The Sketchbook Girl
Sunday mornings in Stockton were quieter than they
had any right to be.
The city always seemed to hold its breath before the
week began again — before the harsh buzz of alarm clocks
and the judgment of teachers and the slow, heavy crawl
toward senior year, which sat on the horizon now like a
train you could see coming but couldn't do anything useful
about. The streets were emptier than on Saturday. The heat
was already there but hadn't committed yet. The birds were
louder than usual, as if they understood they had more
audience.
The mower was still in the backyard from the night
before. I had done the lawn, technically, hitting the grass atexactly six o'clock as promised, my mother watching from
the kitchen window with her arms folded and nodding once
— a nod that communicated the specific satisfaction of
someone whose confidence in you had been validated.
But even as the mower chewed through the dry grass,
my mind hadn't been on the yard. It had been on the
willows. On a charcoal-smudged sketchbook. On the way
Teppie Stewart had appeared out of the silver-green curtain
of the Delta like something the afternoon had decided to
include without asking anyone.
I told myself I wasn't going to think about her. That
was the plan: don't replay the moment, don't turn it into
something bigger than it was, don't put it in the Walkman
and listen to it on repeat.
But the problem with having a Walkman is that your
life always comes with a soundtrack. And every time the
opening guitar of "Every Breath You Take" surfaced in my
head — which was often, which was the problem — the
river came back with it. The sun-warmed rock. The orange
foam earpiece tucked under her hair. The smell of mud andriver water and the particular clean smell of a summer
afternoon that has not yet asked anything of you.
Girls like that don't just show up for the music.
By noon the heat had returned with its usual Stockton
conviction. I rode my bike down Pacific Avenue toward the
strip mall where kids spent their Sundays pretending they
weren't counting down the days until school started —
buying sodas they didn't need, reading comic books they
might not buy, existing in the specific suspended animation
of a Sunday that hasn't decided what it wants to be yet.
I bought a bottle of Orange Crush from the liquor store
that also sold comic books and beef jerky, the glass cold
against my palm in the way that glass bottles are cold in a
way plastic never quite manages. I leaned my bike against
the wall and stood in the shade of the awning and felt the
afternoon be what it was.
That's when I saw her.
Teppie was sitting on the curb near the laundromat.Barefoot, knees drawn up to her chest, sketchbook
balanced across her thighs with the easy security of
something that had always been there. Her hair was pulled
up in a loose, messy knot, a few strands falling down
around her face in the particular way of hair that has been
put up without a mirror and is better for it. She wasn't
trying to look like anything in particular, which is — I
would come to understand — the most specific way of
looking like exactly what you are. Her pencil was moving
with a steady scritch-scritch-scritch against the paper. She
drew with her whole hand, not just her fingers, the motion
coming from the wrist with the confidence of someone who
has been doing this long enough that the gesture is as
natural as handwriting.
She didn't look up when I stopped in front of her.
I almost turned around. I could hear Jimmy's voice
somewhere at the back of my head, a flat warning: don't be
stupid. My feet moved anyway, pulled by a magnet I didn't
quite understand and had not signed any paperwork to
receive.
"Hey," I said.Teppie didn't look up. "Hey, baloney."
The nickname from her mouth landed somewhere
unexpected. Nobody outside the guys called me that — not
yet, not in that context. It felt different in her voice. Less
like a prank. More like a decision.
"How do you —
"
"I have ears," she said, her pencil never slowing. "And
your friends aren't exactly subtle."
"That's..." I searched for the word. "Fair."
I stood there for a moment in the socially ambiguous
position of someone who has approached a person and not
yet established a reason for doing so. The laundromat
behind her exhaled a gust of warm, soap-scented air from a
dryer vent. The Sunday afternoon traffic moved past on the
street with its particular Sunday indifference.
"What are you drawing?" I asked.
"Something," she said."That's vague."
"That's art."
I smiled before I decided to. She finally glanced up
then — eyes sharp and assessing, but not unfriendly. The
eyes of someone who has been noticing things longer than
you've been presenting them.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," she said.
"That's kind of my brand."
Teppie nodded as if this confirmed a theory she had
already worked out.
"Jimmy's mad at you."
She said it with the clean directness of a person who
has decided that indirection is not worth the trouble. No
preamble. No softening.The bluntness of it hit like cold water. My throat
tightened. "He's not mad."
Teppie's eyebrow lifted precisely one centimeter.
I sighed. "Okay. He's mad."
"He's mad at me," she corrected, not unkindly.
I hesitated, then decided on the truth the way you
decide on the truth when the lie is obviously worse. "He's
mad at... whatever this is."
Teppie's pencil finally paused. She looked at the
phrase hanging in the air between us.
"Whatever this is," she repeated softly, testing the
weight of it like a stone in her hand.
"I didn't mean —
"
"No," she said. "It's fine. You boys have a whole little
kingdom, don't you?""A kingdom?"
"The Bean," she said, ticking them off. "The river. The
rules. The idea that nothing changes as long as you all
agree it doesn't."
I stared at her. She was too good at this — at seeing
the gears behind the machine, at reading the schematic of
something that was supposed to look like just a bunch of
guys hanging out.
"I didn't know you thought about stuff like that," I said.
Teppie smiled faintly. "I think about everything. That's
sort of the curse."
She went back to drawing. I shifted my weight from
foot to foot, aware that I was standing in front of a
laundromat on a Sunday afternoon holding a bottle of
Orange Crush and conducting what might charitably be
described as a conversation.
"Why were you there yesterday?" I asked. "At the
river."The silence stretched long enough that I thought she
had decided not to answer. The pencil moved. The dryer
exhaled. A car with the bass turned up too high passed
slowly on the street.
Then: "Because I heard the music."
"You really heard it? From three houses down?"
She looked up. "I heard you," she corrected. "The
music is just how you hide."
That landed somewhere deeper than I was prepared
for. I stared at her. I felt the specific, unsettling exposure of
being seen accurately by someone you've only just met.
"I wasn't hiding," I said. The lie was transparent even
to me.
Teppie tilted her head. "Baloney," she said, gently.
"You recorded a song off the radio like it was a hostage
negotiation. You carry a soundtrack around with youbecause it makes the world feel safer. There is nothing
wrong with that. But it is, technically, hiding."
I did not know what to do with that level of honesty at
eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning. So I did what I
always did: I changed the subject.
"What are you drawing?"
Teppie hesitated for a fraction of a second — just
enough to be noticed, not long enough to be explained —
and then she angled the sketchbook.
It was the river.
Not the whole river — just the willows, the rock, and
the bend in the bank where the afternoon light hit the water
and turned it briefly into something that looked like it had
been planned. And on the rock, five figures: Dougie with
his arms raised above his head in an attitude of absolute
triumph, Rick half-laughing with his hands in his pockets,
Jimmy standing slightly apart with his arms crossed in a
posture I recognized immediately as his guarded-but-
watching pose. And me.Sitting beside me was a fifth figure. Her. The
headphone wire drawn between us like a single, connected
thread. Thin as a line, strong as a fact.
"You drew that already?" I said. My voice came out
slightly different than I'd intended. I looked at it for longer
than I should have. Long enough to feel the full weight of
what it meant that she had drawn it already. That she had
seen this specific thing — the wire, the connection, the us-
ness of two people sharing a headphone — and had
committed it to paper before the afternoon was even over.
"Some things stick," she said, with the simplicity of
someone stating a weather fact.
I looked at the page for a moment longer. Then I said,
quietly, "Jimmy thinks you want something."
Teppie's eyes flicked up. Steady. Unhurried. "And do
you?" she asked.
My mouth went dry. "I don't know," I admitted.Teppie nodded slowly, as if this was the right answer.
"Good," she said.
"Good?"
"If you already knew," she said, closing the sketchbook
with a soft, deliberate thump, "it wouldn't be summer
anymore."
That sentence sat between us like a lit match. I stared
at her. She stood up, sliding the sketchbook under her arm,
sliding her feet into her shoes in a single fluid motion.
"Come with me," she said.
My heart did the thing again. "Where?"
Teppie smiled. "Somewhere with no rules."
I stood there with the weight of it all pressing on me
from several directions simultaneously: Jimmy's warning,
the van, the river, my mother's six o'clock deadline, the
whole architecture of the summer we had built and the factthat this girl was standing in front of me offering a door out
of it.
Then she turned and started walking, steady and
unhurried, as if she had already decided I would follow.
I took one step. Then another.
Behind us, the last Sunday of the last summer kept
burning down, slow and golden and irreversible.
I followed her. Of course I followed her. I would
follow her three more times before the summer was over,
each time a little further from the river and a little further
from everything the kingdom meant. I was not being
disloyal. I was being seventeen. But those two things can
look identical from certain angles, and Jimmy was
watching from exactly that angle. I wish I had understood
that then. I wish I had found a way to say: I'm not leaving.
I'm just also going here. But I didn't have the vocabulary.
None of us did. We were still learning how to want two
things at once.