Better Than Running at Night (15 page)

I watched him walk toward the painting studios. He stopped on his way and looked up at an apartment building. He stood there for about a minute before continuing on his way.

As I ran home, something felt different. The cold air didn't fill me with exhilaration. Instead, it seemed to pass through me, as if my body were made of a broken plastic bag, with nothing inside.

Sketching in my bed, I tried to make the empty feeling go away. The old me would've painted a person screaming.

I let my pencil guide my hand.

I wasn't even really sure why I was feeling bad. Maybe Nate and I
aren't
right for each other, I thought. But I quickly drove that idea from my mind. Surely I was overreacting.

I paused to see what I'd been drawing. My marks had started to take the shape of a bowling alley.

I added a ball, rolling down the gutter, completely missing the perfectly placed pins.

Nate's face was there, looking down at me through the window. White-knuckled fists gripping the black bars. Teeth clenched like he was benching Andre the Giant. That's when I realized he was trying to bend the metal.

"You can come in the front," I said. "I'll get the door."

I have to admit, I'd always fantasized about a guy climbing through my window in the middle of the night. But this seemed a bit ridiculous.

By the time I got to my bedroom door, there was this enormous creaking
kaboom.
I turned around. The window was gaping and the curved bars made an opening like a missing tooth. In crawled Nate, tracking snowprints all over my bed.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

He said nothing.

But he came toward me, lifted me and carried me back to my bed and started kissing me all over my face really gently. He laid me down and straddled me, holding me against the mattress by my wrists. Then he raised his head and whistled, as if he was calling a pet.

Before I knew it someone else was negotiating her way through the window.

It was Sloane Boocock. She was trying to hoist herself over the sill, but she kept slipping off. She made little-girl grunts at each attempt, as if she was carrying a heavy load. Nate went to the head of the bed and kneeled on my pillow by the window. Sloane picked up an object I couldn't see. Then Nate put his hands under her armpits to help her. She kicked and wriggled and finally got through, doing a face plant into my mattress. Then she rolled off the bed and onto the floor.

In her arms was a bowling ball.

Nate reached down to help her up to our level, and he told us to sit next to each other on the bed. She handed the big black ball to Nate. He slid his fingers into the holes. Then he took my fingers and pushed them in, too. He started shoving Sloane's in on top of mine.

Nate and Sloane were smiling at each other, as if I wasn't in the room.

I tried to scream, but instead I woke up.

My subconscious obviously hadn't received the news yet; Ellie Yelinsky was no longer dealing with melodramatic symbolism.

That ended in high school.

I saw Sam on my way to the nature lab. He was headed up to Main Street.

"Aren't the stores closed by now?" I asked.

"Not Dunkin' Donuts."

"What's up with you and Dunkin' Donuts, anyway?"

"Um, I've sort of got this plan."

"A plan?"

"It's, um, no big deal."

"Come on, you can tell me."

"Well," he said, glancing around nervously, as if to make sure no government officials were eavesdropping. "My goal is to try each doughnut, bagel, and muffin flavor by the end of Wintersession."

"And all this time, I thought you were just a pig!"

He winced, then looked at his shuffling feet.

"I didn't mean that in a bad way," I apologized. "What I meant was, the
real
story is way more interesting."

"Thanks, I think." He cracked a subtle smile.

"Eat a Boston cream doughnut for me," I said. "They're my favorite."

"I like those, too," he said, shifting his cap. "It's one of the first ones I bought."

"Well, I'd better get going," I said, to avoid any awkward silence. "Good luck."

I turned to look behind me when I got to the nature lab at the bottom of the hill. Sam was still standing where I'd left him, watching me. When he saw me look at him, he quickly did an about-face and sped up College Street.

I settled down in the skeleton room at the nature lab. Along one wall was a glass case full of skeletons. There were seven of them, hanging slack-jawed from wires. The monitor took one out for me and hung it on a stand. This was one of the real skeletons. Some of the others were plastic, and had colors showing where muscles would attach to the bones. I could tell this one was a woman; her pelvis was wider than her rib cage.

I wondered what she looked like when she was alive.

I opened
Human Anatomy for Artists
to the rib cage section and started sketching. Ed wanted us to draw diagrams from three vantage points: front, back, and side.

There were so many ribs, I had to keep counting my lines to make sure I had enough.

I wanted this project to look like a mini version of a huge dinosaur rib cage. I'd set it on its back. The spaces between the ribs would be gaps to look through. If you put it outside on a clear warm night, you could peek at the stars.

It would be a good place to lie down and think, to be alone, but to allow nature into your private world at the same time.

I guess
someone
might say I was making a "chill space."

"Why won't you sleep over here anymore?" he demanded one night. "It's like you don't trust me or something."

It was around nine
P.M
. and I'd gone over to his apartment after working in the Garage for a few hours after class.

"No, I just like sleeping at home. I can't sleep with that racket, anyway." I pointed at the radiator. I was smiling, but I didn't mean to be smiling. My lips were frozen in that position.

I was looking at his paintings of Maura and Sloane. They looked radiant in the pictures, the way you might look after a night with a great kisser.

"What's wrong," he said. "You don't think they actually pose for me, do you?"

"How can I be sure?" I asked. "I've never seen you while you're working. You keep it all so secret."

"You're the only one who knows the plan."

"Right. The
plan.
"

He lifted the corner of his futon and pulled out several frayed porno magazines. He shook them at my face. "We're going to the computer lab," he said.

When we got there, Nate dragged two swivel chairs over to a computer. Only a few other people were in the room, quietly clicking on keyboards.

"I'm going to show you what I do," he whispered. "This is everything. But you have to promise not to tell anyone."

"Okay."

"No, 'okay' isn't good enough. Promise."

"Okay, okay, I promise."

"All through high school I tried to be a photo-realist," he said. "I'd go out and shoot pictures of brick buildings, crowded streets, anything with a lot of detail. Then I'd copy the photographs onto canvas with oils. I got really good at it. Some people can't tell the difference between a photograph of the painting and the original photograph."

Then he opened Photoshop files of the Maura and Sloane images I'd grown to know so well. They did look just like the paintings.

"With Photoshop, I don't have to take my own pictures," he said. "All I have to do is create something that
looks
like I took a picture. Here, watch this."

He scanned each of our ID cards into Photoshop. He taught me how to use the tools, how to select facial features and change their size in proportion to the rest of the face. He showed me how to alter the colors.

Nate completely distorted his headshot. He made it look like he'd been running at cartoon speed and landed splat against a glass door.

"Would you fuck me if I looked like this?" he asked.

"I don't think so," I said, laughing.

It was my turn. I used the cloning tool to rub out my eyes, so they looked like patches of skin.

"Would you fuck me if I looked like this?" I asked.

It was fun using that word in this way.

He laughed. "More girls would probably fuck me if they looked like that."

He copied his mouth, which was open in the picture because he had been talking when it was taken, and pasted one mouth over each eye.

"How about this," he said. "Would you fuck me if I looked like this?"

"No way."

"What about if I looked like this?" Now, in place of all his facial features was one gigantic mouth.

"Absolutely not."

"Then I guess I'm all right the way I am."

"I guess so."

"What'll it be this week?" he asked himself, flipping through the porn.

He put his hand on my knee and looked at me.

"I want you to know, I discriminate between good porn and bad porn."

"What do you mean?"

"I never use
Penthouse or Hustler,
" he said. "That stuff is pure porn. The magazines I use have a hint of art in them. Like
Perfect 10.
See, they put their models in natural environments, and natural poses." He laughed. "Okay, maybe not natural, but they're definitely not as degrading as the poses in the hardcore magazines. And here in
Gear
" —he pointed to a picture of a naked woman clinging to a man in business attire—"they get creative. They actually make porn funny."

The next one was
Skin Two,
a fetish magazine. He stopped, satisfied, on a page with a girl dressed in a cat suit. Actually, it wasn't much of a suit; she was wearing ears and a tail attached to garters, and nothing else. On her face were painted whiskers and she was stretching on the ground. Claws extended, ass in the air.

"This is perfect," he said, tapping the cat girl repeatedly. "
Purrrrr-
fect." He gave me one of those
Get it?
grins.

"You know what really
is
perfect?" I said.

"What."

"Sloane looks like she belongs in one of these magazines."

"Yeah, she's got a nice body, doesn't she."

"Her breasts are too big for her head," I said. "It must be easy to transfer her face to the model's body without changing much."

"Yeah, I guess it is."

"Don't you think it's weird that her boobs are so big and she sounds like she's twelve?"

He laughed. "I guess that's why she's so appealing."

Later that night in my bed Nate asked, "What do you think: are Sloane's breasts real?"

It hadn't occurred to me. I'd only known one person who had gotten a boob job, and that was because she was upset that her younger sister had gotten married before her. Apparently, a boob job was the answer.

"I don't know," I said. "Why?"

"People don't just
look
like that," he said. "There's
work
involved in looking like that."

The next day, Ed ran into class panting.

"Come on, Dalia, come on!" he called, still out of breath.

He turned to face the door, bent his knees, and smacked the fronts of his thighs.

A golden retriever came bounding in and pounced on him. At her full height, her paws practically reached his shoulders.

"That's my girl!" he said. "That's a good girl!"

We'd been waiting for around fifteen minutes for Ed. It was the first time he'd been late.

"Dalia, meet my students!"

Dalia sat at attention, drooling happily.

"Meet Ellie! Meet Sam! Meet Ralph!"

Dalia barked three times.

"Sorry I'm late, folks!" he said. "I had to get Dalia from the vet this morning! She's been sick and I've been taking her back and forth from home to the doctor, but now she's all better! Right Dalia?"

Another bark.

Dalia responded to Ed so well, it must've been frustrating for her to not be able to speak English.

"How's Dalia feeling?" Ed asked.

She howled.

"Aaooooooowww!" Ed chimed in with her.