Leslie at Art Explorers taught them how to make the stairs.
Leslie wore her locs tied up in colorful head wraps. She had big round glasses, and tattoos covering both arms. When they first started Art Explorers, they’d called her “Miss Leslie,” but when they got to fourth grade they dropped the “Miss.” It happened without their being told or asking permission. As if by some signal, they all just started calling her by her first name.
This session of Art Explorers was Book Bonanza. For three whole weeks they learned about all different kinds of book art. Leslie taught them how to make their own books from scratch. They used cereal boxes, cloth, butcher paper, scissors, and glue. They had to cut the cereal boxes and cover them in cloth, then fold the butcher paper accordion-style. They used a bone folder to make nice crisp creases, and they made paper hinges to hold multiple accordion sections together. When they were finished, you could really write in them. It took them two whole afternoons.
On the third and final Thursday of the session, Leslie showed them how, if they ran out of room in their books, they could add more pages by folding new lengths of paper accordion-style, and pasting these inserts onto existing pages. Like expanding staircases, they could be unfolded to extend up or down.
“You could just make a new book,” said Carla.
“You could,” said Leslie. “But I wanted to keep using this one.” And then she brought out her own homemade book, so swollen with extra pages, it had to be held together with a ribbon around its middle. When she untied the ribbon, the book spronged open like a jack-in-the-box. She held it up and leafed through it slowly, unfolding its staircases as she went, so they could appreciate all its signs and wonders. Page after page she’d filled with her wild, loopy calligraphy, miniature portraits in oil pastel, fortunes from fortune cookies, tags from tea bags, candy wrappers from other parts of the world.
“That’s sick,” Carla said with approval.
“I’m doing that to mine,” whispered Renu.
But Annamae—although she spent the rest of the afternoon like the others, pasting into her book paper stair inserts and also scraps from the cigar box where Leslie collected stuff for collages—knew that her real project would begin only later, after she got home. She would apply what she’d learned to Coco: paste vertical additions into the pages she’d already filled, so that she could go on using the little leather-bound book forever. It really could be forever. Because if you could add stairs to pages, couldn’t you also add stairs to stairs? Build them up and up and down and down, extend them without end.
Around her, the other kids chattered busily.
“Oh, can I use that?” said Renu, already snatching the heart-shaped doily from the cigar box.
“Check out my manicure,” said Carla, displaying the googly eyes she’d found in the box and glued to her fingernails.
The Art Explorers studio was a little room below street level. This afternoon, there were six explorers, Annamae, Renu, and Carla and three other kids. They sat on stools at high tables facing the windows, which were covered with wrought-iron grilles. Through them you could see people’s feet, the occasional wheelchair or stroller, sometimes dogs. Leslie put on music while they worked and the day outside grew sootily dark and then turned streetlamp pink. Dry leaves and pieces of litter whisked along the sidewalk. Annamae was not working. She was doing that thing she did when she thought, pulling out her bottom lip with her finger and thumb, but she was not even really thinking. She was simply with the leaves and plastic bags and Styrofoam blowing outside.
“Whatcha doing, Miss Annamae?” It was interesting. When they stopped calling Leslie “Miss,” it was a sign of affection, and yet whenever Leslie called any of them “Miss,” it was just the same.
Annamae turned to her dumbly.
“Building castles in Spain?” asked Leslie.
Annamae looked down. What castles? There was only the paper she had creased into accordion folds.
Leslie leaned over then and, just as if it were the most natural thing in the world, walked her pointer and middle finger slowly up the paper stairs, tread by tread.
Annamae’s heart was like a paper bag someone had just blown into.
Before class ended, she found in the cigar box a mirror no bigger than a stick of gum. When no one was looking, she slipped it in her pocket. She would glue it on the cover of Coco.