Excerpt: The Bells

I'd been hearing them for six weeks before I met her. The first time I heard them, I answered the door. When no one turned out to be there, I poked my head out into the hallway, considering that today's youth must really be hard up for something to do. I went back to my art room, picked up my paintbrush and got back to work. I was painting my walls. Not just any old boring whitewash job, either, no, not for me. I am what has been called -- well, if I listed all the things i've been called, we'd be here all night, but what I like to call myself is Non-Standard. What my mother tells her friends about me is thatI'm an Artist. Indeed, I did spend a few years in art school, I even have a piece of paper to prove where all my money went, and I was and still am periodically paid to produce works of art. What I was producing that afternoon was not something you would ever see hanging in the Louvre, but I liked to think that perhaps the local museum of modern art might one day be interested, if only in a "featured local artist" kind of way. I was chalkboarding the walls. Well, I was chalkboarding two of the walls. I was dry erase boarding the other two. I had been browsing through the hardware store on a completely unrelated mission when I happened upon the chalkboard paint and, right next to it, the dry erase board paint. As many times as I've found myself with an idea and no paper? As many times as I've found myself with an almost inhuman urge to scribble on the walls? I put the two cans in my basket without a second thought. And so there I was, plastic tarps over my furniture, my scrabbiest jeans and tshirt on my skinny bones, and people who didn't actually exist ringing my doorbell. I spent the remainder of the evening making the volume bar on my stereo ever larger until at last a beating at my door convinced me that there was indeed someone out there, someone who didn't want to sell me cookies.