Guest Post: THE LEAF READER and My Brother’s Green Graffiti

I’m thrilled to be sharing a guest post from Emily Arsenault, author of The Leaf Reader, which is out now from Soho Teen:

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When I was fourteen, my brother found a can of spray paint and drew a few large green concentric circles on our family’s worn red tool shed. It was a target of some kind. For what? Archery? Baseballs? A BB gun? I didn’t ask. I was too mortified to ask questions.

There was probably talk of him earning money for the paint to cover it up, but it didn’t happen. Not for a year or two, anyway. My mother didn’t insist—not because she didn’t care, but because she had other priorities. I write this with an understanding that I simply didn’t have then. I am a married mother of one who can easily walk by the same dirty sock in the hallway for a month or two. I have no idea how long it would take me to repaint a shed. I have no idea how my mother even had three children, much less met all of our basic needs as a single mother after she divorced my dad when I was twelve. Of course the shed wasn’t repainted right away.

I didn’t think this way when I was fourteen. I grew up in a little red house in a modest neighborhood of a fairly affluent, image-conscious Connecticut town. Even on our relatively humble street, there were certain standards for house and yard upkeep, very few of which we met. Our house badly needed a paint job and we didn’t rake our leaves. These were things we used to pay attention to before the divorce. But now we were the only “broken home” on the block—at least among neighborhood families with kids—and we could no longer keep up.

And now, with my brother’s handiwork, our house had a target on it, identifying us, in my mind, as the trashiest people in the neighborhood. This horrified me beyond rational explanation.  On an almost daily basis, I would roll my eyes at it or covertly give it the finger. This is who we are now, I thought. Crazy people who spray paint shit on their own houses and bring the property values down. I was certain I could feel the disdain in the gaze of our neighbors, with their minivans, remodeled kitchens, and perfectly fluffy Pomeranians.

A couple of months after the target was drawn, I got a date for Homecoming, with a boy I’d had a secret crush on for a couple of years. This wasn’t the sort of the thing that usually happened to me. I was a shy nerdy type who didn’t do sports or go to parties or dances. This one-time date was arranged by a kind girl of much of higher social standing, with whom I was friends very briefly. Anyway, my date suggested his older college brother could pick me up and ferry us both to the dance. I said yes over the phone, but then, upon hanging up, remembered The Target. I wept uncontrollably, and somehow arranged a changed plan whereby we could meet at a Friendly’s in walking distance to the high school. I accepted the ride home because it would be dark and the spray paint wouldn’t be visible to this boy of fine home and significant means.

I didn’t know then that two years later this boy (with whom I barely spoke on our “date”) would be arrested and then shipped off to military school. To the shock of the high school community, he instigated a series of computer robberies of the public schools. According to the rumors, all of the stolen equipment was found in his basement after the arrest. It was more of a game than a money-making operation. So maybe the shabby bad-assery of my brother’s graffiti would have actually appealed to him rather than repelled him. But again, I didn’t think that way at the time.

The green graffiti got painted over a year or two later, when my mother had a boyfriend who offered to paint our house and shed. I remember helping him paint the shed on a sweltering hot day, and I remember the relief I felt as I slapped red paint over the green circles, as if I was finally dressing a raw, festering wound. What I didn’t know then was that soon after that, high school would take a couple of difficult turns for me, and I’d have a lot more to worry about than a few spray-painted circles on an old shed.

I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t think about the shed graffiti for twenty years, until I suddenly found myself putting it in a book. I was only a few pages into The Leaf Reader when I had my teenage narrator, Marnie, walk by a spray-painted image her brother drew on the family shed. I entered this into my story almost automatically, without thinking about it on a conscious level. Marnie’s brother’s graffiti is red instead of green, and has a different shape and motivation than my brother’s—which Marnie puzzles over and must eventually figure out.

I was recently asked to write a couple of paragraphs about my “inspirations” for The Leaf Reader. I tried to briefly note my brother’s graffiti, but found I couldn’t write about it succinctly, and needed to clarify my memory of it. I was pretty sure my younger brother had drawn it, but after more than twenty years, I wasn’t certain. Maybe it was the other brother? I asked my older brother first, and he had almost no recollection of the green circles ever being there. “Huh,” he said, after some prodding. “I guess I kind of remember that. Maybe I did it? I wouldn’t put it past me.”

My younger brother, who indeed had drawn them, wrote this in response to my inquiring e-mail:

“It was for soccer kicking practice, me and BJ thought it was a solid idea . . . I don’t think my prefrontal cortex had appeared yet, the whole idea was completely without reservation until other people informed us otherwise.”

His recollection was that our mom and grandmother had insisted he paint over it immediately. I know that can’t be true; I remember my November Homecoming anguish very clearly, and am certain that the repainting occurred on a hot July or August day—eight or perhaps even twenty months later. I believe the problem with revisiting and reconstructing adolescent memories is that indeed we were all operating on somewhat underdeveloped brain functioning. I was probably the most impaired of all of us. Given the choice of being the one who drew the target, the one who barely noticed it was there, and the one who used it, like almost everything around her, to flog herself with, I know now that I’d much prefer to have been one of the first two.

So in The Leaf Reader I gave my character Marnie my brother’s graffiti, but I gave her a different disposition. She doesn’t love her worn-down house or her brother’s indiscretion, but she has the good sense not to let this kind of thing bother her to the point of crazy. She has a sense of humor about her situation, because she can see a future beyond it. For this reason, she is a magical character for me. Not so much because she might have a bit of psychic twinge when she looks into a teacup—but because she has an emotional skill hard to come by in high school. I certainly think kids like her exist—I just wasn’t one of them. I wish I was. In that sense, she is like my teenage Mary Sue. She’s not gorgeous or popular or a star athlete. When I look back at myself at that age, I don’t generally wish I had any of those things. Just a slightly higher emotional IQ—a mere hint of perception regarding what might matter in the future, and what might not—would have been enough.

About The Leaf Reader:

Maybe, occasionally, some of the pictures I saw in teacups were not for the tea drinkers. Maybe some of them were for me.

Marnie Wells knows that she creeps people out. It’s not really her fault; her brother is always in trouble, and her grandmother, who’s been their guardian since Mom took off is…eccentric. So no one even bats an eye when Marnie finds an old book about reading tea leaves and starts telling fortunes. The ceremony and symbols are weirdly soothing, but she knows—and hopes everyone else does too—that none of it’s real.

Then basketball star Matt Cotrell asks for a reading. He’s been getting emails from someone claiming to be his best friend, Andrea Quinley, who disappeared and is presumed dead. And while they’d always denied they were romantically involved, a cloud of suspicion now hangs over Matt. But Marnie sees a kindred spirit: someone who, like her, is damaged by association.

Suddenly the readings seem real. And, despite the fact that they’re telling Marnie things about Matt that make him seem increasingly dangerous, she can’t shake her initial attraction to him. In fact, it’s getting stronger. And that could turn out to be deadly.

You can find The Leaf Reader here: Indiebound |Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads

 

 

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