THERE’S ALWAYS ART

The best part of my week was art class. I only had it on Tuesdays and Fridays, but it was with Ms. Donatello, which was cool.

When I started middle school, Ms. D was my English teacher. I used to think that she was the Dragon Lady and that all she wanted was to make my life miserable. (Kind of like you-know-who… Rhymes with Filler, Diller, and Chocolate-Vaniller.)

But it turned out that Ms. D was okay. She’s the first person besides Mom who ever told me I was a good artist. (She actually said “talented,” but that’s just embarrassing.) And she’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a teacher being a friend.

This year, besides teaching English to the sixth graders, she got stuck teaching art class for my grade. Which is awesome for me, since she’s practically the only grown-up in this whole school who likes me. Budget cuts can come in pretty handy sometimes.

So far, she’d been showing us all these famous works of art that she said every kid should be aware of. We’d talked about King Tut’s funerary mask, the Mona Lisa, a painting of a diner called Nighthawks, and Andy Warhol’s picture of a can of tomato soup (which I’m not so sure about, but Ms. D said it was “important”). And that wasn’t all.

She seemed like she knew what she was talking about, anyway. And I knew I could trust her with something private, which was more than I could say about my other teachers at HVMS.

So at the end of class, I stuck around, taking a crazy long time to put my pastels away. But really, I was just waiting for everyone to leave. I wanted to ask Ms. Donatello a question. A really basic one.

I walked up to her desk, where she was drawing with a charcoal pencil. “Ms. Donatello, can I talk to you?” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “About the assignment?”

“No,” I said. “Not really. It’s just that, um… well, you’ve known me since I started middle school, and you can be honest, okay?”