Page 52 of The Big Easy & Other Lies
“How’s your capstone coming?” I asked, ready to be done talking about me.
“Awesome.” He shifted. “I know where I want to go. If I didn’t have so many AP English writing prompts every week, I could get there a lot faster.”
“Drop AP,” I said. “Switch to one of the English electives.”
“I can’t. My dad thinks it looks better on my transcript. Besides, I’ll get laughed out of college if I’m the only English major who didn’t take AP.”
“You’re going to major in English? I would have guessed music or something.”
“Not in his world. In that world, his only son needs a better lead-in to law school. And since I flat out won’t do pre-law, I guess it’s going to be English.”
I stared at him. “You’re going to be a lawyer?”
“That’s the plan until I grow some cojones and tell him to shove it. Which may never happen,” he admitted. “I can take the heat from my dad, but I hate stressing out my mom, and a fight that big would about kill her.”
“Oh.” I guess he did understand complicated.
“Sorry. Boring rich kid sob story. Back to Urban Renewal.”
I let him change the subject, understanding the need to leave parts of his life unexamined.
“It’s going to be insanely labor-intensive to find everything I need.” I propped my chin on my hand. “I wish I would have decided to be interested in visual arts. Maybe it’s not too late to switch to multimedia collages or something. I could find trash and glue it to old plywood and make up stuff about how it’s a comment on society.”
“Brilliant,” he said. “No one can argue with art or they risk looking like they don’t get it.”
“Seriously,” I said. “Everyone feels free to hate on fashion, but no one will say a word about a painting, especially if it doesn’t look like anything.”
He nodded. “Of course not. Those are the ones that are really good. Only a hack paints stuff that looks like other stuff.”
I could feel the giggles from earlier in the evening coming on again. “I could hot glue a bunch of Coke bottles together into a circle and call it the crown of capitalism.”
“How about Lucky Dog wrappers?” he asked. “Can you make something happen with those?” He was referring to the ubiquitous Lucky Dog wiener carts that dotted the city with their disgusting-yet-addictive hot dogs wrapped in waxy paper.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll origami those suckers into necklaces and pass them out to the rich ladies on the jury who will have to wear them to support student art.”
“But what does itmean?” he asked.
I pretended to think. “You know we’re the most unhealthy city in the US? I’ll make the necklaces huge to symbolize that our eating habits are weighing us down.”
“Even better than the collage idea,” he said, grinning.
“See, I can’t get away from fashion design.”
He stared into space for a minute, then his eyes snapped back to me. “I’m imagining it. You should work it into your line. It’ll be awesome.”
“Save your Coke tops for me. It may be the only thing I get designed.”
“You said your aunt has a ton of stuff, right?”
“Yeah. There are literally hundreds of yards of material lying around the house, and she won’t let me touch any of it.”
His eyebrows drew together. “What’s she doing with it that she can’t give some to you?”
I hesitated. No way was I going to reveal how creepy my living situation was, so I sorted through the information I could safely share. “My great-grandfather owned a textile business. Delphine inherited it, but she sold it off a long time ago.” When Remy was killed, actually, and there was no one to take over. “She kept a lot of the fabric remnants that the new owners didn’t want. They sit in these huge stacks and rot. Every single yard is a security blanket for her even though she hasn’t looked at it since she brought it home. She just needs to know it’s there.”
“Weird,” he said.
And he didn’t know the half of it. Not even a tenth of the crazy. “Yeah. Weird.”
