Chapter Nine

As the semester went by, Chill and I talked less and less. Even when we worked together on the mural, I spoke to Chill only when necessary, to ask about a color or shade or which brush to use.

I began giving Mr. Sfinkter updates on how the book was coming, and he gave me long and impressive lists of all the people he knew. He told me how tiring it was when they were always after him to spend time with them and give them advice on their own works.

Mr. Sfinkter would only talk to me during class. It seemed that students were only visible to him during class time. We appeared when the bell rang and disappeared at the end of the period. It took a powerful mind to do that, the mind of a famous writer.

The more he talked, the dumber I felt for not knowing who he was when he first came to class. All his books were in the library. Well, they weren’t when I first checked, but within a few days of his being at the school they were on the shelf. His website was filled with the wonderful things that he’d said and done and wonderful things others said about him. I couldn’t find much else on the web about him, but I think that’s because he was just so big he tried to avoid too much publicity.

You could see by the way he joked with and talked to the other teachers that they all liked him, even Ms. Surette. I think he was only teaching because he loved to share what he knew. Or perhaps he was just doing research for his next book.

As for his critique of the students’ career choices, he was just trying to get us to look at things in a more realistic way, to prepare us for the “real world.”

As the semester went by, I became certain that Chill’s dislike for Mr. Sfinkter was simply jealousy and anger at the brutality of his honesty. Chill hated that I was getting the attention for a change. He was jealous that Mr. Sfinkter would let me work on my book but wouldn’t let him work on his sketches. The day I finished the book and brought it into class was the day Chill’s jealousy boiled over.