Absolutely Almost(29)
Harriet did not start laughing. She did not seem to think that zombies were very funny.
“I’m not cleaning that up,” she told me. And then she stomped out of the bathroom and hollered at Calista if she knew where my parents kept the aspirin, and then she spent the next hour lying on the couch with a cool washcloth over her eyes while Calista and I scrubbed the tub clean.
But anyway, the zombie costume turned out pretty great.
a fresh piece
of paper.
When we finished with my homework on Wednesday, Calista said she wanted to do some drawing.
“What kind of drawing?” I asked.
“How about people?” she said. “Cartoons, maybe, like in Captain Underpants.”
“Can we draw superheroes?” I asked. “I want to make my own superhero.” I knew exactly the one I wanted to do.
“Sure,” Calista said, so we got out the markers and paper.
Calista’s superhero looked amazing. It was a girl superhero, and Calista named her Art Girl. She had curly hair and a paintbrush in one hand and one of those wooden things artist people put their thumbs through that has all the colors of paint on it. Also, she had a cape.
Calista said superheroes always had capes.
Calista sure was good at drawing. She was using the exact same markers as me, but somehow when she drew with them, her drawings looked a million times better than mine. My superhero was supposed to be Donut Man, the best superhero anybody ever invented. But he just looked like a blobby stick.
“What are you doing?” Calista asked when she looked over at me.
I had my head down on the table, close to her hand so I could watch while she drew, and my right hand was up in the air, gripped tight around the marker. “I’m trying to see if I’m holding it wrong,” I said, but then I sat up, because all of a sudden I felt silly. “How come I can’t draw as good as you?”
“Albie.” Calista set down her marker and looked over at my paper. “Yours is good!”
It was not good. “That’s what teachers say when they don’t want to hurt your feelings,” I told Calista. Then I grumped, crossing my hands over my chest. I was feeling particularly grumpy.
Calista glanced at me sideways. Then she leaned in close to look at my drawing a little harder. “All right,” she said after a while. “It’s awful.”
At first that made me mad, because that was not the thing a not-a-babysitter was supposed to say, especially a nice one. But when I saw the look on her face, a scrunched-up half smile, I couldn’t help but laugh. Because Calista was telling the truth, and I knew it—my Donut Man drawing was awful.
“It’s horrible!” I said, still laughing.
“Wretched!” Calista added.
“Gross!”
“Putrid!”
“Terrible!”
“An abomination!”
I shook my head. “I guess I’ll never be an artist like you,” I said.
Calista thought about that. “Oh, I don’t know that that’s true,” she said. “I’ve had a lot more practice that you have. I could teach you a couple tricks, if you want.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
So Calista took out a fresh piece of paper and gave me a new marker, one where the tip wasn’t all mushed-up used. “We’ll start easy,” she said. And she drew one line, straight down the paper. She told me to draw one just like it, right beside it. So I did. I copied her like that, one little step after another, and when we were done and we pulled our hands from the paper, wouldn’t you know it—Calista had shown me how to draw a whole person. Head, legs, feet, everything. It wasn’t a superhero yet, just a person. Actually it was a little bit like a stick figure, like in hangman, but with more details. Then Calista showed me how to make changes, whatever I wanted, like giving the man muscles or a fat belly, or bending his arms or making him run, or anything. By dinnertime we had tons of people, all different kinds, crammed all up and down and sideways across the paper. I’d even drawn a better version of Donut Man.