Bridge of Sighs

“normal” about their efforts that I envied. After all, what kind of thirteen-year-old boy drew a picture of his family’s corner market? I remembered Karen Cirillo’s remark—“You’re
weird,
Lou. You know that?”—and felt the full force of her judgment. Worse, I’d made our store look exhausted and drab. It was as if, without meaning to, I’d managed to document why more people didn’t shop there. Suddenly grateful it hadn’t won, I wanted desperately to remove the evidence from public view. The OTHER bin wasn’t going to attract a lot of attention, but even so I was about to fold up the drawing and put it in my pocket when a voice at my elbow said, “It’s good.”
    I hadn’t heard her come in but immediately recognized the speaker as Sarah Berg, the girl who’d been sitting with Gabriel Mock the Third at the movie. In the weeks that followed the incident I’d seen her in the corridors at school, always alone and frightened looking, as she was now. The elbow to the nose she’d taken in the scuffle had resulted in two black eyes, and now, over a month later, one cheekbone was still a faint, greenish yellow.
    “You should trust your lines, though,” she said, taking my drawing from me and studying it critically. Perhaps because I didn’t understand what she meant by “trust your lines,” the remark irritated me, and I wished I’d been quicker about hiding the drawing. “You shade everything. It’s as if you’re afraid of the white.”
    Her index finger traveled over the surface without quite touching the paper, pausing here and there so I could see what she meant. And it was true. I
had
shaded everything right out to the edges, and this was responsible for what I’d earlier identified as the drawing’s smudginess. Strange, too, because when I’d been working on it, the subtle variations of the shadings, rendered so carefully with the side of my pencil, were what I’d been most proud of. What I’d thought of as the drawing’s principal strength I now saw was its primary weakness. I’d been blaming myself for not working on it harder, for somehow betraying Ikey’s, but I suddenly realized another hour or two or four would only have made it worse. That this should be true was disconcerting. Working hard at something, I’d learned in school, usually paid dividends.
    “It’s not cheating to leave some white,” Sarah Berg explained. “It shows where the light’s coming from. Some drawings can be mostly white, if the lines are good.”
    “It’s my dad’s store,” I said, apropos of nothing.
    “Ikey Lubin’s,” she said. “I recognized it.”
    Of course that’s what the sign above the door said, so…
    “I mean I
would
have recognized it, even without the sign,” she said, flushing bright red. “That was stupid.
I’m
stupid.”
    “No,” I said urgently, surprising myself. “It’s the drawing that’s dumb.”
    “The judge gave it two checks,” she said, pointing out two pencil markings in the upper-right-hand corner that I hadn’t noticed.
    “Is that good?”
    She nodded. “Three checks is highest. Most have just one.”
    We went through the trough again, and she was right. The majority had just one check. Four or five, like my drawing of Ikey’s, had two. I couldn’t find any with three. “I guess our class isn’t very talented,” I said, annoyed that the judges should’ve reached so unflattering a conclusion.
    “Two of the winners got three checks,” she said, indicating the cork wall across the room. “Third place and honorable mention got two checks, which means yours was as good as those…” That would have cheered me up if she hadn’t added, as if compelled by scrupulous honesty, “Almost.”
    It occurred to me that she had a lot of knowledge. “Did you…?”
    She shrugged apologetically. “It’s the only thing I’m any good at,” she assured me, lest I peg her for a braggart. After an awkward pause she said, “I could show you mine.”
    “Sure,” I said, and to my astonishment she took my hand and led me across the room, as if I might not be able to find her drawing otherwise. Her hand was slender and warm, and it fit into my own like it belonged there. I remembered how Jerzy had slid his index finger into the waistband of Karen’s slacks, how thrilling that gesture had been to observe and interpret. This was less suggestive of sex, but it was also better in some way I couldn’t define, and I could feel myself flush with a