Waves of Light (13 page)

R
uth smiled at me as I slipped in, almost late, to class. I took out my notebook and pencil as quietly as I could, as Ms. Barton started talking.

“On Monday, I asked you to write a poem, but I didn’t give you much guidance — just to see what you’d do. Well, your poems ranged from humorous to practical to deep and meaningful.”

“The meaningful one was my ode to pepperoni pizza,” Mario called out.

“I put yours in the humorous pile, actually.” Ms. Barton smiled. “Here’s my point: Poems can be any of those things — silly, serious, you name it. So we’re going to spend some time working on poems from prompts. You can take them in whatever direction you’d like.”

“What about —” Mario began.

“As long as you keep it appropriate for school,” Ms. Barton interrupted.

My mind was filled with thoughts about Mom, but I couldn’t write a poem about her — not when I had no idea how I felt.

“I’d like you to choose a natural element to compare yourself to. It could be a force of nature or something you find outside. Use descriptive language and poetic form to show why you and this element are alike.”

“I don’t get it,” Abby said.

Erin leaned over to whisper an explanation, but Ms. Barton interrupted. “Thank you, Erin, for your help. But maybe we could all use an example? I’ll read you a poem that I love.”

She flipped open a worn, leather book and turned to a page she’d marked. The poem she read was about how the poet felt like an ink pot — sometimes so dried up that the words just wouldn’t come. Other times he overflowed with so many words that he couldn’t write them down fast enough.

“Now, an ink pot isn’t a natural object,” Ms. Barton said, closing the book. “But notice how the poet uses adjectives and draws out the metaphor? That’s what I want you to do.”

I closed my eyes, but no images came to mind. Ms. Barton circled the room. She’d probably think I was fooling around if she found me drawing, but I wasn’t sure how else to come up with an image. I didn’t want a repeat of the crumpled poem from Monday. Ms. Barton seemed to be in
a relatively good mood this morning, so I might as well give drawing a try.

As soon as my pencil touched the page, ideas started to flow. I sketched quickly, giving myself plenty of options. A tree wasn’t right. Not a flower either, or a river, a waterfall, a volcano.

Ms. Barton stopped at my desk. “How are those ideas coming today, Sadie?”

“I think I’m getting closer.”

She smiled. “Great. Good work.”

Maybe it only bothered her when I drew during math. Fair enough, since my drawings had absolutely nothing to do with math, and we both knew I was only avoiding the tangle of numbers. As I relaxed into my drawing, I found myself sketching a key tumbling in the wind.

And then I knew what to write my poem about.

It came out in a flurry of words — so fast that I didn’t feel like I was thinking. I was catching the words as they poured through me, the same way my pictures sometimes did when I drew at night.

What if the wind

could choose

whether

to bluster or breeze

to swirl or storm

to lilt or lie still

But the wind cannot choose

Instead, the sun

The moon

The angle of the earth

Combine

Outside pressures

The wind cannot control

Like me

The wind wakes up

Only to discover

What others have planned

Still, maybe she chooses

Sometimes.

When the bell rang, I waited until everyone had turned in their poems before I walked up to Ms. Barton’s desk with mine.

As I handed her my poem, I said, “I’m sorry about the other day. I wasn’t feeling very ‘poem-y.’”

Ms. Barton smiled and tapped her fingers on the stack of poems on her desk. “I thought that might be the case. May I read this now?”

When I nodded, she looked down at my poem. Her lips moved as she read down the page.

“You know what?” Ms. Barton said, finally looking up. “I really hope she does get to choose some of the time.”

I nodded again, feeling the heaviness lift a little more. All of these tiny choices — writing the poem instead of blowing it off, watching Ruth dance instead of pretending to be too busy with my sets — might not change anything around me, but they changed
me
. And maybe that was enough.

“Nice work today, Sadie,” Ms. Barton said.

“Thank you.” I smiled and headed for PE.

During rehearsal, I touched up the gold flourishes on the music box as I waited for Annabelle. I’d rather do almost anything than spend a half hour with her, explaining how to use the box. But since I’d made it, it would be weird if I asked someone else to help her. Then she’d have yet another reason to think I hated her.

She gasped behind me. “Sadie, this is beautiful!”

I turned to face her, half expecting to see a sarcastic expression on her face. But instead, she stared openmouthed at the box. I should have expected a genuine reaction from Annabelle. I’d never heard her use sarcasm before. She was too perfect for sarcasm.

She reached toward the box.

“Careful. Some of the paint is still wet.”

My voice must have been sharper than I intended because she flinched and stepped back. “I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean …”

She shook her head like it didn’t matter, but some of the light had gone out of her eyes. Her smile was just as bright as ever, though.

Maybe she really did care what I thought, although I couldn’t imagine why.

“Do you want me to show you how to use the box?” I asked, hoping the change in subject would make this conversation less awkward.

“Yeah, sure,” she said.

I demonstrated how to fold back the false top at the hinges and slide it down into the box, and how to set up the pipes with the curtains so the box looked open. We practiced until we could do the change from closed to open in thirty seconds, and from open to closed in the same amount of time.

“It’s almost like a dance,” she said as we set the lid down for the last time.

I checked my watch. “Twenty-nine seconds.”

“We’ll never have to do it so quickly during the show,” Annabelle said. “I think all of the scene changes will allow for at least a minute. People will be moving on the trails, and Doug is leading the group, trying to make it take five minutes for each walk.”

“I probably won’t be there to help you during the show, so you’ll have to teach someone else how to do my part.”

Annabelle looked at me. “Why won’t you be there?”

“Vivian’s art show is that same night, and I’m planning to go to it with her.” There. I’d finally said it out loud. I knew Ruth would be disappointed if I wasn’t at the play, but they didn’t really need me. My job was finished now. Anyway, I’d feel left out sitting in the audience while everyone else performed.

“I … um …” Annabelle shuffled from one foot to the other. “I think Andrew really wants you to be here for the show.”

The last person I wanted to talk about with Annabelle was Andrew. And I had no idea why she’d say something like this about Andrew and me, when she so obviously liked him.

She dug her toe in the dirt. “When I first got here, all he could talk about was you. And then something happened — I don’t know what. I just want him to be happy again.”

She looked up at me, and her smile was gone. All the brightness was gone from her face, actually. I could see clearly how much she cared about Andrew — probably a mirror of my own expression. We stared at each other for a full minute, not saying anything, as understanding passed between us. We both liked Andrew. We both wanted him to be happy. Strange.

“Just think about it,” Annabelle said. “If you’re here, then you should be in the last dance too. Even Penny’s going to be in it. I know having you there would … mean a lot … to Andrew.”

Through all of this, I hadn’t spoken. Now I forced myself to say, “I’ll think about it.”

I didn’t want to think about staying for the show. But even if Annabelle was wrong about whether or not Andrew would care if I were here, I knew that my being here mattered to Ruth. And also to Annabelle, in her own way. So I really would think about it.

But for now, I just wanted to paint.

Y
ou’ll never finish this today.” Ruth shook her head as she compared the plans to the faint sketches on the wood. “Good thing my mom said I can stay and help.”

I gave Ruth a small paintbrush and asked her to start working on the storefront windowpanes. After a few minutes, I went over to check her work, worried that she’d have trouble with the lines. But it turned out that even though Ruth couldn’t draw to save her life, she had a perfectly steady hand with a paintbrush.

She pulled the brush down in one long, steady stroke, biting her lip as she worked.

“Ruth, that’s perfect,” I said.

The storefronts needed a little flair here and there, but mostly they were time-intensive because of all the borders, which needed straight edges.

“Why didn’t you tell me you could paint perfectly straight lines?”

“I didn’t know,” Ruth said, laughing as she picked her brush up off the board. “So this is going to help?”

“So much,” I said. “Dad’s picking me up at four o’clock. When do you have to go?”

“Mom is shopping with the twins and said she’d pick me up around two. It’s noon now, so I’ll call and ask her to come a little later.”

After Ruth called her mom, she came back with her iPod and Penny’s portable speaker from the office. Once she was sure Cameron had gone for the day, she pulled up her favorite playlist, and the two of us sang along as loudly as we could. I almost didn’t want to talk. Right now, singing with Ruth, I could pretend everything that had happened these past few weeks was all in my imagination. Ruth and Andrew and I were all just like we’d been before, Frankie hadn’t moved, Mom was getting healthier all the time at the spa, and Vivian was working in her art studio. I could pretend my life hadn’t collapsed around me.

“Thanks for watching my dance,” Ruth said, breaking the silence between songs.

“You’re amazing,” I said.

She tossed me a you-don’t-have-to-say-that smile and started singing along with the next song.

“Why don’t you ever sing for Cameron?” I started on the bakery sign’s gold lettering.

“Singing used to be my own thing,” Ruth said. “And
then, I met Cam. Since he’s got the band, it just seemed weird to sing for him. I mean, if I sang for him and he didn’t like my voice and then … you know? Whoops!”

She’d been gesturing with her paintbrush and white drops had fallen onto the door. “I’ll fix that, don’t worry.” She went to look for the brown paint.

“It’s over there,” I said, pointing to a cup on the table.

She brought the cup back with another brush and a paper towel. She rubbed off as much white as she could and started painting over it with the brown.

“You can’t keep your voice a secret from him forever.”

“Yes, but it’s blown out of proportion. Cam really wants to hear my voice because people have told him I can sing, and now I’m afraid I’ll disappoint him. If he’d just accidentally heard me sing once a long time ago, it would be no big deal. You know what I mean?”

I finished the last gold swirl on the old-fashioned E at the end of
Shoppe
, and dunked my brush in the water bucket.

“Yeah. I guess the longer you don’t talk about something, the harder it is.”

“Speaking of …” Ruth said, cleaning her own brush. “Have you and Andrew talked?”

“Sort of.” If an argument counted as a conversation.

Ruth went back to her white windowpanes, and I moved on to the lamps, which I’d drawn to look like iron lanterns hanging off the buildings.

After a few more minutes, Ruth said, “Annabelle told me you’re thinking about going to New York next weekend.”

“I was going to tell you—”

“Oh, no. It’s okay. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go … It’s just that I agree with her — Andrew would want you to be here.”

I stopped painting. “You talked about me and Andrew? With Annabelle?”

She stopped painting and looked up at me, her eyes wide with worry. “It wasn’t like that. She said she thinks Andrew is upset and that maybe he misses you. She’s worried that by being here, she’s causing problems for him. I think last year, when she got sick, maybe she felt more for him than he felt for her. I didn’t realize she had those kind of feelings for him, or I would have said something …” her voice trailed off, and I could see she felt like she was digging herself a hole.

I wasn’t sure how to help her out of it. “Ruth …”

Ruth sighed. “Now it’s my turn. It’s not okay, not really. Isn’t that what you said to me? I’m really sorry, Sadie.”

Suddenly, the whole conversation seemed ridiculous. Ruth and I were tiptoeing around each other as though we were both made of glass. “You don’t have to keep apologizing for everything.”

“Sor—” Ruth began and then stopped.

I grinned at her, and she grinned back. Suddenly, I remembered painting with Frankie just a few weeks ago. I dipped a finger in the paint bucket and drew a streak down Ruth’s forehead and nose.

“Wha—” Ruth started, and then she dipped her own finger in paint and returned the favor.

Soon, we were flipping paint back and forth and laughing
for real. Who cared if the doors were a little splattered? Ruth was back.

“So are you? Going to New York, I mean?” Ruth asked, as we wiped off our hands and faces with paper towels.

Ruth kept her head down, focusing harder than necessary on the towel in her hands. Of course she didn’t want me to see her expression. She knew if I saw her face, I’d see how much she wanted me to stay, to watch her in the show; but she wanted me to decide on my own, for my own reasons.

“I’m not sure,” I finally said, because I didn’t want to lie to her anymore. “I really want to see Frankie, and it sounds nice to get away … from everything. But I don’t know. When I saw you dance, I started thinking maybe I do want to be here. For you. Not for Andrew or Annabelle or anyone else. But for you.”

She looked up at me, finally, and I saw the expression in her eyes that I’d expected: A mixture of hope and hurt and sadness.

“I feel …”

“Sad,” I finished for her. “I know. I am too.”

“Can I teach you the dance?” she asked as she set down her towel. “Just in case? I promise it won’t take long.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “I’m not much of a dancer.”

“I’m not much of a painter, and look what I just did.” She pointed to the finished windowpanes and then reached out a hand to help me to my feet.

I put my brushes in the water to soak and then grabbed her hand. “Just promise to go slow.”