Callway

School started up again in September. My senior year of high school would be finished at the Callway Conservatory. It was a magnet school nestled to the left of Towson’s cold, robotic heart. It sported music, theater, visual arts, and writing majors. At the end of my first week, I learned that students called it the Copy Cat School for the Arts, since the programs borrowed heavily from the Baltimore School for the Arts. I couldn’t argue. Everything I’d seen from the art departments was so … generic. It all screamed “I’m a young artiste! I draw/paint/photoshop deep, meaningful stuff! Take me seriously!”

The art major was broken up into four departments: multi-media, painting, photography, and sculpture. All art students had to take drawing with the head of the art department, Mr. Anders, and painting with Ms. O’Neil, regardless of what their area of focus was. I’d ended up choosing sculpture for two reasons; first, it was the only focus area whose works on display showed any originality, and second, the studio was fantastic.

The sculpture studio was this big warehouse that had obviously been attached to the school as an afterthought. Metal shelves were filled with unused slabs of clay and plasticine, and student sculptures in various states of completion. There were two or three reclaiming stations, where dried clay was broken to bits and immersed in garbage cans of water until they were pliable again. Kilns were through a door at the far end of the room. In another corner was a blowtorch. Hooks and chains hung from the ceiling in abundance, holding up installation pieces.

There was a giant model volcano made from melted crayons on a shelf. From the ceiling hung a pterodactyl made from welded silverware. In the back of the teachers office was a life-sized human figure…made from the exoskeletons of seventeen-year cicadas. And everything was coated in a fine layer of clay dust.

Since I’d managed to fulfill most of my non-focus related credits down in New Orleans, my schedule was pretty light; three art classes and one Calculus class. I foresaw a lot of potential free time this semester which I’d probably waste reading manga on the library computers. I’d already prepared my excuse; ‘I’m studying the use of different drawing and inking techniques in storytelling. See how so-and-so is drawing from traditional insert-obscure-cultures’-art-history-here?’ First period was drawing with Mr. Anders in the AP studio at 7:15 AM. Because your hand-eye coordination is so sharp at fuck-o’clock in the morning.

Mr. Anders was of average height and average build. His one concession to artistic oddity was a stubby ponytail he'd pulled his average brown hair back into. When he spoke, he had a musical voice, which resonated in the melodious tones of the pompous and ass-holy. He handed out our syllabus for the year, explaining the sketchbook policy (two entries a week, all sketches must be taken from life, no photos, no fantasy, no cartoons, any sign of originality or individualism are punishable by death, etc), then moved on to roll call.

“Constantine, Seraphim.”

“Yo,” I flipped my left hand up to catch his attention, then let it flop back to my lap. I was scrutinizing the syllabus, trying to find the rule or loophole that would be taken advantage of to spell my doom this year.

“Cool name. Can we call you Sarah?”

“I prefer Fin.” Seriously, what was the point of having a weird name if you shortened it to something normal?

“Fim?” It wasn't really a question, the way he said it. It was more of an “I've-decided-I-don't-like-you-and-want-the-rest-of-this-class-to-dislike-and-isolate-you-too-because-it’s-within-my-power-to-do-so sneer. I immediately understood this type of teacher wouldn't waste time using a loophole in the syllabus to fail me. My assignments would just conveniently disappear and he'd be forced to fail me, counting on parents to take the word of a teacher over the word of their kid. He was right. Fuck.

“Nope," I sighed, biting back my tempter and bracing myself for the coming semester. "Just Fin.”

“Fin. Not Seraphim? Or Sarah?” I looked at him, making sure to give him my biggest, bitchiest smile.

“Nooo, Fin. As in finished, finicky, or Finland. Think the ending of French noir films. Fin.” A few brave souls laughed. I held Mr. Anders gaze, smiling, showing off my incisors.

“Oookay, Fin it is.” I gave him another too-bright, bullshit grin, then dropped it completely and turned back to the syllabus. Roll call rolled along and the girl next to me kept laughing. I ignored her.

The class was seated in a semi circle around a small stage, draped with sheets and covered with boxes, jars, vases, flowers, shoes, dolls, - and that was just what I could see from my side. Across from me, on the other side of the still-life set, two boys were whispering about a naked Barbie peeking out of a purse. My classmates were mostly sophomores. Because I hadn’t started from the ground up with the program, I couldn’t be in the same art classes as the rest of the seniors. Boo fucking hoo. It didn’t matter too much to me. I was short and hardly anyone ever realized I was 17. It would probably take them until next semester to figure out that I wasn't a sophomore if I didn't tell them.

Roll call finished and we pulled out our sketchbooks. A slight hush fell over the room as we all began drawing sections of the still-life. There were whispered conversations going on continuously; I eavesdropped when I could. Gossip was a hell of a lot more interesting than the Charlie Brown soundtrack Mr. Anders had put on.

Gossip is pretty much the same in all schools, but every now and then, you hear some real gems. This sharing session was particularly juicy. Sure, I heard more snarky comments about Copy Cat school and how half the freshman class had been rejected from Baltimore School for the Arts, but I also heard that the Latin teacher had tried to commit suicide over the summer and was at Shepherd Pratt, and the chorus teacher had been fired last year for sleeping with his student and his replacement had been fired from his last job for sexually blackmailing college students. Oh my god, I was either going to love this school or burn it to the ground and salt its’ smoldering ashes.

After a while, I noticed the two boys across from were pointing, not to the Barbie anymore, but to me. Paranoia set in briefly, then I saw that their gazes kept flickering back to my chest, which was exposed by the low cut of my tank top. Ah ha. I was being checked out. Not too surprising. God had graciously gifted me with a blessing of bounteous boobage (what? Your teachers never gave extra points for alliteration?), and my hair – almost black, straight, long and feathered – was pulled back, giving them a pretty clear view. I liked my tits. They were my bodies one concession to maturity on an otherwise stunted torso. And their size balanced out my fat Italian ass, giving me what might almost be considered an hourglass figure. Drew, the Twins step-brother, had said before that I was “kinda hot.”

But in New Orleans, my attractiveness had been an afterthought in the wake of the twins. Artemis, through some perverse quirk of genetics, had overcome generations of stocky brunettes and grown up to be a 5'10", leggy, natural blond with green eyes. And Holly was one of those perfect women, the kind God makes just to prove that He can. She was tall like Artemis, with perfect legs, a perfect figure, high C-cup breasts, and the most amazing hair; rich, curly brown with natural blond highlights. And her whole body was toned from years of dance. I'd seen both my sisters stop traffic. I was the Betty Boop to their Jessica Rabbits; nothing to sneeze at, but no one would notice me with my sisters in the room.

It occurred to me now that there was no legacy of the Constantine Twins to haunt me. I was the hot new girl. I was going to enjoy this.

My internal gloating was cut short as class ended. I didn’t have Calc until 3^rd period, so while the class filed out the door and rushed off to whatever they had next, I loitered in the hallway. The only person who wasn’t rushing was the girl who’d sat next to me and laughed at my snap at Mr. Anders. She hung outside with me and waited for the rush and jam of bodies to ebb.

Five minutes later, the hall was almost empty. Mr. Anders had a new class to drone to on the other side of the door. It was just me and weird laughing girl. All alone in an empty hallway. While she kept staring at me. Yup.

“Hi,” she smiled, “I’m Iris.” Iris, aside from laughing at my bitchiness and engaging in mildly stalker-y behavior, had the nicest purple dread locks I’d ever seen on a white girl. No joke. They were tight and beaded and all that cool shit. “You’re Fin, right?”

“Yeah.” Iris was also had a functioning short term memory. Good to know.

“I liked your jab at Mr. A. Fucker deserved it,” she chuckled a little.

“I take he’s always an ass?”

“We don’t call ‘im Mr. A for our health,” her smile widened. “What’s your next class? I don’t got anything til 4^th and I need a smoke.”

And so began my friendship with Iris Moore. Iris was 16, a junior, and had switched from the theater program to photography last year. Like me, she was starting from the bottom up. She had a twin brother named Ian who was in the literary program. She was only at Callway because School for the Arts didn’t accept her and there were no tuition fees here.

We were sitting on benches outside, in clear view of the office. When Iris lit up, I was expecting teachers to come to the windows or rush outside demanding we put it out and come back inside to speak to the vice. But none of that happened. People from the office looked out at us, Iris waved, and they went away and left us alone. At my raised eyebrow, Iris explained.

“Welcome to ‘mandatory socialization’ at a half-assed art school. As long as they know you’re a student and you’re with another student, they really don’t care what you’re doing,” she paused and took a drag. “Unless you cross the parking lot to the Taco Bell. Then they freak the hell out.” She rolled her eyes and took a looooong drag. “So. Whaddya think of our happy little high school home?”

“Well, let’s see. What do I think. After one period. On my first day...” I cast a look back at the office window and broke up laughing then and there.” I think this place is fucking retarded.”

“Amen to that,” she cackled, “but it’s better than any of the alternatives. I mean, at least we get to wear hats here and shit.”

“At least.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Calculus was calculus and the less said about it the better. Painting was 4^th period, and I sat with Iris again. Ms. O’Neil was a head trip through and through. She didn’t like cooler shades and felt that you could only express true emotion through the color red. I made a mental note to infuse all my compositions with copious amounts of blue and green. We didn’t get to do any actual painting, and probably wouldn’t for the first week, she said. Instead, she gave us a list of art supply stores and told us to write an essay about a painting that ‘moved’ us. I was going to write about something in Picasso’s blue phase.

Lunch was followed by two periods of abso-friggin-lutely nothing. Iris had classes, so I lounged around in the library, looking up which free manga sites could get past the security firewalls. The high-traffic sites with fairly tame manga was blocked. The largely unknown sites, the ones with all the hentai, were invariably accepted as “safe” by the school network. Weird. The last class of the day got me into the sculpture studio. Sculpture was taught by Jasper Zimmer, who everyone called Mr. J. He rode a Vespa to school, spoke 5 foreign languages fluently, and he looked like Jesus.

After roll call, he talked to all the students he’d known from last year a little, talked about the summer vacation. I was the only new face in the group, so we had the usual get up and tell us about yourself routine that plagues all grade levels. But it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared it would be. When he heard I was from New Orleans, he talked to me in Creole French for a while. I spoke French, Italian, and Spanish, none of it fluently, but enough to hold a conversation and, more importantly, insult people. We traded a few favored curses and then he told the class about the time he lived in Mississippi as part of a resident artist program. It was hilarious and I’m not even going to try retell it. I’d just ruin it.

Class was over way too soon. We all milled around the buses, checking and rechecking numbers to make sure no one got on a bus headed to Catonsville when they really wanted Owings Mills or Essex. I saw Iris and a guy I guessed was her brother board the number that went to Hampdon. I wondered if I could persuade Iris to pick me up a Hon Café sticker. I’d had one from my last visit to the city, but it had worn off the folder I’d stuck it on.

I managed to find the right bus, in spite of my continued fears about public transportation. The ride was about two hours with rush hour traffic. I started the calc homework (because there’s always calc homework) and tried to think happy thoughts about reorganizing my book shelves while the other kids were screaming and jumping around in back. This was pretty much the pattern for the rest of the week. The only thing that changed were my conversations with Iris and Ian.

I met Ian on Wednesday and immediately started cultivating a verbally abusive relationship. He started pontificating about how To Kill A Mockingbird was the perfect book, I said I got its importance but the format and style really weren’t my thing, and the conversation tail-spinned from there. Lunches turned into verbal sparring matches about books and authors on the benches outside. Iris played referee while she smoked and munched on Taco Bell take-out. Friday, she gave me one of his poems to rip into at lunch. He actually winced. I enjoyed his suffering even more since he looked like an indie rocker; scrawny with shaggy black hair and vintage tees. Indie boys always deserve whatever pain is sent their way. The only way I’d only enjoy it more would if he were emo. Win some, lose some.

The second week of school, more of my classmates started talking to me as they got used to the look of me. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that a lot of them were guys I’d caught looking down my shirt at various times last week. Not that it was hard; I was short, the weather was still hot, and tank tops are friends to all tall boys. I think they realized I wasn’t going hit them just for looking.

The inquisition went as follows: where did you come from? Why did you move here? Are you Mexican? Where’s your accent from (I had a very slight southern accent that only came out when I was getting pissed about something, something like being asked if I was Mexican)? Do you have a boyfriend? Are you a lez? How’d you get into art?

As if I needed more proof that my boobs were a main attraction, I got a couple of questions about my pendant. I had a wolves tooth on a silver chain that I wore all the time. I was so used to it that I usually forgot it was even there.

“Seriously? You were attacked by a wolf?”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit yourself,” I snarked back. “I was out in the desert when I was nine and I got attacked by a wolf. Fucker tore open my whole right side. I was out there bleeding for a couple of hours before anyone found me. They pulled this sucker out of a rib,” I said, fingering the tooth proudly. We were sprawled out across steps in one of the stairwells, me, Iris, some guys from our painting class, and one or two girls who’d passed by while we were talking and stayed to listen.

“I was in the hospital for nearly a year. Mom was freaked right on out.”

Everyone was quite for a minute, before one of the guys - Liam, I think his name was – said, “I still think it’s bullshit.”

Obviously the boy wanted proof. I could give him proof. I pulled up the end of my shirt on the right side, exposing a mass of shiny scar tissue, several shades darker than the rest of my skin.

“Holy shit!” Iris squeaked. Some of the guys looked squicked out. I shrugged. I’d never been too self conscious about my scars from the accident. There’s that bumper sticker that says “Scars are tattoos with better stories.” A classmate had visited me when I was in the hospital and stuck that sticker on my bandages. The nurse had had a fit, but I’d taken the words to heart.

“What the fuck were you doing in a desert? I didn’t know there were deserts in New Orleans.”

“There aren’t. This happened when I was living in New Mexico. It’s hard to avoid desert out there,” I smiled, totally chill about everything. “I was hunting for snakes. Snake venom can be mixed with some cosmetics to enhance them. I had a little elementary school, cottage industry, mixing rattle snake venom with nail polish. It was cool.” I was so chill about this conversation, the temperature had dropped. If my hands were clenching or my smile twitching, it was just in response to how cool everything was.

“Don’t you guys have classes?” There was suddenly a teacher at the top of the stairs. A few people got up to leave. I went with them. I didn’t have class but I was through with this conversation.