The Suburban Strange Read Online Free

they felt, what they thought, what they dreamt, and then she tried to capture these ephemeral things in a portrait. In a way, people weren’t real for her until she had drawn them a few times, from different angles. They were safer on paper, too—no sudden movements, no betrayals. Regine couldn’t know it, but by rendering her on paper, Celia had welcomed Regine into her life in her own timid way that first day of drawing class.
    “Where do you go to school?” Regine was composed and not intimidated even after she had conceded her lack of talent. Celia admired her for it.
    “Suburban. I’ll be a sophomore.”
    “I go to Suburban! Wait, were you there last year?”
    “No, we moved across town a month ago.”
    “I’ll be a junior. We are going to have to be friends in this class. I’ll tell you all about Suburban, and you try to show me how to draw something—anything.”
    Celia had agreed, a little surprised by how easily it was happening. From the next class on she had sat with Regine. Regine’s drawing skills would not improve much over the summer, but she didn’t hold it against Celia.
    “My first love is making collages,” Regine explained as they settled in next to one another the following week. She reached for her bag and pulled out a little album designed to hold a single photograph in each of its page sleeves, with an oval window on the front to let the first image show through. Instead of photographs, Regine had filled the book with a series of twenty-four tiny collages that told a dark story of unrequited love, assembled from fragments of text and images clipped out of magazines. A beautiful woman sat next to a beautiful man with smooth white hands as he drove a luxurious car. She stood in the background, watching him drink from a fluted glass. She peered out from under a curved staircase while he looked up at a stained-glass skylight, a tear on his cheek. A cluster of mismatched words cut from different advertisements read, He caught me staring but soon his eyes moved on.
    “It’s beautiful,” Celia said, turning back to study each page again.
    “Thank you. But I couldn’t have drawn any of it to save my soul. It’s all other people’s things that I’ve stolen.”
    “Still, it’s so creative, so delicate. And collage—” Celia was going to say collage was difficult. She had tried it on a few occasions and always made a mess with the glue. But Regine cut her off.
    “I know—Schwitters, Cornell, Picasso—everybody does it,” Regine said dismissively. “I still wish I could draw.”
    Celia didn’t recognize the first two names, and she had thought Picasso was a painter. She heard both pride and insecurity in Regine’s voice, and she didn’t know what to make of it. She let it go and admired Regine’s latest outfit. This week it was a sleeveless black sweater and a pleated gray skirt. Regine had knotted a gray and cream silk scarf at her throat, tucking the ends into the neckline of the sweater, and Celia thought this girl had such a flair for wearing black and gray, she must have been dressing that way since she’d begun to walk. To Celia, Regine was a cross between a silent-movie star and a creature from a foreign fashion magazine. Regine brought a fan to class with her on hotter days, waving it in a short arc below her face during critiques, and Celia wondered how someone could do something like that and not be ridiculed. But Regine made it look so natural, so glamorous; no one possibly could mock her for it.
    Celia felt like a different kind of foreigner in her own barely considered clothes—compared with Regine, she might as well have arrived on a boxcar of a freight train, using a flannel shirt interchangeably as a hobo’s bindle. Celia glanced down at her loose T-shirt and cutoff jeans and hoped Regine was looking only at her drawings. In that moment Celia discovered a new desire to dress like Regine, but she had no idea how to go about it. Celia’s frizzy hair escaped