All-American Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

is this pear. This is a pear from your imagination. It is what you know to be a pear—a perfect pear—but it is not any of the pears you actually saw.”
    I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about, but Gertie and Lynn and John and Jeffrey and David knew, apparently. They were all nodding.
    â€œDon’t you see, Sam?” Susan Boone picked up my drawing pad and walked over to me. She pointed at the grapes I had drawn. “You’ve drawn some beautiful grapes. But they aren’t the grapes on the table. The grapes on the table aren’t so perfectly oblong, and they aren’t all the same size, either. What you’ve drawn here is your idea of how grapes should look, not the grapes that are actually in front of us.”
    I blinked down at the drawing pad. I didn’t get it. I really didn’t. I mean, I guess I sort of understood what she was saying, but I didn’t see what the big deal was. My grapes looked a lot better than anybody else’s grapes. Wasn’t that a good thing?
    The worst part of it was, I could feel everybody looking at me sympathetically. My face started getting hot. That is the thing about being a redhead, of course. You go around blushing something like ninety-seven percent of the time. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to hide it.
    â€œDraw what you see ,” Susan Boone said, not in an unkind way. “Not what you know, Sam.”
    And then Theresa, panting from her climb up the stairs, came in, causing Joe to start shrieking “Hello Joe! Hello Joe!” all over again.
    And it was time to go. I thought I would collapse with relief.
    â€œI’ll see you on Thursday,” Susan Boone called cheerfully to me as I put on my coat.
    I smiled back at her, but of course I was thinking, Over my dead body will you see me on Thursday.
    I didn’t know then, of course, how right I was. Well, in a way.

4
    When I told Jack about it—what had happened at the Susan Boone Art Studio, I mean—he just laughed.
    Laughed! Like it was funny!
    I was kind of hurt by this, but I guess it was kind of funny. In a way.
    â€œSam,” he said, shaking his head so that the silver ankh he wears in one ear caught the light. “You can’t let the establishment win. You’ve got to fight against the system.”
    Which is easy for Jack to say. Jack is six foot four and weighs over two hundred pounds. He was assiduously courted by our school football coach after the team’s best linebacker moved to Dubai.
    But Jack wouldn’t have any part of Coach Donnelly’s scheme to dominate our school district’s sectionals. Jack doesn’t believe in organized sports, but not because, like me, he is resentful of their draining valuable funds away from the arts. No, Jack is convinced that sports, like the Lottery, only serve to lull the proletariat into a false sense of hope that he might one day rise above his Bud-swilling, pickup truck–driving peers.
    It is very easy for a guy like Jack to fight against the system.
    I, on the other hand, am only five foot two and do not know what I weigh, since Mom threw out the scale after seeing a news story on the prevalence of anorexia in today’s teenage girls. Plus I have never been able to climb the rope in PE, having inherited my father’s complete lack of upper body strength.
    When I mentioned this, however, Jack started laughing even harder, which I thought was, you know, kind of rude. For a man who is supposed to be my soul mate, and all. Even if he maybe doesn’t know it yet.
    â€œSam,” he said. “I’m not talking about physically fighting the system. You’ve got to be more subtle than that.”
    He was sitting at the kitchen table, polishing off a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-covered doughnuts Theresa had put out for us as an after-school snack. Entenmann’s is not what we normally get as after-school snack fare. My mom