Mimi's Demons

Chapter 40: Angels in Wrinkles

"You're very good at this for your age."

Mimi didn't look up from her sketch. They were doing still life, which involved a lot of lifting your pencil up at arm's length and eyeballing it. She would have preferred if she got to do a cadaver as a model, but she supposed a bunch of random bottles and fruit would work too. Something about practice with basic shapes.

Her art teacher was a friend of her main teacher, Mr. Shacketts. Mrs. Bloomfield was a slender elderly lady who had technically retired from teaching, but came out of it for Mimi. She wore different and exotic chains on her glasses and her short, curly hair was white as snow. Mimi liked her for some reason she couldn't quite explain. She just had a warm, peaceful feeling about her, like a quiet summer's afternoon at a lake in the mountains with her grandpa. Or maybe it was the soft way in which she talked to Mimi or her gentle instructions. She even sat next to Mimi at her little desk, helped by the fact she was quite little herself, and sketched with her. Afterwards they would compare and she'd point out to Mimi the differences in their sketches, not to make her feel small, but to show her new and better ways to make the picture look the way Mimi wanted too.

"And if you want to get weird with your drawings, that's okay too," Mrs. Bloomfield said. "These techniques are to help you get exactly what you're seeing in your head out for everyone to see. That's why we practice with still life."

Get what she saw in her head for others to see...something about that lit a desperate sort of flame in her, the same electricity that had made her tremble as she drew the demons for Duke. If she could sketch the demons, people wouldn't necessarily believe her, but they would see what she saw. She wouldn't be alone.

Mimi rarely saw demons in her classroom. She only ever saw them around the rest of the mansion when they were hanging onto someone or just skittering out of sight, unlike on the street where there was simply so many she couldn't help but spot them in full before they sensed her gaze and scuttled away. But she never saw them hanging onto her teachers, and not even a speck of them anywhere when Mrs. Bloomfield was around.

She sometimes wondered if Mrs. Bloomfield was an angel.

"Do you have kids?" Maybe Mrs. Bloomfield had some grandkids Mimi's age that were also angels. Mimi was tired of Juli's flittering stealy demon.

"I have five," she said, her own pencil skittering across the page. "And twenty-seven grandchildren and three great grandchildren."

"Whoa."

"Yeah, they multiply fast. I have two more greats on the way."

"Any my age?"

"Why, yes. My eldest great granddaughter is twelve. But, I'm afraid she can't come here. I'm only able to come here with special permission from your father."

Mimi pursed her lips, embarrassed to be caught even though she hadn't been particularly hiding. She was acting like a baby looking for friends. She didn't need friends, didn't she? She'd done just fine on her own for year. Once you got use to that stupid achiness it went away. Maybe Serena and Juli had ruined all that for her. There was always at least one of them hanging around.

Mrs. Bloomfield and Mimi sketched and eyeballed their pencils in against their models in quiet for a bit. Only the gentle ticking of the clock on the wall filled the silence. It used to be a simple, if not elegant clock with short pendulums in a glass case and the traditional chimed tune at the hour. But recently it had been replaced with a beautiful coo-coo clock the size of a small doll house with long, draping gold pendulums beneath its little house and a beautiful blue jay bird that would appear from its doors at every hour and half hour. Mimi loved tracing all the detailed leaves and branches carved into the wood when she needed something to look at besides her teachers during her lectures. Something wiggled in her stomach at the thought that Duke had bought it just for her. She was afraid to ask.