‘Yea, ma’am,’ Weed sullenly answered, opening his notebook.
‘I can’t wait to hear it,’ she continued to encourage him. ‘You’re the only person in the class to pick a fish.’
‘I know,’ he said.
The assignment for the past two weeks had been to make a papier-mache figure that was symbolic to the student. Most picked a symbol from mythology or folklore, such as a dragon or tiger or raven or snake. But Weed had constructed a cruel blue fish. Its gaping mouth bared rows of bloody teeth, and Weed had fashioned glittery eyes from small compact mirrors that flashed at anyone walking past.
‘I’m sure all of the students can’t wait to hear about your fish,’ Mrs. Grannis went on as she wrote.
‘We doing watercolor next?’ Weed asked with interest as he made out what she was writing.
‘Yes. A still-life composition that includes reflective objects, texture.’ She wrote with flourish. ‘And a 2-D object that gives the illusion of a 3-D object.’
‘My fish is three-dimensional,’ Weed said, ‘because it takes up real space.’
‘That’s right. And what are the words we use?’
‘Over, under, through, behind and around,’ he recited.
Weed could remember words in art, and they didn’t have to be in bold.
‘Freestanding, or surrounded by negative areas,’ he added.
Mrs. Grannis put down her Magic Marker. ‘And how do you think you’d make your fish three-dimensional if it was actually two-dimensional?’
‘Light and shadow,’ he said easily.
‘Chiaroscuro.’
‘Except I can never pronunciate it,’ Weed told her. ‘It’s what you do to make a drawing of a wineglass look three-dimensional instead of flat. Same for a lightbulb or an ice chicle or even clouds in the air.’
Weed looked around at boxes of pastels and the 140-weight Grumbacher paper he only got to use on final sketches. There were shelves of Elmer’s glue and colored pencils and carts of the Crayola tempera paints he had used on his fish. On a counter in the back of the room the computer terminals for graphics reminded him of the secret thing he had done.
By now, students were wandering into the room and scooting out chairs. They greeted Weed in their typically affectionate, smack-him-around fashion.
‘Hey, Weed Garden, what’s going on?’
‘How come you’re always in here before we are? Doing your homework early?’
‘You finished the Mono Lisa yet?’
‘You got paint on your jeans.’
‘Whoa, doesn’t look like paint to me. You been bleeding, man?’
‘Uh uh,’ Weed lied.
Mrs. Grannis’s eyes got darker as she looked at him and his jeans. He could see a question mark in a little balloon over her head. Weed had nothing to say.
‘Everybody ready to read what you wrote about your symbols?’ She returned her attention to the class.
‘Groan.’
‘I can’t figure out what mine means.’
‘No one said we had to write.’
‘Let’s take a minute to talk about symbols.’ Mrs. Grannis hushed them. ‘What is a symbol? Matthew?’
‘Something that means something else.’
‘And where do we find them? Joan?’
‘In pyramids. And jewelry.’
‘Annie?’
‘In the catacombs, so the Christians could express themselves in secret.’
‘Weed? Where else might we find symbols?’ Mrs. Grannis’s face got soft with concern as she looked at him.
‘Doodles and what I play in the band,’ Weed said.
Brazil was at his desk, drawing designs on a legal pad, trying to come up with a newsletter logotype as the chairman of the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Crime Commission drove him crazy over the speakerphone.
‘I think it is a dread-filled miscalculation,’ Lelia Ehrhart’s emphatic, haughty voice sounded.
Brazil turned down the volume.
‘To even suggest much less implicate we might have a gang here is to cause one,’ she proclaimed.
The logo was for the website and needed to attract attention, and since it was agreed that CPR was out the window, Brazil had to start over. He hated newsletters, but Hammer had been insistent.
‘And not every children are little mobsters. Many of them are misguided and misled astray, mistreated and abusive and need our help, Officer Brazil. To dwell on those few bad, especially those to band together in little groups you call gangs, is to give the public a very wrong, untrue and false view. My committee is completely all about prevention and doing that first before the other. That’s what the governor has mandated to tell us to do it.’