Pièce de Résistance

My head pounds, and I feel like I’ve eaten a bag of sawdust. Mother knocks on my door and peers in my room. “You do look rough. Tarin told me about the bad sushi,” she says. “I canceled your appointment with Dr. K. Do you think we should take you to the doctor?”

I shake my head. “I’m fine.” When she’s gone, I pop some aspirin. Bad sushi. I’m not surprised that smooth Tarin would come up with some creative explanation to save my butt. I sleep most of the day away, and when I finally drag myself downstairs I find only Stephen in the living room. A soccer game plays on tv, but there’s no sound.

“Mom and Dad are in town,” he says stiffly. “With the agent. There’s been an offer on the farm.” I sit beside him, wishing I could help, wishing I could use some positive thinking to make everything better. Instead, I choke down some dry cereal, say goodnight and head back to my room.

What’s a girl with brain damage supposed to do anyway?

I wake up in the middle of the night, headache gone. I toss and turn and think about how my life is about to change. I don’t know if Mother and Dad accepted the offer, or what’s going to happen now. I head downstairs and sit in the half darkness of the basement, watching the news channel. In the world there are:

Starving children with ribs that stick out.

People living in refugee camps, with little food and no home to go back to.

Children who have been kidnapped.

Children who have been drowned in the bathtub by their own mothers.

Tsunamis and earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes that rip up towns like they are made of Tinkertoys.

Drive-by shootings and rapes and serial killings.

Kids with bombs strapped onto their stomachs who get on buses and blow themselves up.

And then, here at home on our cozy couch with a bowl of cereal in her lap, there’s me.

Poor me, poor me. I’m hung over and I made a fool of myself. I don’t remember everything about my picture-perfect, spoiled existence with loving parents and a nice house and enough food to make me obese. Poor me, my parents want to sell the farm that I don’t even know if I like. One of my memories wasn’t real at all, and my brother is disappointed in me. Cry me a river.

Dr. K. is trying to teach me to be grateful for what I have, but I am failing miserably. I can’t shake this feeling of self-pity. Who is Jessica Grenier, in the big scheme of things? I am a drop in the bucket, and my problems aren’t even a grain of sand in the Sahara.

I need to get over myself.

I march upstairs and grab my cell phone. I could sneak outside and take some moonlit photos, but the mere thought of the effort required wears me out. I go back to the basement instead and turn on Mother’s laptop. While it’s booting up, I go through the photos I took outside—the picnic table, Ginger, the trees, the sky—and email them to myself.

A few minutes later I have the pictures open in the photo-editing program.

I click on a shot of Ginger, looking up at me with her soulful eyes.

“Aw, look at you,” I say. It’s a nice pic, with a tenderness to it, but it lacks a certain something. I find the Edit button and move the slider to make the photo dark, then overly bright. I do the same with the contrast. I try Ginger in sepia and in black-and-white. It’s strangely soothing to see her morph and change at my fingertips, so I go back to my files and try the same with the photo of the picnic table. I want to do something more, something crazier. I click around the menus until I find Editing Options.

I start with the Ginger shot, cropping and cutting and changing colors. Then I open a few other photos in new windows: the picnic table, a shot of some clouds floating lonely in the sky, another of the squirrel. I play with them one by one until they all look funky and wild and a little surreal. So much better than they were before. A button at the top says Layers, so I open all the new images and drag and drop the photos until I’ve created a full-screen image of the four shots melded into one.

Ginger, a bright red, in the top left corner; the squirrel, striped like a zebra, on the right. In the lower left corner, the picnic table; beside it, the single cloud, a soft pink, floating in pale-blue sky. It’s a crazy patchwork collage. Probably something a kindergartener could do, I know. But it feels good looking at what I have made. The images and colors speak to me; they stir something up inside. It’s especially the cloud, that drifting bit of pink fluff, that draws me in, and the reason comes to me slowly.

That lone cloud is me. Floating, distant, watching everyone from above. Untouchable. I save the collage with the name Twisted Nature, then click Print, and it comes out of the printer. I’m shutting down the computer when a text appears on my phone.

It’s from Tarin. All it says is Taj Mahal. Tonight.