Many Points of Me

by Caroline Gertler

  “That’s true,” Mr. B says. “Faces are challenging to draw, which is why we’re going to break it down into forms and general proportions, looking at features as units. For example, eyes are generally in the middle of the face, centered between the chin and the top of the head, and most faces are five eyes wide. But not every face is perfectly symmetrical—far from it—and there are artists who break those rules, too.”

  He flashes through a series of self-portraits by Pablo Picasso, starting when he was a teenager and drew himself naturalistic, to his twenties, when he starts to make himself look exaggerated and sculptural. And then, in his fifties, with a drawing where both his eyes are on one side of his head and nothing is symmetrical or in proportion.

  “Why would Picasso choose to paint himself this way?” Mr. B asks.

  Theo raises his hand. “He’s exploring new ways to express the same idea.”

  “Yes, Theo. And what is that idea?” I feel like Mr. B is looking directly at me, like I should know the answer.

  And I do. Self-portrait is about making a visual representation of yourself. Sometimes you need to skew things on the outside in order to show how shattered you feel inside. But that thought makes me feel panicky. So I pretend to look down at my paper, and let Mr. B call on Alex Cohen.

  “The idea of knowing who you are?” Alex says like it’s a question, not a statement.

  “Exactly.” Mr. B nods. He starts flashing images of other famous artists’ self-portraits: Rembrandt, Chuck Close, Frida Kahlo, and van Gogh (thankfully the one of him in a straw hat at the Met, not the one that we modeled my Halloween costume on). “The best portraits go beneath the surface to capture a sense of who the person is, or was. They reveal the truth of an artist. Truth with a capital T. That’s the idea—Truth—that I want us all to explore through our self-portraits. We’ll begin by sketching in pencil—the most direct way to get feelings on paper.”

  Maybe that’s why self-portraits make me nervous. Because it means finding my Truth. Who I really am. And if an artist like van Gogh will go so far as to chop off his own ear to figure it out, maybe I don’t really want to know, anyway.

  Harper probably never questions who she really is. She’s making fish faces at me and doodling on my paper. A stick-figure cartoon of Mr. B looking at himself in the mirror and patting his belly. I let out a snort of laughter.

  Theo’s eyes bore into me, watching from his seat down the table. His hair sticks up like a halo, lit by the window behind him. Like he’s an angel, judging me from above. Theo knows his Truth. He is a true artist. Maybe that’s why he inspired Dad to paint the stars, and I didn’t.

  I make a Harper-style fish face at him, but he doesn’t smile. His eyes dart back to his own mirror, and he keeps them glued there, as if he can find the answer to the world’s problems in his own reflection, on his own paper.

  My mirror shows me nothing. It reveals no Truth, that’s for sure.

  For the rest of class, I try to relax into making an easy sketch of myself. But my hand is stiff, and I grip the pencil so tightly that my palm gets sweaty and clammy. I’m far from smooth like I used to be when I drew with Dad at home, in our studio.

  When Mr. B announces it’s time to wrap up, my drawing hardly even looks like a face that a five-year-old would make. The eyes are just ovals, the nose a right angle. Nothing that I can use for a self-portrait.

  I crumple it up and toss it in the trash.

  Chapter

  Four

  After class Harper links her arm in mine and pulls me along to the door. But I always wait for Theo after art. It takes him a few minutes to come back to reality after he’s been in his drawing zone.

  “I just have to . . . um . . . wait for a sec.” I stall for time, pretending to study the rules on the NYC ART flyer. Lunch is next, and Harper sits at the cool kids’ table with Chloe and Violet. I always sit with Theo and the musical theater kids. It doesn’t make sense for me to walk off to the cafeteria with Harper, without Theo.

  “No probs.” Harper swings her hair over her shoulder and starts braiding it in her fidgety way. As she twists and coils the strands, the different colors of her hair swirl together. Her marigold color is looking more orange today. Neon orange, like a flashing sign, signaling for me to follow.

  Theo stands up front, chatting with Mr. Butterweit. When he sees me dawdling, he gives a quick wave and runs over, like an eager puppy, which I used to find reassuring, but now just makes me think I shouldn’t have waited. If I’d left with Harper, maybe I could’ve tried sitting at her table. Just for once.

  “Lunch?” he asks. I nod.

  Harper relinks her arm in mine as we head down the hall to the cafeteria.

  Theo walks on my other side. I could link arms with him, too, but his copper color, which never changes, doesn’t go with Harper’s neon orange.

  “What are you thinking for your portrait?” he asks me, ignoring Harper.

  “I don’t know.” I’m not thinking anything. “I’m probably just going to make mine straightforward. More of a Rembrandt than a Picasso.”

  “What, you mean you don’t want to paint yourself with two eyes on one side of your head?” Harper says.

  Theo ignores her. “G, you’re going to have to focus if you want to be competitive.”

  Competitive grates like nails on a chalkboard to my ears.

  I give my new, longer hair a little flip. “I just feel like—I have too much else going on right now.”

  “Like what? What could be more important than this?”

  “How could you forget,” Harper pipes up. “Someone has a big birthday. Twelve!”

  “So do I,” Theo says. “My birthday is two days after hers.”

  “It is?” Harper looks at me like she’s wondering why I didn’t share that piece of information. I didn’t think she’d care that Theo’s birthday is practically the same day as mine.

  “But so what,” Theo continues. “It doesn’t take three weeks to plan your birthday. It could take three months to make a self-portrait good enough to submit. And we don’t have three months. We only have two weeks!”

  “Twelve’s a big birthday!” I don’t know where these words are coming from. It’s like I’m channeling Harper—the kind of thing she would say.

  “We’re working on ideas,” Harper says.

  We are? I look at her and she smiles. And just like that, her color shifts, from neon orange to softer, warmer marigold again.

  “Aren’t we going to do our usual?” There’s a note of panic in Theo’s voice.

  I want to say yes to him, like always. But then I remember his tears of joy at Mom asking him to do the Q&A. “Maybe I also want something different.”

  “Yeah, Georgia told me she never does anything special for her birthday. I’m making it my mission to get this girl to have some fun for once!”

  I cringe at Harper’s words. I know she doesn’t realize how they’re hurting Theo, that I described our usual as nothing special.

  Theo’s face drops. For a moment I feel his heart like my own. I get a pang of guilt for removing that piece of Dad from his photograph yesterday.

  I think fast how to fix it, though Theo can see right through me. “I didn’t mean it’s not special. I just meant that I—we—always do something at home.”

  “So, Theo, why don’t you come, too?” Harper asks, like it’d be the most natural thing in the world.

  Really? But I say what I think Harper would want to hear: “Yeah. It’ll be fun.”

  I try to picture what Harper might plan: me, Theo, and Harper going out to a Japanese restaurant, ordering sushi platters, even though I only eat avocado and cucumber rolls. I bet Harper is a sushi expert.

  “Chloe and Violet can make it!” Harper announces.

  That’s where my vision falls apart. Theo and I have never been close with Chloe and Violet. There was a time that Chloe and I had a bunch of playdates when we were in the same class in first and second grades. But then in fourth grad
e she was one of the first girls to get a phone, and she started taking voice lessons and going to concerts, and we were never in the same homeroom again.

  I sense Theo pulling away; he won’t have a place at that kind of party. I’m not sure I will, either.

  “And something else big.” Harper nudges my side with her elbow.

  “Oh, right.” I haven’t told Theo yet, and now doesn’t seem like the time. If I keep my expression flat, maybe he won’t push. But he’s not like that.

  “What?” Theo asks. “What else?”

  “Hasn’t Georgia told you?” Harper raises her eyebrows.

  “Told me what?”

  “Nothing, it’s not a big deal,” I protest.

  “It’s a huge deal!” Harper bursts out. At this moment I wish she wasn’t so enthusiastic about every little thing. “Georgia agreed to design Valentine’s Day cards for us. We’re selling them to raise money for charity.”

  Harper asked me about it last week. She said the Mermaids were raising money for a shelter for homeless women and children, and they wanted me to come up with designs for Valentine’s Day cards to sell. At first I couldn’t believe she was asking me, who never gets asked to participate in anything by anybody. But Valentine’s Day isn’t really my thing, so I said I wasn’t sure. Then Harper pulled me into a lavender-and-jasmine–scented hug and said I had to, that I was the one-and-only artist who could do it. So I said yes.

  “Wow, that’s gonna take a lot of time,” Theo says. “No way you can do card designs and enter NYC ART.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet!”

  Harper wags her finger at me. “You promised. Remember the first planning meeting—my house after school on Friday.” Harper’s house. Her parents are big art collectors. She thought it was so cool when she met me that Hank Rosenbloom’s my dad, because her parents own one of his paintings, and I’ll get to see it when I go to her house.

  “Yes, yes,” I say, leading the way into the syrup-scented cafeteria. Breakfast-for-lunch day.

  Harper tugs me toward the table where Chloe and Violet sit. It’s full, except for two chairs crammed in at the head.

  “Sit with us today,” she says. “The girls saved seats.”

  I’m not sure if they’ve saved a seat for me on purpose, or just for Harper. But Harper wants me to sit with her, and the other girls will include me if she does. Even if it’s strange, for all of us. Even if Harper shifts back to aqua when she’s with them.

  “Come on,” I say to Theo, reaching out my hand for him at the same time that I let myself be pulled by Harper. I want to sit with them, but I can’t do it without him.

  “There’s no room,” he says.

  “We can bring over another chair.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “We’ll squeeze. Share a seat with me.” I look at him with pleading eyes.

  “I’m fine sitting at our table.” I don’t get why he’s not taking this chance to sit at the table we’ve both watched from a distance for years. He’s being stubbornly, impossibly difficult old Theo.

  “Enough indecision, kids. I’m starving.” Harper pats her stomach and reaches dramatically toward the lunch line, which is extra-long. “Yum, waffles and sausage!”

  I stand there like one of Dad’s favorite Bernini sculptures—Apollo and Daphne, which he promised to take me to see one day in person in Rome—all twisted in different directions.

  “C’mon,” Harper says, dragging me along with her.

  I could pull away. I could say no and go with Theo to our usual table.

  Instead, I choose Harper.

  I mouth “sorry” to Theo. But I can’t look him in the eyes. If I see the judgment there, I won’t be able to enjoy my lunch.

  Even so, I steal one last glance at him from where I sit with the Mermaids as I chew my waffle, not even tasting it.

  And what I see on his face isn’t judgment. It’s hurt.

  Chapter

  Five

  I don’t run into Theo the rest of the day.

  The way I abandoned him at lunch pangs inside of me.

  After school I look for him where we always meet up. Outside the main doors, to the left of the gate. He isn’t there.

  I wait until the frosty air bites through my gloves and boots, and my fingers and toes are numb. I wait until the stream of kids rushing past slows to a trickle, and then he comes.

  “You waited.” He seems surprised.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Our moms started letting us walk to school together last year, in fifth grade. Now the rule is I’m allowed to walk anywhere on my own that’s in reasonable distance from home. Like the Met, which is just across Central Park.

  “After you ditched me at lunch, I wasn’t so sure.”

  “C’mon, Theo. It’s not like I didn’t ask you to join. And people can have more than one friend, you know.”

  “But Chloe and Violet? Harper? Really?”

  “They’re fun.”

  “And I’m not?”

  “That’s not what I said, Theo.”

  “You kind of did, apparently. You told Harper you never do anything special for your birthday.”

  “Fine. Look, I’m sorry. That’s not really what I meant.” But I can’t get the right tone of apology in my voice, and he’s staring straight ahead, his nostrils flaring and his breath huffing out puffs of cold air.

  We continue in silence, passing the Shooting Star diner, where some of the cooler kids from our grade go after school. I let my hair swing over my face, just in case Harper and the Mermaids are in there and might see me. As we weave down the busy sidewalks of Columbus Avenue, dodging kids on scooters and old people with walkers, Theo tells me about his idea for his NYC ART entry.

  “You think I can make my self-portrait as a single panel from the Adventures of Theo-Dare?” he asks. “That would be something different, right? Make my entry stand out from the rest. Most kids are going to try to go all artsy and deep. And then you’ve got my superhero. Wham-bam-kapow-pow!”

  “Probably,” I agree. He launches into Theo-Dare’s newest adventure, breaking into a fortified mansion to recover the largest ruby in the world, which was stolen from a museum by an expert jewelry thief for a billionaire gangster.

  As I space out, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a store window. Do I really look like that? Flat and narrow, shoulders straining under the weight of my backpack, dark hair swinging into my face.

  That’s an interesting idea for a self-portrait—to sketch my reflection as I see it in a store window. I could snap a picture, but that would ruin it, take away how it makes me feel inside. Which is strange, and disconnected. Like my mind is not really in that body.

  “Are you even listening, Georgia?” Theo asks. I look up, startled. He’s a few steps ahead.

  “Yeah, keep going.”

  The idea for a window reflection self-portrait fades as Theo plays out his story with voices and hand movements. I avoid turning my head so I don’t catch my reflection again.

  We turn off Columbus onto our street, West Eighty-Seventh, lined with brownstones and low-rise apartment buildings. You can tell which buildings have been bought and made fancier for single families and which are still divided into lots of apartments. The sidewalk is uneven in front of the buildings no one cares about. In some places, the squares of concrete have risen up to create little hills that Theo and I used to race over on our scooters.

  Spindly tree branches stretch overhead. The roots break out of sad-looking patches of rocky soil, some still littered with fragments of discarded Christmas trees. Garbage pickup day means we have to weave single file around heaps of trash bags spilling their junk onto the street. Outside one of the crumbling brownstones, there’s a large mattress, stained and wrapped in plastic. And an easy chair with itchy-looking green-and-gold fabric that’s been scratched to pieces, maybe by a cat, leaking its insides.

  We get to our building, and Theo’s still talking: “So then, he finds this security badge,
that’s, like, the answer to all his problems. Or at least he thinks so. But when he goes to use it, he realizes it’s super-encrypted, and he also needs fingerprint verification. When he doesn’t give that, it sets off an alarm—”

  I interrupt Theo to wave and call hello to Mrs. Velandry. She’s the old lady who lives in the first floor apartment of our building, a low-rise tucked behind the fancy buildings on Central Park West with their doormen and elevator attendants.

  We don’t have door people, but Mrs. Velandry is kind of like a door person, the way she sits there all day, watching people coming and going. Her living room is next to the entrance. Mom says she has mild agoraphobia—a fear of going outside. So she’s there. Almost all the time.

  She’s also our landlady. Her husband’s family owned the building; he grew up and died here, and left it to her. When I was younger and Mom was working late, Mrs. Velandry would keep an eye on me. But I had to go to her apartment—she wouldn’t come to ours.

  Even though Mom lets me stay home by myself now, I still like going to Mrs. Velandry’s apartment. She’s a good cook, and she’ll always offer me a bowl of soup or spaghetti for dinner. Plus her dogs, Olive and especially Royal, are practically my own.

  Dad adopted Royal, a golden Shih Tzu (named for his favorite color, royal blue) as a puppy, when he first moved into the building. But then he met Mom, who is allergic to dogs, and Mrs. Velandry offered to keep Royal for Dad when they got married. A couple of years later, Mrs. Velandry bought Olive at a pet shop, because she saw her in the window and felt sorry for her, and she thought Royal was lonely, too. Olive is a brown-and-white Shih Tzu and she barks all the time. Unlike Royal, who indulges his younger sister and tries to ignore her noise like we all do.

  Royal is seventeen now, and mostly blind and maybe deaf. He doesn’t like to walk, even though Mrs. Velandry has a dog walker take them out four times a day, so the building’s vestibule always smells like pee, because that’s where he loses control of his bladder. No cleaning products can mask the icky smell. But it’s worth it, because Dad loved Royal, and so do I.