As the bus goes east, we pass through the University of the Arts campus. This is where I say I want to go to college. Except I’m skipping school, so I probably won’t get to go to college. Or maybe I will. I’m not sure. Going to college doesn’t seem original. Not going to college doesn’t seem original unless I plan to do something original instead of just not going to college.
I thought being an artist would be the right thing to do. Since I was little, everybody told me I was good at it. Every year on my birthday Dad gave me something a real artist should have—a wooden artist’s model, a set of oil paints, a palette, an easel, a pottery wheel. When I was nine, he woke me up every summer morning saying, “Time to make the art!” And I made art. Sometimes I made great art and I knew it because people’s expressions change when they look at great art. When I was ten, after we went to Mexico, he stopped waking me up that way, but I still made the art. Right up until Miss Smith and the pear. It wasn’t the pear’s fault. It was building for months because sixteen is when people stop saying great things about a kid’s drawings and start asking questions like “Where do you want to go to college?”
I just don’t think college is where artists go. I think they go to Spain or Macedonia or something.
Umbrella
By the time I get to City Hall, I figure the idea to change my name isn’t original anymore. The idea is now two hours old. I don’t even go to the sixth floor to get the paperwork so I can practice how I’ll do it when I turn eighteen.
I decide my name is Umbrella, but I won’t tell anyone else. Not even the Social Security Administration. Changing one’s name without actually changing one’s name has been done before, but I doubt anyone else on Earth ever opted to call themselves Umbrella.
I take the next bus that comes around. The rain has stopped, which makes my new name ironic. I am useless now in every possible way. I am a sixteen-year-old truant. I am Umbrella on a day with no rain. I am as blank as a piece of white paper in a world with no pencils. While this may sound dramatic and silly, it’s comforting to me so I don’t care how it sounds. The whole world thinks sixteen-year-old girls are dramatic and silly anyway. But really we’re not. Not even when we change our names to Umbrella.
Everything I see from the bus window is the same. The streets, the sidewalks, the people are all the same. Homeless people sit on corners. Businesspeople walk with purpose. Tourists look at maps, trying to find the Liberty Bell or Betsy Ross’s house. Half the people are looking at or talking into their phones. Other people are holding their devices as if they could ring any second—like soldiers in wartime—guns always at the ready. But nothing ever really happens.
It starts to drizzle again and I think back to Miss Smith’s art class two weeks ago. I couldn’t draw the pear. I couldn’t draw my hand one more time. If someone asked me to draw anything right now, I wouldn’t be able to do it. My hands do not work. Not in that way. Mom tells stories about patients in the ER who need amputations. Arm/hand/multiple-finger amputations. People who drive with their arms out car windows. Unlucky motorcyclists. Lawn mowers. Snowblowers. At least I still have hands. I have nothing to complain about.
I can’t draw a pear, though. Or anything else.
My hands ran out of art.
I am simply Umbrella. I am the layer between the light rain and a human walking down Spruce Street talking into her phone, maybe finding out her cat just threw up on the new Berber carpet. I am the barrier between the bullshit that falls from the sky and the humans who do not want bullshit on their pantsuits. In eight days of riding around, that’s what I’ve discovered. It’s raining bullshit. Probably all the time.
Twenty-three-year-old Sarah gets on the bus again. She sits next to me and smiles, just like last time. But now, there’s something condescending in her smile. Unsympathetic. It says I am silly and dramatic. We don’t say a thing to each other and when we get off at the stop near home, the rain has started again and she opens her umbrella and walks north. I walk south and let the rain hit me until I’m soaked.
Dropout
“She told me that we should let her drop out for the year,” Mom says. “She could do summer classes and then she’d be able to come back next year and reenroll as a junior.”
“No,” Dad says. “She’s sixteen. She’s talented. What about her future?”
“That doesn’t seem to matter to her,” Mom says.
“You said you’d back me up on this. We made a parental deal. She can’t drop out of high school.”
“It’s that or expulsion. Expulsion would stay on her record.”
“I should have called. You’re a shitty communicator,” Dad says.