“Well, it’s beautiful,” said Sharon. “Who taught you how to draw like that?”
“I dunno.” Little bullets of blood pounded inside his chest. “I just figured it out.”
“Well, you’re talented,” said Sharon. “You could be an artist — an architect or something — if you wanted.”
Over the days that followed, they began eating lunch and doing group work together. They began wandering the field behind the playground during outdoor recess, sometimes catching and releasing tiny quarter-sized toads, sometimes sitting on the grass to play Uno or rummy. Sharon knew how to shuffle the cards fast, so that they sounded like fleeing pigeons. Sometimes they just talked. She told him about her parents’ divorce and her mother’s new jobs and boyfriends. She explained that her father could lose his temper, but at heart he was a real softie. Sharon’s father now lived in North Carolina and worked as a truck driver. He had recently bought her a new trumpet for a recital she’d be attending in New York City, at some famous music school Siddharth had never heard of.
Initially, his stomach burned when Sharon divulged so much personal information. He worried that if she told him so much, he might have to tell her what was going on in his own screwed-up world. But Sharon seemed okay with his silence, and he started allowing himself to sit back and get lost in the details of her complicated life. He listened carefully as she told him about her big brother, who knew how to program computers. Sharon said her brother would probably get a job at NASA one day, and Siddharth imagined him to be like Matthew Broderick in War Games. Sharon’s eyes lit up when she spoke about her aunt, a paralegal who lived alone in a Manhattan high-rise. Her aunt attended the ballet and the theater, and Sharon had spent four nights with her over the summer, when her parents were finalizing the divorce. She swore she was going to move in with her aunt on her sixteenth birthday.
Sharon also told him fictional stories, and he liked these more than the stories from her actual life. At first, she just related simple things, like the plot of a movie she had seen or a book she’d recently read, but as time went on, she started inventing her own stories. She told him the tale of a teenager who dropped out of high school to become a musician. The girl worked as a waitress in the Plaza Hotel, though she soon got discovered by a big producer. This producer eventually proposed to her, but the girl chose to remain alone. Siddharth objected to this outcome. He asked, “Why can’t this story have a happy ending?” Sharon explained that being alone can be the best thing in the world — especially for a woman.
When he listened to these adventures, he managed to forget about Mohan Lal and his mother and the fact that he didn’t have friends anymore — except for Sharon. She pushed him to invent some stories of his own, but he shrugged her off every time. He always felt too drained and embarrassed to come up with something. Eventually, she decided that she would be the one to tell the stories, and his job would be to sit down and draw them out.
“What do you mean, draw them out?”
“Duh, it’s called illustration,” said Sharon. “I’ll be the writer and you can illustrate.”
He was resistant in the beginning. Something about this game felt too childish — better suited to girls. But Sharon was persistent, and they soon had a smoothly running system. She told him her stories during lunch, and in the afternoon, while their teacher Miss Kleinberg was babbling about multiplication tables or Pilgrims collaborating with Indians, he secretly began his sketches, finishing them off at his boring after-school program. During after-school, most of the other kids played dodgeball or tetherball, and it was a relief to have something fun to occupy his time.
By the end of fifth grade, Sharon’s stories got even better. As usual, her characters were runaways, musicians, and farmers. But these people started falling in love. They started fooling around. Men sucked on women’s necks, and women licked the earlobes of their boyfriends. In one of her stories, a farmer hooked up with a schoolteacher who had come to buy carrots at his farm stand. Siddharth hoped that this man would bring his hand to the teacher’s breast, but he knew better than to say so out loud.
As Sharon narrated her souped-up stories behind the playground, he sometimes found himself developing an erection, and he had to yank his T-shirt toward his knees on the way back into the brick-faced school. But these boners were nice, and he began looking forward to them. He started spending more time on his illustrations, creating characters who could have gone in real comic books. The men he drew wore old-fashioned hats and trench coats, like the actors in his father’s black-and-white movies, and the women had beauty marks, bobbed hair, and tight-fitting tops. His mother had once taught him how to make an object seem more spherical, by smudging pencil marks with his finger, and he found that this technique could make a woman’s chest leap off the page.
* * *
The following year, Sharon Nagorski wasn’t in his sixth grade class, and he was both relieved and disappointed. He was relieved because some of the other kids had dubbed him a loser just for being friends with her. But he also knew Sharon was his only real friend at Deer Run Elementary. Without her sitting next to him, his school days would be long and lonely. At least they would still have lunch together. He had Sharon at lunch, and he had her at recess too.
During recess, the pair normally sat as far away from the other kids as possible. On a crisp and cloudy Monday in late September, however, they opted for a small patch of sun that was a mere fifty feet from the baseball diamond, where Luca Peroti and his notorious posse were playing kickball. The ground was moist after a day of hard rain, so Siddharth tore out a few pages from his sketchpad for them to sit on.
Sharon was telling him a story about two kids who had run away from home and were sleeping in the stalls of the New York Public Library bathroom. These kids climbed atop the toilets to conceal their legs when the guards came by early in the morning. They made friends with strangers, who sometimes bought them donuts from a snack bar, or cups of hot chocolate with little marshmallows.
“So these kids,” asked Siddharth, “are they, like, boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“They’re brother and sister,” said Sharon. “Are you even listening?”
He stopped sketching and stared at his overweight sixth grade teacher, Mr. Latella, who was chatting with the principal. Mr. Latella had a whistle around his neck and a short-sleeve shirt despite the unseasonably cool air. “But do they meet anybody?” he asked Sharon. “I mean, maybe one of them is fooling around with a librarian?”
She glared at him. “Do you want me to stop, Siddharth?”
“Chill,” he said, avoiding her light-blue eyes. “Keep going.”
As she recommenced her tale, he placed his sketchpad on the ground and leaned back, propping himself up with his palms. He stared at the slender oak trees that surrounded the playground; their tall tips were starting to yellow. A group of girls and boys was playing tag, and he was envious of how often they got to touch each other. The kickball boys seemed to be having the most fun. Eddie Benson, the blond-haired pitcher, was laughing hard at Luca, who was at third base and miming some sort of an animal, possibly an orangutan.
He knew that if Eric Connor or Arjun were in his grade, they would be friends with Luca Peroti and Eddie Benson. But he was stuck with Sharon. A couple of weeks earlier, Luca had called her a ho, probably because of the short shorts she was wearing. All the girls had been wearing short shorts, but for some reason Luca only picked on Sharon. Sometimes Siddharth wished he could tell Sharon to leave him alone. But he knew she was only partly to blame for his social situation. The real problem was him. The real problem was his personality. It was his defective personality that made Mohan Lal sad all the time. It was his defective personality that had made Arjun move so far away from home.