最后的演講:平房里的電梯 (3/4)

Given my limited artistic skills, I thought it best if I sketched things out in basic geometric shapes. So I painted a simple rocket ship with fins. I painted Snow White's mirror with the line: "Remember when I told you that you were the fairest? I lied!" On the ceiling, Jack and I wrote the words "I'm trapped in the attic!" We did the letters backwards, so it seemed as if we'd imprisoned someone up there and he was scratching out an S.O.S. Because I loved chess, Tammy painted chess pieces (she was the only one of us with any drawing talent.) While she handled that, I painted a submarine lurking in a body of water behind the bunk bed. I drew a periscope rising above the bedspread, in search of enemy ships. I always liked the story of Pandora's box, so Tammy and I painted our version of it. Pandora, from Greek mythology, was given a box with all the world's evils in it. She disobeyed orders not to open it. When the lid came off, evil spread throughout the world. I was always drawn to the story's optimistic ending: Left at the bottom of the box was "hope." So inside my Pandora's box, I wrote the word "Hope." Jack saw that and couldn't resist writing the word "Bob" over "Hope." When friends visited my room, it always took them a minute to figure out why the word "Bob" was there. Then came the inevitable eye-roll.