What I did think about, that fall, was how weird it was that people suddenly cared what I did.
Because it had never been like that. In our house, Krista was the one. She was the one who got straight A's without looking like she was trying and won the regional spelling bee in sixth grade on the word "chrysanthemum" and was in the paper for that, actually, I forgot, a little photo on page B4. She was the one who got the Lake Promise Scholarship, the first person in our family on either side to go to college, and the night she found out my mother cried so hard at the kitchen table that she had to take her contacts out. She was going to be a nurse. Not a CNA, a real RN, maybe a nurse practitioner, maybe more. My mother told everybody on Route 19. She told the lady with the oxygen tanks and the man with the three-legged beagle and the guy at the Sheetz on Peach Street where she gets her coffee. She told Toomey, the carrier who has the route next to hers, so many times that Toomey started calling Krista "the Doctor" and asking about her every morning at the sorting cases. How's the Doctor, Terri? The Doctor ace her tests? Tell the Doctor I got a mole she should look at.
And I was the other one. I was the one who drew on things. I drew on my homework and my sneakers and the backs of my hands, and on the wall behind my bed, which I got in trouble for, and on the paper placemats at the Eat'n Park. I was the one who got a C in geometry. I was fine. Everybody loved me fine. Nobody worried about me, which I used to think was a compliment.
My mother's attitude toward my art, for most of my life, was the attitude you'd have toward a kid who really liked trains. She'd stick a drawing on the fridge. She'd say "That's beautiful, baby," without looking at it very long. She came to the art show at school in eighth grade and stayed for fifteen minutes because she had to go back for a parcel run. When I asked for a set of good pastels for Christmas she got them, but she also said, "Just don't get your hopes up about art, okay? You need a thing that pays." Which was fair. We did need a thing that pays. We needed several.
And then I made Everyone Home and something changed.
It started with Ms. Ledbetter, who took photos of the panel in progress and sent them to the Hessler without telling me, which you could do, it turned out; teachers could nominate. Then I was a finalist. Then the paper called, because they do a little piece on the five finalists every year, and a reporter named Mr. Paik came to the house on a Sunday afternoon and stood in our dining room with his notebook and asked me questions while my mother hovered in the kitchen doorway pretending to dry a pot. The piece ran the next Thursday, on the front of the local section. FIVE YOUNG ARTISTS VIE FOR HESSLER PRIZE. There was a photo of me with the panel. You couldn't see the roof very well because of the light. You could see my face, which was very red, and my hair, which I should have done something about.
My mother bought eleven copies. She cut out the article and laminated it at the Staples on Upper Peach and put one on the fridge and one in her car on the sun visor and one, I found out later, in the pocket of her uniform shirt, where she carried it around Route 19 for a week and showed it to everyone. The oxygen tank lady. The beagle man. The guy at the Sheetz. Toomey. She told me Toomey stopped calling Krista "the Doctor" and started calling me "the Picasso," which I hated, and which made my mother laugh so hard she had to sit down.
"You're the famous one now," she said to me one night in the kitchen, eating cold rice out of the container with her shoes off. "My baby. Who knew. All these years you're drawing on the walls and I'm yelling. I should've been framing the walls."
Krista was at the table, behind her. I saw her face. I didn't understand it.