the edges of Ashley’s name.
“Yes.”
“I might have to watch it, then.”
I focused on my picket sign, trying to ignore the fact that Ashley Woodstone was infiltrating my time with Poe.
“You and Ashley are friends, right?” Poe asked.
“I wouldn’t say that, no.”
“She’s always hanging around you.”
“I don’t understand it either,” I said. “Doesn’t it bother you that she’s at this camp?”
“Why should it?” Poe said.
“Nepotism. Special treatment. We worked hard to get here, and she comes in with a bogus campaign and just expects everyone to listen to her because she’s famous. She doesn’t even need the internship. And what about her campaign?”
“What about it?”
“Eat Dirt? It’s ridiculous.”
“Dirt’s not that bad. I tried some.”
I put down the marker and looked at Poe. She was focused on her artwork, smiling serenely as she drew as though she hadn’t just admitted that she’d eaten dirt. “You what?”
“Ashley says it’s nutritious.”
“Ashley says a lot of weird things.”
“I really think you’re being too hard on her, Gregor. Ashley’s campaign may seem a little odd, but people just need to be more open-minded. Plus, dirt’s supposed to be really good for your hair and nails.”
I sat there dazed.
“I think Ashley’s great,” Poe said. There was that special tone of voice again, the one that seemed reserved only for people whom Poe deemed worthy. My own name on Poe’s lips sounded like a hacking cough by comparison. Poe may have been painting my likeness, but it was clear by the look in her eyes that it wasn’t me she was seeing in her mind anymore. Count on Ashley Woodstone to ruin my day. And she didn’t even have to be here to do it.
* * *
Lunchtime came and you’d think a war had broken out by the fervor of our protesting. One hundred campers shrouded in plum-colored poster board stormed the mess hall. We blocked the entrance as if we’d all silently agreed that lunch was our biggest foe and letting anyone into the building meant failure. Not that anybody wanted in.
Campers stomped, marched, punched fists into the air, and chanted their own made-up rhymes, drowning one another out. The flames of activism raged on. It was infectious. I pumped my own picke
t sign into the air and shouted, “FEED THE CHILDREN NOW!” at anyone who came near.
“Is that Bruce Willis?” Unity asked, breaking through the crowd to suddenly appear before me, his eyes narrowed as he looked at my protest sign.
“What? No,” I said, looking over my sign again to check that nothing in it had radically changed. No, it was still the same sign, with the same drawing. “It’s Adam Levine. The guy from Maroon 5.”
“Oh, cool,” Unity said. “I included him too.” Unity’s picket sign was just the words UNITY THROUGH MULTICULTURALISM surrounded by smiley face stickers in all different colors. Near the bottom left of the poster was a magazine cutout of Adam Levine’s face. “I’m just letting you know that your Adam Levine looks like Bruce Willis. Is he eating a butt?”
“What? Dude! It’s Adam Levine eating a plum! Because our arts and crafts counselor likes plums.”
“She likes Adam Levine and the color plum. Not Bruce Willis eating ass.”
“Hey, Gregor, hey, Unity!” Win strolled up with his picket sign, which may as well have been a professionally made national ad campaign for its beauty. It was just a blown-up black-and-white shot of a small child sitting alone in a village, eyes huge and all cried out. He was holding a small piece of bread. The picket sign didn’t need any words on it for me to know what it was about.
“I thought the picture alone, without commentary, would be much more powerful,” Win said. “I took this photo last year on a trip to India. It’s started a lot of conversations with everyone I’ve shown it to. Hopefully, it can do the same today.”
Unity put down his sign. “Powerful stuff,” he said solemnly.
“Yeah,” I said. Win’s picket perfectly encapsulated the importance of ending hunger. Not like my sign, which apparently looked like Bruce Willis eating ass.
“Hey, is that Adrian Grenier?” Win said, brightening up as he looked at my sign. “I love Adrian Grenier. Great actor, awesome activist.”
“It’s Adam Levine.”
“Oh, I think the googly eyes were throwing me off.”
I knew I shouldn’t have given Adam Levine googly eyes.
“Well, good luck, guys.” Win continued to protest, and all Unity and I could do was watch him go. This was probably part of Win’s plan—show everyone that haunting photograph and leave them in the dust, crying, dejected, and without the ability to pick up their own signs.
“Win Cassidy is, like, the perfect guy,” Unity said.
“I know.”
“Well, what do we have here?” It was Men’s Rights this time, fists casually in his pockets, biceps casually bursting from his short sleeves. Unity immediately ducked back into the crowd.
“Is that 1996 Olympic gold medalist Kerri Strug in your picket sign, Superman? And—wait a minute—is she eating ass?”
It took everything in me not to swing my picket sign at Rights, but the guy right next to me was chanting about ending violence and it would not have looked good.
“It’s Adam Levine,” I said. “Everyone else who’s seen it clearly agrees.”
“Oh, Adam Levine, really? How nice,” Rights said. “I feel bad for you, Superman. Everyone else? They’re going to get points just for participation, but you? I wouldn’t count on it, man.”
“You don’t even have a picket sign, Rights.”
“Oh, but I do.” His shit-eating smirk turned into a full-fledged shit-eating grin. He took his hand out of his pocket like it was an act of charity, pointing up to the top of the mess hall. I turned around to see what amounted to a full billboard hanging from the roof of the building. It was a photograph of a shirtless Men’s Rights standing beside a shirtless Adam Levine. Together, their smiles blessed the proceedings of the picketing below. There was only one word, in bold white letters, written over the picture: MEN.
“Adam Levine and I go to the same gym in LA,” Rights said. He took his hand out of his other pocket. Wadded up inside it were crumpled dollar bills. He tossed them at my feet. “Here’s a little something for ya. Go feed the children of Latin America with that, asshole.”
I’d been humiliated a lot in my life. In school. Even by my own family. But there was nothing quite like standing with a couple of dollars at my feet, holding a picket sign of someone who looked like anyone but Adam Levine, as the real Adam Levine shirtlessly smiled down at me from above. I was clearly not winning this competition. The only thing I could rely on now was the hope that what Rights said was true: Maybe I could earn a measly participation point. This competition could not get any worse. And then Ashley Woodstone showed up.
You could tell when Ashley showed up because crowds silenced and then parted like this was the Red Sea or something. But this time it actually looked like Ashley had come from the depths of the Red Sea. She wore a tiny tank top and shorts and she was covered from head to toe in dirt. I stood watching her like the rest of the crowd: jaw unhinged. Of course, she came right toward me.
“Gregor Maravilla!”
“Ashley Woodstone.” Her name was all I could say for the moment. Her hair looked to be encrusted in mud, her face streaked with it. I was pretty sure her tank top had been white once upon a time. “What … ?”
“I decided to turn my picketing into a sort of performance piece. Performing is what I know best, after all. Plus, this whole look coincides with the photo shoot I did yesterday.”
It was then that I saw the enormous picket sign Pika was holding up. It was a photograph of Ashley looking a lot like she did now, except in the picture I was pretty sure she was not only covered in dirt but also stark naked. I say “pretty sure” because big block letters spelling out EAT DIRT covered her chest and then … the bottom half of her. The photo showed everything and nothing.
“I got my friend Annie to come in last night for the shoot,” Ashley went on. “She’s an amazing photographer. She’s shot everyone before. Anyway, we’re running it in the New York Times today as a full-page ad. Isn’t it a wonderful protest, Gregor?”
I looked at the picket sign and then back at Ashley, her smile blindingly bright. Then I looked back at the picket sign.
“Hey! Is that Adam Levine?” Ashley said, pointing at my sign.
Judy walked up to us at the most perfectly worst time. “Ooh, it’s your big moment of judgment,” Ashley said. “I’ll get out of your hair.”
She stepped into the crowd and I thought fast, quickly finding my voice again. “It’s Adam Levine. And that’s a plum,” I told Judy before she had the chance to think anything else.
She did not look very happy as she examined my sign. “Is your sign a protest of Adam Levine?” Judy said.
“I know the googly eyes were a bad idea, but I tr—”
“I know some people don’t appreciate his talents, but it’s a little uncalled for to cover him in crap, don’t you think?”
What? I looked at my sign, and there it was. Right over Adam Levine’s face, where Ashley must’ve pointed and touched my poster, was a smear of dirt that looked all too much like a skid mark. I closed my eyes tightly, not believing my luck. And not believing how royally Ashley Woodstone had screwed me, again.
“I can’t give you any points for this,” Judy said.
“Of course you can’t.” I nodded, defeated.
And then, out of nowhere, I Like Paint appeared on the scene. He’d thus far largely avoided all activities in order to focus on his mural. But now he was here. The guy was shuffling around, wearing only one shoe, sobbing, his bandana askew. And he was completely covered in red. He was dripping in it. At first I thought it was blood. The sight of a guy stumbling around covered in blood was startling enough, but as he got closer, I could see that the red was far too bright and thick to be blood. It was paint.
ILP collapsed onto the ground in a slippery heap. Though none of us could know what had happened, it was clear that ILP had been attacked.
Hello, Mother, hello, Father, here I
am at Camp Save the World.
It’s been a week a
nd everything’s
going great. You guys were worried
about sending me away for the
summer, but you have nothing to be
afraid of. I’ve made friends. My
bunkmates are great. And I’m learning
so much about how to save the world.
Everyone has been getting along
great and absolutely no one has tried
to sabotage anyone else, especially
not by destroying a beautiful unity
mural.
I’ll write again soon with more
updates on my progress.
P.S. If Anton or Katrina are also
reading this, I just want you to know
that I’ve met Ashley Woodstone and
she is weirder than I am. She eats dirt.
I mean that literally.
The counselors’ office was a lot bigger than I expected, and a lot messier. There were papers strewn on every surface—on top of filing cabinets, desks, the floor—but I ignored all of the disarray and stared at Jimmy, who sat behind his desk with his chin balancing on his knuckles, looking back at me.
“I didn’t do it.” I thought that much was obvious. After all, I’d been at the picket competition when ILP suddenly staggered into view, covered in red paint. It was hard to know exactly what had happened to I Like Paint since he couldn’t communicate with us, but his mural told a lot of the story. It had been completely covered in a giant splash of red paint except for the center of it, where the negative space of ILP’s silhouette remained. He’d apparently thrown himself against the wall, arms outstretched, fingers splayed, taking on his attacker’s vicious paint assault. In the end, it was a futile attempt to protect his art. ILP’s attack had everyone on edge, including Jimmy, who looked at me with a lot more skepticism than I was expecting.
No Good Deed Page 7
