I Know You

I love to sit in the art classroom, watching all the students work. I don’t dare to do anything myself when people might see me. I don’t want to scare them.

I walk around them, unseen and unheard, watching as their artwork progresses. From a few scribbles of an idea, a shadow of a thought, all the way to a masterpiece of color and creation. I listen to them laugh, talk and whisper while they work, pencils moving swiftly, ever moving, never still.

I’ve seen fantastical creatures, family members and friends, landscapes and dreams appear on their papers and canvases. I’ve seen beautiful ideas sketched in books, then hidden away and replaced with something everybody’s already seen. I’ve seen students smother their ideas at the thought of ridicule, seen them hold their breath, bend over their art as people pass, trying to hide what they think they should be ashamed of. They’re all wonderful ideas, but they seem to fear laughter more than they dream of happiness.

I’ve seen the kids who don’t try, who give up before they’ve even started. Who turn something in last-minute, and don’t care how they do. Then there are the kids who don’t care what people think about their artwork, and they try, they really do try. They show their work proudly, display their thoughts and ideas, their inner feelings. They do not fear laughter.

I did.

When the students all leave, I love to pick up a pencil, a paintbrush, a pen, and draw something. Usually I don’t know what it is when I’ve started, but with hours to myself alone once everybody has left, when I finally realize that the sky has gone dark and I’m squinting, my scribbles have transformed into a masterpiece. It isn’t always beautiful; sometimes it’s dark, harsh and true. Other times it’s soft, quiet, a dream, yet draws the attention and pulls it along.

I keep a stash of these drawings hidden. Nobody ever sees them. Like nobody ever sees me.

When the students all return in the morning, I watch them all. I notice them all.

Kylie, Sam, Daisy, Dean, Nadiyah, Owen, Alex, Nicholas, Kazimir, Ian, Delaney, Aria. I notice them all so that if they disappear, somebody will know. Somebody will wonder, somebody will care.

Nobody noticed when I left.

I’ve learned to speak Spanish and German, the two languages offered here. I know all of the lessons of every class by heart. I have read all of the books I could find a million times, and have them all memorized, down to the little smudges that dirty fingers left on the pages. I know every student in the school; I know where every teacher stashes their candy; I know where all the missing bookmarks and earrings and pencils have gone. I am the master of this school. 

But nobody knows it.

Seventeen years now, and what do I have to show for it? A pile of drawings hidden behind a shelf in the library. A  lifetime’s supply of student’s names and schedules and whispered hopes. A forgotten life. A mind filled with stories where good always triumphs over evil.

Not every story ends like that. Mine didn’t.

I always wanted a happy ending, something to make all of . . . this worthwhile. I guess that not everybody gets their perfect, fairy-tale story ending.

You know I’m in one of my moods when the teacher’s start to notice candy from their stashes disappearing. You know that I’m deep in one of my moods when the lights in the school start flickering for no apparent reason. And when the food explodes in the microwaves? That’s me taking out all of my pent-up frustration on the food.

Because my powers scare me, now. I’m afraid that one day I’ll go too far, hurt somebody. So I never let myself get to that point. I usually let it out once everybody’s left, but sometimes it happens unexpectedly. That’s what scares me the most. That I might hurt somebody just because I was hurting.

During these times I usually hide behind the couches in the library, looking out at the world I can’t explore. Stuck within these walls, forever. Sometimes I’m glad for the windows that cover the walls like ivy, but other times those green-covered hills in the distance just bring me down, throw another rock onto the pile that is slowly burying me.

About a month into the new school year, I've just recovered from one of my moods, when I notice a girl. She’s sitting beneath the stairs in a tiny nook, staring out a window, her legs criss-crossed beneath her with a book resting on her knees. An array of pencils and pens is spread around the floor around her in an arc, and as I get closer I notice that it is color-categorized. But it isn’t the typical rainbow order. It’s from yellows to greens, greens to browns, browns to reds, reds to pinks, pinks to purples, purples to blue, blue to black, black to gray, gray to white, white to orange. 

I lean over her shoulder, watch her sketch the view outside. Small kinnikinnick bushes grow on the bark-covered slope that borders the entire school, little red berries shining in the sunlight. She’s captured the image beautifully on her paper, colors blending to create shadows and light.

I know that in the biology class down the hallway they will be playing a video on ladybugs that I wanted to watch; it’s rare that I get these new glimpses of the outside world, as most of the videos the teachers show have been played every year. But I can’t tear myself away from this girl and her pencils and markers and the tip of her tongue sticking out between her lips in concentration as she glances up and down, from window to paper.

I wonder what she’s doing here; lunch has ended and class started ten minutes ago. She doesn’t look like the kind of kid who would skip. Perhaps she has a free period?

I come around in front of her and peer at her face. I recognize her, but I can’t place her. It’s only when she brushes a strand of her dark, honey-toned brown hair out of her face that I remember.

I saw her the first day of school, as she walked in through the great entrance doors, clutching her sketchbook tightly to her chest as though it were the only thing keeping her from bolting. Her hair had been in her face then, too. She seemed to use it as a shield, thinking that if people couldn’t see her face, they wouldn’t remember her. It nearly worked.

I watch her for a while longer, mesmerized by the way her pale gray eyes follow the lines her pencil makes on her paper. She seems so oblivious to the world around her, except for the plant outside the window and her paper. Her fingers move quickly, gracefully.

I’m trying to place this girl’s name as she draws, the little berries on her paper coming to life in bursts of color as she grabs for the colors arrayed in front of her. She’s careful to always put them back where she took them from in the arc of color. 

She’s in the middle of coloring one of the kinnikinnick leaves when there’s a loud laugh from above, and then there’s a clatter of footsteps pounding heavily on the steps above. The girl’s head shoots up, her eyes wide. We watch two boys walk down to the hallway, sharing something on their phones.

The girl looks about at the empty space, searching for something. Scrambling to her knees, she starts to frantically put away all of her colors into a bag, that when it’s full is so stuffed it looks as though it might explode. She hurriedly shoves all her things into her backpack and brings out her phone as if it were an afterthought. The time pops up and she inhales sharply. She swings her backpack on, staggers slightly under the weight of all her art supplies, then slides out from under the stairs and sets off down the hallway.

I follow at a distance, watching the way she walks. Heel first, lightly, then along the sides of her feet until she lifts off at her toes, almost gliding. This girl is a master at not being heard. Despite the empty hallway and concrete floor, she makes no sound as she walks, swiftly and silently. She keeps her head down, her hair falling at her sides to screen her face from view. But nobody else is in the hallway to see her.

I wonder how she would feel if she knew that I was watching her.

She slips into a classroom, her cheeks burning. I follow her in; I want to know more about this girl. The class is loud and wild, one I would typically avoid on a normal day. Perhaps this is why I haven’t seen her since that first day. She walks up to the desk in the back of the room, where the teacher sits, munching on a candy. The small trash can at the side of her desk is filled with candy-wrappers.

The girl apologizes for being late, her voice soft and hard to hear. The teacher looks up, then glances down, searching for a paper on her desk and reading it swiftly. The teacher nods and waves the girl to her seat with a smile, saying that it’s okay. That she understands that there was likely a good reason.

As the girl walks away with a thank you, I don’t follow her. I come around behind the teacher and look at the paper she had read.

Oh.

I follow the girl around for the rest of the day, watching her. She makes me curious. The way she is hard to spot in a classroom full of other students; the way she flinches whenever there’s a loud noise; the way she never speaks unless she has to; the way she sits, as if half of her is paying attention to the lesson and the other half is far away in another world. She aces her physics test and her Spanish quiz, as one of few to get a perfect score. She doodles in the margins of her math worksheets, having finished in half the time as the other students. When she leaves for the day, allowed to leave the class ten minutes earlier than other students, I see her exit through a smaller, less-used door. I watch her from the doorway as she climbs into a small, blue car in the pick-up lane. The car leaves quickly, avoiding the traffic-jam by less than two minutes as parents come to pick up their kids.

The next few weeks I spend mainly following around the girl. She draws quickly, her sketchbook filling up in just three weeks. I follow her to her art classes, where she no longer hides behind her hair. In this class she strikes up conversations with her table-mates, and the teacher talks to her without a hint of the pity of the other teachers in her voice.

I like to sit behind the girl, watching her body relax as she draws, no longer tense and ready to bolt at the slightest sound. She debates about the proper names for colors, shares her vast arrow of drawing tools. I try to imagine what her life is like outside of school, what she does and how she acts when nobody’s around.

Four weeks later, I’m in one of my moods again. I hide behind the couches in the library, which I can usually count on to be deserted at most times of the day. Every time a tear falls from my eyes the lights flicker throughout the whole school. Students laugh and shriek in delight as the hallways are plunged into darkness, lit only by the pale sunlight filtering through the dirty, finger-smudged windows. Stacks of paper scatter in classrooms as little bursts of wind find their way through open windows or appear for no apparent reason. Books in the library tremble, some falling off the shelves. The librarian calls in sick, saying they need a few days of break for their mental health.

Four days pass, and I’m still drowning, still lost in my sadness and fear behind the couches in the library, staring out the windows at the world I’ll never see again.

When I finally emerge after six days, it’s Monday, and there’s an unusual buzz around the school. The sky is dim, bruised by dark clouds that threaten to pour down rain on anyone who dares to walk beneath them. Students speak in whispers, huddled in groups that speak behind their hands, and show muffled videos on their phones.

But I don’t have time to stop and listen.

I roam the hallways, searching every place in the school for the girl. She doesn’t appear in any of her first three classes, and by lunchtime I wonder if she’s skipping school. But as I search the cafeteria, I pass a particularly large group of girls. They’re all huddled together, whispering about the school being haunted.

Humans are smarter than they look.

The girl with the dark brown hair and pale gray eyes doesn’t come back to school the rest of the week. That Monday, right after coming out of one of my moods, I collapse back into it.

The power goes out for minutes at a time; the floors vibrate with an unfamiliar energy. Plants wither, plants that I watered for forgetful teachers not long ago; posters taped in hallways fall to the ground in strange winds that whip through hallways and through any open doors. Three days pass, and eventually I emerge on Thursday, pick up all the posters from the hallway and clean up all of the scattered papers nobody’s had time to take care of yet.

I hear students laugh about the sudden unpredictable power-outages in the school that had plunged them into darkness and gotten them out of tests. Teachers complain about the lessons cut short when their electronics died and forced them to rely on the meager light that made its way through the windows.

As an apology of some sorts for the disruption I caused, I spend my night folding origami dragons out of the scattered papers, leaving them around the school. Some I leave in staged mini battles on desks, others I hang from the ceiling and stretch out their wings so that they appear to be flying.

I finish in the art classroom, holding my pile of paper dragons close to my chest. I pause at the gray-eyed girl’s desk, set down the dragons and open up the little cabinet beneath the table that has her name on it. 

Hope.

So many drawings are shoved into this tiny space; ideas for projects and color combinations; fantasy scenes and medieval battles; maps of magical worlds and castles that tower high above the clouds. I pull every one of them out, lay them on the table in a great arc, and then all I can do is stare at them, hold them one at a time up close and admire every tiny detail; every scale on a dragon, every brick in a castle and every pebble in a forest.

I’m so invested in the girl’s drawings that I don’t hear the footsteps approaching, don’t see the door open until there’s a clattering beside me.

My head shoots up, and I spot the art teacher hiss softly as she wipes off a drop of evidently hot coffee from her hand. I’m thankful that I wasn’t holding anything up when she walked in; it would look like it was floating all by itself.

The teacher looks tired, sad. Her pale brown hair is pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, a pencil pushed behind her ear. She turns on her computer and begins to bring up the lesson for the day. I check the clock. It’s about the time that teachers normally come in to prepare. She’s early, though.

She sighs, looks up from the computer. Her eyes alight on the papers strewn about the gray-eyed girl’s -- Hope’s -- desk. I hear her mutter as she rises from her computer and approaches the desk. I step back. If people get too near me, they feel what I’m feeling. And I do not want to curse this woman with that.

She eyes the artwork as I had done just before, her brown eyes wide open, her head cocked to one side as though confused. She reaches for one of the papers, looks at it, then reaches for another. I hear her whisper to herself, a question, and then she brushes at her eye.

I shrink away, hugging myself as though that could comfort me. That note I read . . . I should have known . . . I leave the room, running down the hallway as the lights flicker, my tears leaving an invisible trail behind me.

The students arrive at the school in darkness, the lights having gone out a half hour before. Occasionally they flicker on as I suck in breath to a body that no longer breathes. I’m curled up behind the couches, surrounded by my artwork. Thousands of papers full of ideas and illustrations, colors and patterns that no one will ever see. No one will ever see them and think of me. No one will ever wonder what happened to that little blue-eyed, dark-brown haired girl who never spoke and never showed herself at her best for fear of being seen.

No one will ever know who I was, who I am, who I could have been.

Including me.

A hand on my shoulder makes me freeze. I place my own hand on theirs, hesitantly, turn around slowly, my eyes wide. How could I feel--

Gray eyes meet blue in silent recognition.

“I know you.”