By Emily Rinkema

The day after Jack Carson died, my art teacher Miss Logan asked me to organize his portfolio so she could send it to his parents. She put her hand on my back as she asked me, and we both looked across the room at a table of crying girls draped over each other in collective grief.

“You were his partner,” she said quietly, giving me rights to a piece of their sadness. Jack Carson was the most popular boy in the eleventh grade, and I wasn’t his friend or his girlfriend or his teammate or his neighbor, just the unpopular kid he was forced to sit with in art so that he wouldn’t distract any of the other students. I didn’t even like him.

                                                                                                             ~

Jack Carson was a good artist. 

The first week of class, we worked on still lifes. Miss Logan set up a pitcher and a mug and an apple on a table in the center of the room, and we had to make it look real, with perspective and shading. Jack barely looked at his paper as he flirted with Carrie and Lily at the next table and texted with Zeb and Mark across the room, but during the whole class, he was drawing, and I kept looking at his still life and then back at mine, and it looked like we weren’t even drawing the same objects. 

When Miss Logan circled around to our table, she knelt down beside me and pointed at Jack’s paper.

“Look at the lines Jack uses at the bottom. See how they make the jug seem heavy? And the way the contact points are darker where the apple meets the table?”

His objects had weight. 

                                                                                             ~

I stayed after school in the art room like I always did, and while Miss Logan sat at her computer, I went through Jack’s portfolio. She asked me to keep anything I thought his parents would want to see. I think what she really wanted me to do was take out anything they wouldn’t want to see. He was always adding things to his work, like swears and lyrics or lines of poetry, hidden in the background so you wouldn’t notice unless you were really looking. I didn’t know Miss Logan knew. 

“You can hide anything you want in plain sight,” Jack said to me once as he added the words “a fucking lie” to his self-portrait, words so small you had to squint to see them, tucked into the shading beneath one of his eyes. “You’ve just got to give people somewhere else to focus. Something they want to see.” 

I had started and destroyed over a dozen self-portraits. Each attempt felt like a commitment I wasn’t ready to make.

                                                                                                      ~

The local paper called Jack Carson’s death a tragic accident. The police chief said there were no skid marks, that he didn’t even brake, just hit the tree straight on. His parents said there must have been something in the road, a cat, maybe, because he was such a good driver, such a good boy. His coach said his team had lost a brother. His girlfriend said they’d been talking about going to college together out West, that he’d been so happy. Jack Carson’s last post on Instagram was a selfie, a close-up of his face, a filter blurring everything except his smile. Beneath it he wrote #thefutureisbright #goodtobetheking #maybetomorrow. 

“See?” Everyone said, “Just a terrible accident.”

                                                                                               ~

The day before Jack Carson died, he ignored me throughout art class like he always did, his chair turned away slightly, as if he wanted everyone to know he was forced to sit here. I was working on another draft of my self-portrait, this one a pen-and-ink drawing of a girl sitting on a swing in a playground, her feet not reaching the ground, but the more I added, the less it felt like me, so I started drawing lines over it all, small slashes covering her legs and her body and her arms, and I just kept going, more and more lines, darker and darker, smaller and smaller, until the only part that wasn’t covered in sharp, tiny lines was her face. 

“Maybe it’s better to not know who you are,” Jack said to me, so quietly I wasn’t sure I had even heard it. Then he turned back towards his friends. 

I gripped the edge of my table with both hands to stop from floating away.

                                                                                                   ~

“Late bus will be here in five minutes,” Miss Logan said, looking up from her computer. 

I’d get dropped off by the bus as I did every evening, right in the center of town, and then I’d walk the quarter mile home where my mother would be waiting to ask me how school was, and I’d see it in her smile, her need for this time, this town, this school to be different, to the be the one that makes me happy, so I’d give it to her. I’d tell her how fun drama club was, how a boy in math class passed me a note, how I was thinking of going shopping with some girls this weekend, each lie a darker line. 

I slid Jack’s self-portrait out of his portfolio. He was looking straight at the viewer, one eyebrow raised just slightly, lips starting to curve on one side as if he were about to laugh. I took an eraser out of the desk drawer and checked that Miss Logan wasn’t looking. I erased the tiny words beneath his eye, smudging the charcoal, and put the portrait back in the portfolio for his parents. I imagined it framed in their living room. I imagined his parents looking at it every day.