“You want to?” Jared asked. “I have enough money.”
I shook my head.
“Oh. Okay.” But I could tell he was disappointed.
Antoinette scanned the area for customers. “Tell you what. I’ll do her for half price.”
“You will?” Jared looked delighted. “You’re sure you don’t want to, Wilma? If you do, we’ll both have souvenirs.”
I did not want a caricature of me as a souvenir.
But I didn’t want Jared to know how much all this embarrassed me. Especially, I didn’t want him to know that he embarrassed me. He was still wearing my sweater as a cape and holding his revolting caricature tenderly.
He was nuts, but he looked so hopeful, as hopeful as Reggie before mealtime. I couldn’t spoil his day. Anyway, how bad could it be? It took just a few minutes, and nobody from school was around to see.
“Okay,” I said. “But if you ever tell anybody about this, I’ll . . .”
“I won’t. I’ll go to my grave—”
“Pay me first. And remember, you asked for it.”
I sat on the bench where Jared had been, and instantly it was worse than I expected. I faced out, so everybody who passed by could see me. I hadn’t thought about that when Jared was sitting here. I felt like a spotlight in the sky was focused on me. My face heated up. If I fainted, Antoinette would just draw me sideways, with my tongue hanging out.
She held out the pencil again.
“Why do you do that?” I asked, to delay things. Maybe she’d talk and forget about drawing.
“Explanations aren’t included in the price.”
Jared laughed.
“I do it to compare the length and width of your face.”
She started drawing. I started panicking. What was she doing? Was she already turning me into a joke?
“Are you all right, Wilma?” Jared said.
I pasted on a smile. “I’m fine. How does it look?”
Antoinette didn’t seem to mind if her victim talked. She went on drawing.
“She hasn’t done much yet.” Then he added, “Wait. That’s good.” He grinned. “She just put in your shoulders.”
What was wrong with my shoulders? I forced myself not to dash to the easel and tear off the page with poor mutilated me on it.
A few centuries passed. I sat. People walked by, looked, did not gasp, and walked on. A woman and her son, about nine, stopped and watched. The boy stuck his teeth out at me.
Oh no. My big beaver teeth. I clamped my lips together, but I was sure it was too late.
Antoinette stood back from the caricature and studied it. “You’re done. I outdid myself.”
I jumped up and zoomed to the other side of the easel.
The first thing I saw was my teeth, popping out of my mouth, big and squared off as piano keys. My whole face receded behind those teeth, except for my lips, which smiled insanely around my bicuspids and incisors and molars and fangs and tusks.
Then I saw my shoulders. In themselves they were fine. But they cradled my head. No neck. None. My head was like a golf ball resting on a tee. Like an egg in the palm of your hand. Like a horror movie.
Jared’s voice got through. “—super. It’s even better than mine. Don’t you love it?”
I nodded. Yes, I don’t love it. I hated it.
“Never before in history,” Jared said. “There’s never . . .”
If Ripley saw this, he’d put me in a museum.
“. . . been a popular girl before who would do this, who wouldn’t be too scared of how she’d look. The most popular kid at Claverford. No wonder.”
He was serious. He actually liked me better than before, and he thought other kids would too. I was totally confused.
We left the park. Jared took my hand again, and we walked along Central Park South. He was going to walk me to my apartment and then get the subway home. We went a block or so without talking. I was thinking about how I didn’t act popular. Like I should have turned Jared down when he asked me to the zoo, and I shouldn’t be holding hands with him, and I definitely should have said no about the caricature.
“Wilma . . .”
“What?”
“Could we trade caricatures? You can have mine if I can have yours.”
I took my drawing out of its envelope. Suppose it weren’t me? If it weren’t me, then I’d think the smile was insane but infectious, and the eyes, although they were too small, were friendly. And the face itself was heart shaped, which would have been pretty if you could ignore the teeth and the lack of neck, which of course you couldn’t. But on the real me, you might be able to, if you tried.
“Could we?”
I should give it to him, since he liked it. But now I didn’t want to part with it. I was getting to enjoy it too.
“Let me see yours again,” I said.
He showed me. This time I liked his. It was just a joke. It wasn’t mean. Jared’s face was good-natured under the attic of his forehead.
“Do you think we could find a copy place open on a Sunday?” I asked. “Then we can have one of each of us.”
“Let’s look.”
We had to walk at least a mile, but we found one. Although I was nervous about showing my caricature to the clerk, I was brave and handed it over first.
“Cool,” he said. “You want poster size?”
I nodded, and he took the drawing to the back of the store. A minute later, my face with the clerk’s legs sticking out from under it advanced toward us. Being enormous intensified the drawing. It came at you. My teeth gobbled you up. I laughed.
“We should get as many copies as we can afford,” Jared said. He giggled. “For posterity.”
We emptied our wallets. Between us, we had enough for subway fare plus two poster-size copies, two regular-size ones, and one half-size reduction for each of us.
Jared gave me his original drawing plus one poster and his half-size copy. I did the same, and the clerk rolled them into cardboard tubes. Then we headed for the subway. I’d get on the uptown train, and he’d ride downtown to Brooklyn. We walked, holding hands and clutching our tubes.
I shouldn’t have made him promise not to tell anybody about the caricature. It was too good to keep secret.
“I don’t care if you tell people about the caricature of me,” I said. “I changed my mind.”
“You can hang mine from a blimp. You can hang it on a banner outside Claverford.” He paused. “You could hang the small one in your locker at school. I could do the same thing with yours. Um, can I?”
That would mean he was my boyfriend. People would see the drawings, and that’s what it would mean. In three weeks the spell was going to end and I’d have Jared Fein for a boyfriend, which wouldn’t help me at all.
And I’d never even had a crush on him. I had a crush on Carlos, and before him, I had a crush on Terence. I liked Jared, but did I like him?
I thought about the time I was stuck in the elevator with Carlos. He’d been rude, refusing to talk to me. But then, the instant I became popular, he wrote me a note asking me to Grad Night, even though he had a girlfriend.
It would be fun to be stuck in an elevator with Jared. He’d tell me how people stuck in elevators behaved, or how fast they were rescued, or something else I’d never thought of.
The subway was a block away.
“Hey, Wilma,” Jared said. “I asked you something. Did you hear me?”
I nodded and then I said, “Do you want to go to Grad Night with me?”