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It’s a small event, but still, there’s a table with flyers that act as a map, labeled with each student’s name, the title of their work, and where you can find it. Ally picks one up and scans it for her own name, then heads in that direction.
I look for mine, too, and find that it’s a little too close for comfort.
We stop in front of a charcoal drawing that’s textbook Ally; I could pick something she made from any line up…a mile away.
It’s a car parked next to a beach. There’s a girl and her mother standing at the outdoor showers—the ones they always have so you can wash the sand from your body before you leave. It looks like she’s washing the girl’s hair.
“What is this?” I ask.
“Home,” she says. “Remember when I told you my mom and I lived in her car for a while? This is the car.”
“I’m sorry, Ally.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says. “You know, I never minded it. Before the car, there were a lot of very temporary living situations that never felt like home. The car was a constant. I felt like every day was an adventure. We spent the entire summer outside at parks or on the beach, and we’d shower in our bathing suits like this, and I thought it was fun. I only knew it was something to be embarrassed about because I could feel it coming from my mom. She still tried to make it fun, though.”
I catch her off guard when I move closer and hook my pinky around hers, but she doesn’t pull away. She looks over at me with just her eyes through thick, dark lashes, her head still straight forward.
“It’s beautiful,” I tell her. “You’re an amazing artist; you know that.”
I hear a couple of guys laughing, and sure enough, when I glance over my shoulder, I see them in front of my drawing, taking pictures with their phones.
Fuck.
“Yeah. Yeah, I like this one. It’s kind of a reminder of…how sometimes we don’t notice how good things are when we’re in them. We’re too focused on what’s wrong or what we don’t have to enjoy what we do. I didn’t know that car was the safest home I’d ever have.”
“Is that what happened with us?” I ask before I have a chance to think better of it.
She pulls her hand away and crosses her arms in front of her chest.
“No…I knew it was good. I just…knew I didn’t deserve it. It wastoogood. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when…I saw that picture.”
“Allyson, there’s no way you still think I did that. Howcouldyou?”
“I don’t know. I guess maybe I don’t; maybe not now. But I did. Everybody wanted her.”
“Not me, Ally. Not under any circumstance.”
She holds my eyes for a moment, and I wait for her reply, but it’s only, “I’m going to go try to check out the rest of this before my bus comes.”
Ally turns and walks directly toward my contribution to this shit show.
“Hey,” I say, stepping into her path. “Or…we could go now. I thought maybe we could go see Darci’s grave like you said.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know, Devon. I don’t know if I could handle that, and I don’t know if it would feel right if we were there together.”
She tries to step around me again, and I grab her shoulder. “We could go to a drive-thru. I could get you something really greasy and a giant soda. You want to?”
“Yeah, but…” she pauses, narrowing her eyes. “What did you do, Devon?”
Fuck.“Nothing!”
“Move!” she says.
She shoves me aside and rushes right over to my fucked up display, shouldering her way through our peers until she has a front-row seat to take it all in.
Nearby students snicker and take out their cell phones as I walk up behind her, holding my breath. Ally takes in the Ally on my canvas, which is essentially a modern take on a caricature, exaggerating all the things I know she hates about herself—her nose, her neck, the bags under her eyes. I left a hole in the place where her heart should be, the word liar where she should have a mouth, gave her a bag of stolen money and cell phones, a bruise on her cheek, and festering cuts down her arms.
“It turned out you were ugly on the inside, too,” she reads aloud from the page.
