The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [55]
Within an hour, we had three excellent butts on our list. We made notes about the paintings, the periods, the colors, the context, all that. We had just gone back into one of the smaller galleries, one full of tiny paintings, when I felt Jerome standing much closer to me than he really needed to.
“Now, that,” he said, “is a fine butt.”
I looked around. This was primarily a fruit room, with a few paintings of angry priests thrown in for kicks. Only one painting was blocked from my view by a woman standing right in front of it. The woman was wearing a very form-fitting kneelength skirt with a red swing jacket with cropped arms. The jacket stopped right at her waistline, so her butt was well displayed. She even wore seamed black stockings and low, thick heels. Her bobbed hair was elaborately arranged in tight curls, close to the head.
From the loopy smile on his face and the way he was craning his neck a little, I finally figured out that he meant my butt, not hers. It took me a second to realize Jerome could come out with a line that bad—and mean it. I wasn’t even sure how my butt looked in my Wexford skirt. Gray, I guessed. Kind of woolly. But there was a goofy sincerity to his effort that made me flush. We were going to public kiss. Actually here, in this museum, in front of real people and possibly our classmates.
“Sorry,” he said. “I had to say it.”
“It’s okay,” I said, stepping closer. “But I think she heard you.”
“What?” he asked.
We were pretty much face-to-face now, whispering to each other.
“I think she heard you.”
“Who heard me?”
“The lady.”
“What lady?”
We were chest-to-chest and stomach-to-stomach. I had my hands on his waist. He put his hands on my hips as well, but he wasn’t making a kissing face. He was making a “what are you talking about?” face, which is squishier.
The woman turned and looked at us. She had to have heard everything we were saying about her. For someone so dressed up, her face was remarkably plain. She wore no makeup and her skin was dull. More than that, she looked extremely unhappy. She walked out of the gallery, leaving us alone.
“We chased her off,” I said.
“Yeah . . .” Jerome detached his hands from my hips. “Still not following you.”
Just like that, the moment blew away. There would be no kiss. Instead, we were both confused.
“You know what?” I said. “I’m going to go to the bathroom for a second.”
I tried not to run through the maze of rooms, past the pictures of fruit and dogs and kings and sunsets, past the art students doing sketches and the bored tourists milling around trying to look interested. I needed the bathroom. I needed to think. I was getting dizzier by the second. First, I saw a man standing in front of me that my roommate didn’t see. Second, I had just seen a woman standing in front of a painting, and Jerome hadn’t seen her. The first time kind of made sense. It was Ripper night, we were rushing back, we were scared of getting caught, it was dark. Yes, Jazza could have missed him. But there was no way Jerome could have missed what I was talking about today—which meant either we didn’t understand each other at all, or . . .
Or . . .
I found the bathroom finally, and it was empty. I looked at myself in the mirror.
Or I was crazy. Healing Angel Ministry crazy. I certainly wouldn’t be the first in my family to see people or things that weren’t there.
No. It had to be simpler than that. We had to just be misunderstanding each other. I paced the bathroom and tried to come up