ude squinted at the match. Its tip still glowed. She was thinking of throwing it sideways into the long stems of dead grass by the porch. She could see the grass catch, a pause and then one sudden flame, as high as the grass, widening into many flames, leaving the stems smoking. The picture was so entrancing—black and orange, the broad strokes of flame against the lines of grass—that she knew the first toke had taken effect. If she did throw the match she'd be too interested in the fire to do anything but watch it move. The match had gone black anyway. She carefully set it down beside her on the porch, suddenly depressed.

She wished Richie were old enough to watch Denny and DeeDee by himself, but Ma put her foot down: no ten year old was going to watch her babies. So he got to ramble through the woods and down by the creek while she was stuck on the porch. She missed staying after school, going out with her friends and smoking under the ceanothus on the headlands the way they did last year. They'd wander around the cliffs, letting their souls sink down into the clear blue-green of the water soughing in and out of the sea caves, sure that God was in that color. Then they'd go to the grocery store and buy a half gallon of milk and the cheapest cookies they could get, go back to the hollow under the bushes and scarf it all down, laughing and laughing. She liked it best in spring when the ceanothus was blooming. She'd lie down on the dirt and smell its dark smell mixed with the honey-and-soap of the flowers, and watch the sun through the shiny new leaves.

That afternoon Jimmy'd been sorry for her when he asked her to come with them and she said she couldn't, she had to stay home and baby-sit. So he'd reached into the Skoal can he carried and pulled out a joint already rolled and stuffed it into her jeans pocket. She had been so grateful. Everybody'd known last year when they had to start living in a camper on Navarro beach. Even though they'd gotten on HUD so they were living in a real house now, she'd expected everyone to avoid her like she had lice. Some people did, the ones who wore new Levi's every year, but most of the ones she'd smoked with had been all right. She'd hadn't felt sure, though, until she felt Jimmy's hand hastily jammed in and out of her pocket.

She dragged on the joint again, feeling the rawness in her throat that meant pleasure. She held her breath as long as she could, then slowly let out the smoke, playing with it, trying to see if she could let it out of just one nostril. Denny was crawling toward the far side of the porch, where the biggest drop-off was. Really she should be sitting on that side, but the scenery was better the way she was facing now. She watched the way the shadow spread and shrank across the back of his thigh as his leg moved, watched the crinkles change in the back of his diaper as it wobbled along with his butt. Pretty soon she was going to have to grab him and pull him back beside her so he could head right down to the other end of the porch again. She thought, I should get him now, and didn't move. I should get him now—no movement. The very next time he put his arm down he was going to pitch forward—and he stopped. Started crying.

Nothing I do really matters, Jude thought, and inhaled again.

Friday morning. The noise in the school corridors irritated Jude. She frowned her way through the crowds and everyone sidestepped her, even the quarterback in his big red football jersey. Once she got into the art classroom, she was momentarily pleased, as always, by the huge patches of light on the white walls. She got out a photo from National Geographic of a puffed-up-chickadee, along with the pen-and-ink she was doing from it. She'd liked the work when all she was doing was brushing in the black washes—the solid cap, the dramatic branch—but she'd spent the last class with scrap paper, trying to get the texture of the feathers, and never got them right. Today it was the same struggle, till she was ready to put the pen through the paper.

Finally she put her head in her hands and just sat there, breathing hard. She'd seen a picture just like that chickadee, eight dollars in a Gifte Shoppe. All she'd need to turn out a lot of those pictures was a pen and a bottle of ink, a decent brush and some good paper. But she felt like she was fighting the little nib. All she could get out of it was a line, not a shade, not a flow. "Tough time?" Mr. Kroll said behind her. She looked up at the art teacher. "That one's nice," he said, pointing at one of the scratch feathers.

"Yeah, but it doesn't go with this," she said, pointing at the bird.

"You could redo the bird so it goes with the feather."

"Thanks so much." She wasn't in the mood for teasing.

"I'm almost serious. It's really a brush bird. Why don't you do the whole thing in brush work?"

Because the Gifte Shoppe doesn't sell any brush work—but she couldn't say that to Mr. Kroll. She grimaced at him, but politely, because she liked him even though he was round-shouldered and had a bald spot with one wisp that stood straight up. She had to like him, in a way. He was the only teacher who taught her something she actually wanted to do. She got another sheet of paper and tried to figure out how to translate the shape of the branch into thin black lines.

Monday night, and Ma was home on her day off. She was heating left-over rabbit ragout from the restaurant where she was a hostess. She looked tired. She'd looked that way ever since Larry'd left them and they'd gotten so broke they lost their rental. Jude hovered near her in the galley kitchen, poking the ragout, opening the refrigerator door. "Jude, if you want to make dinner yourself I'll just go fold laundry," Ma said. Now she looked grouchy.

"Sorry," Jude said, leaning against the refrigerator.

"Well? What's the problem?"

Jude tried to find something to say besides Don't look so tired or Do you not smile at me anymore because you're always mad at me? "We're supposed to start doing pencil sketches. I wanted to get a pencil and a sketchbook."

"Did you lose all your school pencils already? And we've got all kinds of scrap paper."

"I can't turn it in on scrap paper. And I need a different kind of pencil. The school pencils are too hard."

"How much does all that cost?"

"Seven, eight dollars."

"When are you supposed to have this by?"

"Wednesday."

"Judie, it's been a real tight week," said her mother, finally looking at her. "Tight month. I can't give it to you in two days when I know you have a pencil and there's plenty of paper around. Look, I can give you a dollar, if that'll get you a pencil." Why was it that last year, when they didn't have money, Ma just slipped her a bill and said, "Life will provide," but now she was always worried?

"O-kay... can I do some sketching at the headlands tomorrow? Come home with Corey? Since you have the day off?" The door slammed. "Richie! You're making the whole house shake," Jude yelled.

"Sure," Ma answered. "Richie, come in here a second." Richie appeared, blond curly hair all in tangles, palm skinned, a rip in the calf of his jeans. "What on earth did you do to yourself?"

"Came down a tree too fast."

"I'm going to teach you to sew tonight," Ma said. "Those jeans have to last you the year."

"Jude can sew," he whined.

"You rip 'em, you fix 'em."

"Could I have that dollar, Ma?" Jude asked.

"Hold on, I wanted to tell both of you this. The chef'll pay four dollars a pound for huckleberries and I told him you could pick him some. They've got to be real clean, though. If you want to do it I'll get you some hardware cloth so you can screen the twigs and all out."

"Money!" Richie said.

"That's a lot of huckleberries," Jude said.

"Two pounds and you've got your sketchbook."

"Why don't you pay me for baby-sitting? That's work!"

"If I could, I would, honey, you know that." She looked more tired.

The door opened and Corey came in. "Hey honey!" Ma said. "How's my budding computer programmer?" putting her arm around Corey. Last year Corey had been the baby-sitter if Ma couldn't be home. Now Jude was baby-sitting four, five days a week, and she wasn't getting hugs for being a budding anything.

"There's a thirteen-year old boy that does it better than I can," Corey said, slumping down on the chair and brushing her hair from her eyes. She looked just as tired as Ma. "I don't know, Ma, maybe I should just take that prep-cook job. I know how to do that."

"You're a smart girl and when the time comes you are going to do just fine. I don't know a soul with money in the restaurant except the chef and the owner."

Jude slipped out onto the porch. She wanted Corey to do all right, but she was going to have to turn her sketch in on the back of an old menu while Mom scrounged rides and stuck her at home so Corey could stay evenings at the vocational center. And she hadn't even gotten her dollar.

The next day, after school, she dropped by the computer class and got a dollar from Corey, who had money because she cleaned two vacation cottages Saturday and Sunday mornings, while Jude baby-sat. Then she went to the art-supply section of the hardware store. She thought over the pencils for a long time, since she could only get one: 3B would last longer, but would it be soft enough? 6B would make wonderful black lines, but would she be able to shade in light grays? She finally settled on 4B and hoped it was right. What she really wanted was a big watercolor pad and a little palette, and about eight brushes from the tiny one with about 5 hairs to the thick soft one for filling in skies, and lots of little fat tubes of water color. Pads were eight dollars, brushes three to seven, paint two to five a tube. She could pick the whole ridge clean without finding enough huckleberries to pay for all that.

"Hey!" She turned around and there was Jimmy, with two of the other girls she used to smoke with. "We were going to get some munchies and then go up to our spot, you know? Want to come?"

"Sure," she said. If she bought the pencil, she wouldn't have anything to chip in. She slid the pencil back into the box.

After the smoke, the lemon cookies and milk were like old friends. And it felt so cool making stoned pictures of the surf and handing them out to her buddies and hearing them say "Wow" and laugh about how they couldn't do it, that she didn't care about her mother not smiling or being stuck on the porch or not having the right paper or even, much, how the sketches looked.

She told her mother she wanted to do a series of sketches of the Headlands. She talked a little about tide and weather. Her mother was impressed. So Saturdays, she picked enough huckleberries to chip in for food and reefer and Tuesdays she stayed in Mendocino till Corey drove them both home. She smoked with her buddies till she felt like drawing, then whipped off some five-minute sketches that she could show in case her mother asked. Her mother didn't ask, but her friends saying the sketches were cool almost made up for it. She started to believe them. Stoned it was enough to watch each wave breaking in its own way against the cliffs, and not try to show anyone else how beautiful they were. But when she was back home she looked at the sketches and saw how she got the lines wrong or the shadows too dark, and she saw Richie bringing in huckleberries from all the places he'd found on his rambles, and she started thinking that all she'd ever get to be was a waitress, and being a waitress was even harder than Ma's hostess job. So she didn't try sketching, or anything else, when she was home. When she could, she bought a joint for herself, and hoarded it through the baby-sitting week. When she didn't have any she just sat on the porch and burned matches down to her fingers. And that was how things were, for about a month.

One day when she walked into class Mr. Kroll was smoothing a white cloth that lay under a blue bowl full of apples and oranges. Next to the bowl stood a straw-covered chianti bottle. There were three chrysanthemums in the bottle, two deep red and one copper-colored. "Lunch?" she asked Mr. Kroll, hoping to get him to laugh. He hadn't been very friendly lately. She guessed he'd noticed that she was getting sloppy. He only said, "Still-life." The hell with it, she thought.

The easels were set up, with stubs of pastels in their racks. She stood at one, tuning out Mr. Kroll's opening remarks and frowning at the stupid bottle. It made her think of all the useless things in the shops that she would never in her life be able to afford: orange-peel fudge at eight dollars a pound, wind chimes made of weathered green copper, twenty-dollar baseball hats with embroidered whales and "Mendocino" on them. It made her think of the tourists at her mother's restaurant, paying three times as much as her mother's hourly wage for one bottle of wine. She was starting to hate the chianti bottle. She drew its neck crooked the way life was crooked. She imprisoned the green glass in its little cage of straw. She let the flowers droop a little and slapped the fruit bowl onto the paper as if she were throwing a lump of clay at the easel. She let the fruit just be fruit, but she poked black staring holes in the weave of the white cloth. She got angrier and angrier as she drew, and felt crazier and crazier, because the anger felt so good.

"Having a bad day?" Mr. Kroll murmured as he passed by. The sketch was nearly done but she immediately tore it off the easel and started crumpling it. "No," he said quietly, separating her hands with his own. He smoothed the paper back on the easel, gently so the pastels wouldn't smear. "This is very good," he said. She stared at him. It was rage and hatred. It wasn't supposed to be good. He was looking at her and nodding as though he were expecting her to say something, but she didn't have anything to say. She spent the rest of class staring at the picture, tempted to tear it up anyway.

As soon as the bell rang she made for his desk, waving the picture. "What am I supposed to do with this?"

"Put fixative on it."

"I don't mean that."

"Keep doing it."

"I can't just do it here and then leave it!"

Mr. Kroll opened a drawer, took out a plastic bag with crumbs inside, turned it inside out, then went to Jude's easel and scooped the pastels into the bag. He handed them to Jude. "It's a step-by-step thing," he said. "But if you keep at it, it will get better."

At home Denny crawled up and down the porch, having figured out how to turn around. Jude drew grass fires over and over again on old menus, old newspaper, whatever she could find. The flames were hard, because she had to make them both translucent and real. But she liked when words showed through, as though the pricey food and the bad news were burning too. And she loved the hard black slashes of the grass stems. Lying forgotten in her coin purse was half a carefully preserved joint. The burning grass was hers, and she was going to get it right.

Copyright © 1997 by Amy Boyer. All rights reserved.

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