Tell me I'm not crazy

I enjoyed my elementary education for the most part, but there was one teacher who will always haunt my memory. Mrs. Verdell was someone whom every kid wanted to please. Not necessarily because she deserved respect, but because she was an adult, and always had something to say. Kids hang onto the words of adults like lifelines in the middle of a sea. The world is a very confusing place for a kid growing up, and all they have to guide them is what adults say and do. Until kids someday come across the startling realization that not everything an adult says or does is from the fount of all wisdom, they tend to assume that adults can do no wrong. Sometimes that’s not so good.

Mrs. Verdell taught art to all third and fourth graders, and so twice a week it was my class’s turn to file into the four by eight feet wooden-walled art room and learn how to use crayons and markers and properly administer liquid glue (a drop will do). Sometimes she would twist mannequins into a lifelike position and we would use our imaginations to smooth the angles into skin and turn the wooden balls into faces through our pencil drawings. Then one day, we began a fruit basket project.

When we entered her room, she had an astonishing variance of fruit laid out on the long table at the front of the classroom. There was a bunch of bananas next to a pineapple at the right corner, right next to a pile of apples and strawberries, followed by a bunch of grapes, and finally, on the farthest left, three pears and a bundle of cherries. None of us were particularly excited about the fruit, seeing as fruit was nasty and cupcakes were good, but Mrs. Verdell was sure excited. She flitted around the table arranging cups of crayons and colored pencils next to the fruit, wearing a puffy light green dress cinched at the waist by a paint apron and looking a bit like a pear herself. When we had finally gotten settled down, Mrs. Verdell excitedly clapped her hands and told us that we would have the chance to design our very own fruit basket. The trick was we didn’t have an actual basket to observe, so we had to use our imaginations and the fruit to visualize one to draw.

“Now, I want these [fruit baskets] to be as realistic as you can make them,” I remember her saying. “If you make your drawing really, really good, you might even win the Unit four elementary student still life art show!” It was all very exciting. But then, she started giving us some instructions.

“Now, because these drawings should be realistic, I don’t want any purple apples floating around,” she waved her finger at us and gave her knowing lipsticked smile. “So make sure you use the right color for the right fruit. I’ve set out a bucket of yellow for the yellow fruits,” she gestured to the bananas and pineapples, “red if you’re filling in your apples and strawberries, purple for your grapes—and obviously you can use green for your apples and grapes as well, that’s perfectly natural.” She smiled again at our young faces before finishing. “And a big bucket of green for your pears and cherries.”

There was a silence. I waited for someone to start laughing, because cherries aren’t green, but no one did.

“If you’re unsure whether you’re using the right color, just raise your hand and I’ll help you figure it out, capiche?”

“Capiche!” chimed everyone except me. Then everyone got down to work drawing their fruit baskets while I sat there a little confused as to what had just happened. Why were the cherries in the green section? Why hadn’t anyone pointed out Mrs. Verdell’s mistake? After a little while I figured maybe no one had noticed. I figured it didn’t really matter, and there was no point embarrassing Mrs. Verdell, so I spent the rest of the class drawing. I made some really great progress on my fruit basket—I meticulously created all the outlines of the fruits in a quite lovely arrangement, if I do say so myself. By the time art class had finished for that day, I was ready to begin coloring.

I thought nothing more about the cherry mistake until two days later when we came back to art class to continue our drawings. There was that same assortment of fruit in the same order on the table, with the same tubs of crayons and colored pencils in front of them. The cherries were still with the pears. I figured Mrs. Verdell just hadn’t had a chance to adjust the arrangement.

I got to work coloring my fruits as realistically as possible. The grapes were masterful gradient orbs of purple. The pineapple looked spiky enough to poke you if you ran your finger along the paper. The bananas even had a few of those brown spots that come with ripeness. I was smugly proud with my work. Then, I arrived at the cherries. So up I got, out of my seat, to gather some red crayons and colored pencils.

Mrs. Verdell looked up from her desk and smiled at me. I was a bit of a favorite. “How’s your drawing coming, Emi?” she asked.

“Good,” I squeaked. I wanted her to come look at my work and maybe point out how good it was to the class. Sure enough, she did come over a few minutes later on her rounds, where she would either stop and compliment an aspect of someone’s art or just pass over them. She stopped, and I felt her shadow over me. I didn’t look up because I was so humbly focused in my art. I waited for her to praise the beauty of my grapes. Instead she reached out and pulled the paper out from beneath my colored pencil, holding it up to her face as though she couldn’t quite make out something.

“Emi, are these cherries?” she asked, turning my drawing towards me and pressing her finger into one of the cherries, which I was in the midst of coloring dark red. She was frowning down at me from behind her thick misty spectacles. Then she turned to the class, holding up my drawing for all to see, and sighed. “I thought I made myself clear on Monday that these drawings are realistic. Please don’t color your cherries a color they’re not supposed to be.” She put my paper back down, and then she set a container of white-out in front of me before wordlessly returning to her desk. My friend Emma was sitting across from me and gave me a sympathetic smile. I stared hard down at my fruit basket for the rest of class, trying not to cry. I felt so confused and wronged. What a horrible, strange day this was turning out to be. I couldn’t wait to go home and tell my mom everything that had happened and have her hug me and tell me that sometimes teachers are wrong.

Well, I got home. And as soon as I told my mother I had colored my cherries red, she burst out laughing.

“Well, why on earth did you do that?” she asked. “Don’t you know by now that cherries are green? I knew by your age that cherries are green.” Then she went right on preparing supper, chuckling to herself about red cherries. Where does that girl get her ideas.

I told my mom I was going for a walk, then I grabbed my drawing out of my backpack and left the house. Up and down the street I walked, and to everyone I met, I held it out and asked them what they thought of it.

“Fanciful!” exclaimed one man, after examining my art. Another woman smiled and said, “Now wherever in the world are cherries red, may I ask?” Again and again, not a single person agreed that cherries are red. And eventually I stopped showing my drawing to people and just walked quietly along, hugging it inward to my chest. I couldn’t understand why I saw cherries so differently. There was nothing green about them that I could make out besides the stems. Not after they had ripened, at least. Cherries were most definitely red. All I could see was red. Red, red, red. Why was I the only one who saw red?

Well I went back to school and back to Mrs. Verdell, and I colored my cherries green. Maybe I could learn to see them as green. And I tried, I really tried, to think of them as green and not red, and for a while I really did think I could do it. But after a while, I just cracked. There was something wrong with me. I was living in a world where cherries were green, but in my own little head I knew they were red. But, no one else thought they were red, and so I figured I must be crazy. I was crazy and I was completely alone.

I felt so alone.

So one Saturday when my mom left for work, I wrote her a note saying that I was taking a long walk, and then I got a bottle of pills and crawled into a dark gap in the wall of our breezeway and took the pills until red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes and I rushed into sleep.