Meg Cabot - All American Girl

Just the thought that I could feel frisson for anyone but Jack put me in a really bad mood.

Or maybe it had been all the reporters. In any case, instead of saying hi or whatever to David, I went, “Doesn’t all that bother you?” I jerked my cast in the direction of the reporters. “I mean, that’s just scary, and you’re smiling .”

“You think the press is scary?” David asked. Now he wasn’t just smiling. He was laughing. “Aren’t you the girl who jumped on the back of a crazy man who was holding a gun ?”

I blinked at him. Laughing, I couldn’t help noticing, David looked even better than when he was smiling.

But I quickly squelched any such notion and said, in a business-like way, “That wasn’t scary. It was just what I had to do. You’d have done it, if you’d been there.”

“I wonder,” David said, thoughtfully.

And then Theresa opened the door to go back out again, and all chance of having a conversation in the stairwell was lost in the shouts of the reporters. John kind of herded us up the stairs, and we went in and there were the benches, exactly as they’d been the last—and only—time I’d been there. The only real difference was that the fruit that had been on the table in the middle of the circle of benches was gone. Instead there was just this white egg sitting there. I thought maybe Susan Boone had forgotten part of her lunch, or something. Either that or Joseph was really Josephine and nobody had bothered to mention it to me.

“So,” David said, as we settled on to our benches and got our drawing pads all ready and stuff. “What’s it going to be today? Pineapple again? Or are you going to try for something a little more seasonal. . . squash, perhaps?”

“Would you shut up already,” I said, not loudly enough for anyone else to hear, “about the pineapple thing?” I couldn’t believe I had actually experienced frisson for a guy who did nothing but tease me.

“Oh, sorry,” David said, but he didn’t look very sorry. I mean, he was still smiling. “I forgot about you being a sensitive artist and all.”

“Just because I’m not willing,” I muttered, glaring at Susan Boone, who was over at the slop sink rinsing out some brushes, “to have my creative impulses stamped out by some art dictator doesn’t mean I am overly sensitive.”

Both of David’s eyebrows went up at the same time. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Susan Boone,” I said, sending a dirty look in the Elf Queen’s direction. “This whole draw-what-you-see thing. I mean, it’s bogus.”

“Bogus?” David had finally stopped smiling. Now he just looked confused. “How is it bogus?”

“Because where would the art world be,” I whispered, “if Picasso only drew what he saw?”

David blinked at me. “Picasso did only draw what he saw,” he said. “For years and years. It was only after he’d mastered the ability to draw whatever he was looking at with absolute precision that Picasso began experimenting with perceptions of line and space.”

I stared at him. “What?” I asked intelligently. I hadn’t understood a word he’d said.

David said, “Look, it’s simple. Before you can start trying to change the rules, you have to learn what the rules are. That’s what Susan is trying to teach us. She just wants you to learn to draw what you see first, before you move on to cubism, or pineapple-ism, or whatever-ism it is you choose eventually to espouse.”

It was my turn to blink. This was all news to me. Jack had certainly never said anything about getting to know the rules before trying to break them. And Jack knew all about breaking the rules. I mean, wasn’t that what he was always doing in order to show people—like his dad, and all those people at the country club, and Mr. Esposito, back at school—the error of their ways?

Then Susan Boone stepped away from the sink and clapped her hands.

“OK,” she said. “As I’m sure all of you know by now, there was some excitement last week after class—” This caused some laughter from Gertie and Lynn and the others. “—maybe a little more excitement for some of us than others—” Susan Boone smiled meaningfully at me. “But we’re all here now, and thankfully unscathed . . . well, for the most part. So let’s get back to work, shall we? See this egg?” Susan Boone pointed to the egg on the table in front of us. “Today I want you all to paint this egg. Those of you who are unaccustomed to paint may use coloured pencils or chalk.”

I looked at the egg on the table. It was sitting on a piece of white silk. I looked down at the handful of coloured pencils she had dropped on to my bench. There wasn’t a single white one.

I sighed, and raised my hand.

Well, what was I supposed to do? I mean, this woman had practically blackmailed me into coming back to her class and then, when I get there, she doesn’t even give me a white-coloured pencil . . . yet she expects me to draw what I see? What gives? I mean, I am all for learning the rules before I break them, but this didn’t seem like it was even on the rule list.

“Yes, Sam,” Susan said, coming over to my bench.

“Yeah,” I said, putting my hand down. “I don’t have a white-coloured pencil.”

“No, you don’t,” Susan Boone said. Then she just smiled down at me and started to walk away.

“Wait,” I said, conscious that David, who was sitting next to me, was probably listening. He looked pretty absorbed in his own painting, which he’d started as soon as Susan Boone put the egg down, but you never knew.

“How am I supposed to draw a white egg sitting on a white sheet when I don’t have a white pencil?” I didn’t mean to sound whiny, or anything. I really couldn’t figure out what it was Susan Boone wanted. I mean, was I supposed to work with negative space, or something? Just put in the shadows and leave the rest white? What?

Susan Boone looked at the egg. Then she said the most astonishing thing I had heard in a while, and I had heard some pretty astonishing things lately, not the least of which was that I was a hero, and my best friend Catherine wanted to be part of the In Crowd:

“I don’t see any white there,” Susan Boone said mildly.

I looked at her like she was crazy. Why, that egg and that sheet were as white as ... well, as white as the hair streaming down her shoulders.

“Um,” I said. “Excuse me?”

Susan bent down so that she was looking at the egg on my same eye level.

“Remember what I said, Sam,” she said. “Draw what you see , not what you know. You know there is a white egg on a white sheet in front of you. But do you really see any white there? Or do you see the pink reflected from the sun in the window? Or the blue and purple of the shadows beneath the egg? The yellow of the overhead light, where it is reflected on the top curve of the egg. The faint green where the silk meets the table. Those are the colours I see. No white. No white at all.”

It didn’t seem to me that, in any part of this speech, there was anything remotely smacking of an attempt to stamp out my natural creativity and style. You have to learn the rules, David had pointed out, before you can break them. Susan Boone was really trying, just as he had said, to get me to see.

So I looked. I looked hard. Harder, really, than I’d ever looked at anything before.

And I saw.

It sounds dumb, I know. I mean, I’ve always been able to see. I have twenty-twenty vision.

But suddenly, I saw:

I saw the purple shadow beneath the egg.

I saw the pink light from the sun outside the window.

I even saw the little yellow moon of light reflected on the top of the egg.

And so, moving really fast, I picked up the first pencil I could reach, and started sketching.