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

of”—Kensington stops, pushes her glasses up her nose—“curiosity, a clinical eye. I'm looking for the emotion in this image. Class, what do you see?”
    “It's icky,” mumbles this girl Margaret, who hardly ever says anything.
    “It's so graphic,” Cammie breathes. I bet she just wants Titus to look at her.
    “Graphic, how?” Kensington.
    Cammie purses her lips in thought. “Gory. Like a horror movie.”
    “Is that what you're getting at, Titus?” Kensington asks him. “Is this heart a violent image?”
    “Not exactly.” Titus scratches the back of his neck.
    “Can the image be clinical and violent at the same time?” Kensington prods.
    No one answers.
    She goes on: “Does anyone see how this drawing answers the assignment, to draw something you love?”
    No answer.
“Anyone?”
Silence.
    “It's the opposite of love.” Me. Talking without planning to.
    “Hmm? How so?”
    “People think of hearts when they think of love, but a heart is a bloody organ in the body. It doesn't have any emotions. It's like a metaphor for love that has nothing to do with what love actually is.”
    “Oh?” Kensington looks at me as if asking me to go on.
    “So the picture's like loving the bare truth about love, not the crap that people think is love from Hallmark cards and chick flicks.” Everyone's staring at me now. “Or it's about there being no love, not in the body. Like saying love is in the mind, or the eye—but not in the body at all. 'Cause look at that heart. There's no love there.”
    Hell. Why did I say all that? It didn't even make sense. It's like two different answers that don't match up with each other.
    “Is that what you're getting at, Titus?” Kensington asks.
    He blushes. “Something like that. Yeah, actually. That's what I meant.”
    “Well then. Good work.”
    He liked what I said.
    He did.
    And after class he will stop me in the hall and say, “You really understand me, Gretchen,” and I'll smile in an attractiveway and he'll touch my hair and our hands will brush against each other—and then it won't matter if people are walking by, he'll put his hand on my chin and kiss me, and from then on we'll—
    “Gretchen Yee,” says Kensington. “I'm sure we can all guess which is yours.”
    Everyone chuckles at this. Even Katya.
    Shane laughs outright.
    Maybe I shouldn't have laid it out comic book–style, in panels. I know that drives Kensington crazy. But I wanted to get that swoop where Spider-Man swings past the straight lines of panels, over the panels, out of the picture with his foot nearly up in your face and his left hand way in the background, holding on to the thinnest thread of webbing—to land in poor Gretchen Yee's hell-messy bedroom in the bottom panel of the page, late at night, where he rescues her from her tiny dark self and her insignificant life.
    “All right, then. You love comic books.” Kensington. “What a surprise. That's easy for all of us to see from your work so far this year.”
    “Yeah, but—”
    “Gretchen,” she goes on, “I thought I made it clear that I can't judge your progress if you continue to draw in this stylized manner. It's been obvious since the beginning that you've got an admirable command ofhuman musculature”—another laugh—“but you're not going to develop your own style if you keep imitating the hacks who draw for the Marvel corporation.”
    But look at the drawing, Kensington. Look at the story.
    “I can't judge your line, your shading, I can't judge anything when you draw this way. It's like bringing a synthesizer to a violin lesson.”
    But can't you look at what I draw for the drawing it is? Not for what it isn't?
    Can't you tell me how to fix the foreshortening on Spidey's foot, or get the shadows right in poor Gretchen Yee's bedroom, illuminated by the moon?
    And don't you want to find out what I love? Don't you even want to look at what I actually drew?
    Because it's not that I love comic books. Sure, I love them, but