Spoon River Middle School: 47

Daria d’Splay

Required note to Mother from Office—found in file

No one saw me in the hall.  No one.  Not between the girls’ room to the art room.  Okay, here’s the story.  Mr. Painter—that’s the art teacher—asked our class if any of us would like to model for the pencil drawing exercise we were going to do.  “Life Studies,” he called it.

Anyway, the models he was referring to were girls, of course, though a couple of guys, trying to be funny (why do guys always think they have to be funny? usually they aren’t), put up their hands, waving them back and forth like birches bending left to right (Robert Frost, sort of, a poem I had to read in English) and grunting Uuuuuh, uuuuh, me! me!  That sort of thing.

Mr. Painter ignored them.  Looked my way.  Mostly because I was the only girl with her hand up.  The others, probably figuring how the guys would react to them if they posed in class, had decided to sit quietly, keep their eyes on the top of the table—the only part of their bodies they were going to put on any table in the art room, that’s for sure.

“Why, thank you, Daria,” he said.  He sounded so grateful I should have asked for money.

And I said, “Just let me go to the girls’ room and, you know, get ready?”

“Of course,” he said.  And I headed out to the girls’ room—which is right next to the art room.  It’s not like it’s a mile away or anything.  As I walked out of the room, I could hear him giving instructions to the class, and I could hear a few of the grosser guys saying stuff—softly, softly—like “Get it ready for us, Daria!”  and “I’m going to have to use all my imagination on her body!”  Ha, ha.

In the girls’ room, I got ready, looked at myself one last time in the mirror.  I walked right out into the hall (remember, though, it’s right next to the art room), right into the class, where there was at first silence, then wild cries and clapping from the boys, then screams, one of them from Mr. Painter, who yelled at me to go put my clothes back on and get down to the Office.

Which is where I am right now, writing this, all my clothes back on.  I can’t understand why the human body—especially a nice naked one like mine—can make people so crazy.