The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton Page B

and they were already liking my “special circumstances.” It made a good angle for them, I guess. The Miracle Boy healed by art.
    “This could be your big ticket,” he said. “You know what happens to you at art school?”
    I shook my head.
    “All that good natural technique you have? All that detail? They’ll beat it right out of you. They’ll be so threatened by it, they’ll make you start throwing paint at the canvas like a monkey. By the time you graduate, the only thing you’ll be able to do is teach art to high school kids.”
    Okay, I thought. I’m glad he’s excited for me.
    “On the plus side, you’ll probably get laid a lot.”
    I gave him a nod and a quick thumbs-up. He patted me on the shoulder and then left me alone.
    I kept thinking about it for the rest of the day. Maybe I’d end up at Wisconsin with Griffin. Or hell, any art school that would take me away from this place. I had this feeling in my chest, this helium lightness that I’d never experienced before. When school let out and we all had this long summer stretching out in front of us, I wondered what the evening would hold for me. There were parties, of course. I wasn’t exactly a party animal, as youcan imagine, but I knew Griffin and all of the other art students would be doing
something
that night.
    He had arranged to pick me up at the liquor store right after dinner. I was waiting outside when he arrived in his red Chevy Nova with the plaid seats. When he got out of his car, I pointed at myself and made a driving motion.
    “No, I’ll drive.” He looked over at Uncle Lito’s old Grand Marquis. “Come on, get in.”
    I pointed at him, made a drinking motion, spun my hands around both ears, then made like a man driving like a maniac. He got the general idea then. So that’s how we ended up in the Grand Marquis. It was total style, of course, with the two-tone finish, light brown and dark brown. Big dent in the back fender. Just over a hundred thousand miles on it, and smelling like a cigar factory. It was the only way to hit a summer night in Milford, Michigan, on the last day of school.
    We drove to the house of one of the girls in our art class. There were a dozen people sitting around in folding chairs, looking bored. We hung around a few minutes, then moved on to the next. The sun went down. The air was turning cool.
    We kept making the rounds and ended up at another art student’s house. It hadn’t been a winning formula yet, but here, finally, things were looking up. There were a lot of people there, for one thing, and the growing darkness seemed to be a signal to everyone that the real party was just beginning. There was loud music coming from the backyard, smoke rising in the sky from a barbecue. I found my classmate and shook her hand, didn’t flinch when she wrapped her arms around me. She whispered in my ear that I could have anything I wanted in my life if I kept working hard enough. The kind of thing you say only after a few beers on an empty stomach.
    She dragged me into the backyard, where the music was so loud it hurt. She was into obscure techno music, as I remember, so all the kids were dancing away or voguing or whatever the hell they were doing. Another six or seven kids were jumping up and down on a trampoline, bumping into each other and almost falling off the damned thing. The one oblivious adult stood flipping burgers at the grill, a thick pair of acoustic headphones on his ears.
    My classmate tried to yell something to me. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She gave up and pointed to a group of girls who were standing in the far corner of the yard. Nadine spotted me and waved me over.
    I caught an elbow in the ribs as I made my way through the crowd, from somebody doing some kind of robot dance. When I finally got to the other side, I saw that the girls were all standing around a huge silver tub filled with ice and beer bottles. Nadine separated herself from the other girls and came to me, one