Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [67]
She needn’t have worried about her thighs, or even that she was naked. Except for the neat white card tacked beneath the painting—“Shipley, December 1992”—she was virtually unrecognizable. Nothing was where it ought to have been and nothing was the color it was in nature. Her belly button was a green eye lodged between her breasts. One breast faced forward, an overripe yellow gourd, the other lilted to the side, a shriveled plum. Her legs were black talons sprouting from her stomach, her hair a mass of purple tentacles. And, in the middle of everything, an inexplicable red Macy’s bag—the only thing left unchanged.
“You made it!” Eliza bounded over and kissed Tom’s mother and father on the cheek. She poured each of them a glass of wine.
“What do you think?” Shipley asked her roommate, nodding at Tom’s painting.
“Well, it could be worse,” Eliza said. “At least you can’t see your cooter. Or maybe you can, but no one will ever know that’s what it is.”
“It’s very different,” Mrs. Ferguson offered.
“A major contribution.” Tom’s art teacher, Mr. Zanes, sidled up to them, sucking on a lollipop. Greasy tendrils of white hair clung to his drooping ears. “Shows you what can happen if you allow yourself to let go.”
“So this is good?” Mr. Ferguson frowned at the painting.
Mr. Zanes nodded, the lollipop bulged inside his cheek. “I would say so.”
“We should be proud?” Tom’s mother asked.
“I’m proud,” Shipley offered. Just because she didn’t like the painting didn’t mean it wasn’t good.
Mrs. Ferguson touched her elbow. “We’re going to the Lobster Shack for dinner after the play. We’re hoping you’ll come too.”
The Lobster Shack was a Maine fixture where Dexter students took their parents to gorge on whole lobsters, baked clams, and French fries, and returned stinking of fish and grease. Shipley’s mother wouldn’t dream of going there. Too fattening, too smelly, too déclassé.
“I’d love to,” Shipley said.
Meanwhile, Tom was getting ready for the play in the only way he knew how. The Grannies had run out of E. Stealing ether from the Chemistry lab was the next best thing.
“Ether is different,” Liam warned. “It doesn’t last. And you have to really go to town to feel the effects. It’s a short-term out-of-body super-high.”
“Sounds fine,” Tom said. All he knew was he could not stand up in front of an audience, pretend to get stabbed, and smear himself with fake blood, without the aid of chemicals.
“The Robin Hood thing is what I like about it,” Grover enthused on their way across campus. “Stealing from the rich and giving to…us.”
“Don’t worry, Geoff knows what he’s doing,” Wills whispered as the four boys tiptoed into Crowley, Dexter’s science building. The building was unlocked, suggesting that there were other life forms on the premises.
Geoff Walker, ether-knapping expert, was waiting for them. Tom had only ever seen the pale, wasted, ponytailed Geoff jogging the five-mile loop around campus or scraping the wax off Granny Smith apples in the dining hall. It was almost incomprehensible that he ever did anything else.
Tom pressed the button for the elevator. Geoff shook his anorexic head gravely. “That is not your destiny,” he said, leading the way to the fire stairs.
The ether was kept in a locked storeroom in the largest lab, on the fourth floor. Geoff had the key.
“I cut keys with my nail clippers,” he explained.
“Can we hurry this up?” Tom said. “I have to be onstage in half an hour.”
Inside the storeroom, two sizable brown glass bottles stood waiting on the shelf. The label read “Diethyl Ether,” and beneath that was a picture of red flames with the word “flammable” in black.
“No smoking,” Geoff warned. He removed one bottle from the shelf, unscrewed the top, and took a whiff. “Ah,” he said, smiling for the first time. He recapped the bottle and handed it to Tom. The other bottle he wrapped in a spare white lab coat and placed gingerly into his backpack.
“If you want to feel it while you’re up there, you’ve got to do it right