The Wall on Fenwick Street

The Wall on Fenwick Street

1Every summer, the neighborhood council on Fenwick Street chose two students to paint a mural on the long brick wall behind the community center. This year, the council chose Marisol Vega and Dev Okafor, two fifth graders who had never worked together before.

2Marisol arrived on the first morning with a folder tucked under her arm. Inside were twelve sketches on graph paper, with every square numbered and every color labeled in neat letters. "I measured the wall last week," she said. "If we follow the grid, every piece will fit."

3Dev arrived twenty minutes late, carrying a sketchbook full of loose, swirling drawings. He glanced at her folder and grinned. "That's a lot of squares," he said. "I was thinking we could just start painting and see what the wall wants to be."

4Marisol frowned. A wall didn't want anything, she thought. It needed a plan. But all she said was, "Let's at least agree on the picture." After some discussion, they decided to paint Fenwick Street itself: the shoe repair shop, the bus stop, the old oak tree, and the people who passed by every day.

5For the first week, they worked at opposite ends of the wall. Marisol painted slowly and carefully, checking her grid after every few strokes. She rarely spoke to the neighbors who stopped to watch. Dev painted fast, in big, bold sweeps of orange and purple, and he chatted with everyone. When Mr. Lund from the shoe repair shop wandered over, Dev asked him to stand still for ten minutes and painted him right onto the wall, waving from his doorway.

6On Thursday, trouble came from both ends of the wall. A soccer ball bounced off the bricks and smeared Marisol's wet blue sky. She stared at the smudge, and her eyes filled with tears. "It's ruined," she whispered. "I'll have to paint that whole section over." At the same moment, Dev stepped back from his end and groaned. The bus stop he had painted without a plan was tilted, and the bus looked as if it were sliding downhill.

7Dev walked over and studied the smudge. "What if it isn't a smudge?" he asked. "What if it's a cloud?" He dabbed a little white paint into the blue, and the smear became a soft, puffy cloud. Marisol laughed in spite of herself. Then she pulled out her graph paper and a long ruler. "Your bus stop is easy to fix," she said. "Let me show you where the lines go."

8On the last day, the two of them painted side by side in the middle of the wall. Marisol let Dev add a flock of birds that wasn't in her sketches, and Dev let Marisol measure the oak tree before he painted its branches. When they finished, they signed their names in one corner, close together, in the same bright orange.