“Miss Rothstein enjoys beating around the bush,” said Moats.
“I’m just saying she’s had a hard time, okay? That’s all.”
“Well, life isn’t a cakewalk, is it?!” asked Moats. “Eighty-nine percent of the world’s most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velázquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!”
“No one’s talking about Velázquez,” said Tim “Raging” Waters, slumped on the stool at the center of the Life Drawing Circle. “We’re talking about Hannah Schneider and how Blue was with her when she died.”
Usually no one, including myself, paid any attention to Raging, so typical his sullen voice and the bumper stickers all over the trunk of his car, I LOVE PAIN, BLOOD TASTES GOOD, and the words scrawled in black permanent marker all over his backpack, . Whiffs of cigarette smoke followed in his wake like a Just-Married convertible trailing cans. But he said her name, and it floated out into the center of the room like an empty rowboat and — I don’t know why — in that moment, I think I would’ve run away with that pale angry kid if he’d asked me to. I loved him desperately, an agonizing, overwhelming love, for three, maybe four seconds. (That was how things were after Hannah died. You didn’t notice someone and when you did you adored him/her, wanted to have his/her offspring, until the moment passed as abruptly as it had come.)
Mr. Moats didn’t move. He raised a hand to his green plaid vest and kept it pressed there, as if he was going to be sick, or else he was trying to remember words to a song he once knew.
“I see,” he said. Gently, he returned my sad Strathmore pad to my easel. “Resume your drawings!”
He stood next to me. When I started drawing again, beginning with Raging’s leather shoe in the middle of the page (a brown shoe, on the side of which a word was scrawled, Mayhem), Mr. Moats, oddly enough, bent down next to me so his head was inches from the white paper. I sort of glanced over at him, reluctantly, because like the sun, it was never a good idea to stare directly into a teacher’s face. Inevitably, you noticed things you wished you hadn’t — sleep, moles, hairs, wrinkles, some calloused or discolored patch of skin. You were aware there was a sour, vinegary truth to these physical details, but you didn’t want to know what it was, not yet, because it’d directly affect one’s ability to pay attention in class, to take notes on the many stages of club mosses reproduction, or the exact year and month of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863).
Moats didn’t say anything. His eyes traveled all over my blank paper, stopping on Raging down in the corner with his leg over his face, and I watched him, spellbound by his craggy profile, a profile that bore a striking resemblance to the southeastern coast of England. And then he closed his eyes, and I could see how upset he was, and I started to wonder if perhaps he’d loved Hannah. I was aware too how strange adults were, how their lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.
“Maybe I should start over on another piece of paper,” I said. I wanted him to say something. If he said something, it meant he might bear extreme heat, freezing temperatures at night, the odd sandstorm, but otherwise be all right.
He nodded and stood up again. “Continue.”
That day after school, I went to Hannah’s classroom. I’d hoped nobody would be there, but when I walked into Loomis, I saw two freshman girls taping things — it looked like Get Well Soon cards — to Hannah’s door. On the floor to their right was a giant picture of Hannah, as well as a pile of flowers — carnations for the most part, in pinks, whites and reds. Perón had mentioned them on the intercom during Afternoon Announcements: “The outpouring of flowers and cards shows us that, despite our different backgrounds we can band together and support each other, not as students, parents, teachers and administrators, but as human beings. Hannah would be overwhelmed with joy.” Immediately, I wanted to leave, but the girls had seen me so I had no choice but to continue down the hall.
“Wish we could light the candles.”
“Let me do it. You’re going to ruin the whole design, Kara—”
“Maybe we should light them anyway. For her sake, you know?”
“We can’t. Didn’t you listen to Ms. Brewster? It’s a fire hazard.”
The taller, pale girl was taping a large card to the door, which sported a giant gold sun and read, “A star has dimmed…” The other girl, bowlegged, with black hair, was holding an even larger card, this one handmade with crude orange lettering: TREASURED MEMORIES. There were at least fifty more cards propped up on the floor around the flowers. I bent down so I could read a few.
“Rest in peace. Love, the Friggs,” wrote the Friggs. “C U N HEV N,” wrote Anonymous. “In this world of bitter religious hatred and unmitigated violence against our fellow man, you were a shining star,” wrote Rachid Foxglove. “We’ll miss you,” wrote Amy Hempshaw and Bill Chews. “I hope you’re reincarnated as a mammal and our paths cross again, sooner rather than later because when I go to med school I doubt I’ll have a life,” wrote Lin Xe-Pen. Some cards were introspective (“Why did it happen?”) or harmlessly irreverent (“It’d be cool if you could send me a sign that indicates there’s a discernible afterlife, that it’s not just eternity in a box because if that’s what it is, I’d rather not go through with it.”). Others were filled with remarks suitable for Post-its, for shouts out of unrolled windows of cars driving away (“You were an awesome teacher!!!”).
“Would you be interested in signing the Condolence Card?” the black-haired girl asked me.
“Sure,” I said.
The inside of the Condolence Card was graffitied with student signatures and read: “We find peace and comfort knowing you are now in a Perfect Place.” I hesitated signing, but the girl was watching me so I squeezed my name between Charlie Lin and Millicent Newman.
“Thank you very much,” said the girl, as if I’d just given her enough change to buy a soft drink. She taped the card to the door.
I walked outside again and stood in the shade of a pine tree in front of the building until I saw them leave, and then returned inside. Someone (the black-haired girl, self-appointed Executor of the H. Schneider Memorial) had placed a plastic green tarp beneath the flowers (all stems pointing in the same direction), as well as a clipboard next to the door that read, “Sign here and pledge a special amount to raise money for the Hannah Schneider Hummingbird Garden. (Minimum donation $5.)”
To be honest, I wasn’t especially thrilled with all the grief. It felt artificial, as if they’d taken her away somehow, stolen her, replaced her with this frightening smiling stranger whose giant color faculty photo was laminated and propped up on the floor by a squat unlit candle. It didn’t look like her; school photographers, armed with watery lighting and smeary neutral backgrounds, cheerfully leveled everyone’s uniqueness, made them look the same. No, the real Hannah, the cinematic one who sometimes got a little too drunk with her bra straps showing, she was being held against her will by all these limp carnations, wobbly signatures, humid sentiments of “Missing U.”