by Mira St. Clair
“I’m doing acrylics,” said Meghna. “Because I’m done with freshman art class and I’ll never have to hear Dillman drone about watercolors ever again.”
“Subtlety is key,” I said, mimicking Mr. Dillman’s monotone. “Muted and dilute.”
“Open mouth and shoot,” said Meghna. Her imitation was better than mine. “Maybe I’ll paint an entire canvas in shades of orange. I could call it ‘Dillman’s Heart Attack.’”
I laughed. “Very subtle.”
Meghna took a bottle of orange paint off the shelf. We were in the craft store at the mall, browsing in the art supplies aisle. “Think I’d get in trouble with Ms. Rivera?” she said. “Dillman won’t notice. He’ll just blink and mumble about sloppy technique.”
“Probably,” I said.
“The man needs a good cup of coffee. Maybe then he’d have the energy to open his eyes all the way.” Meghna put the orange paint back on the shelf. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”
“For the project, you mean?” I took a sketchpad from a display rack, changed my mind, and put it back. “I was thinking of doing something with pastels,” I said. “Or maybe just an ink drawing.”
Meghna rolled her eyes. “Wow, a drawing. You’re really pushing your boundaries there, Jess. Just use one of the four thousand in that notebook of yours.”
My hand went to my back pocket, where I kept my pad and pencil. “Those are just sketches. This has to be something good.”
“Yeah,” Meghna said. “This is probably the only time we’ll get to design our own projects. And Rivera is actually worth the effort.”
“What’re you going to paint?” I asked. There was a convex mirror mounted on the ceiling above us. I moved directly underneath it, turning my reflection into a round button face between curving shelves.
“I want to do something with water,” Meghna said. Her reflection in the mirror was tapered like a top-heavy cone. I took out my sketchbook and started trying to draw her jeans and ponytail inside the arc of the mirror. “Not the ocean, though,” she said. “Everybody does the ocean. I want to do clear water.”
“Like a drinking glass?” I tilted my pencil and shaded in her hair.
“More exciting than that. Like the fountain over there.” Meghna pointed out the front of the store into the mall atrium. Between the up and down escalators was a pool the size of a ping-pong table with a single jet mushrooming out of the center. A thin man in red ski pants sat on the edge of the basin.
“Or maybe a different fountain. That one’s kind of boring.” Meghna looked at me. “What are you drawing?” She leaned forward to see my page.
I slapped the sketchbook shut, banging my elbow on a rack of seasonal decorations. A spray of fake maple leaves fell to the floor.
“Wow, full defense mode.” Meghna picked up the leaves and put them back. “You have state secrets in that notebook?”
“Just sketches,” I said.
“You don’t have to hide them,” she said. “I’ve seen some. They’re good.”
I mumbled something. Meghna shrugged and turned back to the paint shelf. “So how about you?” she said. “Know what you’re going to draw?”
I reopened my sketchbook and fiddled with my drawing, adding the scrunchie on Meghna’s wrist and the streaks on the linoleum floor. “I have some ideas,” I said.
Meghna turned to me with her hands on her hips, a bottle of white paint in each fist. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “You’re going to copy the mural.”
“I was thinking about it,” I admitted.
“Oh, come on, Jess.” It felt like Meghna was glaring down at me, even though she was a head shorter. “Everybody’s going to do the mural. Rivera’s probably sick of it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with drawing the mural,” I said. “The mural’s amazing.”
“Yeah, but people copy it for all the wrong reasons. They want a piece of the magic.”
“It’s not like I’m trying to do magic,” I said defensively.
“Good,” Meghna said. “You’re not stupid, then. Can you imagine wasting your one chance on a school project?”
“It’s not like you can control when it happens,” I said.
“Well, maybe you can.” Meghna twirled a paintbrush thoughtfully between her fingers. “Ms. Rivera’s an artist, and she ended up with the mural.”
The mural was the reason the wait list for Ms. Rivera’s class was always full, even though you had to sit through a year of Mr. Dillman to get on it. The upperclassmen in the art department passed the story down to the freshmen in reverent whispers.
Years ago, before any of us were old enough for high school, Ms. Rivera had crammed the janitor’s trolley with cans of paint and parked it in front of the auditorium doors. The school play was over for the year and the ticket window was closed and locked. The cinderblock walls bare of posters.
No one witnessed the next quarter hour. When the janitor put his head around the door, looking for his trolley, Ms. Rivera was standing in the middle of the hallway with her hands slack at her sides and a bewildered expression on her face. Cans and brushes were scattered for twenty feet in every direction. Drying purple paint sealed Ms. Rivera’s shoes to the floor.
But the astonishing thing, the thing that made the janitor stand there speechless until the bell rang, was the mural. The ceiling, the floor, and both walls, from the ticket window to the emergency exit, were utterly transformed into a riot of color, swirls and bold strokes and half-seen images that covered the walls, the tiles, even the hinges of the doors.
Every year during the first week of school, freshmen slow to a stop in the middle of the hallway while the class-change crowd streams past on either side. Their mouths hang open and their eyes follow the spirals and whorls of paint – the blue star-shaped flowers in the ivy that surrounds the drinking fountain, the fireworks exploding across the auditorium doors, the clouds that drift across the floor, the suggestion of green land far beneath them. Some stare long enough to see the human faces that emerge when the sun from the windows strikes the wall. Thousands of people walk over the floor and run their fingers over the walls, but the strokes and detailing don’t faded in the least. It’s never been painted over, either, even though it was technically an act of vandalism. There are always exceptions for a magic.
“I wish I knew how she did it,” I said.
“She doesn’t remember,” Meghna told me. “I asked her once. She got all annoyed and told me she’d painted other things too.”
“I guess she has.” I picked up a sketchbook again and pinched the first page between my thumb and forefinger, testing the thickness of the paper. “All those landscapes on the classroom wall.”
“They’re not very good,” said Meghna dismissively.
“What do you mean?” I asked, a little hotly.
“Well, it’s true,” she said. “They’re well-executed and all that, but they all look the same.”
“She’ll paint something amazing someday,” I said.
“No, she won’t.”
I slammed the sketchbook closed and shoved it to the back of the shelf. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be just once,” I said. “She could paint like that again if something inspired her.”
“That’s not how it works,” Meghna said. “Nobody gets a second time.”
“Well, maybe they haven’t tried hard enough!” I looked down at the floor. “It doesn’t even have to be a magic, you know? It just has to be good. If you work hard and you practice and you pay close attention, you could paint like that every time.”
Meghna was quiet for a minute, turning a paint bottle in her fingers. “So that’s why you want to paint the mural.”
“Sort of,” I said. “I want to know what it felt like. To do—that.”
“Have you ever seen a magic?” Meghna asked.
“No.” I said. “Not besides the mural.”
My dad told me once about his magic. It happened when he was in college. A driver honked at him while he was crossing the street, and all of a sudden the sound turned high and pure, like a harp, or the last note of taps played in an empty graveyard. He still dreams about that sound, my dad said. But the next minute, the driver honked again and he had to get out of the way. That was it—one sound—and nobody heard except him and some girl in a convertible.
“I haven’t seen one either,” Meghna said. She weighed two bottles of paint in her hand. “What do you think? Blue or white?”
“You could get both,” I suggested.
“True. I could do a dual-tone thing. That might be pretty cool, actually.” She looked at me. “Did you find everything?”
“Yeah.” I slid a pocket-sized sketchbook off the shelf. “I’m ready.”
We paid at the register and left the store. A man with trim silver hair was leaning over the second-floor railing in the atrium, holding a cell phone to his ear and gesturing. The thin man sitting on the fountain had not moved. His ski pants were smudged at the knees and the fabric swished as he swung his legs back and forth. As we passed him, he stood up and climbed up on the wall that surrounded the fountain’s pool. That got Meghna’s attention.
“What’s he doing?” she murmured, leaning in close so he wouldn’t hear.
The man began to walk around the rim of the fountain, looking intently at the water jet in the center.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’s homeless.’
“That’s a brand-name jacket,” Meghna disagreed. “At least sixty dollars at the outdoor store.”
“He’s going to notice us staring,” I said uncomfortably.
“Okay, okay.” Meghna started moving again. “Hey, want to go to Capeman’s? They make good crepes.” She pointed to the top of the escalator. The name was stenciled in red and yellow script on a second-floor shopfront.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve got ten dollars left.”
We rode up the escalator behind a woman in stiletto heels whose ankles wobbled so badly when she stepped onto unmoving ground that I thought she was going to fall. Behind her back Meghna caught my eye and grinned.
The crepe place was small, with rubber tiles shaped like bricks and lamps hanging by metal cables from the ceiling. The wall opposite the counter was open on the atrium. There were barstools lined up at a narrow table against the railing. I could see the fountain down below and the thin man standing on its edge.
The cashier was leaning on the counter, scrolling through her phone with one thumb. Her shirt had CAPEMAN’S CREPES embroidered over the breast pocket. When we came in, she stood up straight and slid her phone into her pocket.
“Hi,” she said. “What can I get you?”
“Hi.” Meghna glanced at the menu, which was chalked up on blackboards on the wall behind the counter. “I’ll have the banana split deluxe with chocolate sauce, please.”
“Sure.” The cashier’s blond ponytail fell over her shoulder as she punched it in. “You want a drink?”
Meghna got a pink lemonade, paid, and sat down at a table to wait for her crepe to be done. The cashier switched her gaze to me, and I realized that I knew her. Sam was one of the older kids who sat in the back of my math class. I’d always been a little jealous of her because she had done her magic when she was only three. People peppered her with questions, wanting to know what it was like. She said it was hot like fire, or cold like ice, or both at the same time. She said it felt like you could do anything in the world.
“I’ll just get a crepe with, um, blueberries,” I stuttered. “And whipped cream.”
I wasn’t sure if I should say hello or not, but then she said, “Oh, hey, Jess. How’d you do on the test yesterday?”
I shrugged. “It was okay.”
“I ran out of time on the last problem,” she said. “Couldn’t figure out how to factor that giant equation.”
“Yeah, that one was kind of hard.” I paid for my crepe with my ten-dollar bill. Sam poised her hand over the receipt slot, waiting for the machine to print.
“You’re an art kid, right?” she said. “Did you ever have drawing with Mr. Dillman?”
“Yup,” I said. “Most boring teacher alive.”
“Is he actually alive, though?” Sam said. “I have him this semester. Yesterday he fell asleep right at his desk while we were sketching. A bunch of kids left before the bell and he didn’t even notice.”
The receipt scrolled into her hand and she gave it to me with my change. “Crepes’ll be done in about ten minutes.”
I nodded. Then something behind my left shoulder caught Sam’s eye, and her eyebrows shot up. “What’s going on with that guy?”
I turned around. The thin man on the fountain had flung his hands out wide, like a singer coming onstage for an encore, except that his arms were as taut as wires. I had seen that posture at the circus, on a woman who was hanging from two silk ribbons, all her weight on her arms.
“What’s he gonna do, dive in?” Sam said.
The man’s arms rose a fraction, trembling with effort. Meghna jumped up from her chair.
“Did you see that?” she said. “I swear the fountain got bigger for a second,”
The man raised his arms again and leaned forward, a conductor urging on his orchestra. This time all three of us saw the fountain stretch upward, like it was standing on tiptoe. A woman in a black uniform ran into the atrium, talking urgently into a walkie-talkie.
“No, no, no,” I said under my breath. “Go away. Leave him alone.”
“Excuse me, sir,” the security woman said loudly. “Excuse me, sir. I need you to step down from there.”
The thin man blinked at her. His arms moved slowly down, like a resting butterfly’s wings. “What?” he said.
“I need you to step down from the fountain, sir,” the uniformed woman said. “You’re alarming the other patrons.”
The man seemed not to hear her. His arms trembled, building up tension, and then shot toward the sky in a huge dynamic V. With a roar, the fountain leapt out of its basin, rising as high as the balcony, even higher. The silver-haired man who had been leaning on the railing stumbled backwards in alarm, his phone skittering across the floor. The jet of water collided with the ceiling of the atrium, sending mist flying in all directions. I shook the wet hair out of my face.
“Clear the area!” the woman from security was shouting. “For your own safety, please clear the area!” I saw her holding back a group of shoppers, who were jostling each other and trying to see over her head. One of them lifted a toddler onto his shoulders.
The thin man’s arms relaxed, and the water collapsed back into the pool with a crash. A wave rose over the rim of the pool and broke on the floor tiles.
On our floor, the high-heeled woman was back, trying to get onto the down escalator. A second official from security, a big, balding man with his walkie-talkie in a holster at his belt, was barring her way. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I can’t interfere. This is a magic.”
“A magic!” Meghna breathed. We looked at each other.
“Maybe he’ll change the water into something else,” Sam said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I could use a chocolate fountain in this mall.”
The man on the fountain was swaying forward and back, slowly and hypnotically. The jet of water swelled and receded, responding to his movements like a charmed snake.
“He’s building up to it,” Sam said, watching him keenly.
“Have you seen a magic before?” Meghna asked her.
“I’ve done mine,” Sam told her. “When I was really little.”
“Really? What was it?”
Sam looked smug. My mother said once that it’s a shame Sam’s magic happened early, because it gives her nothing to hope for. Then my mother looked embarrassed and asked me not to repeat that. She is forty-one and her magic hasn’t happened yet. I used to hope I would come home from school one day and find a mural painted on the kitchen wall.
“I did it on a rose bush,” Sam said. “I was walking in the park. Well, I was too little to actually walk much, so my dad was carrying me.”
It occurred to me all of a sudden that Sam probably didn’t remember her magic. I wondered if I had been right to be jealous of her.
“We passed by this bush near the bridge,” she said, “and I held out my hand like I wanted to touch it. So my dad brought me closer, and when I touched the leaves — “
I gasped out loud. Meghna glanced at me and whirled to look at the fountain.
“—it bloomed,” Sam said quickly. “Even though it was March and the snow wasn’t even melted yet. It still blooms in March every year.”
Meghna and I weren’t listening. The fountain’s single jet had split into two streams that twined around each other like stripes on a candy cane. The man in the red ski pants was on the far side, hidden except for his outstretched hands. The sound of rushing water echoed in the foyer, resonating against the girders and glass on the ceiling. Behind the security woman, the group of shoppers had grown into a crowd. They were holding up phones, videotaping, turning around for selfies.
The two jets of water fractured into four, then eight, then more, making thin cylinders that bent and merged in midair. They twisted around each other, rising as high as the top of the escalator in a liquid trellis that foamed and roared like a waterfall.
With a final little jump, like a basketball player making a shot, the water arced over the banisters onto the second-floor concourse. Meghna gasped, but the water came no closer. It was impossible to tell if it was flowing up or down.
The rushing sound stopped, and in the sudden silence I noticed how overwhelming it had been. I felt like a wad of cotton had been pulled out of my midsection, leaving an empty space below my rib cage. The security woman, caught midsentence, said, “—temporary precaution, ladies and gentlemen—” and quickly lowered her voice.
The fountain was changing. Streams of water merged together, thickening and smoothing out, while strange corners appeared elsewhere. The rough white texture of the water was disappearing, as if a carpenter were polishing it away with a miraculous piece of sandpaper. The structure turned as transparent as blown glass and I realized what it was – a spiral staircase, climbing from the center of the fountain up to the second floor. Here and there throughout were fragments of red, reflected from the red ski pants and beanie. I looked at the center of the fountain, into the space between the stairs, and I saw the magic-maker himself.
His hair still stuck out from under his beanie and his arms were held away from his sides, like wings about to beat down. His eyes were wide open. Something about his expression made all the lines of his face seem to lead toward or away from those eyes, as if whatever he saw in the fountain was more important than all the experiences that had grooved the wrinkles into his skin.
I clawed for my sketchbook. That was it—that, there, was what it felt like to do magic. It was all there in his face. It was like when an image strikes your eye and a moment later it is there, complete, in your sketchbook; it was like when you draw and draw and you get one line exactly right, and it feels like you’ve touched the firmament.
A rush of mist exploded up from the fountain and the security woman raced forward. She emerged from behind the fountain half-carrying the thin man, her forearms under his armpits. His pants and the front of his jacket were wet. I realized he had fallen into the fountain.
The woman dragged him to a bench while the crowd swarmed around the transformed fountain, filling the arcing water with colors reflected from their clothes. A small boy escaped his parents and jumped onto the spiral stair, climbing up with hands and feet. A gasp went up. The boy’s father, reaching up to catch him if he fell, rested a foot on the first transparent step. It held his weight.
I took out my pencil and discovered that the point had snapped off in my pocket. “Do you have a pen?” I asked, turning around, but Sam had disappeared into the restaurant kitchen. I snatched a ballpoint from a cup by the cash register and began to draw.
“Look at the colors!” Meghna said, half to herself. “I should’ve bought pink paint . . . and yellow . . .”
I drew the curved rim of a fountain and sketched in the surface of the pool with wavering horizontal lines. I drew the craft store in the background, a sloppy square with a block-letter sign. There was the escalator with the high-heeled woman on it, the second-floor railing, the skylights in the ceiling.
“No, I’m fine,” said the man in the ski pants. The security team was bent over him, offering water and warm jackets. “I was only here to have my watch fixed. I had it in a shopping bag—I don’t know where—has anyone seen it?”
The water on my sketch was a blurry tangle of lines, but that didn’t matter. A face took shape in the middle of the fountain, framed by spray and foam.
“Here are your crepes,” Sam said woodenly.
I moved my sketchbook to make space on the counter. “Thanks,” I said, glancing up, but Sam already had her back to me.
I almost had it: the solid wall of the basin, the intricacy of the water, the figure animating its center. I drew and drew over the outward-angling arms, the raised chin. Two eyes, large and dark, seeing—what? Someday I would know.
Meghna was looking over my shoulder. “What’s that?” she said curiously.
I thumped the pen down on the counter. “That,” I said, “is what I’m going to draw for Ms. Rivera.”
Mira St. Clair
Mira St. Clair recently escaped from English class. She objects to self-reflexive writing, parallelism and the Oxford comma, but doesn’t mind what you end your sentences with. She once jumped off a cliff, and twice jumped off a bridge, although she had a hard time persuading her friends to jump with her. She lives in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, and wastes most of her time.
