Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything (15 page)

But I feel lighter.

Pop goes to bed early because he's jet-lagged. I do the full-length portrait assignment Katya told me about, so I won't be massively behind in Kensington's class.

Head,
ear,
shoulders,
shirt.

I am not sharing my biscuits with the whole art class, thank you very much.

Legs,
fabric of jeans,
and feet.

It is reasonably like me. A figure of a girl with her chin tilted up. I look like I'm gazing into the sky.

With shading and detail, it's semilikely to please Kensington, since there are no panels, no hard edges and no hypermuscled superheroes.

But: I
don't really want to please Kensington
after all,
now
do I?

So I add a huge, ornate pair of wings to my selfportrait. I shade the figure, and add the details of my shirt pocket and my bracelets, and the clip in my hair. But I concentrate most of my effort on the wings, making them transparent and fragile, but also strong and aerodynamic.

I am a winged girl.

i
spend Sunday afternoon down in Brighton Beach with Katya. We walk along the boardwalk and she tells me how she snuck into Malachy's apartment last night after everyone was asleep, and they made out on his bed for nearly two hours.

She's got a hickey on her neck.

I tell her about the divorce.

Ma won't be home until Tuesday, but I buy her some Russian candy as a coming-home present. They have it in big bins upstairs in one of the grocery stores, wrapped in brightly colored paper and marked with writing I don't understand.

At home, Pop cooks dinner, and we avoid discussing Ma, or the move, or anything heavy. I spend some time on the computer while he does the dishes, and then we watch TV until I'm falling asleep on the couch.

m
onday morning, I wear the red vinyl miniskirt that's been lying on the floor of my closet ever since I bought it.

Milkshake.

I'm at school early, and I don't go sit on the steps with my coffee and my sketchbook, the way I usually do. I walk around the block to the back of the building where the garbage cans are.

No one's there yet except Brat. He's got coffee and a muffin and
Ender's Game
and a cigarette and he's multitasking unsuccessfully. He ends up with some ash on his muffin.

“Hey, Brat.”

“Gretchen. You been out sick?” His face is toward the sun, so he squints.

I go through my green-snot drugstore-in-pajamas story.

“You missed some high drama,” he says.

“Katya told me about Taffy and her biscuits.”

“Yeah. She took crap about it, but it's like it rolls right off her. I guess she likes the attention.” He looks down at his coffee and swirls it around. “Hey, here's one you don't know. Shane and Titus got in a fistfight Saturday. We were all down in Battery Park. Them and me and Ip and Malachy.”

“A fight like they were punching each other?”

“Well, Titus only put his hands up to his chest to
defend himself, but Shane really swung. Titus has a black eye.” He exhales a cloud of smoke. “Your friend Titus fights like—”

“Don't say ‘like a girl.’ ”

“Like a mouse,” laughs Brat. “He got his ass kicked.”

“What was it about?”

“I don't know. Some macho crap.”

I'm sure he's lying, but that's okay. “Are they friends again?”

Brat shrugs. “I'm guessing not. We had to get ice from a guy with a hot dog cart to put on Titus's eye. Shane took off.”

“Hell,” I say. “One week and everything changes.”

We are quiet for a minute. I can see Malachy down at the corner, heading our way. “Wanna see something my dad brought me from Hong Kong?” I ask.

Brat nods.

I pull out two Bean Curd Babies from my bag. “You know what these are?”

“Oh, wow. Is that the new generation?” says Brat, his voice excited. “I read on the Web they have pets, too. Did he bring you the pets?”

And we talk Bean Curd Babies as people arrive and light up around us—until I remember that I have to see the principal before class.

i
head into Valenti's office with a note from my dad. It says I had a nasty bout of the flu, my parents were out
of town, he's so sorry he didn't notify the school about it earlier, and of course I am planning to make up all the work.

“Hm,” says Valenti when I hand her the note. “I trust you're feeling better now, Miss Yee?”

“Yes.”

“I've got your transcript here,” the principal says, pulling a file from her drawer. “Your academic record isn't in great shape.”

“I know,” I say. “I have to get myself together.”

“Attendance at the Manhattan High School for the Arts is a privilege,” Valenti continues, “and I want to see my students striving to reach the high bar we set. This spotty record doesn't speak well for your commitment to the visual arts or to your academic studies….”

She goes on, a speech I'm sure she delivers a hundred times a year to degenerate students of various kinds.

“Um, excuse me?” I venture, when the lecture seems to be winding down. “There
is
something I want to talk to you about. Since I'm here.”

“Yes? I'm listening.” Valenti puts on a sympathetic face, like she's all set to listen to a story about me doing drugs or being pregnant.

I take a deep breath. “Can you tell me the ratio of students at this school? Like how many girls there are, compared to how many boys?”

“Certainly,” she answers, looking a bit surprised.

“The student body is fifty-two percent female, fortyeight percent male.”

“It is?” I say. “Because it has, ah, come to my attention—I mean, not that I've ever been in there, but I was talking to some people, and it seems like the girls' locker room is only like half the size of the boys'. They've got twice as many showerheads as we do, more bins for dirty towels, more toilet stalls and urinals on top of that.”

“Go on.”

“Well, I hear they've got a full-length mirror in there, and some minilockers to keep their shoes in overnight, or shampoo, or whatever, and also fullheight lockers so they can hang their coats up.”

Valenti leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. “I see.”

“I was talking to my dad about it,” I go on, “and he said Title Nine makes it illegal to have sex discrimination in sports programs at a school that gets government funding. Which we must be getting, right? Because this is a public school.”

“Title Nine,” says Valenti.

I look down at the Post-it note in my hand. “Yeah. Title Nine of the Education Amendments of 1972.”

“I know what Title Nine is, Miss Yee.”

“Oh.” Because she really had sounded like she didn't. “So, it's more than thirty years since it became
illegal to give girls only half the space that boys get in the locker rooms, plus worse facilities like smaller lockers and no minilockers.”

She's silent.

“I'm right, aren't I? Because equal treatment means supplies and practice times and scholarships, but also locker rooms. I looked it up on the Web. And, um, like I said, it's been more than thirty years and we still have these tiny-ass locker rooms and it's just wrong. I'd like to make a complaint.”

Hell. I can't believe I said “tiny-ass” right in front of the principal.

Is she gonna throw me out for disrespect?

Valenti sighs heavily and leans forward. “You know, Miss Yee, it's a good point. This building was built in the 1950s, before Title Nine existed, when it was commonplace to have unequal facilities. Girls participated very little in athletics and team sports back then. In my day”— and here, Valenti actually cracks a smile—“the only sports girls did were volleyball and cheerleading.”

“But now,” I blurt out, “you're
making
us do gym five days a week and we have to play a sport starting junior year. And it is just too stupid crowded in there.”

“I'd like to be in compliance with Title Nine,” says Valenti, “but where is the money going to come from?

Even should we apply for additional government money or raise funds from the PTA to remodel, we'd have to cut into the sculpture studio in order to make space for the expanded locker room—and the studio is too small as it is. Believe me, Miss Yee, I'm aware of the inequality; I just don't see what there is to do about it. Take space from the arts program that is the premise of our school, or leave things as they are. And that's not even considering where the money is to come from, and whether a big remodeling project is the best possible allocation of funds, considering the fact that we're undersupplied with basics like textbooks.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” says Valenti. “Now you can see why things stand as they do. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, but unless something major happens in terms of funding, I'm afraid it's impossible.”

“It's so unfair!”

“Look. I'm pleased to see you engaging in community activism, Miss Yee. And of course we want our students' voices to be heard. How about holding a bake sale to raise money for art supplies? Or running for student council?”

Whatever. I don't like baking, and student council elections aren't until next September.

This can't be an unsolvable problem.

Valenti wasn't the one who spent a week watching all those boys showering in comfort and hanging up their clothes in big lockers. Valenti doesn't have to lug her running shoes and shampoo in her backpack every day, when all the supposedly stronger sex have minilockers.

“Can't we switch?” It comes out of my mouth before I even think about saying it.

“What?”

“Can't you put the girls in the boys' locker room, starting next fall? We could switch back again halfway through the year.”

“Oh.” She wrinkles her brow. “Um. Well, there's the matter of the bathroom facilities.”

“Oh, please. They don't need urinals. They can do fine in the regular ones.”

Crap,
that came out so sarcastic,
I bet I ruined everything just now—

Principal Valenti laughs. “You know, Miss Yee, I'm sure they can.” She chuckles again. “Do fine in the regular ones. It's a good idea, actually. I'm surprised no one thought of it before. How about I run it by Mr. Sanchez and put it forward at the board meeting this Wednesday?” she asks.

She said yes,
she said yes,
she said yes!

I stand up and collect my bag from the floor. “Okay. I mean, great. I should get to class now.”

“Keep up on your studies, Miss Yee,” says Valenti, suddenly strict again. “There's still time to get those grades in shape by the end of the school year. And now that we've met, I'll have my eye on you.”

“All right. And thanks.”

I walk down the hall in a glow.

Spidey's got nothing on me today.

I'm Gretchen Yee, advocate for equal opportunity and proud wearer of a red vinyl miniskirt.

Housefly no more.

i
'm ten minutes late for first-period drawing, and when I get there the whole class has moved the benches so they face one another. Everyone is propping their sketchbooks on their laps and looking carefully at the person across the way. Katya is drawing Brat. Shane is with Malachy. Adrian is with Cammie. Taffy is with that mousy girl Margaret.

Titus is getting ready to draw Kensington, which is
what happens when there's not an even number of people in class. You have to use the teacher as your model. But as soon as Kensington sees me, she stands up and silently gestures that I should get my pad from the storage closet and take her place.

I show her the note from my dad, which now has Principal Valenti's initials on it, and she nods and tells me to sit down. I know the drill. We've done this exercise more than once during the portraiture unit, usually with some variation: the medium we use, or the way we're supposed to look at the subject. I sit down with my pencil box next to me, and peek at what Katya's working with. Vine charcoal.

“Facial portrait,” she whispers to me. “Draw the background, too. You're not supposed to take your charcoal off the paper 'cause you're aiming to get a flow going. Start with the inside corner of the eye.”

“Got it.” I reach over and squeeze her knee.

I get my charcoal out of the box, and flip the sketchbook to a clean page. And now I have to draw Titus.

Titus I've seen without clothes.
Titus I've seen looking in the mirror like he hates himself.
Titus whose dad is gay.
Titus I'm more crazy about than even before I knew this stuff.

And he is going to draw me.

We've never been partners for this exercise before.

I've drawn Katya and Taffy and Malachy, but never Titus, and never Shane. I always avoided it, since I didn't think I'd be able to stand having either one of them look at me for half an hour. It would make me too self-conscious.

And for the first few minutes, I am.

Are my bangs sticking funny to my forehead?
And is my lip gloss still on,
and do I have a pimple on my chin,
or anything on my teeth?

When Katya drew me, I looked round and very Chinese and soft. Her portraits always look warm. When Taffy drew me I looked hard and remote, all sharp edges. Like a shell of a person. And Malachy's was chaotic and precise at the same time—he's good— but he made me look old and worldly, which I'm not.

How will Titus draw me?

I draw the eyes without looking directly at him, the way I draw from the inside of my head when I'm doing comic book stuff. But then I look up, and he's Titus. Still so beautiful, and his right eye is green and purple from the bruise Shane gave him. He's looking down at his paper partly like he's shy and partly like he's thinking
hard about what he's doing. And suddenly, I want to see if I can draw him. The way I see him.

Because I know he doesn't see himself as I do.

Charcoal is one of my favorite things to draw with. It's soft, and you can smudge it with your finger to blend, or press hard and get this thick dark line that's very dramatic. I move from his eyes up to his eyebrows, which are narrow and black, and then I do his hair, which I make inky dark and soft-looking. I forget about the background part of the assignment and concentrate on the dark area under his eyes, on his long thin nose, his soft lips with the bottom one jutting out as he concentrates, the shadows across his neck and the details of the silver key chain he wears around it. His lovely bony collarbone jutting out of his worn T-shirt. And I just think