The Opposite of Hallelujah by Anna Jarzab

“This is going to be the best! Class! Ever!”
    I laughed softly. “You know it.”
    “That is the most humorless man I have ever met,” Pawel said.
    “Just wait until precalculus,” I said. “You do have that, right?”
    “Yup. Pure unadulterated fun.”

7
    Pawel was hard not to like, and it didn’t escape my notice that I wasn’t the only person paying attention to him. We didn’t have all our classes together. He wasn’t on the AP track for English—“Reading is for readers,” he said, only half kidding—and even though he’d tried to get into the film appreciation class when he’d enrolled, it was a popular elective with a waiting list.
    “I can’t believe you’re taking that class,” he said miserably as we gathered up our books after physics. “Lucky. This is the part of being a transfer that sucks.”
    “Is there a part of being a transfer that doesn’t suck?”I asked. We left the classroom and descended the stairs, emerging into a long hallway that connected the two main buildings.
    “New friends,” he said after a long pause, catching my eye before turning his head toward a large student painting that had been hung on the wall. “Damn, that’s ugly.”
    We stopped and stared at it. It was pretty hideous. At first, it looked like the artist had just painted the whole canvas navy, then dumped globs of different paint on it. The globs were horrible colors, like puke green and salmon and urine yellow. After looking at it for a few seconds, I could see that there was a three-dimensional aspect to it; the artist had taken what looked like pieces of trash (candy wrappers, bottle tops, packs of cigarettes) and glued them onto the canvas, then covered them with the paint. I looked at the little plaque near the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas. It said the name of the artist, and then the name of the piece: Waste .
    “Wow,” Pawel said in mock awe. He shook his head and scoffed: “Art.”
    I laughed. I didn’t have much of an eye for art, either. The creator of Waste could’ve been the next Picasso and I wouldn’t have known it. The only art I’d ever really responded to was the work of M. C. Escher, a Dutch graphic artist from the early twentieth century who was famous for his woodcuts and lithographs. Dad loved Escher, and we’d had several prints of his hangingin our house for as long as I could remember. I think I responded to them because they were inspired by mathematics and featured geometrical paradoxes, exploring and showcasing the beauty of the impossible world. Art I didn’t get, but math—math I got.
    He pulled me backward to look at it from a greater distance. “Does it have wings?”
    I squinted. There was a darker part of the canvas that had the vague outline of a person, and the trash seemed to fan out from it to form large wings, like those of an eagle. “Yeah,” I said. “I think it does.”
    “What are you looking at?” The voice belonged to Derek, and it was coming from behind me. I turned slowly, appreciating the paralyzing irony that he would show up when I was less interested in seeing him than I had ever been—and talking to another guy, to boot.
    Pawel jerked his thumb toward Waste . “This monstrosity,” he said, offering his hand for Derek to shake. “Pawel.”
    “Derek,” my ex said. “You new?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Cool.” Derek turned to me. Pawel shifted awkwardly; he seemed to sense that he had been dismissed, but wasn’t quite willing to leave. “How’re you doing, Caro?”
    “Fine,” I said coolly. It was just like Derek to think that we could be buddies so soon. I could feel my cheeks growing hot from embarrassment. I didn’t particularlywant to see him at the moment. I wished he would just go away.
    “Hey, Pawel, do you mind if Caro and I have a sec?” Derek asked.
    I opened my mouth to protest but before I could get a word out, Pawel shrugged and said, “Sure. See you … later, Caro.”
    I gave him a little wave. “See