Simon Says (3 page)

There was a tension in the book—a sense that life was packed full of decisions that had to be made, that from moment to moment our every action was only a reaction feeding the expectations that control us in the end. The kid knew he was building his own prison, action by reaction, but what did he care? He was winning. Maybe—and I wasn't sure about this—he didn't believe that people were individuals; maybe he thought they were just carbon copies that made a community, the way all the houses in a subdivision have the same floor plan even if they're disguised with different-colored aluminum sidings.

I read
The Eye of the Storm
as a warning story, like the old Aesop's fables—only the other kids never got it Everybody was reading the book at my old school, but they never saw that How could they miss it? I was so sure Graeme Brandt was showing everybody how ter
rible the game could be, so they'd realize and stop playing it. But after seeing him, it's as if he's just playing the game, too. If he is, then how could he write about it so honestly?

Nobody talks about the game—maybe they can't even admit to themselves that it exists. Only outsiders like me, who won't play, seem to see it That's why I was so sure Graeme had to be like me, only better, because he could use his art to expose the game, to warn people about it and not be destroyed by them. Maybe that's still true. It was only a party, after all. I was just expecting (
wanting
) him to be different.

I pause at the tree line and listen to the rustling leaves and birds perched above, a low murmur punctuated by sudden raucous cries that are answered by creaks and shifts in the tree branches and new rustlings. Then I stretch my stride and make my footfalls soft, catlike, on the pavement I barely breathe. The thought of alarming hundreds of cowbirds is powerful inspiration to stay silent How would I sketch the scene? A huddled figure, straining for the open green lawn ahead, only to step on a dry, weathered twig that cracks ominously. The figure darts a panic-stricken look above to see a cloud of feathered wings rise from the shuddering treetops.

That's what I'd draw for
Ventures
—the
reality,
but not the
possibility
that I'd paint for myself.

I reach the dorm safely and hide out in our room. It still looks ... I don't know, undefined—a scattering of Adrian's clothes and music notebooks in closets and on shelves along one side of the room, and a CD player and
headphones on his desk, CDs stacked in the shelves intended for textbooks. He's already at home.

The policy at Whitman is for new students to room with somebody who's already been here at least a year. For freshmen, that means rooming with a sophomore. For junior transfers like me, it's usually someone in the same grade. They say it's to keep us from getting too homesick, to help us fit into boarding-school life. It's probably to keep us from bugging our mentor with too many questions on how things are supposed to run—the roommate knows the rules.
Adrian says ... go to class. Adrian says ... show time.

There's nothing on my side of the room except clothes in the closet and a few empty sketch pads and blank notebooks for classes on my desk, along with a large hasp lock and a scattering of roller ball refills for my pen, a computer I didn't want, and a file folder with a copy of my application to Whitman. I pick that up and open it They wanted a biographical sketch to round out their form. A
sketch...

I drew them a sketch, of course: a self-portrait from the back, me standing before an easel. They couldn't see my face because it's turned away from them, and they couldn't see my painting because the canvas remained white. I hadn't yet begun. All you could see were the possibilities.

My parents said that wasn't enough. If I seriously wanted to get into this school, they said I had to
write
a biographical sketch, because that was what the instructions obviously meant
Obvious to whom?
But I did want to get in, so I wrote it:

I was born with a crayon in one hand and a stick of colored chalk in the other. At least, from the way my mother complains of the mess I made drawing before I started school, I must have been. By the time I began preschool I was working in chalks, as they were easiest to clean up. I moved on to poster paints in preschool and was soon experimenting with different tools: the finger versus the brush.

I painted packs of wolves chasing indistinct figures in preschool and kindergarten. The grown-ups said the pictures were very nice, but clearly they didn't like the savage quality of the wolves. The other kids thought the wolves were cool, but they didn't like the feet that my drawings of wolves actually looked like wolves instead of like black stick figures with big teeth—or maybe they didn't like the fact that I couldn't help laughing at their awkward stick figures. Take your pick. So what if they were better at kicking a ball or playing catch than I was? That didn't stop them from laughing at me when the teacher forced me to play their games at recess—or from resenting that I was better with paint. It didn't stop them from calling me names, although the teachers finally stopped them from calling me colored boy (I
did
seem to end up with almost as much paint on me as on the paper).

The kids understood instinctively that the wolf pack was the whole bunch of them, mediocrity incarnate, chasing the one who was different. None of us had the words for it then, of course, but I had the imagery, and the talent, to show it. What I wanted was someone to
see my paintings and nod and say, "That's how it is, all right" But no one did, not even the teachers or parents. Maybe they were scared of admitting they were part of the wolf pack, even to themselves. Maybe they wished they could be different, special—the one who escaped the wolves. But they couldn't be, or they just wouldn't try.

I began sketching people in first grade.

Miss Bush, my first-grade teacher, took away my sketch pad and told me to concentrate on reading and addition and subtraction, so I drew on the ruled pages of my workbook and in the margins of the schoolbooks. I sketched Miss Bush drawing big red
Xs
over students who didn't pay attention. She found my drawings when she graded our workbooks and was furious—and hurt How did she think
I
felt when she told me I was "wasting my time" drawing "stupid" pictures in class? I was glad I could make her hurt back.

After that she even said my paintings in art were wrong. How can a painting be wrong, unless it's a lie? She told us to paint flowers, and I painted a meadow of wildflowers, bright colors dancing above the weeds, a deer looking up as it ate a flower. "Wrong!" Miss Bush told me. "This is a flower!" And right on top of my meadow she drew an ugly daisy with a black Magic Marker. Sure, she'd drawn a daisy on the chalkboard when she told us to draw flowers, but I didn't think she actually meant us to
copy
it When I looked around me, however, the other kids all had rows of identical daisies
on their drawing paper. Well, if they all thought they were supposed to copy her model, okay for them. But telling us to paint flowers didn't sound anything like saying "reproduce daisy clones"—at least not to me. Why should I draw them that way?

In second, grade I was put in charge of the artwork for the class bulletin board and the backdrops for our class play.

Second grade was worse, because Mrs. Argenta actually seemed to like my drawings at first She asked me to do the bulletin board artwork. "See how Charlie painted the tree trunk on the backdrop, boys and girls? Now you paint more trees just like his." But the other kids couldn't, and they resented me. I realized after a while that Mrs. Argenta didn't really see what I painted—she only saw that I could draw and paint She couldn't teach art, so she told the other kids to copy me. Maybe she expected me to teach them. But I didn't know how. Anyway, you can't just copy something. You have to make it your own somehow, and paint that Mrs. Argenta got impatient with the other kids and mad at me for not showing them how to do what I did. I finally sketched her blind, with dark glasses and a cane, holding up a large brush that was really a puppeteer's stick, with the strings attached to brushes the other students were holding. After that Mrs. Argenta didn't make me show the class how to draw anything anymore, but the kids never forgot I'd said it was a waste of time trying to show them how to paint the way I did.

The names got worse, and I started zipping my sketch pad inside a backpack to keep it safe. Paintings I did in art stopped making it to the bulletin board. Somehow they ended up on the bottom of the pile, and sometimes they ended up torn. The reports of "Doesn't play well with others" and "Doesn't follow instructions" started to bother my parents. They had a parent-teacher conference, but Dad came home saying Mrs. Argenta was a flake, so nothing happened. I wasn't sure, however, that she was all that different from the rest of them.

The following summer I began working in watercolors and experimenting with textures.

I found I could achieve a luminous quality with watercolors, especially when I textured them by painting over pencil work. I could have lived in my room forever, drawing and painting, if only I'd had someone to share it with. I showed Mom, and she said my pictures were "very nice," but she wanted me to get out and play. I noticed she didn't really look at the pictures anymore. Maybe she'd figured out she was just another wolf in the pack (even though I wasn't painting wolves anymore) and didn't like the feeling.

But that's not what I wanted. I wanted people to look at my paintings and think, "Yes, I could be the one standing out—I could be different from the rest—I
am
different from the rest—there's something special about me." Why didn't anybody see that? Other kids acted like
they wanted to be special, so I couldn't understand why my being different made them dislike me. Wasn't I only doing what they wanted to do?

By third grade I had gained a reputation among my peers as a caricature artist, sketching various teachers and classmates.

Third grade was torture, with a teacher who thought art was a waste of time, even in art class. Mr. Birkin told the rest of the class that I was a "distraction," a "troublemaker," "too self-absorbed." He moved me to the for back comer of the classroom and made comments like, "Do tell us if the history lesson disturbs you, young van Gogh." Then he told the class how van Gogh was crazy. I drew Mr. Birkin again and again in my sketch pad as a crippled, hunched-over skeleton clawing through paintings that clung to the wall, despite their tatters. I tried not to listen to him, which made it hard to pass third grade. Mr. Birkin was going to keep me back, but my parents mobilized to prevent that. They made the school test me, proving that I actually could read and do math, even if my grasp of history and science was rather vague.

When I left Mr. Birkin's classroom for the last time, I put a drawing on his desk that showed him torturing a jail cell full of students—whips and chains and all kinds of things I'd seen in an old black-and-white movie on cable. From the hallway I could hear the sound of paper ripping.

In fourth grade I began incorporating classical symbolism into my paintings. By this time I was working in watercolors, pen-and-ink, charcoal, colored pencils, or colored chalk, depending on the project.

It was fourth grade that taught me that school actually could be useful. I made sure to do my homework and study for tests, but I didn't always listen in class. One afternoon, though, Ms. Geller was talking about mythology, and she told us the story of the phoenix rising from its ashes. It suddenly occurred to me that I could use a reference like that in my paintings. If you painted a symbol that everybody recognized, then it could help them understand what the painting meant I got really excited by the idea and painted the phoenix in the next art class—I added in lions, their tawny bodies contrasting with the gold of the phoenix's feathers as they tore it apart, only to have it burst into flames in their claws and rise above them, reborn. I thought Ms. Geller would love it since I used what she'd said in class, but she looked uncomfortable and said it was "striking." She said I was "very talented." She put it on the bottom of the pile of drawings. Maybe she didn't like the lions tearing the phoenix apart But what does she think it feels like, having everybody telling you you're strange, you're different, you don't go along with the crowd, you don't play what we like to play, you don't think what we think,
what's wrong with you
? As if it never occurs to them that there might be something wrong with them. It
feels
like claws ripping you to
pieces. And if you don't believe you can rise from the fire, then you'll just shrivel up and die inside.

In fifth grade the kids were banding together into clubs (
packs
), some sanctioned by the school, some overlooked. The kids who'd called me the worst names started flashing a hand signal at each other. Mrs. Silverman was teaching us sign language in English class, and I recognized the letter "K" repeated three times fast, but I didn't know what they meant, and didn't care; at least until I saw it on one kid's notebook. "KKK" and beneath it "Klu Klux Kharles." Someone had been doing their American history homework, even if the alliteration was a little strained. My locker door got slammed a lot that year, just as I was trying to reach inside it And my homework never made it to Mrs. Silverman in one piece unless she walked up and down the aisles, picking up everyone's paper herself. I painted sweeping heraldic birds and threatening forests in art class, and wasn't surprised when a jar of rinse water or another kid's pot of paint splashed over my paper. Mrs. Silverman knew I was a loner and tried to be encouraging, but either she never guessed about the Klu Klux Kharles or she thought it must be innocuous. It's not as if any fighting went on in her class. "What was the point of fighting with fists if paint couldn't make them see?