Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “So was Guernica. And yet: it was the greatest anti-war statement of the twentieth century.”

  Pup arranged his face into an expression of neutrality, and made a mental note to Google Guernica as soon as he got home. “Can’t you just glance at it? So I can go home tonight with an idea of whether I’m going to fail art?”

  “I could,” Mr. Hughes said, leaning back in his chair and ominously removing his glasses. “But I won’t. You kept me waiting. Now it’s your turn to wait.”

  Space:

  used to create the illusion of depth

  10

  YAWNING UNCONTROLLABLY, Pup walked toward the school parking lot on a very early Saturday morning at the beginning of June. The dawn air was heavy and warm and the rising pink sun made the tall, pale brick building that was Abraham Lincoln High School glow softly, like a giant spaceship.

  The day after he’d turned in his photograph of Luke, Mr. Hughes had not just given Pup the first A of his entire life, bringing his semester grade up to passing. He’d also informed Pup that he was choosing the photo to represent Lincoln at the Illinois High School Association Art and Design Competition. “I believe in you, Pup,” Mr. Hughes had said. But Pup could hardly believe it himself. He’d never been chosen for anything before, not even a gym class dodgeball team. Out of all the hundreds of art students at Lincoln, only three others’ work had been picked: Abrihet’s photo of her amoui, a landscape photo by Maya Ulrich, and a blueprint for a skateboarding park designed by none other than Brody Krueger.

  When Brody saw Pup coming toward him in the parking lot, he pulled his headphones off his ears and stared.

  “Wait, you’re here?” he demanded. “You got picked for this thing?”

  “I know,” Pup said. “It’s almost as shocking as the fact that you got picked for this thing.”

  “At least Brody was in our graphic design elective,” Maya said, slurping loudly from a giant iced coffee. “You practically failed Studio One. You’re, like, nobody.”

  “Everybody’s somebody,” retorted Pup, quoting a poster from Mrs. Barrera’s office wall.

  “Guys, give him a break,” Abrihet said. “You should see his photo. It’s really beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” Pup said, a smile twitching in the corners of his mouth. Brody and Maya shut up after that, and the four of them stood in an awkward circle in the middle of the empty parking lot until a whining sound pierced the early morning quiet and began to grow steadily louder. Finally, a beat-up sedan in desperate need of a new muffler came barreling into the lot, the rusty front bumper covered with stickers like MAKE ART NOT WAR and TEACH PEACE and I’D RATHER BE A TREE-HUGGER THAN A NEOCONSERVATIVE WARMONGERING CLIMATE-DESTROYING CORPORATE SHILL (the font was pretty small on that particular bumper sticker). Mr. Hughes was at the wheel, wearing aviator sunglasses, his gray-threaded dreadlocks waving like a flag out of his open window.

  “You’re late, Hughes,” Brody called as their teacher stepped out of the car. “How come we have to show up at the ass-crack of dawn but you get to show up half an hour late?”

  Mr. Hughes looked at his watch.

  “Krueger, it’s not even six yet. I’d say we’re still firmly wedged in dawn’s ass crack, wouldn’t you?”

  Brody rolled his eyes and stuffed his headphones back over his ears.

  “Flanagan!” Mr. Hughes barked. “You and those goofy long legs of yours better sit shotgun with me. There’s less legroom in that backseat than on a coach flight to Kansas on Econo-Air.”

  “Are you sure, sir?” Pup began to protest. Sure, the extra legroom was tempting, but what kid wants to sit up front with the teacher? “I mean, I really don’t mind—”

  “Did you just call me ‘sir’? What do I look like, an English lord? Now get in front, Pup, and fire up the GPS. We’re already running late and I want to get to Champaign before this thing is halfway over.”

  With an obedient shrug, Pup climbed into the front and watched through the rearview mirror as Brody settled into the back middle seat, spreading his legs so that his knees were touching Abrihet’s right and Maya’s left. He winked at Pup in the mirror as he buckled his seat belt. Pup entertained a brief fantasy of head-butting Brody, right in the pointy nose that Izzy had once described as “regal,” which had prompted Pup to mutter under his breath that he doubted any king in history wore socks as dirty as Brody’s.

  “Everybody ready to kick some art-show ass?” Mr. Hughes shouted, and Maya responded with a sarcastic whoop.

  “Cool. Let’s roll.” Hughes stuck his coffee in the cup holder, slopping some of it on his hand, and they roared out of the empty parking lot toward the Kennedy Expressway.

  11

  THE DRIVE WENT BY QUICKLY. Pup kept himself busy by updating Mr. Hughes on what the GPS was saying—though he wasn’t sure what was so confusing since all they had to do was drive in a flat, straight, corn-hedged line until they got to the University of Illinois—while eyeing the rearview as Brody chatted it up in the backseat with Maya and Abrihet. While Pup himself was terrible at flirting, he wasn’t so clueless as to not be able to tell the difference between innocent conversation and slimy flirtation. And he was quite sure that if he were somehow able to secretly record a video of Brody’s behavior in the backseat and send it to Izzy, she would be pissed. Probably not pissed enough to dump him, though, which made the whole thing that much more infuriating.

  But, in a weird way, Pup was glad to be stuck in the front seat with Mr. Hughes, listening to Brody hit on Abrihet and Maya all the way to Champaign, glad to have this small and manageable and distracting annoyance. The last time he’d been on this road, it had been a different Saturday morning, the harvested fields glistening in the October rain, and he’d been crammed into a car with Luke and Carrie and Sal and Annemarie, with the rest of his siblings caravanning in the cars ahead, each of them staring at their phones, waiting for an update, a text or call with a spark of good news, of hope, that never came.

  As soon as they arrived on campus, Mr. Hughes pulled into the nearest illegal parking space he could find and hurried them out of the car.

  “Leave your bags in the trunk,” he said. “We don’t have time to check into the hotel. Hurry up, Krueger! You’re not walking, you’re sauntering!”

  As Mr. Hughes strode ahead, his messenger bag bouncing on his hip, Maya slowed her own walk to match Brody’s saunter and Abrihet fell into step beside Pup.

  “So,” she said as they headed up a street lined with bars and bookstores that ended in the leafy entrance to the quad. “Have you ever been down to U of I before?”

  “Once,” Pup answered. “My brother went here.”

  “Oh, cool. When did he graduate?”

  “He didn’t finish, actually.” Pup changed the subject quickly. “It’s a pretty nice place, though, isn’t it?”

  “It’s exactly what I pictured an American university to be like.”

  Pup knew what she meant. There were these big brick buildings everywhere that just looked like if you went inside, you’d find shelves of dusty, important books and rows of glossy desks lit with green-shaded lamps, where smart kids pored over their studies. The buildings were laid out along a huge rectangular lawn where students basked in the morning sun on blankets, reading books, scrolling lazily on their phones, playing Frisbee, or sitting cross-legged in the grass with steaming paper cups of coffee in their hands. An intellectual-looking dude with neat cornrows read a thick paperback with onionskin pages under the shade of an elm tree. Another kid with pale legs and dark glasses kind of looked like a dork except for the fact that he was jamming on a guitar and people—including a pair of very beautiful spandex-clad young women out for a morning jog—were nodding their heads approvingly as they bounced along the path. As he and Abrihet hurried to catch up with Mr. Hughes, Pup remembered a selfie Patrick had sent him once from somewhere on this huge green lawn. It was morning and the sky was a brilliant blue. In the picture, Pat sported a pair of mirrored sunglasses and his ever-p
resent Cubs hat, soft and faded from years of wear. One of his gigantic biology textbooks was tented over his knees. #quadgoals, he had written, with about eight hundred laughing emojis, because Patrick always laughed at his own jokes, even if they weren’t funny.

  When Patrick had been accepted to the U of I on a full academic scholarship, the family had celebrated with cheap champagne at Sunday dinner. They could do things like that back then, because Luke still drank like a normal adult. Pup remembered how everybody had been so excited until the moment when Pat announced his major: philosophy.

  “But what are you going to do with a philosophy major?” Jeanine had demanded. “Go to law school?”

  “No.” Pat twirled a mouthful of spaghetti around his fork. “Be a philosopher.”

  “But you can’t just be a philosopher,” Mary had protested.

  “Well, Sartre would argue that I can’t be at all, since being-in-the-world is the same as nothingness. And if I am nothing, who cares what I major in?”

  “See, Mom?” Noreen demanded. “See what happens, all because you bought him that black turtleneck for Christmas?”

  “I don’t know about this, Pat,” their father had said. “You gotta think practical. I mean, look at me. I never even went to college, but I got in with the union when I was a young man. Got myself set up with good benefits, a nice pension—a salary that provided for eight children. So someone like you? With your brains? There’s no limit to what you can do. Why can’t you ponder the meaning of life in your free time, like everybody else?”

  “Dad’s right,” Jeanine had said, pointing her fork at him. “You have to think about the real world, Patrick. Whatever happened to your plans to be a doctor?”

  “A doctor in the family would be nice, honey,” their mother agreed.

  “I can get my PhD in philosophy, Ma,” Patrick had said, stuffing the forkful of spaghetti into his mouth. “You can still call me ‘Doctor’ that way.”

  “Please,” snorted Matthew, Jeanine’s husband. “I’ve never seen anyone heal a broken bone with their deep, important thoughts.”

  “It’s my scholarship,” Pat reminded Matthew through his mouthful of food. “So I can do whatever I want with it. Not my problem if you guys don’t get me.”

  “I get you,” Pup had said timidly. Everybody laughed, because Pup was only eleven and therefore he didn’t “get” anything. Patrick didn’t laugh, though. Instead, he had leaned over to Pup while the pineapple upside-down cake was being passed around and whispered, “I know you do, Pup Squeak.”

  Later that night, shooting hoops in the alley, Pat told Luke, Pup, and Annemarie the rest of his college plans.

  “I’m double majoring,” he said, dribbling past Pup for an easy bucket. “Philosophy and marine biology. I would have said so, if the sister-moms hadn’t jumped down my throat as soon as I opened my mouth.”

  “Nice,” laughed Annemarie. “You realize, they’re still sitting around the table as we speak, trying to figure out how to get you to choose something more practical.” She shot wide from the post. Pup grabbed the rebound and flipped it back up, missing the easy layup.

  “Stop showboating,” Luke instructed, chasing down the ball. “You’re not using your legs. Low man wins!”

  He fired off a quick chest pass that Pup wasn’t ready for; he held his arms up too late, and the spinning ball slammed right into his nose. The pain shot through his forehead, and when he tipped his head forward, two streams of blood gushed out. Patrick grabbed his water bottle from the closed lid of the garbage can, sat Pup down in the middle of the alley, leaned his head back and held the cold plastic to the bridge of his nose. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “It’s all right. It’s not broken, but you’ll probably get two good black eyes that will make you look tough and intriguing to all the girls in school.”

  Pup nodded as tears filled his eyes. There was nothing he hated more than looking stupid in front of his brothers. To not even be able to catch an easy pass when Declan was already playing travel basketball and setting scoring records at their middle school.

  “It’s his own fault,” Luke called as Pup shuddered with sobs. “When you showboat, you take your head out of the game.”

  “Will you shut up?” Annemarie yelled. “It isn’t enough you have to nail him in the face with a basketball, now you have to make him cry, too?”

  “He isn’t crying,” Pat snapped, wiping the tears that streamed from Pup’s eyes with the back of his hand. “That’s just a physical reaction to the hit he took.”

  Pup knew that this medical diagnosis was not strictly accurate. He suspected that Patrick knew, too. But if he did, he wasn’t going to say anything. He was good that way.

  He would have made a great philosopher.

  “Nervous, Flanagan?” Mr. Hughes clapped a large hand on Pup’s shoulder as they crossed from the sunny quad into the cool dimness of an old building with heavy wooden doors and a sign that read WELCOME TO THE ILLINOIS HIGH SCHOOL ASSOCIATION ART AND DESIGN COMPETITION!

  “Why would I be nervous?”

  “Maybe because you’re sweating like a sinner in church?”

  “Oh.” Pup wiped his clammy hands on his shorts. “That’s just my glands.”

  “Well, whatever it is, try to relax. All of you.” Hughes turned to the four of them. “You aren’t expected to do anything—no speeches, no explanations. There’s going to be judges who come around and examine the entries. Just stand next to your piece, smile, and let the art speak for itself.”

  They had entered a huge, hot, high-ceilinged room, with big metal fans whirring in the corners and warped windows where the late-spring light flooded through. A maze of felt-walled displays was set up, where hundreds of photographs, drawings, paintings, and designs were pinned up next to slips of paper containing the name of the artist and the school he or she represented. Along the edges of the room were various dead animals, stuffed and preserved on raised platforms, bolted down in lifelike positions with metal rods.

  “We’re in the Natural History building,” Mr. Hughes explained as he led the group past a giant moose with dull brown fur and a magnificent set of antlers, scored with scars and wider across than if Pup spread his arms out from fingertip to fingertip. The moose’s glassy brown eyes stared steadily ahead at a glowing EXIT sign. His nose was surrounded by stiff whiskers but the space around the nostrils looked like it was made of moss or velvet.

  While Mr. Hughes went to the teachers’ area to help himself to the spread of coffee and pastries, Abrihet, Maya, Brody, and Pup separated into the maze to find their entries. Pup eventually found himself stationed next to a guy whose entry was a black-and-white photo of a bunch of naked headless mannequins piled up in a dumpster in a shopping mall parking lot. It was creepy and weird, but strangely compelling and hard to look away.

  “Hi,” Pup said to the guy, who was currently peering into the camera of his phone and fiddling with the waxed tips of his little black mustache.

  “Hey.”

  “Cool photo.”

  The guy put down his phone and glanced over at it, a look of studied boredom playing across his face.

  “This isn’t even my best work.” He sighed. “I’m not sure why they picked it, really. Probably because my other stuff is too provocative.”

  “Oh,” Pup said. He knew that the guy was waiting for him to ask what was provocative about it, but he didn’t really feel like giving him the satisfaction. “I’m Pup,” he said instead.

  “I’m Curt. With a Q.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah. Q-U-R-T. I mean, that’s not how it’s spelled on my birth certificate, of course. But once I turn eighteen and move to Paris, I’m going to get it legally changed.”

  “Oh.”

  Qurt tapped through his phone and pushed it across the folding table to Pup.

  “This is the entry I wanted my teacher to submit,” he said. “Instead, it almost got me suspended. Almost got me arrested, as a matter of fact.”

&nb
sp; Pup held the phone out in front of him and looked at the image, in which a couple of the naked headless mannequins had been propped up against the dumpster so it looked like they were standing. In between them was a skinny, mournful-looking girl with long, stringy hair and an expressionless look on her face. Her hands hung limply by her sides and her shoulders slumped forward. Pup almost mistook her for a mannequin, too, until he saw the pale nipples and the wedge of pubic hair and realized she was a real person who just so happened to be as skinny—and as naked—as the mannequins that surrounded her.

  “That’s my girlfriend,” Qurt drawled. “It was totally consensual and collaborative, but when I tried to hand it in, my teacher freaked. Reported it to the principal. Threatened to charge me with child pornography. Child pornography! When my girlfriend is three months older than me. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?”

  “Um,” Pup said.

  “But what can you expect from a small-town Illinois art teacher? I was the fool to think he’d ever understand my vision.” Qurt glanced at the tag above Pup’s picture. Pup Flanagan. Abraham Lincoln High School. “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “Chicago,” Pup said.

  “You mean like the actual city, or the suburbs?”

  “The city. I mean, I don’t live, like, downtown in a high-rise or anything. I live in a regular neighborhood. But in the city, yeah.”

  “You’re so lucky.” Qurt sighed.

  “I guess,” Pup said.

  “But wait a minute.” Qurt scrutinized Pup’s Javier Baez T-shirt that he’d purchased for five bucks from an illegal vendor outside the Harlem blue line station. “You’re not really dressed like a city kid. You look more like a bro-dork. I thought city kids were supposed to be cool.”

  “Well—”

  “Oh, I get it now,” Qurt laughed. “You’re into normcore. Cool.”

  Normcore? Pup had no idea what this meant. He started to explain to Qurt that he was wearing a Baez T-shirt because he was a Cubs superfan, and he was wearing red basketball shorts because his mom had washed them and they’d been sitting at the top of the clean laundry basket, which Luke had managed not to pee all over when he’d stumbled in twenty minutes before Pup’s alarm went off at five that morning. But just then, the judges arrived. According to their name tags, they were art professors at the university. Pup stood up straight, smoothing down his wiry hair and wishing he had taken the extra time that morning to locate a pair of pants with an actual zip fly. Real, live college professors! Looking at his photograph! He couldn’t wait to tell Annemarie.