Alex as Well Read Online Free PDF

been pretty down.

8
    IN ART METAL I’m drawing a picture of our house. Amina does general wood, so I’m on my own.
    I told you that we should have done general wood, Alex says.
    I have to draw because I haven’t got the right shoes on to bang bits of metal with a hammer. I’m supposed to have steel-capped boots in case I go into a frenzy and metal and hammers fly everywhere.
    The other students are hitting bits of metal with hammers. A few of them stare at me every now and then. Mostly they ignore me.
    You know when you arrive late to a thing, you’ve missed the instructions, and everybody has already started doing whatever they’re doing? They know each other’s names. They’ve already formed little groups. I’ve always felt like that, but this time it’s warranted.
    There’s music playing. Sometimes everyone hits theirhammers in time with the beat. It sounds like Tapdogs.
    The teacher’s name is Susannah. She has long blonde hair that falls in ringlets. She has a nose ring. She doesn’t wear tie-dye exactly, but she wears clothes in layers with beads hanging off them and she smells like sandalwood. Sounds all arty and casual, right? Sounds like she’s got rings on her fingers and bells on her toes and goes tinkling around the classroom sprinkling encouragement like a big nurturing teacher fairy.
    You can imagine that Susannah is going to be all supportive and I am going to blossom under her tutelage. I will make an art-metal cage and find my inner spirit, and open the door to the cage and set my soul free. There will be butterflies, or white doves, or attractive people smiling and blowing bubbles, which will catch on the breeze and float away over some green grassy hillside with unicorns grazing on it.
    The reason we don’t use her surname is because it’s Eastern European, so it’s about ten syllables entirely composed of consonants. She plays music loud because that way we don’t talk and we concentrate on our work instead. Susannah is actually an art-metal dictator.
    At the beginning of class this guy threw his hammer in the air and caught it. Susannah dragged him over to the seat next to me by the ear. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. He has to draw too.
    I am nonchalantly drawing my house and the guy next to me kicks my leg. He has one of those pencil caseswhere you can slip the letters in that spell your name and his says ‘Ty’. That’s it. Two letters. He does a chopping action across his throat.
    ‘What?’ I mime.
    He draws a square on the table and then he rubs it out with his thumb.
    Ty glances furtively around. ‘Is this your house?’ he asks.
    ‘Yeah,’ I answer.
    ‘Can’t you do a different one? Something simple,’ he tells me.
    I look around at other kids banging and crashing with Beyoncé.
    (If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it.)
    I turn the page over and chew on the end of my pencil.
    Susannah jingles up and leans over our desk. She picks up Ty’s drawing and harrumphs. She drops it and picks up mine. She chuckles.
    ‘What?’ I ask.
    ‘You are going to make this,’ she tells me. She outlines how I am going to make an exact replica of our house and then put a hinge on the roof to make it a letterbox. ‘This part will be tricky,’ she says, pointing at the page.
    I shake my fist. ‘ Damn you, turret!’
    Ty laughs. He looks at me and there is genuine appreciation in his face. I think we might be friends, Ty and I. Imagine that.
    I went to see a Sidney Nolan exhibition one time,because…It sounds like I am arty and intellectual, but the truth was it was raining, I needed a slash, the art gallery was right there, and the Sidney Nolan paintings were on the way to the loos. It wasn’t the Ned Kellys, it was just rocks. Canvas after canvas of red rocks, and I was like, ‘meh,’ and then I looked up close at the tiny, little brushstrokes that looked like nothing, but then when I stood back they were rocks. It occurred to me that it would be really hard