Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

Jerome lingered with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me to walk with him. I hadn’t taken the Tube yet since my arrival, so I was nerdily excited about this. Our lives at Wexford were very contained. I was finally going to London , even though I’d been in London the whole time. There was the famous sign—the big red circle with the blue line through it. The white-tiled walls and the dozens of electronic ads that kept time with you as you went down the escalators, changing their displays so you could watch an entire commercial. The floor-toceiling ads for albums and books and concerts and museums. The whoosh of the white trains with the red and blue sliding doors. Boo put her earbuds in immediately and slipped into a daze once on the train. I sat next to Jerome and watched London go by, station after station.

When we got off, we were on Trafalgar Square, the massive plaza with Nelson’s Column and the four big stone lions. The National Gallery was just behind them, a palace-like structure on its own island of cobbles and stone.

“Today,” Mark said, when we finally assembled in room thirty, “I want you to get the feel of the galleries by doing something quite simple and, I think, fun. I want you to partner up and choose one object or subject, then find five treatments of that subject in paintings by five different artists.”

“Partners?” Jerome asked.

“Sure,” I said, trying to smile in a relaxed way.

I don’t think Boo actually knew we were partnering up. She hadn’t taken her earbuds out and was now looking at the assignment sheet with a baffled expression. I hurried Jerome out of the room before she noticed where we had gone. Around us, I could hear other people making their choices—horses, fruit, the Crucifixion, domestic bliss, windmills, the Thames, business transactions. None of these things seemed very interesting.

“So what do you think we should do?” Jerome asked.

We had stopped by The Rokeby Venus, which is a huge painting by Diego Velázquez of a woman lounging around, admiring her face in a mirror held by Cupid. But the picture is painted from behind, so the focus of the painting is mostly her butt.

“I suggest we do ours on ‘five treatments of the human butt,’” I said.

“Agreed,” he said, smiling. “Bottoms it is.”

For the next hour, we went around the National Gallery assessing butts. There are a lot of naked butts in classical paintings. Big, proud, classical butts everywhere, sometimes draped with a little cloth for flavor. We favored the bigger butts with the most detail. We gave points for best cracks, best dimpling, and best smiley curvature around the upper thigh. We differed on only one issue: I liked the reclining butts, Jerome liked the action butts. Butts leading people into battle, butts about to get on a horse, butts giving speeches, butts looking dramatic. Those were his kind of butts. I liked the way the more relaxed butts squished on one side, and the cheeky over-the-shoulder look most of their owners gave. “Behold,” they seemed to say. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

Within an hour, we had three excellent butts on our list. We made notes about the paintings, the periods, the colors, the context, all that. We had just gone back into one of the smaller galleries, one full of tiny paintings, when I felt Jerome standing much closer to me than he really needed to.

“Now, that,” he said, “is a fine butt.”

I looked around. This was primarily a fruit room, with a few paintings of angry priests thrown in for kicks. Only one painting was blocked from my view by a woman standing right in front of it. The woman was wearing a very form-fitting kneelength skirt with a red swing jacket with cropped arms. The jacket stopped right at her waistline, so her butt was well displayed. She even wore seamed black stockings and low, thick heels. Her bobbed hair was elaborately arranged in tight curls, close to the head.

From the loopy smile on his face and the way he was craning his neck a little, I finally figured out that he meant my butt, not hers. It took me a second to realize Jerome could come out with a line that bad—and mean it. I wasn’t even sure how my butt looked in my Wexford skirt. Gray, I guessed. Kind of woolly. But there was a goofy sincerity to his effort that made me flush. We were going to public kiss. Actually here, in this museum, in front of real people and possibly our classmates.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had to say it.”

“It’s okay,” I said, stepping closer. “But I think she heard you.”

“What?” he asked.

We were pretty much face-to-face now, whispering to each other.

“I think she heard you.”

“Who heard me?”

“The lady .”

“What lady ?”

We were chest-to-chest and stomach-to-stomach. I had my hands on his waist. He put his hands on my hips as well, but he wasn’t making a kissing face. He was making a “what are you talking about?” face, which is squishier.

The woman turned and looked at us. She had to have heard everything we were saying about her. For someone so dressed up, her face was remarkably plain. She wore no makeup and her skin was dull. More than that, she looked extremely unhappy. She walked out of the gallery, leaving us alone.

“We chased her off,” I said.

“Yeah . . .” Jerome detached his hands from my hips. “Still not following you.”

Just like that, the moment blew away. There would be no kiss. Instead, we were both confused.

“You know what?” I said. “I’m going to go to the bathroom for a second.”

I tried not to run through the maze of rooms, past the pictures of fruit and dogs and kings and sunsets, past the art students doing sketches and the bored tourists milling around trying to look interested. I needed the bathroom. I needed to think. I was getting dizzier by the second. First, I saw a man standing in front of me that my roommate didn’t see. Second, I had just seen a woman standing in front of a painting, and Jerome hadn’t seen her. The first time kind of made sense. It was Ripper night, we were rushing back, we were scared of getting caught, it was dark. Yes, Jazza could have missed him. But there was no way Jerome could have missed what I was talking about today—which meant either we didn’t understand each other at all, or . . .

Or . . .

I found the bathroom finally, and it was empty. I looked at myself in the mirror.

Or I was crazy. Healing Angel Ministry crazy. I certainly wouldn’t be the first in my family to see people or things that weren’t there.

No. It had to be simpler than that. We had to just be misunderstanding each other. I paced the bathroom and tried to come up with some interpretation of his words that made it all make sense, but nothing came to mind.

Boo came in.

“You all right?” she said.

“Uh . . . yeah. Fine.”

“You sure?”

“I just . . . I must not be feeling well. I’m just a little confused.”

“Confused how?”

“It’s nothing,” I said.

I went into one of the stalls and locked the door. Boo stood outside.

“You can tell me,” she said. “Honestly. You can tell me anything, no matter how weird it sounds.”

“Just leave me alone!” I snapped.

Nothing for a moment, then I saw her feet backing away from the stall. She paused by the door, then I heard it open. I looked out to see if she had gone. She had. I emerged and went to the sinks. “I misunderstood,” I said aloud to myself. “That’s all. I don’t get the English stuff yet.”

With that, I splashed some water on my face, fixed on a smile, and stepped out. I would find Jerome. I would make him explain to me what I was missing. We would laugh, then we would kiss with tongue, and all would be well.