Free The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton Page B

about introducing me and telling everyone else about my “unique circumstances.” The “challenge” I was bravely facing. Everybody welcome Mike, eh? Just don’t expect him to say thank you in return. Ha ha.
    I’m not sure how I got through that first day. It’s all a blur now, looking back on it. I didn’t eat lunch, I remember that much. I kept walking through the hallways, eventually finding myself back at my locker. I felt utterly lost and alone as I stood there, just spinning the dial on my locker, over and over.
    The next morning, as I was getting ready to go back to that school again, I admit it . . . I started thinking about suicide. I rode on the bus in my own little cocoon of silence among the roar of the other kids.
    The next day, when I got home I actually started looking around to see if I could find any pills. Uncle Lito had his own bathroom. I usually didn’t have any reason to go in there, but that evening, while he was minding the store, I took inventory of his medicine cabinet. There was aspirin and cough syrup and hangover medicine and jock-itch cream and a thousand other things, but nothing strong enough to do what I had in mind.
    I wasn’t driving yet, but still, I thought maybe I could take his car, get up some speed, and then aim right for a tree. Or hell, for those concrete embankments under the railroad bridge. Talk about a proven death trap. My biggest worry about that was that I wouldn’t get the car going fast enough,or that I’d hit something else first and end up just wounded and fucked up and in huge trouble but still very much alive.
    What a cheerful turn my little story has taken here, I know, but this was pretty much a running theme for that whole first semester at the high school. Nobody talked to me. I mean nobody. As that first semester went on, it got colder, and darker. I was getting up at six in the morning, in total darkness, to catch the bus at six forty to get to school by seven fifteen, not just going to this place I hated so much, but doing it before the sun even started thinking about coming up.
    It makes my heart ache, just thinking back on that time in my life. How lonely I was. How out of place I felt every single minute of every day.
    When I went back to school for the second semester, there were new classrooms to find, a new set of kids to get used to me sitting in the back of the room, never making a sound. And right off the bat, a new class for me. Freshman art, or, excuse me, Art Foundations. The teacher was a man named Mr. Martie. He was younger than most of the other teachers in the school. He had a beard and permanently red eyes, and he spent most of that first class mumbling to himself about the size, shape, and color of his headache.
    “Let’s not get too excited on the first day, eh?” He walked among the art tables, ripping off sheets of drawing paper from a large pad. When he came to me, he ripped off a sheet and I got maybe eighty percent of it, most of one corner still on the pad. “Just draw something today. I don’t care what.”
    He passed by me, not giving me a second look. Not pausing to single me out like most of the other teachers did. So he had that going for him already. With any luck, this would be one class where I could really disappear into the wallpaper.
    He went back to his desk and tilted his head back. “I would murder for a cigarette right now,” he said, his eyes closed.
    There was a small basket of art supplies on each table. Mine had a few broken pieces of charcoal-looking crayon things and a couple of pencils. I took out one of the pencils and stared at the blank piece of paper. Three square corners of nothing, and one jagged edge.
    “You’ve got to give us a subject,” a girl in the front row said, apparently with the authority to speak for all of us. “We don’t know what to draw.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Mr. Martie said. “Draw a landscape.”
    “A landscape?”
    Mr. Martie looked up at the girl. There was