“You notice how she’s been looking more and more like Casper the Ghost?”
The girls’ giggles follow them outside. After they leave, Thandi stays inside the stall. She stands back to look at her drawing, then scribbles all over it, turning it into a shapeless form—the eye of a hurricane spinning relentlessly out of control. Thandi adjusts the pin on her skirt where the button has fallen off (they have been falling off her blouses too, the meager threads giving way to the defiance of her newly fattened breasts) and exits the stall. She cuts across the lawn, making her way to the Vocational Block, where Brother Smith’s office is located. It’s another one of the modern buildings painted bright yellow. Brother Smith is gathering materials for class, his brown robe nearly swallowing his thin frame. When he sees Thandi, he closes the Jamaica Gleaner and puts it on his desk. “Damn politicians. This country has gone to the dogs. Did you know that we owe the World Bank billions of dollars?” Thandi shifts from one leg to the next, her backpack weighing heavily on her shoulders. Brother Smith must sense that something is wrong when he doesn’t get at least a Really, sir? or You don’t say.
“You don’t look well,” he says. “Come in and sit down.”
Thandi does as he says, closing the door behind her, then removing a few cardboard collages off a chair by Brother Smith’s desk, which is neat despite the disarray of his office. There are prints of paintings everywhere, some he had been meaning to hang on the already crowded walls. Van Gogh, Picasso, da Vinci, Botticelli. Artists he has discussed in Thandi’s art class, assigning extensive readings about their life and work. Artists whose works Brother Smith says he has seen in Europe. Thandi wishes she could go to Europe too. To exist in those places, especially those paintings of the English countryside with wide-open fields, greener than the greenest grass in River Bank, and with flowers in the softest shades of lavender and yellow. Those images don’t look at all like sunny days in River Bank, where weeds grow to your knees in the brown fields, itching around the ankles; and black boys hang from trees, foraging for ripe mangoes, their dangling, ashy, sore-ridden legs attracting as much flies as the rotten fruits.
Thandi sits and regards the frame on Brother Smith’s desk that reads I CAN DO ALL THINGS THROUGH CHRIST WHO STRENGTHENS ME. She stares at it for a while. Surely she has been working hard, doing everything to please. Jesus Christ peers at her with sympathetic eyes that mirror the nuns’ and those of the missionaries. She’s supposed to want this. She’s supposed to be grateful. A girl like her should excel at school, because it’s the only way out—the only way to clamber up the ladder. I’m supposed to want this. Yet, year after year when she walks away with all A’s on her school report, a nagging persists. Like she’s running a race, panting on her way to a finish line that doesn’t exist.
“Thandi, what’s going on? Our class starts in thirty minutes,” Brother Smith says. Though he’s quite young, Brother Smith is prematurely balding. His bald spot shines in the natural light from outside like the silver plate he passes around during mass. He tries to cover it with four strands of brown hair combed to the side. He’s small in stature, his fair skin interrupted by brown freckles covering his entire face like a dotted mask. But his kind, chestnut-colored eyes stand out like the languid strokes of a brush, capturing everything about a person, an object, or a setting. Currently they’re steady on her face, as if trying to figure out a crossword puzzle. He leans forward to rub her arm in that paternal way she has gotten used to. He doesn’t seem to hear the slight crinkling of the plastic underneath her sweatshirt. And if he does, he doesn’t ask. It’s here, inside Brother Smith’s art class, that Thandi feels most free.
“Is it possible to be good at something even if you don’t want to?”
“Yes, that’s plausible. Why?”
Thandi shrugs, looking down at her hands. “I—I was thinking . . .” Her voice trails off. “I was thinking how much I love art. More than any other subject.” Brother Smith takes his hand away and creates distance between them. A distance Thandi feels, which momentarily creates an ache within her. He’s rubbing his chin as though suddenly aware of a burgeoning five o’clock shadow.
“My advice is for you to love all your subjects. The CXC is just around the corner.”
“I know. And I am prepared to pass it. It’s just . . .”
“Thandi, I teach art as a vocational subject.”
His response puts a sinking feeling inside Thandi’s chest like the melting of chipped ice. She looks around the room, her desires springing forth like vines across the white ceiling, coloring the beige walls. “Nothing else feels right.”