“The city is ten square miles! They can’t even afford to demolish some collapsing warehouses and you want them to put in, like, eighteen thousand sprinklers?”
“Ugh, this place sucks.” Adriana sighs in defeat just as the bell rings. Reluctantly, we start for class. “By the way, my abuela wants you to come over for dinner again. She kind of won’t shut up about it.”
“Abuela as in Abuela Rosales?” For the first time today, I finally perk up. “As in my bestest friend, Ximena Rosales, who will hopefully be making her famous guacamole?”
“Yeah, that’s her. So I can tell her you’re in?”
“Yes!” I do a little dance move, because Ximena Rosales is possibly the best cook in Fulton Heights. Mentally, I add her to the list of people I don’t want eaten. When we reach our classroom, we see the three boys sitting in the front row, and a very familiar combination of fear, envy, and horniness rolls over me.
“Okay.” Adriana rounds on me. “Fuck, marry, kill: Boyd Crandall, Dante Gardner, and Kenton Reed.”
She thinks this is a stumper, but I don’t even have to consider my answer. “Fuck Boyd Crandall, marry Boyd Crandall, and then kill Boyd Crandall and collect the insurance money.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s cheating,” Adriana says, narrowing her eyes. “And Boyd? He’s, like … he’s an assclown. And a bro. And a douche.” She shakes her head. “He’s an assdouche bro-clown, and you’re telling me you would seriously do sex to his body?”
“In my imagination, he is doing sex to my body, and the answer is emphatically yes.” My palms are sweaty just thinking about it. Adriana knows all about my lust-hate feelings for Boyd—she just doesn’t understand. Apparently, me seriously wishing I could bone someone I don’t even like is a concept she finds mind-boggling. Boyd might be an assdouche bro-clown, and I’ll never actually date him, but I am about 90 percent of the way toward developing carpal tunnel syndrome after a week of private time thinking about him making a snow angel in his underpants.
“Are you going to be hanging out in the art room after school today?” my best friend inquires now, and her tone is ridiculously casual. As if I don’t know why she’s asking.
“Yes.” I wait patiently.
“Tell Hope I said hi. Or whatever.” She acts like it’s an afterthought.
“Hi … or … whatever,” I repeat, typing it into my Notes app. “Got it.”
Her face turns scarlet, and she rolls her eyes as she precedes me into the classroom. Adriana may have higher standards than I do, but she crushes on as many girls as I do boys—and yet both of us are perpetually alone. At least it’s nice to not be the only hopeless case in Fulton Heights.
* * *
If Adriana’s plan to arson all our hometown’s unwanted buildings ever gets any traction, I will humbly propose that our high school be added to the list—with the single condition that the art room be spared. It is literally the only thing worth saving here. The tables and chairs are stained; the walls are covered with yellowing watercolors by students who graduated before I was born; and the air is always gummy with the combined smell of papier-mâché and Murphy Oil Soap. I love it.
Ever since I was a kid, art is the only thing I’ve really been passionate about. I have dozens of sketchbooks at home filled with my own drawings—from the stick-figure families and their lumpy cartoon dogs I did in preschool, to the complicated sketches I’m working on now. My big dream is to one day illustrate my own graphic novel.
“Ah, my star pupils!” exclaims Mr. Strauss as he sweeps into the room, beaming at me and Hope Cheng, as if we’re actually doing him some big favor by making him stay after school to make sure we don’t actually arson the place. “What are we doing today?”
“I still have my sculpture to finish.” Hope gestures at the project she’s been working on for the past few weeks, which sort of defies an easy description. She’s building a statue out of pine cones and glue, but it honestly looks like a robot made of spiky turds.
“How about you, Auggie?” Mr. Strauss turns to me as Hope empties a bag of pine cones she’s salvaged from who-knows-where all over one of the art tables.
“I guess I wanted to practice with the charcoals some more.” My big flaw as an artist is that I get easily mired in details, and I’ll spend forty minutes trying to perfect a single tree before I finally give up and accept that everything I’m doing is pointless. Mr. Strauss suggested I work with charcoals for a while—a medium that allows for quick sketches that focus on shape and composition rather than minutiae.
Unlocking the supply cabinet, our teacher retrieves all the necessary materials while I clip a wide sheet of paper to an easel. Hope sets up her turd monster on a table across from me, and before I put my headphones on, I clear my throat. “Adriana told me to say hi.”
“Oh.” Hope tosses her hair, turning away just as a little smile touches her lips. “Tell her I said hi back. I listened to that K-pop group she was talking about at lunch last week, and I really liked them.”
“You know, if you want to say hi back, you could always text her…” I let my inflection go up at the end—a suggestion and a question. Hope is very cute and totally Adriana’s type: ethereal and witchy, all hippie skirts, flowing hair, and mismatched accessories.
“I don’t know.” Hope bites her lip, swiveling her sculpture around like she’s trying to figure out which part to make worse first. “What if she thought I was trying to, like, flirt with her?”
“Ugh, you guys are both ridiculous.” I take off my glasses so I can pinch the bridge of my nose. “Flirting is the whole point!” Adriana will totally kill me for going off script, but come on. “If you’re not into her, that’s okay; but if you are, I promise you don’t have anything to worry about. That’s all I’m saying.”
Hope doesn’t look over, but I watch as she bobs her head a little, absorbing the information. Finally, she says, “Well, maybe I will text her.”
Feeling smug, I slip my headphones on and start my playlist. It’s a lot of ambient stuff—background music with a heavy beat to get my blood going. When I start to feel the rhythm, I pick up a stick of charcoal and get to work.
A hand claps me on the shoulder and I jump about a mile, the headphones slipping down around my neck. Mr. Strauss hovers beside me. “Sorry—didn’t mean to scare you! It’s just that the sun is going to set pretty soon, and we need to lock up.”
I blink, my eyes dry and my head swimming. “What do you mean? We just…”
My voice trails off as I notice the advanced angle of the daylight shining through the classroom’s windows, and when I look over at Hope’s workstation, I see her poop goblin has sprouted an entire arm out of nowhere. She’s staring at me, too, and I blink a few more times as Mr. Strauss asks, “So what have you been working on for the past two hours? You’ve been so focused I hated to interrupt.”
The past two hours? Dazed—half convinced my favorite teacher is gaslighting me, but unable to deny that the actual angle of the sun has changed—I face my easel and freeze. What was a blank sheet not ten seconds ago is now filled edge to edge with a tableau I have no memory of drawing. It’s a mob scene of some kind, so dense that the people in it spill into shadowy suggestion in the background. The faces are all vague and featureless, but the attitude is undeniably angry.