Portfolio!

I've always liked the word “portfolio"; it has a cool, official-y sound to it.  These are the two new-and-improved revised drafts I handed in to my Creative Writing class for my final portfolio.  Enjoy!! :)

(If you are interested in seeing revision in process, the original draft of Bullied is Principal's Office, and the original of The Perfect Shade of Blue is here.)

Bullied

“So what happened this time?”

Jesse watched his running shoes kick the bottom edge of Mr. Burke’s desk and shrugged.  He didn’t know what happened.  He didn’t understand it at all.

“Do you want me to tell you what Mrs. Pelletier said?”

Jesse shook his head.  He needed new shoes – he could see his sock. He wiggled his toes.

“You tell me what happened then.”

He was going to get lace-up shoes this time.  Velcro was for kids who didn’t know how to tie their shoes.  Jesse had been tying his own shoes for four years now.

“Jesse, look at me.”

Jesse looked at Mr. Burke’s tie. It was red, like a long tongue hanging down all the way to his pants.

“At my eyes.”

Jesse looked at Mr. Burke’s glasses.

“Why did Mrs. Pelletier send you to my office?” Mr. Burke asked.  Mr. Burke’s glasses looked like his aunt’s glasses.  Was Mr. Burke wearing girl glasses?

“Jesse. Answer me.”

Jesse pushed the toe that stuck out of his shoe into the edge of the desk until it almost hurt.  Mr. Burke leaned down so that his red tie touched Jesse’s hand on the desk.  He quickly moved it away.  Now he had Mr. Burke germs on his hand.

“Jesse – look at me – the sooner you answer me, the sooner you can go back to class.”

Jesse looked at Mr. Burke’s glasses a moment longer before he dropped his gaze to his shoes again.  They were blue, and new this month.  His mom probably wasn’t going to buy him another new pair of shoes.  These ones broke in the last explosion.  It was a small explosion, not even a quarter the size of the one at the park when Riley had – Riley had –

“Well!” said Mr. Burke, standing back up. “Shall I tell you what Mrs. Pelletier said?”

Jesse shrugged and held it, his shoulders nearly touching his ears.

“She said you were threatening some of the other students at recess,” Mr. Burke said.  “That would make this how many times you have come to the office because you were bullying other students?”

Jesse’s shoulders dropped.

“Bullying, Jesse.  The students keep saying that you told them to run away because you are going to blow them up, and whatever else it was. How many times have we told you that it isn’t nice to make up stories to scare the other students? I know it’s hard to fit in to a new school, but you’ve been making trouble for yourself ever since you’ve come here.”

“I didn’t make up a story,” Jesse said.

“What was that? Speak up.” Mr. Burke sat in his royal principal’s throne and delicately placed his fingers together.

“I didn’t make up a story.”

“Did you tell them the truth?”

Jesse nodded.

“What was the truth?”

            Jesse frowned.  How was he supposed to explain the truth, when nobody ever believed him?  Everyone demanded “the truth,” but nobody understood when he told it.  Not his friends, not the police, not his mother, nobody.

            When his mother first started noticing him coming home from the bike park with ripped clothes, she immediately told him not to go back.

“It’s no place for seven-year-olds, wait ‘til you’re older,” she’d said.  “You get bullied in a place like that.”

But Dad had said it was okay.  He said he knew the families of the other kids.  He said he was only seven when he started hanging out at the bike park. 

“Explain the broken shoes, then,” Mom would demand.  Jesse would listen at the heat register to them arguing about shoes and pants and bikes and bullies.  That was before they moved here.  Before what happened to Riley.

 “Jesse, are you listening to me?” Mr. Burke asked.  “Tell me the truth please.”

“I told them,” Jesse started to say.

“Speak up, Jesse.”

“I told them, they better be careful, ‘cause I might blow them up.”

“Why did you tell them that?”

“Because, I was angry.  When I’m angry, things blow up.”

“Do you realize that people get scared when you tell them things like that?”

“Ye-es,” Jesse said.  “I’m just warning them.”

“That you might blow them up.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think you will blow them up?”

“Yeah.”

“How will you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“With bombs? Dynamite? Grenades?”

Jesse glowered at Mr. Burke.  Mrs. Findlay, the principal at his old school, and said the same things as he did.  Jesse knew it meant they didn’t believe him.  His parents hadn’t believed him either.  Now, two schools and hundreds of shoes later, nothing had changed.

“I don’t know how it happens, or why it happens,” said Jesse. 

“Jesse, that’s enough.  If you don’t stop threatening to blow up the other students, things will get much more serious than just a detention.”

Mrs. Findlay had said that too.  There were worse things than detentions.  They were big words, but Jesse knew what they meant.  SUS-PEN-SION. EX-PUL-SION.

“I didn’t threaten them,” Jesse said.  “I warned them.”

“It’s the same thing.”

Jesse didn’t think they were the same thing in his case, but he wasn’t sure how to explain why they were different.

“Can I go back to class now?” he asked.

“Are you going to stop telling your schoolmates you’re going to hurt them?”

Hurt them?

“I don’t want to hurt my friends,” said Jesse.  “If I blow them up, it’s an accident.”

“Jesse,” Mr. Burke said, “quit playing games.”

“It isn’t a game,” Jesse replied.  “It’s real life.”

Mr. Burke raised his eyebrows.

“You think you will blow people up in real life?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesse, I am being serious.”

“Yeah.”

“Am I going to have to call your mom?”

Don’t cry, Jesse told himself.  He was too old to cry.  Besides, he was used to this.

“Please don’t call my mom,” he said in a small voice.

“Are you going to stop threatening to blow up the other kids?”

“But what if I did blow them up?”

“Jesse,” Mr. Burke sighed.  “What have you learned about being truthful?”

Jesse just shook his head.  He didn’t know what he had learned about being truthful.  When his mother looked at his torn shoes, or opened his bedroom door and asked him why it literally looked like a tornado had just been through, or whether or not the big boys at the bike park were hurting him, Jesse never knew what to say. 

And when Riley had wandered away from her at the park that day, Jesse hadn’t known what the truth was then either.

“JESSE!” she had screamed for days.  “TELL ME THE TRUTH! WHAT HAPPENED!?”

Jesse didn’t know how to explain it, though he had seen it with his own eyes.  An explosion, his mother kept crying to everyone, what explosion? How, from what, from where? Why?  What kind of people, what kind of stupid kids, bullies, would play with explosives near other, younger children? What had happened? 

There was something crawling across the floor.  One of those land-tadpoles, skimming along under Mr. Burke’s desk.  Jesse wished he could shrink himself to the size of a bug and follow it.  Anywhere but here.

“Jesse.”

There was no way to describe what it was like, to feel angry at someone, and to feel it bubble out of you and explode away like a burst of lightning.  The feeling of being thrown backward and watching everyone around you fly in every direction away from you and get hurt.  The feeling of – something – ripping out of you and blasting everything around you, of watching things close by smash to the floor.  There was no way to describe it.

Maybe the truth Jesse should tell Mr. Burke was the part where people actually did blow up.  Maybe the part where Riley had taken Jesse’s skateboard, his brand new skateboard he got for his eighth birthday, a skateboard like the bigger boys had – “give it back! Give. It. Back! Riley, give me my skateboard! Ri-a-leey! I’m gonna tell Mom. Riley! Let go! I’m telling Mom.”

But there was nothing to tell Mom.  There had been an explosion.  Riley had taken his skateboard. 

Jesse looked Mr. Burke dead in the eye.

“I won’t threaten to blow up any kids,” he said.  “I promise.”

There was a pause.

“Alright, Jesse,” said Mr. Burke softly.  “You can go back to class now.”

Bullied was inspired by the music video of David Guetta's song Titanium, featuring Sia. I don't know what inspired the video, but this is my idea of what the boy in the video was like when he was a little younger.

The Perfect Shade of Blue

“Why are artists always depressed failures?”

My thirteen-year-old cousin Kristy had asked me that at the last family gathering I went to, and I’ve been chewing on it ever since.  She had been flipping through my camera, where I’d captured some of my paintings as well as experimented with some really lame photography.  She handed it back to me stopped on a painting of a green-and-yellow parakeet in mid-flight, revealing the bright blue underside of his wings.  My favourite painting.

“Where on earth did you get that idea?” I had asked, astonished.  “Artists are rapturously happy!”

“Are you?”

“Of course, always!”

I had only gone to my aunt’s that day because I’d decided that enduring another horrid family gathering would be better than the month’s worth of messages I would get from my mother lamenting my absence.  I hated family gatherings for one thing: interrogations.  I should just write it all down and give a copy to everyone on my mother’s side, so when they want to ask me something they can refer to it instead.

“How is work going, dear? – ah yes, you wrote it here…”

-   How work is going: good. 

-   When I will quit and find another job: I don’t know.

-   How my artwork is going: it’s going. 

-   Do I have a boyfriend yet: NO.

“I’m not really an artist,” I had told Kristy, “I just dabble in it for fun.”

“What are you then?”

A good question.  I feel like it’s an offense to all talented and educated artists out there to claim to be one of them.  I bought a bunch of supplies on a whim. My undergrad is in music.  Not a BMus, a pitiful BA.  I write and paint for fun, I pretend I can dance and sing, and I compose music.  I’m quirky and I have crazy neighbours.  I have – had – a pet bird.

From where I’m lying on the couch, Kristy’s comment replaying in my mind, I can see every worthless inch of painted canvas in my living room.  Next door, there’s a huge party going on to celebrate the new pope.  It’s as though the wall between us doesn’t even exist: 

“Francis – Jesuit – so exciting – I love him!” – an awfully noisy party for one that doesn’t involve a lot of alcohol.  But they’re a big bunch, and all young, so I can forgive the noise.  Besides, we have a truce; they can praise their almighty Jesus on their guitars and have parties, and I can dance around the house to George Gershwin, sing along to my Joni Mitchell, and bang on the piano at the most ungodly of hours.  I could start a noise war and match their pope partying, but all I can do right now is wallow in misery on the couch and stare at the failed artwork around me.  

“The Home of a Broken Artist.”

That was a sign I put on my door once in a fit of dramatic self-pity, and immediately took back down because it was too pathetic and would just invite trouble from the Catholics next door.  It sits in my living room now, the word “broken” gloating with a gloriously ironic palatinate-blue beauty over the excuses for art cluttered around it.  I tried another sign – “Abby the Artist” – a legit artist! A legit delusional loser artist.  Then I gave up on signs. 

“Broken.”  So perfectly painted, so perfectly blue.  Broken, because:

1.       My art sucks.

No, really.  I’ll write, play music, paint, wave my “I’m an artist” flag, and it’s all just one big joke.

2.       I hate my job.

I’m a key holder at Suzy Shier. Not a manager, just a key holder.  Retail just doesn’t cut it for this wannabe painter-poet-songwriter university graduate.

3.       The boy I love doesn’t love me back.

Under the deck at my parents’ place I buried the key to the chest I keep under my kitchen sink.  Locked inside of it are poems and songs I wrote for Jackson McEvoy.  Most of the time I pretend that chest isn’t there.

4.       My parakeet is dead.

Okay, let me reword that.  I killed my parakeet.  Normally I’m not superstitious, but this is different.  I was writing a makeshift masterpiece on the inside of a cigarette box:

“An Elegy for Budgie”

(The height of my artistic achievements! His name, I mean.)  When I wrote the poem, inspired by some alcohol-induced idea to contemplate the afterlife of a parakeet, he was just as alive as ever.  Then I went to show him my masterpiece.

“The Home of a Prophetess-Murderess,” my sign should say.  “Poetry with the Power to Kill.” 

Now I lie amidst shades of blue, despising myself and finishing off an entire batch of cookies.  I had actually baked them for my neighbours; I had decided for once to actually accept their invitation and, benevolent neighbour that I am, I was even going to bring cookies.  But then my bird died.

It doesn’t matter; they would have baked me some if they knew Budgie was dead. Maybe not if they knew I was guilty though. Except, I wanted to give some to Mr. Seymour across the street, too. Oh well. 

Mr. Seymour actually saw my sign before I took it down.  He’d snorted at it and said,

“Something’s wrong with this.”

“What?”

“Broken at twenty?”

(I’m twenty-two, actually.)

“Isn’t it the most perfect shade of blue though?” I had asked.

“If you have to decorate, put something happy or you’ll worry your neighbours,” he’d replied.  I thought he meant the Catholics, who always seem to think it’s their business to worry about me, but later I realized he meant himself.  I think I’m his temporary replacement for his kids when they’re not visiting.

“Broken.” 

This time last year, I was high on life; loving school, going to church sometimes with my neighbours, wielding my identity as an artist like a weapon, and frequenting Friday’s Roast Beef House.  Those nights at the piano bar, I, eager, heartsick, and hopelessly obsessed, would wedge myself into the corner of a booth until I became a wall decoration, and watch him. Jackson McEvoy. 

Beautiful bright eyes below a mop of dark curls.  In my mind I’m back there now, swishing my straw around a cocktail the most luscious shade of dark pink, pretending not to notice the voice at the piano while at the same time basking in it, letting it wash over me as I drink it in.  Sometimes my eyes lift of their own accord and glance at the boy as he sings his “findin’ it hard to believe we’re in heaven,” terrified that he’ll see me, and terrified that he won’t.

“Now our dreams are comin’ true, through the good times and the bad…”

I take a cautious sip of pink and give up, letting my eyes stay fixed on him.  Most of the time he barely seems to care that I exist, but I still know we’re made for each other.

Knew. Were.

It was a dark shade of pink, my crush, and I could paint it.  I always pretended to believe he didn’t notice me at the bar, but really he was ignoring me on purpose.  When we saw each other at school, though, it was all, “Abby! How’s it going!” and I was all sing-song happy and hopeful again.  Until I figured out who it was he loved. Another girl, not me.

All this time, and I still have to push those memories away.  I hate this state of limbo.  I was free and ready to move on, and yet I must keep revisiting those days, and feel ashamed and cheated.  I can’t get away from it, because the memory of him is painted all over my life. 

“It’s time to get rid of these paintings,” my friend Shelah said to me one day when she came over.

“What?” I cried.

“Abby. Look at this place.  You want to get over Jackson? I look around, and what do I see.”

“I don’t know, what do you see, Shelah? Please tell me.”

She shot me an “oh shut up” look and started thrusting paintings into my face.

“Boy at piano bar, pink drink,” she said.  “Major’s hill park, pink sky, blue shadows, silhouette of a guy and a girl.  Blue abstract whatever this is. Another one, another one, another one. You practising your blues? This is pathetic. I see an obsession with Jackson McEvoy, that’s what I see.”

“I’m keeping them,” I told her.

My parents also, claiming a right to how much clutter goes in a place they’re helping to pay for, want me to purge.  I hate all of it, but neither they nor Shelah can convince me to part from even my most atrocious creation.  So it’s all still here, my experiments in capturing a mood on a canvas – a dark, hollow, Egyptian-Zaffre-blue mood that wants to know why Jackson McEvoy couldn’t choose me instead.  I won’t part with a single one, but none of it is beautiful.

That painting over there, though – that one is beautiful.  That green-and-yellow parakeet in mid-flight, revealing the bright blue underside of his wings.  My beautiful Budgie.  I stand up and retrieve it.  I painted it back in the earliest prime of my artistic confidence, but it looks like I’d just caught his spirit as it whisked away in a burst of colour to the parakeet-afterlife.  I remove the Gordon Harrison painting my parents gave me that’s hanging over the piano and replace it with Budgie’s Spirit.  The artist whose hand captured the joy and freedom of my beloved Budgie like this could not be a murderess.  I look with satisfaction at Budgie’s Spirit lording over the room like a true masterpiece, and the leftover melancholy I’d been sitting in all morning crumbles away.  

I think I know what the problem was with what Kristy said.  It was her mash-up of three completely unrelated things: depressed, failure, artist.  I’m no failure; it’s just all ups and downs on the way to success.  I can hold keys for Suzy Shier, attempt creative arts, and lose Jackson McEvoy, and still choose to be as rapturously happy as I can be.

I look around the room again.  Maybe I could clean this up.  Put some of it away, like the poems in the chest.  But not right now – right now I need to just get out for a bit.  The cookies are gone, but maybe there’s a bag of chips or something I can fork up – I think I’ll go to that pope party after all.

I’m not a failure, and I’m not broken. Maybe I have nothing to show for myself but a four-year-old painting of a parakeet, but hey; if anything, I’ve really mastered the colour blue.