Walk Two Moons

21 SOULS

At school the next day, Phoebe wore a fixed expression: a sealed, thin smile. It must have been hard for her to maintain that smile, because by the time English class came around, her chin was quivering from the strain. She was extremely quiet all day. She didn’t speak to anyone but me, and the only thing she said to me was, “Stay at my house tomorrow night.” It wasn’t a question; it was a command.

Mr. Birkway gave us a fifteen-second exercise. As fast as we could, without thinking, we were to draw something. He would tell us what we were to draw when everyone was ready. “Remember,” he said. “Don’t think. Just draw. Fifteen seconds. Ready? Draw your soul. Go.”

We all wasted five seconds staring blankly back at him. When we saw that he was serious and was watching the clock, our pencils hit the paper. I wasn’t thinking. There wasn’t time to think.

When Mr. Birkway called “Stop!” everyone looked up, dazed. Then we looked down at our papers, and a buzz went around the room. We were surprised at what had come out of our pencils.

Mr. Birkway zipped around, scooping up the papers. He shuffled them and tacked them up on the bulletin board. He said, “We now have everyone’s soul captured.” We all crowded around.

The first thing I noticed was that every single person had drawn a central shape—a heart, circle, square, or triangle. I thought that was unusual. I mean, no one drew a bus or a spaceship or a cow—they all drew these same shapes. Next, I noticed that inside each figure was a distinct design. At first it seemed that every one was different. There was a cross, a dark scribble, an eye, a mouth, a window.

There was one with a teardrop inside that I thought must be Phoebe’s.

Then Mary Lou said, “Look at that—two are exactly the same.” People were saying, “Geez” and “Wow” and “Whose are those?”

The duplicate designs were: a circle with a large maple leaf in the center, the tips of the leaf touching the sides of the circle. One of the maple leaf circles was mine. The other was Ben’s.