Zero by Tom Leveen Page A

for that one guy.
    Who I’ll be seeing tomorrow night
. Class goes by faster after that, and I’m the first one out the door when Dr. Salinger lets us go. Taking this class was a bad idea, I’m sure of it. Better to resign myself to living in Phoenix the rest of my life.
    I spend Tuesday trying (uselessly) to duplicate the gestural drawing Dr. Salinger showed us yesterday. No luck. But I have to draw or paint something, and sort of wander around my room looking for inspiration. When my gaze hits the ceiling, I know exactly what to do. It’s destroying, not creating, but then again, maybe this’ll help free the muse.
    We don’t have anything like house paint, so I have to use my white acrylic to cover up the drawing of Jenn’s face on my ceiling. It’s not her face, exactly; just a combination of circles, triangles, and lines that probably wouldn’t make any sense to anyone but me. I never even told her it was her face after I did it.
    But even when the bristles are only an inch away from the drawing, I can’t quite make myself cover it up.
    “Shit,” I whisper.
    I step carefully off my bed and sit on the edge, holding the brush between my fists. After a moment, it starts to tremble, because my hands start shaking.
    Oh, hell, here it comes. I’ve been successful thus far atnot remembering graduation, not
really
. Even in the parking lot of DC a few days ago, I was able to reroute my mind, get rid of the cubist rendering of Jenn’s house. This time, it’s gonna be full-color live action, start to finish. I try to roll with the memory, get it over with….
    After graduation, I drove us back to Jenn’s house. Her parents were gone, as usual; both of them are political lobbyists, her dad for the NRA and her mom for a car manufacturer. Jenn was raised by a series of nannies and au pairs until sophomore year, when her folks pretty much left her to her own devices. They bought her a car, handed her a Visa, told her to keep her grades decent … and that was about it. She didn’t even decide on a school or anything last year, and they didn’t seem to care.
    The Haights’ house is kept in pristine condition for parties and stuff, which also means they have a liquor collection that puts bars like The Graveyard and DC to shame.
    “We should celebrate!” Jenn said when we got inside. “Let’s have our own party, huh?”
    “Why not?” I said. It sounded fun. High school was at long last over and done with, I was still bent about the SAIC rejection letter, and Jenn hadn’t secured herself a guy for the night. But I felt like something was off, like those comics in the paper where you find six differences between the panels, and I was in the wrong one. She’d been invited to a party, while I’d figured I’d spend the rest of the night at home as usual. I had no idea why she hadn’t gone, and I never asked.
    I was just happy she chose me, I guess.
    Jenn cooked up this amazing chicken dinner for us, throwing around French words like she spoke it as her firstlanguage. After dinner, we moved on to piña coladas. “What’s in it?” I asked. “Pineapple and lada,” Jenn said. “Lotta alcohol!” After the first one, I don’t know what else we drank.
    We sat on the floor of her living room, watching cheesy romantic comedies, which I hate. Bitched about boys. Made fun of our former teachers. Laughed our asses off. The usual.
    Sometime later, I was puking her awesome dinner out in a downstairs bathroom. So much for being my father’s child, right? I rinsed my mouth with mouthwash, and Jenn got me upstairs to her room and set me down on her bed. I felt like my drawing mannequin, joints and body made of wood, useless and poseable, as Jenn got most of my clothes off and pulled an oversized T-shirt over me; I’d gotten puke on my own shirt downstairs. I collapsed against the mattress, and Jenn crawled in beside me.
    “This was dumb,” I remember moaning as my eyes swam around uncontrollably in their sockets. It