Rebekkah was so afraid of losing Mr. Avalon’s attention that she did not ask him, “Why?” She nodded, regretfully.
“I won’t let anyone ever hold you back from what you could become,” he said, as if that was what this conversation had been about, as if that sweet-shy, scrawny eleventh grade boy held some claim on her. But Rebekkah could tell that Mr. Avalon expected this proclamation to elicit a hug, and it was then, when she stood from the table to let him receive her, that he kissed her for the first time, a kiss quite unlike the dozens of pecks she’d planted on his cheek. She now tasted his sweet, musty flavor. She tried to measure what this kiss meant, and she wasn’t sure except that she knew it would repair the blackness of his mood, so she kissed him back.
“Who’s there?” her mother called from the study when she came home, just before midnight.
“No one,” Rebekkah said. She took the steps two at a time. Alone in bed, Rebekkah was lit up with her secret, her skin glowing in the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Jed’s secret, poorly kept: it was true. Once upon a very different time, Hector Espina had been only another student of his.
Jed was in his early forties then, at what would prove to be a kind of zenith in his life, though he couldn’t have known it. Jed Loving, local art instructor, with his dreams of succeeding as an artist in his own right not yet entirely crumpled, his whiskey sessions still limited to the weekends. Jed had never wanted to be a teacher, but he liked his job well enough. Things hadn’t been right in Jed’s own childhood, and those kids—sketching miserable scenes of their family lives alongside the usual dragons and flowers and pretty sunsets—were like some daily lesson for Jed, suggesting that he might even still paint his way free of his own past.
But Jed saw it, even back then: Hector Espina had been more troubled than most kids. A slight and awkward boy, all elbows, who chose to work at an easel near the back of the room, just as, in the halls, Jed had watched Hector move through his days like the shadow of his classmates. A flitting, furtive, shaking boy, whose first drawings were grim indeed. “Is that your father?” Jed would later remember asking Hector Espina one day.
“It is a nightmare,” Hector said. “My nightmare.”
Jed looked at the blobby blue corpse Hector had etched, maggot eaten and nude. “It sure is,” Jed said.
Hector shrugged at the mess he’d made on the page. “It’s ugly,” Hector said.
“But isn’t ugliness the point?”
“Not in the way I wanted.”
Jed nodded. “Well, how about you try to do something a little happier next time? Maybe your ma?”
Hector clenched his eyes, shook his head. “My mother? She went back to Mexico when I was five.”
Jed took this fact the way he took many similar admissions from his students; he couldn’t quite bear to look at the poor kid. He looked, instead, at the drawing. The horror aside, it really was crude. Hector was no artist. Still, if ever there was a boy who needed a gold star, it was he. “You are really making some improvements there, Hector. Your only problem,” Jed said, “is that you need to shade.”
Behind Jed, other boys were hardly trying to stifle their snickering. From day one of the semester, Jed had seen that Hector was the unluckiest kind of target for adolescent tormentors; Hector was the kind who fought back. “Fuck you,” Hector now hissed at these boys, to their considerable delight.
“Don’t listen to them,” Jed told Hector in a close voice. “And maybe chill it with the language?” Hector nodded, and Jed patted his shoulder, feeling no small sympathy for the kid. Every day, in front of his class, Jed delivered the same timeworn lectures. Perspective, the color wheel, the tricks to diagramming the human face. But sometimes it could seem that his class work was more therapy than art.
And drawings like Hector’s were hardly unusual among a certain set of Jed’s moody boy students. In fact, Jed often encouraged these boys in their catharsis through painted gore. Near the start of each semester, to make a display of the fact that art should not only be about prettiness, Jed offered his class a slide show of a time-tested student favorite: details from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, its fancifully macabre depictions of hell, the demons delighting in the grotesque punishments of the writhing, naked bodies consigned to their damnation. This slide show was Jed’s little rebellion against the banalities of the state-issued curriculum. More than that, Jed hoped his students might feel encouraged to draw away their own demons.
But perhaps Jed had made a mistake; Hector took to Bosch in a way no boy before him had. Every six weeks, each student was assigned to present a completed painting, to be presented at a “gallery show,” a Friday morning event to which Jed brought decaf coffee and croissants, trying to create a cultured atmosphere. And on that first “viewing” Hector revealed to his teacher and classmates a truly appalling work, a kid’s ode to Bosch that might have dismayed Bosch himself. Hector’s painting was divided into three sections. In the bottom area, Hector’s hell, was a clumsy Boschian display of miseries. In Hector’s rendition, the demons supped at steaks made of human thigh, they luxuriated on a throw rug made of flayed human skin, they bludgeoned the poor humans with a variety of implements: a rolling pin, a golf club, a baseball bat. In the center panel, perhaps representing purgatory, was a clumsy, overcast depiction of the town of Bliss. At the top, Hector’s heaven showed a malformed version of Hector himself on a cloud, while below, a crowd of similarly misshapen audience members, rendered with heartbreaking intricacy, threw up their arms in Hector’s direction. But there was a different, less adoring kind of crowd gathered around Hector now: his fellow art students, who were scoffing quite openly. Jed raised his voice, trying to speak over them.
“Is that you? What are you doing onstage there? Is that some sort of play?”
“I’m singing,” Hector said in a grumpy whisper, bristling at the mocking attention of his classmates.
“Really? You sing? I had no idea.”
“You will,” Hector said, glancing around with a little defiant glare. “Someday everyone will. I’m very, very good.”
Jed cringed a little, on Hector’s behalf. In his own childhood and in his years at the front of the classroom, Jed had learned well that the one piece of truly irresistible bait to a bully was a claim of specialness.
“Yeah, right,” a voice said from behind. “Hector Espina, rock star!”