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weeks she had known him, and paradoxically shed much of the hard defensive
shell that made him appear so much older than he was. There was a boy in his
eyes now a wary boy, to be sure, ready instantly to snap back into his shell,
but still a person who had experienced the first faint glimmerings of hope and
who might, given time, come to believe in it. That this change had taken place
despite the trauma of the alembic was eloquent testimony to his strength of
spirit and the incomprehensible workings of the human mind. It was even
possible, she had to acknowledge, that the change had been worked in part
precisely because of the trauma.
Whatever the cause, and whatever the long-term effects on the boy, Ana was
pleased to find that in recent days, a shift had taken place in her own
perception of the boy as well. A month ago she would have been hard put to sit
with her arm brushing casually against his, their faces eighteen inches apart,
talking about Hemingway and drawing; the electricity of his taut personality
would have left her as dry-mouthed and sweating as a teenager. On the other
hand, it could simply be that familiarity had bred relaxation.
And she was relaxed with him now. She was still intrigued by him, amused and
impressed and yes secretly in love with him, but her libido or hormones or
whatever it was seemed to have rolled over and gone back to sleep, a condition
for which she was truly grateful.
"How did you do this?" he asked, pointing to a drawing she had made of a
tumble of rocks in the bright sun, a shape defined by its shadows.
"That's called negative space," she told him. "You use your pencil to draw
around the object, treating the thing itself as minimally as you can without
making it just a white blob, but working up the background and the shadows.
You have to see it with your eyes out of focus, if that makes sense."
He nodded, cocking his head at the drawing before turning the page.
Ana tensed slightly as he approached the section where she had first written
about him. One's own name had a way of leaping off the page to catch the eye,
and she would rather he not read even the sanitized version of her reaction to
him. But there was not a drawing on that particular page, and he turned past
it, safely now into school and Steven territory.
When he had reached the end (a small horned lizard she had seen sunning
itself the other morning) he handed it back to her.
"You don't have any drawings of people in there."
"No. People's faces are too subtle for me. Lizards are about the closest I
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come, and even those might not be recognizable to a herpetologist."
"The cat was good."
"Anyone can draw a cat."
"That's true," he admitted. He shifted in his seat, and Ana edged aside to
give him a bit more room, under the guise of leaning forward to check on
Benjamin. She sat back into the edge of her seat, and then saw that Jason was
holding out something to her between the thumb and finger of his right hand.
It was a very small sketchbook, about three inches by five, the wire coil of
its binding bent and flattened, the green cardboard cover cracked and limp
with long use. She took the artifact, opened it with the edge of a fingernail,
then put it down on her lap and resumed her reading glasses, feeling around
for the light button.
The drawings were necessarily tiny, the details often smudged by the
treatment the book had withstood and by the graphite on one page rubbing off
onto the facing one. Densely worked, the subjects varied from a figure out of
some video game (horns, huge grimace, and exaggerated muscles) to a sleeping
Dulcie who looked little more than a baby.
After a few pages she looked up. "Are you sure you want me to see these?"
"Yeah. I do."
She went through the book from cover to cover, seeing images of the Change
compound worked into pages already containing drawings of an earlier time: A
coiled rattlesnake had been fit into a blank corner next to the ear of a
seated teddy bear, a spotted goat Ana recognized from an unsuccessful time in
the milking barn appeared to be walking toward a futuristic airship belching
flames from its engines.
She closed it and gave it back to Jason, who shifted again and made the small
book disappear into an inner pocket of his jacket.
"I apologize," she said.
"What for?"
Teachers get into the bad habit of teaching all the time. You don't need to
be told about making a personal space with your drawing. Sorry."
"That's okay." He squirmed again with embarrassment.
"And you draw mostly from memory."
"Yeah. You can tell?"
"In drawings this size it's easier to hide the fuzzy detail, but mostly it's
that the outside objects like the goat and those dogs are more abstract than
the things from your room or Dulcie. You're remembering how you saw them, not
recording how they look. They're very beautiful. Some of them are very fine
drawings. You should have some training."
He did not answer, and she bent forward to look into his face, which was
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