by Nancy N. Rue
From the way he spread his arms toward the wall, I was pretty sure he wasn’t seeing the gardening tools that hung from it.
“Who knew it was an art studio?” I said. “All this time I thought it was just a garage.”
“Everything could be an art studio when you don’t have one.”
“Is that why you make art on freeway overpasses?” I said.
He didn’t look at me. He just said, “Something like that.” And then he shrugged, and the glint came back and he said, “Are we gonna do this or what?”
Yeah. I felt like I’d just spit on somebody.
*
It took us two hours to set up the four boxes and paint the tie-ins so that together they looked like one big wall. It would only have taken me about twenty minutes doing it alone, but where Rafe had worked in broad, sweeping strokes before, he was now the ultimate perfectionist, stepping back to squint at it and then going in to touch up some microscopic detail I would have missed completely.
“Why am I not seeing all this little stuff?” I said—and then immediately braced myself for one of his zingers.
But he just kept shading the nose on a gargoylesque face until I thought he hadn’t heard me. Then he said, “You would if you practiced.”
“No, really. I could practice until I’m ninety-two and never be able to do what you do. I mean, look at this. It’s a masterpiece.”
“Somebody else’s masterpiece.”
“Huh?”
“All I did was put together copies of other people’s stuff.”
“But it’s still amazing!”
He stepped back from the “wall” again and stood beside me.
“How’d you get to be an amazing basketball player?”
I stared at him. He was perfectly serious.
“How did you even know I was a basketball player?”
“What am I, deaf? Who goes to that school and doesn’t know that?”
“I guess I just thought you didn’t pay attention to stuff like that.”
“I pay attention to everything.” The eyebrows wiggled, but only slightly. “So how did it happen?” he said. “How’d you get to be so good?”
I hadn’t really talked about it in so long I had to hunt for the thoughts behind all the others.
“I guess part of it’s a gift,” I said. “Does that sound conceited?”
“So what if it does?”
“Okay—well, then it’s just hard work and good coaching and doing it over and over.”
“Right. So it’s the same with me and art.”
I shook my head, sort of sadly. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I could learn to paint the way you do.”
“I bet I could learn to play basketball the way you do.”
A laugh exploded from me.
“What?” he said. “I played sports when I was a little kid.”
“Everybody did.”
“You could teach me.”
“Teach you what?”
“How to be a basketball star.”
I laughed again, hands over my mouth. Although his eyes were sparkling deep under their hoods, the eyebrows were perfectly still.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” I said.
“Why not? I can be more than one thing.”
“Well, yeah—”
“So—you’ve got a hoop out there. You got a ball?”
“Do I have a ball— do you have a tattoo? Of course I have a ball.”
“So. Bring it on.”
*
It would have been surreal enough showing Rafe Diego how to do a lay up in my driveway. But add to that the fact that the last time I’d held a basketball in my hands was seconds before my life crashed around me, and it was like I was in one of those paintings where pocket watches drip over the sides of tables.
And yet the minute I rested the ball in my palms, everything came into a focus so sharp I could hardly blink. That ball belonged there.
“Coach me,” Rafe said.
He had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, which was the closest we were going to come to him looking like a basketball player that day. I didn’t even try to imagine him in shorts and high-tops, because I knew I’d be deafened by my own guffaws if I did.
“We aren’t going to do a bunch of running,” I said. “Because one, I’m not allowed to, and two, you don’t have on tennis shoes. I’ll just sit here and teach you how to shoot.”
Which was going to be hard without actually showing him—and I didn’t even want to face Ben on Tuesday with the news that I’d been practicing free throws.
Rafe was standing there with the ball on his hip, giving me a game face. I did laugh then.
“If you’re trying to look like a jock” I said.
“What?”
“Okay, it’s sort of working. But lose the toothpick.”
He did.
“All right, so put the ball in your right hand and rest it on your fingertips—not your palm.”
I demonstrated with one ball and he mimicked me with the other, just about perfectly.
“Now turn like you’re going to shoot—yeah, only keep your elbow at an L—that’s it. Now shoot it up and snap your wrist.”
The ball stayed in my hand, but Rafe’s ball left his and dipped just short of the hoop.
“That actually wasn’t bad.”
“It sucked. I’m doing it again.”
“Just remember, the ball should go off your fingertips.” Like a part of yourself is dancing right from your fingers. Oh, man— how I missed that feeling.
Rafe’s ball bounced off the hoop.
“All right—closer that time!”
“I don’t want close. I want it in there.”
“Okay, so we’ll add the guide hand. Use your other hand to direct the ball, but don’t let it shoot. That comes from your other hand.”
Rafe nodded and did everything I told him. The ball dropped in without so much as brushing the metal.
“Two points!” I said.
Rafe wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Get back, Michael Jordan,” he said, and tried to dribble the ball between his legs. It of course bounced off down the lawn, straight for my mother’s car, which was pulling up in front of the house. I didn’t even know she’d left.
“This looks like artists at work,” she said as she emerged from the driver’s seat with two Pike’s Perk bags. “Lisa Brewster. You must be Rafe.”
I cringed, with several possible Rafe-versus-a-parent scenarios playing in my mind. But Rafe put out his hand to shake hers.
“LeBron James, ma’am. You may have heard of me. I’m with the Cleveland Cavaliers.”
“I hope you’re not in training,” she said. “I don’t know if these burritos are on your diet.”
“I can make an exception. Let me carry those for you.”
Oh, brother.
*
Rafe and I ate burritos with Baja salsa in the garage while we admired our wall. The more it dried, the better it looked. I already hated the thought of taking it apart after Monday.
“Hey,” I said. “You haven’t tagged it yet.”
He chewed thoughtfully for a minute and then shook his head.
“Why not? You said you were going to before.”
“Changed my mind. It’s not my original work.”
“Bummer,” I said. “I’ve been waiting to see your tag.”
“I’ll show it to you. You done eating?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Then come on. I’ll take you to it.”
I hesitated, waiting for the warning quills, or at least a saving sarcastic sentence. But nothing came except the words “Let me just tell my mom where I’m going.” I stopped on the steps. “Where am I going?”
“Old Man Stutz’s.”
*
The sky had been so bright that day we’d been outside without coats all afternoon. But as I stood gazing at the wall, I zipped my jacket and turned my collar up around my neck. The air was turning colder
as the sun started to go down behind the Peak, but that wasn’t the only reason I was chilled. There was something about what I was looking at—like it had been done by somebody who knew what it was like to be out in the cold.
I pulled one hand out of my pocket and swept my arm across the expanse of the wall that separated the old man’s yard from Interstate 25. It was at least fifty yards from the back of his house, blocked from view by a line of overgrown fir trees my father would have had dug out of there so they wouldn’t kill his lawn. Old Man Stutz didn’t have a lawn. We stood in gravelly dirt to look at Rafe’s art.
“You did this whole thing?” I said.
“Yeah. Took me two months of painting every night.”
“You did it at night?”
“I had to at first so the old man wouldn’t see what I was doing. Then after he caught me and he made me finish it for him, it was like I could only paint in the dark.” Rafe shrugged. “It’s the only way I ever did it.”
“He made you finish it?”
“Yeah. He said he didn’t want some half—well, half-done piece of art in his backyard. He set up lights and paid for the paint and brought me coffee until I got it done.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. And it truly was—but also painful. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, because the twisting, writhing people he’d painted were all tangled up in fists that came out of nowhere and shouting mouths that were disconnected from faces and words that seemed to have lives of their own. Words like No and Hate. And Loser.
It would have made me want to turn away, except that at the far end, there was a space filled with nothing but blue—a sky-washed blue like the color of my mother’s eyes. Along its edge, letters flowed down as if they were being poured from an unseen pitcher somewhere in the sky.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“It’s my tag,” Rafe said.
“What does it say?”
“It says, ‘The Angel Raphael.’”
I felt him stiffen beside me, like he was expecting me to say what I would have said an hour before—before I saw who he was, painted on a legal wall.
A blue light suddenly flickered from the road beyond the old man’s house, and Rafe jumped like a ninja in one of those old cartoons I used to watch. Except the look in his eyes wasn’t comical.
“We gotta go,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just don’t want to be here,” he said.
Rafe grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the wall.
“Rafe, I can’t run.”
He nodded, and then he threw his head under my shoulder and hauled me up onto his back. I squealed, but I let him run with me like a firefighter performing a rescue. He was barely breathing hard when he deposited me in the front seat of the truck and took off from his parking place behind the house. I didn’t see any more blinking blue lights.
“Did we just run from the cops?” I said.
“Nah. They were just driving by. I didn’t want to talk to them, that’s all.”
I didn’t ask if there was a warrant out for his arrest. I didn’t want the answer to be yes. But Rafe kept glancing at me, as if he wanted me to say something. Maybe anything.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet Old Man Stutz,” I said.
“He’s not home. He’s in the hospital.” Rafe’s eyes went to the rearview mirror. “I guess the cops are keeping an eye on the place. Which they don’t need to do, because I’m not gonna let anything happen to it.”
“He must be amazing, y’know, for you to care about him so much.”
Rafe let his mouth relax into a smile. “He’s actually a pain in the butt most of the time.”
“Then why—”
“Because he’s one of only two people who ever said I was an artist.”
“And the other one’s P-W,” I said.
“No,” he said. “The other one’s you.”
It got hard to breathe. It got even harder when we turned into my driveway and I saw my father standing on the front walk. Arms crossed. Face pointed. Smoke all but shooting out of his ears. I would have known that body language from a hundred yards.
“That your old man?” Rafe said.
“Yeah. Listen, just drop me off and go, okay?”
“Why? Are you busted?”
“I have no idea.”
“Stay in the car. I’ll take you someplace.”
I stopped, fingers on the door handle, and stared at him. “It’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t want you to be involved.”
The hood I’d hardly seen all day came down over Rafe’s eyes.
“I get it,” he said.
“No, you don’t—” I said.
But my father was already rapping his knuckles on the window, and I could see his pointedness reflected in Rafe’s face as he looked past me at Dad.
“I’ll see you Monday,” I said.
I was barely out of the car and Rafe was backing it out of the driveway. Only my father’s voice kept me from going after him. It went through me like an ice pick.
“You have a decision to make, Cassidy.”
I turned slowly from the sight of Rafe’s disappearing taillights.
“You are either going to have a career in basketball, or you’re going to run around with lowlife losers. Before I put myself on the line for you before an appeals board, I need to know which it’s going to be, because it can’t be both.”
“He’s not a loser,” I said.
Dad narrowed his eyes at me until they were no more than tiny points. “Then I guess that answers my question, doesn’t it?”
He turned from me and disappeared into the house. His words didn’t echo in my head as I watched him go. Rafe’s did.
I can be more than one thing, he’d said.
For the first time since I was ten years old, I wanted that to be true.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Well?” Ms. Edelstein said.
Six heads, mine included, came up from cell phones and fantasy novels, and, in my case, the rough draft of my Scarlet Letter paper. Ms. Edelstein was leaning on the front of her desk, her ungraded equations behind her.
“Whatever it was,” Lizard said. “I didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t say you did anything. I want to know how our art project went over this afternoon.”
I glanced back at Rafe, but he was sitting under his hood, like he’d been doing for two periods now. He came out long enough during fifth to help me make the presentation, but he didn’t so much as wiggle his eyebrows when people said things like, “I don’t even want to present ours now after that.” I couldn’t blame them. It really was the best one. Even P-W couldn’t come up with a single thing to critique us on. Except when she said—
“I think you might have glorified vandalism somewhat.”
“We weren’t trying to do that,” I said. “We just wanted to show that it’s art and it makes a valuable statement.”
“I’d just rather see that statement made someplace besides the freeways I have to drive on.”
I glanced at Rafe, who was watching me with still, dark eyes.
“Rafe doesn’t make his art on illegal walls,” I said. “Just so you know.”
He started to smile at that point, I knew. But then it was like a memory tripped him and he had to go take care of that. The hood had slammed down and it had been there ever since.
“We got an A-plus,” I said to Ms. Edelstein. “Our wall’s on display in that enclosed courtyard in the art wing.”
“It’s up now?”
I nodded.
“All right, then,” Ms. Edelstein said. “We’re going on a field trip.”
It was like being back in kindergarten, all of us moving single file out of the math hall and across to the art wing, whispering because Ms. Edelstein told us to keep it down. Once we got there, though, everybody stood speechless before our creation.
Except, of course, Ruthie, who murmured to me, “It’s even better than I tho
ught it was going to be.”
“I want a picture of everybody in front of it,” Ms. Edelstein said. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and blinked at us—because we were all just looking at her, slack-jawed. “Hello—am I speaking Lithuanian?”
It was like they were waiting for me, so I stepped in front, and of course Lizard and Tank weren’t going to miss an opportunity to ham it up. Rafe stood somberly on the other side of them, and Ruthie crowded behind me. I was pretty sure being photographed wasn’t her favorite thing. Only Uma opted out, and Ms. Edelstein didn’t coax her. I avoided looking at the girl, although I didn’t see how she could still be mad at me. Rafe wasn’t even speaking to me.
“Now just Rafe and Cassidy,” Ms. Edelstein said.
“Oooooh-oooh!” Lizard said.
“I think we would all appreciate it if you would grow up, Lizard,” she said as she motioned everyone else off. “Come on, you two, off to the side there.”
She kept gesturing until we were standing with our shoulders touching. All I could think about was being hiked over those shoulders and carried—
“Why you gotta make such a big deal out of this, Miss Frankenstein?” Rafe said.
“Because.” She snapped the picture and held up her hand for us to give her one more. When she lowered the cell phone, she said, “I just want it on record that something beautiful came out of this class. All right, let’s get back. I have work to do.”
Rafe moved away from me and headed for the door.
When the rest of us turned into the math hall again, I heard a coarse whisper behind me.
“Hey, Roid.”
I had never been glad to hear those words before. Still, I eyed the hall ahead of me for Uma. She’d already slipped into Room 109, so I stopped and turned.
But it wasn’t Rafe behind me. It was Tank.
“What’s goin’ on with Rafe?” he said.
“How would I know?” I said. “He’s not talking to me. And why would he? The art project’s over. There’s no reason for him to talk to me anymore.”
Even I heard the sadness in my voice. It wasn’t lost on Tank either.
“But you still want him to talk to you.”
“Why are you asking me this? He’s your ‘homeboy’ or whatever.”
“Because he’s not talk in’ to me neither. And Uma’s mobilizin’ for somethin’, and that’s never a good thing.” Tank shrugged his weapon-tattooed shoulder. “If I can tell her you and Rafe had a fight or somethin’, she’ll probably back off and I won’t have to deal with it.”
