Sometimes By Moonlight Read Online Free PDF Page B

him away?
     
    From my seat in art class, I had a perfect view to Steinfelder’s rear garden, a snow-frosted graveyard of dead stalks and flower bushes. The cold seeped in through the windows, as it did in most places in the old chateau, and Marie-Rose pulled her wide scarf tighter around her arms, feeling the chill more acutely, as skinny girls do.
     
    I’d never been a ballet dancer, and I’d certainly never been skinny. But lately, I’d noticed that my clothes hung a little looser, thanks to Steinfelder’s bland food. Enough mystery meat and you lose your appetite. It was even harder to choke it down now that I knew about Frau Blumen’s forbidden cookies. I was sure I could smell them baking some afternoons, even from all the way up in our dorm room. I wondered how no other students had found out about them. Maybe there was some way to stage a cookie protest, a kitchen sit-in.
     
    “Good afternoon, class.” Miss Kovac, surely the recipient of the aforementioned baked goods, tapped on her board with a chalk holder.
     
    “My fingers are too cold to hold the pencil,” whispered Marie-Rose.
     
    I slipped off my gloves and passed them to her under the table. “Take these.”
     
    Marie-Rose gave me a grateful look and slipped her tiny fingers inside them.
     
    “Class, we will work on shading today. As you must know, nothing looks real if it is drawn one-dimensionally.” Miss Kovac’s thickly accented voice was as raspy as a chain smoker’s, but she was pretty. Her long brunette hair was tied in a girlish side ponytail with a long, red ribbon and her skin was dewy, like she’d spent a fortune on face creams. An old-fashioned artist’s smock hung on her small frame, covering a simple gray dress. Popular with students, she was the youngest teacher at Steinfelder. I’d never found her very warm, but she did know about art.
     
    “You must use dark and light together to show dimension. Here, you see a line drawing of a box. Watch how I shade it to show the dimension.”  Miss Kovac began to sketch furiously, coloring in the sides until it almost looked real.
     
    Most of the girls nodded, understanding the basic technique. Marie-Rose had a puzzled expression on her face.
     
    “You just color in the flat sides, you know, where the light isn’t,” I said.
     
    “Oh.” She slid her pencil behind her ear and the worried smile slipped away.
     
    “If you will direct your attention to the sketches around the room, you will find many examples of shading, which reveals perspective and depth.” Miss Kovac said, with a sweep of her hand. Instantly, I wondered if she’d once worked as a guide of some sort, perhaps the kind that took bored tourists around the castles of her eastern European homeland. “And now, students, please come and get your paper for today’s assignment. You have thirty minutes to draw the still life I have arranged.”
     
    We all glanced over to a small table right next to mine and Marie-Rose’s, where a cow skull, a vase of flowers, a pile of bricks, and a small metal dagger were placed at odd angles to each other. A sheet served as a simple backdrop.
     
    Miss Kovac walked over and clicked a switch, flooding the table with light. “You may begin.”
     
    “Why do the still life objects never have anything to do with each other?” I whispered. “I mean, a cow skull and a vase? Really?”
     
    Marie-Rose shrugged. “I’ll get our papers,” she said.
     
    Miss Kovac insisted on using thick, textured paper instead of newsprint for sketching. She claimed that you never knew when true greatness would strike. I was surprised Steinfelder let her buy the more expensive paper, considering the lack of other luxuries. Then again, our parents wanted to believe we were getting some culture here and frame-worthy art was proof of that.
     
    “Up, up, girls!” commanded Miss Kovac. “Out from behind the tables. Move about the room. One must observe closely to really see.”
     
    Small