“That’s not really useful advice.”
She did a one-shoulder shrug, like,Sorry, that’s all I got.
“You are teaching your hands to think how they must manipulate the pick,” Martine clarified. “The more you do the actions, even if they are not successful, the more your hands become comfortable making the motions. Then one day you pick a lock.”
“When you’re sixty,” I grumbled.
“Perhaps sooner,” Noor said. “When I started to learn, I watched every lock-picking video I could find. I practiced for hours with my ear against the lock so I could hear how it sounded when the pins move into place.”
Martine rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t sound like anything.”
Noor smiled wryly. “Yes, I learned that. Finally, I asked Youssef to teach me. He is very good at locks, and he is a patient teacher. He would say, ‘Do this and do that,’ and then tell me a story about someone he knew or one of his teachers while I did what he had said. Then he would say, ‘When you do that, try it this way,’ and he would tell me another story. It was nice. He did not make me feel stupid, and his stories distracted my brain so that my hands could learn what they needed to do.”
“Maybe a story would help me.” I said, pulling the pick and wrench out of the lock and shaking out my hands. Noor tipped her head up and stared at the sky through almost-closed eyes. I rolled my head and shoulders to loosen them, then put the wrench back into the lock.
“Okay.” She paused, thinking. “I had my first affair of the heart when I was six.”
I burst out an incredulous laugh. “That issucha French thing to say.” I loosened my grip on the pick and kept rakingthe pins. Noor raised an eyebrow at me, and I said, “Don’t tell me: Your eyes met across a crowded playground, and he toasted you with his juice box.”
Martine laughed as Noor shook her head. “No no no.” She smiled. “He was not real. You know Astérix et Obélix?”
I continued to noodle the lock. “The graphic novels, right? With the smart little Gaulois warrior guy and the little dog and the big strong friend who likes to carry huge rocks around? Nick’s little sister loves them.”
Noor nodded.
“Don’t tell me you had a thing for Astérix.”
She shook her head. “Panoramix.”
It took me a minute to remember which one he was. There were a zillion characters in the series. “The druid?”
“His beard and mustache are very satisfying to draw. I liked that he made magic potions. I spent many hours teaching myself to draw him and all the others. I would make up stories and draw my own bandes dessinées.”
“That’s how you got started? Drawing fan-art graphic novels?”
She nodded. “I put people I knew into the stories. I gave Panoramix an apprentice who looked like me—Remix. My friends liked her better than him, so I gave Remix her own adventures.” She glanced at my hands, which had stopped scrubbing the cylinders. I gave her a guilty smile and got back to work.
“How did you start doing street art?” I asked, keeping my hands moving.
She sighed. “Some boys from my school pulled the scarf of my friend and called us names when we were walking home.People saw them do it, but nobody told them to stop. We were so scared. Those boys could have hurt us, and no one would have done anything. It is normal. That summer, I went to a street-art festival, and I saw people making big art about important things. It was a lightning bolt. I thought that if I could make big art about girls in headscarves, we would feel strong instead of scared.”
My phone buzzed with a text. When I saw who it was from, I shivered and shoved the phone back into my pocket without reading it.
Martine noticed my shiver. “What is it?”
I made a face. “Le Bec. He keeps texting. He said he was joking, and then he said I hurt his feelings, so of course he lashed out. And then he did a piece on the side of our building and texted me a photo of it and said it was an apology, but it’s just…” I grimaced. “It’s just too much.” He’d painted an enormous, cinnamon-colored pigeon version of me. Its eyes were the exact hazel color of mine. Its smile was my selfie smile—slightly aloof, not too wide, with the corners barely turned up. It clutched a phone with my green-and-yellow UofO hard case, and the shoes on its pigeon feet were my favorite platform Vans. I didn’t like knowing he’d been observing me so closely. I didn’t want to be one of his pigeons. “He keeps asking what I think of it. I know he wants me to say I love it, but it looks just like me, and it feels creepy, not apologetic.” I sighed. “I don’t know; am I missing some cultural cue—”
“No,” Noor said.
“What he did was terrible,” Martine agreed. “You were having a discussion, and he attacked you. That is not a jokeor a misunderstanding. It is not how you say, ‘You hurt my feelings.’ ”
Noor snorted. “He is not apologizing, Tosh. He never apologizes. He says he is sorry that you have made him apologize to you until you begin to believe that you are the one who has hurt him. And he ‘apologized’ with a big, public piece that will bring him more publicity. This is not about you. It is about him.”
I scrubbed viciously at my lock. “I should block his number.” The girls nodded, like,Wise choice, just as my lock clicked open. I’d done it. “Look—” I said as Noor’s phone buzzed.
She looked up from it, grinning. “Youssef finished the video.”
“Show it to us,” Martine said. We clustered around her, and she pressed Play. He’d done a beautiful job, interspersing time-lapsed footage of us working—so you saw the image grow in front of your eyes—with lingering shots of some of the pieces that made up the installation. He captured Noor as she was building Mona Lisa’s face out of chess pieces, cups, an old handheld video game, and an assortment of scarves. The slow sideways look Noor turned on the camera just before she took out her spray can and made it come alive was a clear challenge to other artists.Top this, it said.
