“No.”
Bruce burps again and excuses himself. “So? What happened?”
“I went to the opening. I even dressed up a little. It was my first art show and I wanted to look like an artist, right? So I dressed up,” I say. “I got there and walked around and saw the ribbons on the winners and mostly it was the seniors in the art club who won and their work was great and all, so I was happy for them, you know? They’re my friends. Or they were then—or whatever.
“I couldn’t find the headpiece anywhere. When I realized it wasn’t there, I found Miss Smith and I told her it was missing. She said, ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s here somewhere.’ And then she went back to shoving those mini quiches in her mouth and laughing it up with the seniors.” I think of forty-year-old Sarah. “Especially with Vicky-the-grand-prizewinner.”
“Well, where the hell did it go?”
We’re still sitting side by side, looking across the street. It’s easier this way. I don’t really want to look at Bruce. I feel pathetic, really.
“It was just gone. But I saw the Styrofoam head I’d mounted it on used as a decoration in some stupid display. Our Art Is Out of This World! They made the Styrofoam head into an alien head. I went back to Miss Smith and told her that the Styrofoam head was there, but my headpiece was gone. She told me to calm down, but I wasn’t freaking out or anything. She just said, ‘Calm down. I’m sure we’ll find the answer.’ But the judging was over and the whole point of being in the show was over and the headpiece was gone.”
Bruce puts his hand on my shoulder. I continue to look forward like we’re at a baseball game and I’m telling him this story with my eye on the game. In reality, I’m watching forty-year-old Sarah walk east down Pine now, trying to get me to talk about the right thing.
“So you never saw it again? Someone just took it?”
“I went early to school that Monday and went to Miss Smith’s room and started looking for it. She was kinda rude about it. Told me good luck and have fun and stuff. She told me I could search the whole room, which I thought was weird because I was only going to search the obvious places.”
“She sounds bitchy,” Bruce says.
“The seniors came in for first-period class and they laughed at me the whole time I searched. No one offered to help. It was so weird. They were my friends the Friday before. Now they just seemed to be Miss Smith’s friends. Even my sophomore friends wouldn’t help. Not even Carmen during second period. She just played it cool.”
Bruce squeezes my shoulder.
“I found it in the end,” I say. “No one expected me to find it.”
I feel deep shame. I have no idea why. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t hurt anyone. I wasn’t being mean or weird. I just wanted to find it. Why am I so ashamed of wanting to find it?
“It was in the bottom of the big trash can behind Miss Smith’s desk,” I say. “It was crumbled into a ball and someone had taken a wire cutter to the middle of it. It looked like they were trying to cut it in half but then gave up.”
Bruce took his hand off my shoulder and put his hands in front of him. “Hold on. Hold on. Someone took your art project and tried to cut it in half and then crumbled it into a ball and threw it in the trash?”
“Yep.”
“That’s the weirdest shit I ever heard.”
“I know, right? And they had to do it Monday morning because the janitors would have emptied the trash on Friday night.”
“So what’d you do?” he asks.
“What could I do?”
But I know what I did. I said, “I found it!” and pulled it out of the trash can. When I saw someone had cut it up, I said, “Oh my God,” because I guess that’s just what came out of my mouth. I remember sweating then. I remember feeling like someone had cut me in half and never finished. I remember wishing someone would have put me in the trash. It was the day I first saw ten-year-old Sarah, only I didn’t let myself see her. She was sitting on a bench outside school chewing bubble gum and blowing bubbles. At the time I thought it was a hallucination, but now I know she was real.
Bruce doesn’t know any of this. He just knows I found it. I don’t know how to explain my breaking to someone else—not even him.
He asks, “Did you ask if anyone knew who did it?”
I shrug. “No matter who I talked to about it after that day, they said I had to ‘let it go’ or ‘stop obsessing.’ I tried to talk to the guidance counselor. He said, ‘There are always other art shows, Sarah.’”
“Not if someone cuts up your freaking projects! What kind of psycho does that?”
“Then the art club stopped talking to me. They wouldn’t even hand me tools in class if I asked. They pretended I was invisible. So I stopped going to school.”
I wasn’t going to tell him about the pear. There was more to it than I couldn’t draw the pear. There were a lot of reasons I couldn’t draw the pear.
“The principal should know about this,” Bruce says. “That’s bullying.”
“Nobody beat me up.”