Tim Murphy - Christodora

“That’s me,” he told Zoya, and she spooked him because she said, “I know. I can see that about you so obviously.”

He tried to giggle off her penetrating stare. “What do you mean?”

“You said it yourself,” she answered. Then she burrowed into his concave chest, making this kind of mewing sound that was half cute, half annoying, and she left him to himself and his stoned brooding.

But they stayed friends — hey, it’s senior year, everybody’s friends by now — and now they’re leg-to-leg on the last day of school. And she’s like, “You going to Oscar’s tonight, right?” And he’s like, “I wouldn’t miss that shit.” And finally the crit comes up on his final project, After L.B. , which was this intricate illustration of spiders using forced perspective. He called it After L.B. because earlier that year he got really into Louise Bourgeois, especially her big spider sculpture that he saw at the Dia center upstate, and he wanted to pay an homage to that cute old French lady with her sick, scary, genius art.

“So what do we think about Mr. M-Dreem’s study?” asks Mr. Adeyemo in his faint Nigerian accent, which M-Dreem loves. He adores Mr. Adeyemo, partly wants to be him. “What’s working and what’s lacking?” That’s a favorite catchphrase of Mr. Adeyemo’s.

The class is lethargic today, drunk on dreams of flight. “Good use of values,” says Horatio Cordero, sweet faced, bespectacled. “Good lines. Organic.”

“There’s good movement from top left to bottom right,” drawls Zoya. She says it in as bored a way as possible without looking at M-Dreem, then finally glances his way. He grins at her. She rolls her eyes and looks away, but it’s nice, he thinks, how their legs have been pressed together still this whole time.

M-Dreem finally speaks up on his own behalf. “I wanted the spiders to, like, make their own web. Not a spiderweb, but a web of actual spiders.”

Oooh, goes Zoya and another shortie, Alexa. “You’re so deep,” says Alexa.

Everybody laughs, including M-Dreem. “You just can’t handle all my levels,” he flips off.

Mr. Adeyemo leans forward, does that dramatic openmouthed thing where he’s going to speak and gets the class to shut up. “Let me tell you something, Mr. M-Dreem.” Another quiet round of oooh s goes up — everyone knows that when Mr. Adeyemo gets all enunciative, he’s about to get pronunciative, too. “We all know here you got mad skills.”

More laughs.

“We’ve all known that since day one you came in to Art and Design,” he continues. “You had good classes before you came.” Now this pricks M-Dreem a little bit and he frowns slightly at Mr. Adeyemo, hurt. Why’d he have to throw that in? “But it’s clear you had that thing.” Is Adeyemo trying to mollify him now? “And you’re just going to continue developing your skills and your technique next year at that fine school.”

“At Pratt, oooh,” goes Alexa.

M-Dreem shoots her a look. “Don’t make me,” he says.

“Double oooh,” she goes.

“But here’s my question for you going forward,” continues Mr. Adeyemo. “With all your form and skills, what’s M-Dreem trying to tell us? What’s up with the spiders?”

“What’s up with the spiders?” M-Dreem echoes defensively. “Nothing’s up with the spiders. I just think they’re cool. So did Louise Bourgeois. The work,” he says, pointing to his study, “it’s a pure expression of form.” He loves this term, which Ms. Courtney uses all the time, and he says it now maybe just a little haughtily. He and Mr. Adeyemo stare at each other for more than a natural moment, both of them with half-smiles on their faces, but there’s a strange, face-off vibe. There are some nervous titters. Zoya gives his leg a squeeze.

“I got two words for you going forward, my gifted M-Dreem,” Adeyemo finally says. “Be open.” He’s mad enunciating now. “Be open to it all, the form and the feeling.”

“That’s, like, twelve words,” Alexa remarks.

“You’re right, it is, Ms. Quiano,” Adeyemo says. “So let’s talk about your study now. Girls with Good Hair Jumping . What’s working and what’s lacking?”

The class starts in on Alexa’s study, which is just what it sounds like: little girls with flowy long hair doing double Dutch, which M-Dreem thinks is kind of a mess technically, but he’s too distracted by Adeyemo’s strange injunction to him to really care. He’s glad the spotlight’s off him. Be open. I’m fucking open, he thinks, and he doesn’t even realize he’s sitting there slumped back, his leg off Zoya’s now, kind of brooding, until Mr. Adeyemo catches his eye amid the chatter and mouths to him, “It’s cool.”

M-Dreem sort of rolls his eyes and looks away, and he can’t really bring himself back to the here and now after that. He wishes he had a blunt. As he often does when he’s uncomfortable, he thinks about the snapshot with its date stamp: 04/14/1984. The short, pudgy, goofy-looking Dominicana thinking she’s fly with the Sheila E. asymmetrical haircut and the studded leather jacket, the lace leggings under the denim mini and the high heels, big dark eyes darting just to the left of the camera’s gaze, one arm up on the shoulder of that gay-looking moreno with the boom box on the ground under his left high-top. Damn. M-Dreem can’t believe there was ever a time in New York City called the 1980s; how could he have missed that shit, Basquiat and Haring and Fab 5 Freddy and all the rest? But miss it he did. He was born in 1992.

At least his grandma, his bubbe , told him about the woman in the picture, the woman who gave birth to him, Ysabel, who died of AIDS before he was old enough to have a memory of her. Bubbe fought for the AIDS people alongside Ysabel, and Bubbe took care of Ysabel at Bubbe’s special home for women with AIDS when Ysabel was pregnant with him, then after, right up to her death.

“Issy went from being a scared girl from Queens who didn’t want anybody to know she had AIDS,” Bubbe told him once, “to an amazing activist and fighter. And she had you! And I told her I’d make sure you were taken care of and loved.” Bubbe stroked back his hair. “Do you think I did an okay job?”

He smiled. “I think you did okay,” he told her. He loved his Bubbe, the loud, strong, pushy Ava, who got things done fast. Ava wasn’t all soft-spoken and mushy like her daugher. That is, his mother.

Bubbe had told him all this when he was twelve, “old enough to fully understand,” as his parents put it. He’d felt better knowing that Ysabel had been able to accomplish things before she died and hadn’t lived a totally sad life. But he thought a lot about that disco-party boom-box side of her, too. The Sheila E. side. The side that looked a bit like a good-time party ho.

“She didn’t know who my real father was?” he asked Bubbe.

She sighed, stroking his hair more. “She got really lonely and scared sometimes and she reached out to different places for love,” Bubbe said.

He was old enough at that point to read between her lines. Nobody knew who his real father was. He could’ve been anybody. He was embarrassed to feel tears, hot tears of shame, pool in his eyes.

“Now, hey,” Bubbe clucked, holding him by the chin. “That man was handsome, whoever he was. That’s obvious.”

That made him smile a little bit.

He comes back to earth, back to the final crit with Adeyemo. After that, school’s out — forever! He’s back downtown in the hood now, the East Village, at Two Boots pizza with Zoya, Alexa, Horatio, and Yusef and Ignacio, these two art-head juniors who want to inherit his mantle — Ignacio with his Mohawk and obsession with lucha libre masks. They’re all just talking shit, swapping around iPods. Eventually Oscar, who’s having the party at his place that night on East Broadway, comes around. Oscar, who graduated from the not-special neighborhood high school, Seward Park, three years ago, and nobody really knows what he does — something tech related in a warehouse in Red Hook. But Oscar has his own place and always has beer and herb, which is key. Oscar, with so many cornrows you can’t count them, and his vintage 2 Live Crew T-shirt on today, and his vague coolness without purpose that could be M-Dreem’s own fate, he knows, if he hadn’t had certain opportunities handed to him by — well, by them. Mr. and Mrs. Parental.