Empire Falls

wondered if one of them might be the next Charlene, the next Janine. A couple were almost pretty if you imagined them without the big hair and the extra pounds that already, in their early twenties, were weighing them down. No, maybe Janine’s days, like Charlene’s, were numbered, but at least there didn’t seem to be much competition on the immediate horizon, which meant that for a while she’d have the field, such as it was, to herself.
    Janine was smiling when the door to the kitchen swung open and her daughter appeared, announcing that she was ready to go home.
    Walt, apparently forgetting there was a friendly hand in his front trouser pocket, damn near leapt off his stool, twisting Janine’s wrist in the process. “There she is,” he cried, ignoring his fiancée’s distress. “There’s our little beauty.”

CHAPTER 4
    I N ART CLASS , the five long, rectangular tables are all color-coded, seven or eight students at each, and Tick has been assigned to Blue. Mrs. Roderigue, the art teacher, is a large woman with a massive shelf of a bosom, of which she appears to have no knowledge. When she enters the classroom and one of the boys says, all too audibly, “Bah-zoooom!,” she never seems to connect her own appearance with this too predictable utterance. Though Mrs. Roderigue is about Tick’s father’s age, she seems older, perhaps because she wears her hair in a style that Tick associates only with elderly women.
    As a teacher, what Mrs. Roderigue prides herself most on is her organization. “There are forty of you,” she told the class after they were all seated that first day, “and so it will be imperative that we get organized and stay organized.” Normally classes are not allowed to grow so large, but an exception is made for art—unspoken acknowledgment, Tick suspects, that nobody considers art to be a real course, like history or math. Mrs. Roderigue isn’t even full-time, teaching afternoons at the high school, mornings at the middle school, her teaching strategies identical regardless of her audience.
    For Tick, the interesting thing about Mrs. Roderigue’s color coding is that the tables themselves are all steel gray, so the only way to differentiate Blue from Red that first day was to read the signs— BLUE, GREEN, RED, YELLOW and BROWN , carefully lettered in black ink—taped to each. On the second day all the signs came down and were slipped into plastic baggies before they could be dirtied or wrinkled. Art, she told her students, was the study and practice of order. There was no such thing as Sloppy Art. Artists, she claimed, first had to know where they were, and in Mrs. Roderigue’s class the first thing you learned was whether you were Blue or Green and so forth. If you were Blue, you were supposed to remember where Blue was, though why Blue was Blue, and not, for instance, a number, like “one” or “two,” remained a mystery.
    Nonetheless, at the Blue table, Tick sits next to Candace Burke, who favors trendy, girlie clothes—baggy jeans, tight shirts, pink Adidas shoes. Also, white eye shadow and lots of mascara. Today she’s wearing her unicorn T-shirt. Either she’s got two of these or she washes the one right after she’s worn it. She’d worn it the first day of school and now, Thursday, she’s wearing it again. “Oh-my-God-oh-my-God!” she exclaims, looking at Tick’s painting. “You’re almost done. I haven’t even started. Help me, okay? What’s my most vivid dream?”
    “I don’t know any of your dreams,” Tick points out.
    Candace shrugs, as if to suggest that that makes two of them, but this problem occupies her for no more than a split second. “So how come you’re in here with the morons?” is what she’d really like to know. Though Candace has asked this every day, and been answered too, she either keeps forgetting or else is suspicious of the answers she’s been given. Her persistence reminds Tick of a movie she saw once in which a man was interrogated for hours, asked all sorts of things, but one question, in particular, over and over. His answer was always the same, but his questioners must have suspected something, because they kept coming back to that one question. Finally, they killed him—out of frustration, apparently. You never found out whether the man was telling the truth or not.
    Candace is openly using an Exacto knife she stole during the first day of class, carving the name of her boyfriend, Bobby, into the back of the