I never did know the truth about it, about toes-for-thumbs-Nicole.
But once that utterance evaporated, more than the scent of a breath-mint lingered. My imagination was in thrall. Like that beautiful scene in Doubt, when pillow feathers rain and scatter through the boroughs’ brick-lined streets and Philip Seymour Hoffman denounces: “That Is Gossip” — no amount of good intention or fact could undo the damage done. Curiosity is like a stray thread — begging to be prodded and pulled until one’s entire sweater has come undone.
There is no way to know who said it: toes-for-thumbs-Nicole. Or even if it were my own mind’s insidious whisper. But I became mildly fascinated by her grotesque hands – so deceptively normal – as we painted a still life in acrylics on neighbouring, rickety easels. Those stubby thumbs with a pronounced outward arch. I would steal glances to notice but never see if her knuckles bore a scar. To this day I’ve never repeated those words, to her, or about her – it seemed unspeakably cruel, somehow. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder: what do her feet look like?
She never wore sandals to art class.
