Three.
In art class, we are shelved alphabetically into desks, deposited like plastic toys that come in fast food Happy Meals. We paint a still life. The objects on my canvas move lustily around each other, secret lovers in the candlelight of an amber pigment. My brain makes a nest of crayons and paint and trampoline canvas, sticks a sign in the yellowing resin and calls it a home.
“That’s not the still life we’re supposed to be painting,” a boy with a mouth like a snake spits.
I raise my head. His eyes flare. “Still life is dead life,” I reply and shove fistfuls of paintbrush through acrylic excrement.
He eyes me uneasily and glances back at the plate of fruit we are depicting.
Suddenly I hear the faint whisperings of a piano. “Where’s that music coming from?” I ask him.
He shakes his head, the fringes of his hair slapping his face and chastising him for talking to me at all. “What music?”
“That music.” I stare at the pimple on the flat bridge of his nose. “The piano? It sounds like a wedding march. Can’t you hear it?”
He looks at me.
“Seriously. You can’t hear the piano?”
“You’re crazy.” He turns back to the pear he is mutilating.
I sigh. Quite possibly, I think.
“Do you hear the music?” I ask my father later when I pass him in the hallway. I clutch a tampon with white knuckles.
My father looks at me and moves away.
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