The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [54]
There was something very weird about Boo Chodhari, something more than the fact that she wasn’t doing any work for school. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I had a strong feeling I should be watching her a lot more carefully.
19
SATURDAY MORNING, I HEADED OFF TO ART HISTORY with Boo at my side. Jazza had gone home for the weekend. Boo and I were on our own for a few days. I had been assigned the task of reporting back every single thing Boo did in her absence. I hadn’t told Jazza about the library incident yet, mostly because it really didn’t make me look good. In boarding school, you have to respect other people’s privacy. I couldn’t just say that I’d been looking at Boo’s notes. That violated the unspoken code.
“I still can’t believe this,” Boo groaned as we walked over to the classroom buildings. “Class on Saturday mornings. Isn’t that against the law or something?”
She pronounced the word something like somefink.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not.”
“I’m going to look it up, because I think it is. Child welfare or somefink.”
In the classroom, everyone was milling around with coats on. Today we were taking one of the trips Mark had promised us on the first day.
“Everyone have their Oyster cards?” Mark asked. “Good. So, we’ll walk over to the Tube together. If we get separated, go to Charing Cross. The museum is right there. We’ll meet in room thirty in one hour’s time.”
Jerome lingered with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me to walk with him. I hadn’t taken the Tube yet since my arrival, so I was nerdily excited about this. Our lives at Wexford were very contained. I was finally going to London, even though I’d been in London the whole time. There was the famous sign—the big red circle with the blue line through it. The white-tiled walls and the dozens of electronic ads that kept time with you as you went down the escalators, changing their displays so you could watch an entire commercial. The floor-toceiling ads for albums and books and concerts and museums. The whoosh of the white trains with the red and blue sliding doors. Boo put her earbuds in immediately and slipped into a daze once on the train. I sat next to Jerome and watched London go by, station after station.
When we got off, we were on Trafalgar Square, the massive plaza with Nelson’s Column and the four big stone lions. The National Gallery was just behind them, a palace-like structure on its own island of cobbles and stone.
“Today,” Mark said, when we finally assembled in room thirty, “I want you to get the feel of the galleries by doing something quite simple and, I think, fun. I want you to partner up and choose one object or subject, then find five treatments of that subject in paintings by five different artists.”
“Partners?” Jerome asked.
“Sure,” I said, trying to smile in a relaxed way.
I don’t think Boo actually knew we were partnering up. She hadn’t taken her earbuds out and was now looking at the assignment sheet with a baffled expression. I hurried Jerome out of the room before she noticed where we had gone. Around us, I could hear other people making their choices—horses, fruit, the Crucifixion, domestic bliss, windmills, the Thames, business transactions. None of these things seemed very interesting.
“So what do you think we should do?” Jerome asked.
We had stopped by The Rokeby Venus, which is a huge painting by Diego Velázquez of a woman lounging around, admiring her face in a mirror held by Cupid. But the picture is painted from behind, so the focus of the painting is mostly her butt.
“I suggest we do ours on ‘five treatments of the human butt,’” I said.
“Agreed,” he said, smiling. “Bottoms it is.”
For the next hour, we went around the National Gallery assessing butts. There are a lot of naked butts in classical paintings. Big, proud, classical butts everywhere, sometimes draped