Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

gorgeous, honey-colored mouth? I'll need to have the rest of this stuff at my disposal.
    In the end, I manage to shove the broken laptop into the garbage, along with the old bagel, the ugliest ofthe jewelry boxes and two books of paper dolls where the dolls are missing so there's no one to put the clothes on. That's it.
    I can't throw anything else out.
    Ma will be furious. She'll say I'm mired in junk, we need a new start, there won't be anywhere to keep all this stuff in the new place, what am I hanging on to it for anyhow, the movers cost money, don't I know that, and they charge by the hour?
    I can't think about it. My room is a catastrophe, now that I've taken nearly everything off the shelves. I know I should straighten it up, but I somehow feel comforted by all the piles of stuff surrounding me. Like these objects are loyal, they're mine, they're not going away. They want me to keep them and love them.
    So I go to sleep with the baby dolls all on the bed, around me.

m onday in first-period drawing, Kensington sticks student art on the corkboard with pushpins so she can critique it publicly. It's an exercise in humiliation, and we have to go through it several times a week. Today, we're discussing last week's assignment to “Draw Something You Love,” which is part of our general focus this term on portraiture and drawing the human body, only Kensington is also trying to get us to draw
feelings
and
character
, so now and then we have to do a personal drawing like this, which is supposed to help us invest our portraits with drama and pathos. I handed mine in late, because I just did it on Sunday afternoon and gave it to her this morning, along with my statue drawings.
    “There's a lot of emotion here,” says Kensington, starting with Katya's picture. Kensington is dressed all in black, with bleached blond hair and heavy black glasses.
    Katya drew baby Ella, which is sweet, but obvious. Loving your little sister. Ella looks lopsided. She's sleeping in her parents' big bed, dwarfed by the pillows and a floral duvet cover. The fabric looks stiff.
    “You draw from the heart,” Kensington goes on, “and anyone would fall in love with that baby from your depiction. But you had some trouble with shading the nose, I see.” She starts talking about techniques for drawing facial features, and I look at the other pictures.
    A souped-up motorcycle; that'll be Shane. The bike is his older brother's. He always draws with a soft touch like that. He made the cycle so shiny, it glows.
    The electric guitar. That's Adrian. He's such a poseur. I bet he never played guitar in his life and just drew one because a guitar seemed like a slick-guy thing to draw.
    A box of fancy chocolates, half-eaten, wrappers strewn all over. The paper cups look real, which I know must have takenforever. Paper is hard to draw. The chocolates make me think Cammie; she seems like the type to have a big box of candy like that. But Cammie could never draw wrappers that well. It's gotta be Malachy. He's a candy man. And he draws with that narrow line.
    “Bradley Parker—which is yours?” Kensington has finished with Katya and is moving on to the next victim.
    That small, freckled white woman with glasses must be Brat's mother. She looks a bit like him—washed out with a pointy chin and a tired look around the eyes.
    “You've done one of the most difficult tasks in portraiture.” Kensington gushes. “You've captured the eccentricities of your subject without descending into caricature. This woman is absolutely specific, and even a little comical, but she is drawn with respect and delicacy. Nice work, Bradley.”
    Brat smiles, but as always he seems slightly nervous, like he's not settled into his seat.
    “Titus Antonakos,” says Kensington. “You drew a human heart?”
    Titus
Titus
Titus
    “My dad has these medical textbooks.”
    “You worked from a photograph?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “All right. Shading is getting better. There's a feeling