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Description
In Loving Memory

     It may have been illegal, it may have been dangerous, it may have pissed a bunch of people off, but it was worth it.  Chase deserved more than a little page in the yearbook with his picture and some clouds.  He deserved an actual memorial, if for no better reason than to remind people of what can happen if you misuse your vehicle.
     I wish I could take the credit for it, but it wasn’t my idea.  It was suggested to me almost as a joke by Sean, a friend of Chase’s whom I’d met a few times before.  He was a graffiti artist who, in my opinion, sometimes tried a little too hard to come up with excuses to “decorate” public property.  This time he wanted to dedicate something to Chase’s memory, and asked if I felt like helping him sneak onto campus some night to paint a wall.
     “You’re kidding?” I asked, laughing.
     “Maybe,” he smiled.  “We’ll need to work out some details, but it could work.”
     A couple weeks later he and a friend of his, Erik, had a plan.  They had figured out all the supplies needed, how long it would take to do, what preparations could be made beforehand, and when it would be best to go.  All they needed was two or three more people so it would go faster.  I managed to talk Kylene into going with us, and Erik got one of his friends to come along, so we were set.
     We planned to meet an hour before midnight on Tuesday evening two weeks later--about two and a half months after Chase’s accident--on the patio behind the school library, where we hung out during lunch and occasionally after school.  I couldn’t let my parents know where I was going, so I had to wait until they fell asleep around ten fifteen.  When they did, I waited another quarter of an hour for good measure, then grabbed my coat and crawled out through my bedroom window, glad that I’d cut my hair the month before--it was so much easier to climb down the tree when I didn’t have to worry about snagging on twigs.
     Erik and his friend, Jack, were already there when I showed up.  Sean and Ky were on the way.  Jack had brought three rolls of blue painter’s tape:  the stuff that’s only a little bit sticky, so it doesn’t peel paint away when you take it off.  Erik had a few cans of spray paint that he’d probably shoplifted and was offering caffeine pills to whoever would take them.  I took one to stay awake for the evening and one more for getting going in the morning.  Being the minor who was deathly afraid of being caught shoplifting, I brought us three boxes of sidewalk chalk and the small paper sketch of our design.  Sean showed up next with his minivan full of all the cardboard stencils we’d made, half a dozen surgical masks, and a box of various colors of spray paint.  When Ky arrived with the latex gloves we needed, we were ready.
     “If anyone wants to back out, now’s the time,” Sean told us before we started.  “What we’re about to do is very illegal.  Leave now and you have nothing to do with it.  If you stay, remember the rules.  When this is done, we don’t know anything about it.  We don’t brag about it to our friends, we don’t talk about it to each other.  Nobody finds out that it was us.  We take the secret to our graves.  But if one of us is caught, we’re all caught.  If one of us is punished, we all fess up.”
     “All for one and one for all,” Jack said.  I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
     “Anyone backing out?” Sean asked, obviously eager to get going.
     I shook my head.  “Hell no.  This is for Chase.” I almost wanted to do that dumb thing where everyone stacks their hands in the middle of the circle, but then I remembered how dumb an idea it was, so I didn’t.
     I felt like those guys who do the crop circles.  We knew--or rather, Sean and Erik knew and told us--exactly what we needed to do.  The target was a wall near the counseling offices, decently-lit by a yellow overhead light, so we could more or less see what we were doing.  First task was to divide the wall into quarters and start drawing a rough sketch lightly with the chalk--after we were all wearing gloves, of course.  I took the bottom left, Ky had the bottom right, and Erik and Jack had the top left and right, respectively.  We drew quickly and lightly, just needing a basic idea of where the stencils would go.  Meanwhile Sean ran back and forth between the wall and his van, bringing us stencils.  Each stencil had a letter and a number corresponding to the color and location on our “blueprint.” Once we had the outlines drawn, we started taping up the stencils, light colors first.  And by the way, yes, it is very difficult to use tape while wearing latex gloves.  The tape sticks to the rubber and it doesn’t like coming off.
     We had about a dozen different colors we were using with the stencils, plus gradients we were painting in after the stencils were done.  Fortunately we knew how our system needed to work.  There was no art involved at this point in the process; everything was craft.  Mechanical application of the tools.  We were basically screen-printing our design on the wall.  We stenciled the white in first, then yellow, light blue, light green, orange, green, red, brown, purple, blue, white again for highlights and clouds, previous colors to fill in holes and add gradients so the thing didn’t look completely stenciled, and finally Sean went through with a paintbrush to add the smooth black outlines we wouldn’t have been able to stencil in.  This way it avoided drips, separating the colors from each other to make the painting look more like a painting and less like a quick tag job.  And while Sean finished the painting off, the rest of us brought all the stencils and paint cans back to the van.
     We were either very lucky or very skilled--we finished without being caught.  It took us only three hours from arrival to departure, but we still had to ditch the evidence.  Sean drove to a shopping center across town while the rest of us, still wearing our gloves because we didn’t want to risk getting fingerprints on anything, sat in back with scissors, cutting our stencils into unrecognizable pieces.  They became chunks of thick paper with paint on them, rather than the shapes they had been moments before.  At the shopping center, we dropped them into the dumpster behind Mervyn’s, tossed our gloves in after them, then Erik burned our “blueprint,” which had fingerprints and recognizable handwriting all over it.
     “So remember,” Sean said as we sat around the open back of the van, me and Ky inside the car and everyone else standing or kneeling outside, watching the drawing blacken and crumple away under the yellow wisps of flame, “we don’t know who did it.  When we see the wall tomorrow, we’ll be just as surprised as everyone else.  That goes double for you and me, Em.”
     “We’re the most likely suspects,” I nodded.
     “Right.  But we don’t know how it happened.”
     “How what happened?”
     Sean smiled as we all got back into the van and pulled the back door closed.  Nothing else was said for the rest of the evening, save directions so Sean could take us all home, until we got to my street.
     “I’m so nervous.” I got out through the sliding door.  “What if we get caught?”
     “They’ve got nothing on us,” Sean pointed out.  “But if one of us is caught, and I mean really caught.  Not just accused--that we can get out of.  But like if they’re gonna make us do community service and shit.  If one of is caught, we all fess up.  Remember?  Nobody’s gonna take the blame alone.”
     “We did it together, we face any consequences together,” Erik agreed.
     If nothing else, the “all for one” attitude was incentive to not get caught.  I’m certain that none of us wanted to be the one to get everyone in trouble.  I walked home--Sean had dropped me off at the corner so the engine, which sounded to me like it was in dire need of an oil change, wouldn’t wake my parents--and climbed the tree back up to my room.  As of now, I told myself as I went into the bathroom to flush the toilet as an alibi in case my parents heard me moving around, I don’t know anything.  I’ve been in bed for the past, my alarm clock glowed 2:47 at me, four and a half hours.
     The alarm went off about three hours later, and I dragged myself into the shower to wake up.  Erik’s caffeine pill went down with breakfast and I brought a thermos of coffee to school with me.  Or rather, a thermos of milk and sugar with a little coffee flavoring.
     As we’d predicted, nobody knew how to handle the painting.  I heard about it almost as soon as I got on campus.  Most students--and probably some faculty--thought it had been done with the school’s permission, probably by the Spirit Club, whose entire purpose seems to be to try to convince people that it’s good to like your high school.  Some people liked our painting, some hated it.  Those that knew it was done illegally wondered who did it and how they got it done so fast.  Sean was suspected by people who knew his hobby, but nobody had any proof.
     And from what I heard, the school didn’t want to clean it up or paint over it because they didn’t want to look like they didn’t respect Chase’s memory.  It was great.  Not only had we gotten away with doing it, it also wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.
     I first saw it in daylight on my way to my zero-period band class, and it was truly beautiful.  All five of us had had a hand in the drawing, designing, and cutting of the stencils, so the drawing style and design didn’t belong to any one of us.  So not only would it be impossible to identify the artist’s style, but the final piece also collected ideas from five different sources.  The focal point of the painting was a caricature of Chase’s car driving through the sky to a group of clouds from which several bright rainbows and sunbeams fanned out, leading the viewer’s eye through the entire picture, which was colored by the rainbows.  One sprayed a prism over a group of clouds, one aimed downward and had the Dali-esque effect of spilling paint over trees and grass, and a couple more ended at the edge of the wall before they could get too far.  In the bottom-right quarter, we did our best to mimic a roman serif font on the words “Chase Matthew Tucker” with his birth and death years below his name in the same font.  I didn’t even have to pretend to be surprised to see it; it looked so different out of the piss-colored streetlight that it might as well have been a completely different painting.
     That didn’t save me from having been Chase’s girlfriend, though.  I was, as Sean had said, one of the prime suspects the school had.  So of course they had to interrupt me at some time during the day, sending a bleached-blonde junior to my art class with the infamous yellow slip of paper that told everyone that a certain someone had somehow gotten the attention of either a counselor or one of the vice principals.  In my case it was the latter.  And it happened to be the vice principal who used to be a football coach.  The kind of guy who would fudge jocks’ grades so they could stay on the team, who would overlook certain events to avoid incriminating people he liked, who hated people who weren’t jocks.  The kind of guy against whom I had no chance if he really wanted to pin me and had half a case.  But I wasn’t going to be caught easily, especially since I had four friends whose necks were also on the line.  I asked the office aide if she knew what it was about, and she shrugged.
     “You wanted to see me, Mr. Sorel?” I asked as I stepped into his doorway.  He was at his desk, writing something that he put away when he noticed me.
     “Come on in, Emily,” he said in an uncomfortably friendly tone, gesturing to a chair.  “Have a seat.” I did so as he got up and closed the door behind me.  “How are your classes going?”
     “Pretty well,” I shrugged, continuing the charade of not knowing why I was there but not blatantly asking what it was about.  “You know, considering.”
     “Must be pretty hard for you lately.”
     “Yeah.  I’m kinda getting used to him being gone.  And everyone’s been really nice about it.”
     “Have you seen the mural over by the counseling offices?”
     “Yeah, I saw it on the way to band.  It’s really cool.  I didn’t know they were gonna do anything like that.  I figured, you know, he’d just get a little placard or something on a wall in the main office.  They’re still doing that page in the yearbook too, right?”
     “I believe it’s already finished; you’ll be able to see it in your yearbook in two weeks,” Sorel nodded, and then directed the conversation back to where he wanted it.  “So you didn’t know it was going to be done?”
     “Nope.  It was a really nice surprise, though.  I almost cried when I saw it this morning.”
     “Do you know who painted it?” Now he was finally getting to the point.  If anyone knew who illegally painted a memorial to Chase, it would be his girlfriend.  But I had been asleep the previous nights when it was done.
     “The Spirit Club?” I asked, pretending not to understand why he was asking me.
     “Is that an answer or a guess?”
     “A guess.”
     “So you don’t know who did it?”
     “Not really, no.”
     “Not really?” He was trying to use my choice of words against me.
     “I don’t know who did it.”
     “Think hard.  Has anyone mentioned anything about it before today?  Even jokingly?”
     I thought about it.  Or rather, I pretended to think about it.  “No, nobody,” I said after a moment, shaking my head.
     He nodded.  I doubt he believed me, but at least he didn’t suspect that I was involved; only that I knew something about it.  Sean’s inquisition would be much harder, but I was pretty sure he’d be able to handle it.  He’d had worse interrogations.
     Though they were pissed about it, I think the school got used to our painting.  It was still there at the end of the school year, probably because the administration didn’t want to risk the bad publicity they’d get for removing it.  I’d have been at the head of the lynch mob accusing the school of having no respect for Chase.
     We were never caught.  I think some people suspected, though.  I left Sorel’s office in the clear, armed with a hall pass that let me go back to my art class.  I gave Kylene a slight nod and smile to let her know we’d won.  When the bell rang, Mr. Conner, the art teacher, called us over to his desk.
     “I think you two should collaborate more,” he told us.  “It’s quite possibly your best work yet.”
     “What is?” I asked, tilting my head, not sure what he was talking about.  Ky understood, and was chewing on her lower lip.
     “Don’t worry about it,” Mr. Conner said with a smile.  “One thing, though.  When you want solid colors, let your paint dry a bit before you paint over it with a different color.  Otherwise the colors blend and it looks a little shoddy.”  He put a finger to his lips, winked, and told us to have a good day before we could try to make an excuse.

Description
In Loving Memory

     It may have been illegal, it may have been dangerous, it may have pissed a bunch of people off, but it was worth it.  Chase deserved more than a little page in the yearbook with his picture and some clouds.  He deserved an actual memorial, if for no better reason than to remind people of what can happen if you misuse your vehicle.
     I wish I could take the credit for it, but it wasn’t my idea.  It was suggested to me almost as a joke by Sean, a friend of Chase’s whom I’d met a few times before.  He was a graffiti artist who, in my opinion, sometimes tried a little too hard to come up with excuses to “decorate” public property.  This time he wanted to dedicate something to Chase’s memory, and asked if I felt like helping him sneak onto campus some night to paint a wall.
     “You’re kidding?” I asked, laughing.
     “Maybe,” he smiled.  “We’ll need to work out some details, but it could work.”
     A couple weeks later he and a friend of his, Erik, had a plan.  They had figured out all the supplies needed, how long it would take to do, what preparations could be made beforehand, and when it would be best to go.  All they needed was two or three more people so it would go faster.  I managed to talk Kylene into going with us, and Erik got one of his friends to come along, so we were set.
     We planned to meet an hour before midnight on Tuesday evening two weeks later--about two and a half months after Chase’s accident--on the patio behind the school library, where we hung out during lunch and occasionally after school.  I couldn’t let my parents know where I was going, so I had to wait until they fell asleep around ten fifteen.  When they did, I waited another quarter of an hour for good measure, then grabbed my coat and crawled out through my bedroom window, glad that I’d cut my hair the month before--it was so much easier to climb down the tree when I didn’t have to worry about snagging on twigs.
     Erik and his friend, Jack, were already there when I showed up.  Sean and Ky were on the way.  Jack had brought three rolls of blue painter’s tape:  the stuff that’s only a little bit sticky, so it doesn’t peel paint away when you take it off.  Erik had a few cans of spray paint that he’d probably shoplifted and was offering caffeine pills to whoever would take them.  I took one to stay awake for the evening and one more for getting going in the morning.  Being the minor who was deathly afraid of being caught shoplifting, I brought us three boxes of sidewalk chalk and the small paper sketch of our design.  Sean showed up next with his minivan full of all the cardboard stencils we’d made, half a dozen surgical masks, and a box of various colors of spray paint.  When Ky arrived with the latex gloves we needed, we were ready.
     “If anyone wants to back out, now’s the time,” Sean told us before we started.  “What we’re about to do is very illegal.  Leave now and you have nothing to do with it.  If you stay, remember the rules.  When this is done, we don’t know anything about it.  We don’t brag about it to our friends, we don’t talk about it to each other.  Nobody finds out that it was us.  We take the secret to our graves.  But if one of us is caught, we’re all caught.  If one of us is punished, we all fess up.”
     “All for one and one for all,” Jack said.  I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
     “Anyone backing out?” Sean asked, obviously eager to get going.
     I shook my head.  “Hell no.  This is for Chase.” I almost wanted to do that dumb thing where everyone stacks their hands in the middle of the circle, but then I remembered how dumb an idea it was, so I didn’t.
     I felt like those guys who do the crop circles.  We knew--or rather, Sean and Erik knew and told us--exactly what we needed to do.  The target was a wall near the counseling offices, decently-lit by a yellow overhead light, so we could more or less see what we were doing.  First task was to divide the wall into quarters and start drawing a rough sketch lightly with the chalk--after we were all wearing gloves, of course.  I took the bottom left, Ky had the bottom right, and Erik and Jack had the top left and right, respectively.  We drew quickly and lightly, just needing a basic idea of where the stencils would go.  Meanwhile Sean ran back and forth between the wall and his van, bringing us stencils.  Each stencil had a letter and a number corresponding to the color and location on our “blueprint.” Once we had the outlines drawn, we started taping up the stencils, light colors first.  And by the way, yes, it is very difficult to use tape while wearing latex gloves.  The tape sticks to the rubber and it doesn’t like coming off.
     We had about a dozen different colors we were using with the stencils, plus gradients we were painting in after the stencils were done.  Fortunately we knew how our system needed to work.  There was no art involved at this point in the process; everything was craft.  Mechanical application of the tools.  We were basically screen-printing our design on the wall.  We stenciled the white in first, then yellow, light blue, light green, orange, green, red, brown, purple, blue, white again for highlights and clouds, previous colors to fill in holes and add gradients so the thing didn’t look completely stenciled, and finally Sean went through with a paintbrush to add the smooth black outlines we wouldn’t have been able to stencil in.  This way it avoided drips, separating the colors from each other to make the painting look more like a painting and less like a quick tag job.  And while Sean finished the painting off, the rest of us brought all the stencils and paint cans back to the van.
     We were either very lucky or very skilled--we finished without being caught.  It took us only three hours from arrival to departure, but we still had to ditch the evidence.  Sean drove to a shopping center across town while the rest of us, still wearing our gloves because we didn’t want to risk getting fingerprints on anything, sat in back with scissors, cutting our stencils into unrecognizable pieces.  They became chunks of thick paper with paint on them, rather than the shapes they had been moments before.  At the shopping center, we dropped them into the dumpster behind Mervyn’s, tossed our gloves in after them, then Erik burned our “blueprint,” which had fingerprints and recognizable handwriting all over it.
     “So remember,” Sean said as we sat around the open back of the van, me and Ky inside the car and everyone else standing or kneeling outside, watching the drawing blacken and crumple away under the yellow wisps of flame, “we don’t know who did it.  When we see the wall tomorrow, we’ll be just as surprised as everyone else.  That goes double for you and me, Em.”
     “We’re the most likely suspects,” I nodded.
     “Right.  But we don’t know how it happened.”
     “How what happened?”
     Sean smiled as we all got back into the van and pulled the back door closed.  Nothing else was said for the rest of the evening, save directions so Sean could take us all home, until we got to my street.
     “I’m so nervous.” I got out through the sliding door.  “What if we get caught?”
     “They’ve got nothing on us,” Sean pointed out.  “But if one of us is caught, and I mean really caught.  Not just accused--that we can get out of.  But like if they’re gonna make us do community service and shit.  If one of is caught, we all fess up.  Remember?  Nobody’s gonna take the blame alone.”
     “We did it together, we face any consequences together,” Erik agreed.
     If nothing else, the “all for one” attitude was incentive to not get caught.  I’m certain that none of us wanted to be the one to get everyone in trouble.  I walked home--Sean had dropped me off at the corner so the engine, which sounded to me like it was in dire need of an oil change, wouldn’t wake my parents--and climbed the tree back up to my room.  As of now, I told myself as I went into the bathroom to flush the toilet as an alibi in case my parents heard me moving around, I don’t know anything.  I’ve been in bed for the past, my alarm clock glowed 2:47 at me, four and a half hours.
     The alarm went off about three hours later, and I dragged myself into the shower to wake up.  Erik’s caffeine pill went down with breakfast and I brought a thermos of coffee to school with me.  Or rather, a thermos of milk and sugar with a little coffee flavoring.
     As we’d predicted, nobody knew how to handle the painting.  I heard about it almost as soon as I got on campus.  Most students--and probably some faculty--thought it had been done with the school’s permission, probably by the Spirit Club, whose entire purpose seems to be to try to convince people that it’s good to like your high school.  Some people liked our painting, some hated it.  Those that knew it was done illegally wondered who did it and how they got it done so fast.  Sean was suspected by people who knew his hobby, but nobody had any proof.
     And from what I heard, the school didn’t want to clean it up or paint over it because they didn’t want to look like they didn’t respect Chase’s memory.  It was great.  Not only had we gotten away with doing it, it also wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.
     I first saw it in daylight on my way to my zero-period band class, and it was truly beautiful.  All five of us had had a hand in the drawing, designing, and cutting of the stencils, so the drawing style and design didn’t belong to any one of us.  So not only would it be impossible to identify the artist’s style, but the final piece also collected ideas from five different sources.  The focal point of the painting was a caricature of Chase’s car driving through the sky to a group of clouds from which several bright rainbows and sunbeams fanned out, leading the viewer’s eye through the entire picture, which was colored by the rainbows.  One sprayed a prism over a group of clouds, one aimed downward and had the Dali-esque effect of spilling paint over trees and grass, and a couple more ended at the edge of the wall before they could get too far.  In the bottom-right quarter, we did our best to mimic a roman serif font on the words “Chase Matthew Tucker” with his birth and death years below his name in the same font.  I didn’t even have to pretend to be surprised to see it; it looked so different out of the piss-colored streetlight that it might as well have been a completely different painting.
     That didn’t save me from having been Chase’s girlfriend, though.  I was, as Sean had said, one of the prime suspects the school had.  So of course they had to interrupt me at some time during the day, sending a bleached-blonde junior to my art class with the infamous yellow slip of paper that told everyone that a certain someone had somehow gotten the attention of either a counselor or one of the vice principals.  In my case it was the latter.  And it happened to be the vice principal who used to be a football coach.  The kind of guy who would fudge jocks’ grades so they could stay on the team, who would overlook certain events to avoid incriminating people he liked, who hated people who weren’t jocks.  The kind of guy against whom I had no chance if he really wanted to pin me and had half a case.  But I wasn’t going to be caught easily, especially since I had four friends whose necks were also on the line.  I asked the office aide if she knew what it was about, and she shrugged.
     “You wanted to see me, Mr. Sorel?” I asked as I stepped into his doorway.  He was at his desk, writing something that he put away when he noticed me.
     “Come on in, Emily,” he said in an uncomfortably friendly tone, gesturing to a chair.  “Have a seat.” I did so as he got up and closed the door behind me.  “How are your classes going?”
     “Pretty well,” I shrugged, continuing the charade of not knowing why I was there but not blatantly asking what it was about.  “You know, considering.”
     “Must be pretty hard for you lately.”
     “Yeah.  I’m kinda getting used to him being gone.  And everyone’s been really nice about it.”
     “Have you seen the mural over by the counseling offices?”
     “Yeah, I saw it on the way to band.  It’s really cool.  I didn’t know they were gonna do anything like that.  I figured, you know, he’d just get a little placard or something on a wall in the main office.  They’re still doing that page in the yearbook too, right?”
     “I believe it’s already finished; you’ll be able to see it in your yearbook in two weeks,” Sorel nodded, and then directed the conversation back to where he wanted it.  “So you didn’t know it was going to be done?”
     “Nope.  It was a really nice surprise, though.  I almost cried when I saw it this morning.”
     “Do you know who painted it?” Now he was finally getting to the point.  If anyone knew who illegally painted a memorial to Chase, it would be his girlfriend.  But I had been asleep the previous nights when it was done.
     “The Spirit Club?” I asked, pretending not to understand why he was asking me.
     “Is that an answer or a guess?”
     “A guess.”
     “So you don’t know who did it?”
     “Not really, no.”
     “Not really?” He was trying to use my choice of words against me.
     “I don’t know who did it.”
     “Think hard.  Has anyone mentioned anything about it before today?  Even jokingly?”
     I thought about it.  Or rather, I pretended to think about it.  “No, nobody,” I said after a moment, shaking my head.
     He nodded.  I doubt he believed me, but at least he didn’t suspect that I was involved; only that I knew something about it.  Sean’s inquisition would be much harder, but I was pretty sure he’d be able to handle it.  He’d had worse interrogations.
     Though they were pissed about it, I think the school got used to our painting.  It was still there at the end of the school year, probably because the administration didn’t want to risk the bad publicity they’d get for removing it.  I’d have been at the head of the lynch mob accusing the school of having no respect for Chase.
     We were never caught.  I think some people suspected, though.  I left Sorel’s office in the clear, armed with a hall pass that let me go back to my art class.  I gave Kylene a slight nod and smile to let her know we’d won.  When the bell rang, Mr. Conner, the art teacher, called us over to his desk.
     “I think you two should collaborate more,” he told us.  “It’s quite possibly your best work yet.”
     “What is?” I asked, tilting my head, not sure what he was talking about.  Ky understood, and was chewing on her lower lip.
     “Don’t worry about it,” Mr. Conner said with a smile.  “One thing, though.  When you want solid colors, let your paint dry a bit before you paint over it with a different color.  Otherwise the colors blend and it looks a little shoddy.”  He put a finger to his lips, winked, and told us to have a good day before we could try to make an excuse.