Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

But today demands composure. She unzips her backpack, tears the Ace bandage from its cover. Taking a few deep breaths, she reviews her lines.

WELL BEFORE THE FIRST BELL, Anju steps into Miss Schimpf’s office, which emits the scent of aging newspapers and jasmine perfume. Miss Schimpf is reading a book titled Media, Sex & the Adolescent , while her fingers stroke a faint rash at her collarbone, presumably from the black metal choker she wore the day before. Behind her, the bolted metal shelves support more books, including Reviving Ophelia and Raising Cain .

Upon Anju’s arrival, Miss Schimpf looks up. “Oh hello!” Her smile dissolves. “What happened?”

Anju touches her bandaged right hand, which she wrapped according to the instructions on the Ace package. It looks a bit bulgier than necessary, but therefore more dramatic. “May I please close the door?”

After doing so, Anju sinks into the plastic chair across from Miss Schimpf, one without armrests, shaped like a bowl rather than a chair that gracelessly sucks her in rear first. She thinks of the last lie she told to Miss Schimpf, standing next to Linno’s painting, the gathering warmth in the room. Anju truly believed, at the time, that she would never take such a risk again, and now it is frightening to consider how she can lie and lie and lie once more. She is reminded of a game she used to play with other children, jumping off a staircase onto the ground, first two stairs, then three, or the low ledge of a wall. She always won, not because she was brave, but because she never let herself look down.

Keeping her hands in her lap, Anju confesses that she does not want to tell her fellow classmates what she is about to tell Miss Schimpf. The pity would be too much. Solemn, quiet with courage, she says, “I suffer from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.”

As Miss Schimpf listens with furrowed brow, fondling her throat, Anju explains the statistics that she culled from several library books, including Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis and Living with Rheumatoid Arthritis:

Arthritis affects approximately one in every thousand children. It is an autoimmune disease that can last for months or years, though patients may experience long periods without symptoms.

When she has finished with her statistics, Anju sighs. A risk, she knows, to embark on such a circuitous journey into falsehood, but she already tried and failed, tried and failed to create anything of worth in the sketchbook. Her pencil never listened to what she meant to draw — an eye became a fish, a tree resembled a hand. Anju resolved, then, that it was time to strategize. A sustained lie is a fragile tower of sorts and requires a continual scaffolding here and there, for fear of the uglier truths toppling down tomorrow. What other choice does she have? Continue drawing pigeons and insisting that they are not seals?

“I wear my brace at night only,” Anju says. “I don’t want any attentions at school. But today it is bothering me very much so.” She grazes a hand over her bulging wrist, which lies, she hopes, forlornly.

Miss Schimpf ponders Anju as one might ponder a perplexing geometry proof. Anju waits, her heart in her throat, for interrogation.

“Does it hurt you to write?” Miss Schimpf asks.

“Sometimes yes. But to draw is most painful.”

“When did you do all those drawings back home?”

“The arthritis, it comes and goes. I only can draw when my hand is not paining me so much.”

Miss Schimpf presses her palms together, as if to say Namaste. Her gold bracelet, a snake-headed contortion with fake diamond eyes, slides down her freckled wrist. Anju senses that this silence is the sort that precedes the final judgment, as pronounced in a court of law.

“Anju,” Miss Schimpf says. “Let me tell you a story.

“When I was a girl, I was stricken with scoliosis. It’s when your spine starts growing crooked. So in order to correct my spine, I had to wear this terrible plastic brace under my shirts, and as you can imagine, my classmates were jerks about it, especially the boys. They knocked on my brace. Called me the Cagemaster. Keep in mind that the women in my family come from a long line of Delaware beauty queens, so the scoliosis was an even bigger deal because, naturally, I had certain aspirations.

“But I wore the brace all through middle school and finally, after two operations, my spine was fixed. That’s a small price to pay for being the 1989 runner-up to the runner-up of Miss Delaware Diamond, don’t you think?”

Anju nods, allowing the drone of the air conditioner to fill the room as she envisions a row of lustrous beauty queens in bikinis and heels, one of them trapped in a plastic brace. Nothing is right about these shared intimacies, this photo album of Miss Schimpf’s past, presented with a pure and lucid honesty that Anju will never be able to return.

“I hadn’t thought of that in a long time.” Miss Schimpf studies her bracelet for a moment, her smile fading. “My point is, I know what you’re going through, sort of. But maybe the student art exhibition will be your Delaware Diamond?”

Anju shifts in her seat, wondering how best to arrange her facial expression.

“The paintings you showed me in Kerala,” Miss Schimpf says. “You brought them, right?”

“Yes, Miss.”

Miss Schimpf explains the details of the student art exhibition, how it is scheduled for December 2, how the winning piece will be shown in the Brigard gallery, downtown. “George de Brigard is an alumnus of Sitwell, and he’ll be conferring the award money on whomever he chooses to showcase.”

“Award money?”

“A thousand dollars. A drop in the bucket to George. He made his money in pharmaceuticals a decade ago, and then ran off and opened his gallery. Never looked back.”

To Anju, a thousand dollars is a green cascade, a deluge so mighty that it will wash away all sins required to obtain it, so great that it justifies one last, delicate lie.

“Sound good?” Miss Schimpf asks.

“Sound good,” Anju says.

“And how are things otherwise? Is everyone treating you well?” Eager to leave, Anju answers a quick yes, but Miss Schimpf tilts her head like a parrot piqued by a particular sound. “Really?”

“There was a rude beggar on the train,” Anju ventures.

Miss Schimpf gives her a wincing smile. “Here, we say ‘dis-advantaged.’”

“There was a disadvantaged beggar on the train.”

“What about here at school? Do you feel at ease with people? Making friends?”

“Fish and I are friends.”

“Ah yes, Mr. Fischer.” She says his name with a flicker of wicked delight. “He’s a character.”

“Yes. A character.” In the face of Miss Schimpf’s luminous smile, Anju wishes she could come up with something more chummy than this, to be the frothy, affectionate person that Miss Schimpf wants her to be. “Miss Schimpf?”

“Yes?”

“May I join the chorus class for an elective? It is compatible with my schedule.”

“Oh, of course.” Miss Schimpf flips through a binder and makes the necessary check marks by which Anju can be freed from art. Anju sits back in her chair, but before she can relax, Miss Schimpf reminds her to bring in the paintings. “I want everyone to see a side of Anju Melvin that they’ve never seen before.”

WHAT MISS SCHIMPF does not know is that Anju has more facets than a fake diamond. She glitters with all her many, many sides.

There is the side she displays to Fish, who tells her stories with hardly a breath between them, as though he has been saving all his anecdotes over the years of her absence. Once, unexpectedly, he tells her about his First Time at age fourteen, and only halfway into the story does she understand that he is not talking about driving a car. “She was Mormon,” he says. “And older. Like sixteen or something.”