Not As Crazy As I Seem by George Harrar Read Free Book Online

time. I figure they should wipe out that last one tenth of a percent.
    Mom said she'd only buy me two bottles a week, so I've been trying to make it go a little further lately. I open doors with my shirttail, I turn on spigots with a paper towel, and some days in the winter I wear handball gloves. They're cool black leather, and they make me look kind of tough,
which is pretty ironic since I wear them because I'm so wimpy about germs.

    "Free" period at school is supposed to mean that you can do whatever you want during it, right? Or even do nothing at all. At Baker it means you have to go to the library to do homework or research four days a week. The other day you must sign up for either art or music.
    Music would seem the logical choice, since I have perfect pitch, as I said. I can tell what any note is just by hearing it, and whether it's sharp or flat. Mom says it's a gift that only one of every ten people has, and I shouldn't waste it.
    Well, some gifts aren't worth the trouble of having them. It's like if your parents give you a fourteen-fret dreadnought Martin guitar for your sixteenth birthday. They're not buying it so you can sit at home in your room strumming chords to yourself. They expect you to be in class shows and play a song or two when relatives visit at holidays. So with my gift of perfect pitch, my parents expect me to join the chorus and be in school musicals. Imagine me standing in front of people, singing! All that breathing on the back of my neck—I'd probably faint and fall off the stage and crack my skull.
    That's why I chose art for my Friday class and I'm sitting in Mrs. Cohen's class after lunch, pinning a fresh sheet of white paper to my drawing table. Art you can do by yourself, and the worst that can happen is that the teacher tapes your painting on the wall for people to see when you aren't there. I'll save my perfect pitch for singing in the shower at home.
    The assignment today is to draw a structure, such as a house. That takes some planning. I open my metal tray of paints and moisten each little tub of color with a drop of water from my brush. I figure I'll do my old house in Amherst, which had six-foot windows in the front and a porch that went all the way around to the backyard. With my ruler and pencil I mark out where the horizon would be, about a quarter of the way up from the bottom. Then I block out my house on the right side of the paper, leaving room on the left for trees or cars or whatever I want. You never put your main object in the middle of your picture. You create tension by putting it to one side or the other, which I learned in art at Amherst. For some reason people like tension in pictures but hate it in their actual lives.
    After fifteen minutes I've got my house outlined. Mrs. Cohen walks by me, stops for the smallest fraction of a second, and moves on to this kid with purple hair two desks up on my right. He has already painted a huge house right in the center of his paper. Now he's dipping his brush into a blob of green and yellow on his mixing board, and then he swipes it across the bottom, under the house.
    Mrs. Cohen looks over his shoulder. "Grass isn't usually that bright. Try more green."
    The kid doesn't even look up at her. "Crabgrass is bright."
    "Houses aren't usually surrounded by crabgrass, Ren."
    At least, I think she said Ren. It could have been Den or Len or Pen for all I know.
    Mrs. Cohen walks on to the next student and tells her that her sunflowers, if that's what they are supposed to be, look more like black-eyed Susans.
    The boy with the crabgrass glances around and gives
me an odd expression, like we're friends sharing a secret joke. Then he picks up his brush, jabs it into the yellow and paints his grass even brighter. He turns toward me again and I look away. When I look back he's brushing black paint all across his sky.
    Mrs. Cohen comes down our aisle again after a minute and tells me that this is a one-hour exercise, so I better begin