I ride down to the gallery every morning and help Tony and Aaron with the show. The other artists are older than me, in their late twenties and thirties. Tony has them experiment with the placement of pieces while he walks around, rubbing his chin and thinking. He’s decided not to frame my drawings, but to mat them simply. Tony was right: there are plenty of installations, including someone’s childhood bedroom, right down to a complete set of My Little Pony figurines and her original ballet shoes paired with her adolescent Docs and fishnets. Someone else has spliced found video footage together: on one wall plays an endless loop of people and dogs jumping from diving boards. The colors are washed and dreamy; the jumpers seem to leap through thickets of watery sunshine, pasteled sky. A man with one half of his head shaved and the other in a tall Mohawk has glued eighteen beach balls together in a pyramid and painted crude words on each one. One woman kind of has paintings, but there isn’t any actual paint on the canvas. Instead, she’s glued squirrel pelts, crow feathers, and chunks of her own hair to the canvas.
A thin, angry-looking woman named Holly plans to lie nude on the floor. “I’m my own exhibit,” she explains to me, crunching her black thumbnail between her teeth. “Just having to confront the fact of my presence will be overwhelming for most people.”
I don’t really understand how the woman’s piece will work (what if someone touches her? What if she has to go to the bathroom?), but when I look over at Tony, he winks and whispers to me, after the woman has stomped away, “Holly’s thesis defense is going to be spectacular. For all the wrong reasons, but spectacular nonetheless.”
They use words and phrases like theory and actualized identity and constructed identity and core fragmentation. When Holly saw me with my sleeves pushed up, she said angrily and earnestly, “You need to understand and examine your transgressions against societal norms.” She gripped my wrist. “Do you understand the act you’ve committed against yourself is fucking revolutionary? I’m going to make you a reading list tonight. You have so much to learn.”
I memorize what they say as I wander the gallery, following Tony’s instructions, moving things this way and that, my hands covered in little white gloves, like Mickey Mouse. I think, no, I know that some of them are laughing at my drawings and me. They snicker at Hector and Manny’s lumpy faces and bad teeth, Karen’s hopeful smile. And when I leave, I go to the library and search for all their terms and words and phrases, working my way through them.
I don’t want them to think I’m stupid, but I also don’t want to be stupid, that’s why I take the time to learn their language.
And when I look at my arms, I don’t think revolutionary. I think sad, and pain, but not revolutionary.
The next time I see Holly, though, I do think asshole, and that makes me smile all day.
