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W hen I heard the crunch of gravel on the driveway, I slapped the drawing upside down and darted to my bedroom window. My eyes flinched at the noonday sun. Then I saw him. My father was leaping out from his car and waving down the station wagon edging up to our house.

"Mom!" I yelled down to the kitchen. "Dad brought company!"

"Not again." Her voice turned icy. "I do not have enough sandwiches to feed the entire country."

"I've had it with the tours!" I yelled back down, and then I raked together the other drawings strewn across the floor.

My father had gone to an auction and was returning with an electric lawnmower sticking out the trunk and a family of four just behind.

Before he came home, I had been exploring the wonders of pencil shading, thanks to a dusty copy of "How to Draw Horses." You had to make these whirling faint circles (pages seven and eight), which seemed to have nothing to do with a horse. But when you flipped the pencil on its side and crept up on the animal from behind with soft feathery strokes (pages nine through twelve) the horse suddenly took shape and started growing out of the paper until it practically galloped off the page. Thirteen, that is.

But I didn't want to draw an old horse. I wanted to draw me for the hundredth time, with full shading. I made the overlapping circles that would apparently promise a body. I took a detour and gave myself curling spider leg eyelashes and then I cocked my pencil at a dangerously steep angle and shaded like mad. An idea went ping in my head - one the horse artist might have been very interested in knowing about. I rubbed and rubbed the shading until my finger turned hot and silver. It worked. My ample breasts looked round and full and perfect.

I paused to survey my likeness. There was nothing horsy about me. I drew a Homo sapiens all right, but a mutant one with ridiculously oversized breasts.

I felt for the eraser and scrubbed the overblown study in three dimensions. My Pink Pearl arced back against the page and exploded fireworks of eraser (good thing no one would ever see these drawings) until the hopeful hemispheres got eroded down (as if my boobs would ever be that big) and the paper gave way to ragged holes. I was moaning about how I'd never understand how all my parts fit together, according to an HB pencil anyway, when my dad and the station wagon pulled in.

I stashed my naked poses at the bottom and shoved the ragged pile in the shadows under my desk.

The front screen door squawked open. "Peggy! Martha! I met a family at the auction!"

I returned to the window. A boy was racing toward our house. An older girl closer to my age was still glued to the back seat, which was fine by me. You could see her eyeliner all the way up to my bedroom, like she used a wide tipped marker. I liked my old friends, thank you. And with my dad displaying his supposed castle once again, I was ready to cash in my pillow at this address anyway.

"Come in! Welcome!" my dad bellowed out the door.

I darted to the ledge and peered down. My bedroom was the balcony of the church we lived in. I slept in a bedroom that was never meant to be a bedroom. I lived in a house never meant to be a house. It was more like a museum. A tourist attraction with limited appeal.

The family crowded inside our front door.

"Nice to meet you." Strangers wouldn't discern the Aspartame in my mother's greeting.

"What you see is the original interior of a nineteenth-century German Baptist Church," my father began with his usual game-show-host enthusiasm. From the balcony, I could see them all shuffling into the living room. The five-year-old ran to the pump organ and stomped on the foot pedals until the brass offering plate that hung off the top spindle clattered. His sister leaned against one of the pews we used for furniture. I hoped she wouldn't notice the ridiculous grid of hymn numbers hanging on the wall beside her. Their parents were looking up. Way up. Our house was one big open room. "And there's our daughter, Martha." My dad presented me with open hand. "Her bedroom was the balcony for the choir. Upstairs, everyone, let's have a look."

"Oh we don't want to bother anyone." I could hear the parents' protests as I squared away the drawings in the far corner.

"No bother at all!" insisted my father. "You know what it's like to have a home like ours! Peggy!" he said to my mother. "I didn't tell you! These people live in a schoolhouse, in King Township. We got talking at the auction."

"Oh really?" My mother was starting to melt.

A schoolhouse. I returned to the ledge of my balcony. This family had potential. They could, possibly, see past our freak show. I imagined the two kids sitting in a row of desks, bent over their homework until the school bell clanged for dinner. Everyone in the family left notes on the massive blackboard. These people - the girl at least - might understand the kooky dilemmas I couldn't share with anyone else. We could trade stories and form an official support group for Children with Wacky Houses.

"Maybe Krista could go up and see Martha." The father looked up at me. "Our girls look about the same age."

"I want to go too!" demanded the brother. He came bounding up the stairs and Krista's footsteps creaked behind him.

"This is your room?" The floor lamp by my bed teetered as the boy sped down my narrow space. He made a tight turn at my dresser. On his trip back, my posters - the Frida Kahlo reproductions and various boy pop stars - fluttered and swung from their pushpins.

"This place is weird!" His Toronto Maple Leaf shirt was oversized, but it didn't hang low enough to cover the scab on his knee, a scab that swung open like a screen door someone forgot to shut.

Then Krista appeared, a skinny thing, her hair pulled tight and high into a ponytail. She'd opted for liquid eyeliner, and plucked her eyebrows into crescent slivers.

The kid was lying flat on his maple leaf by then. He was reaching down into the window openings. The tall windows that peaked in my room slit open the wall down to the main floor. "Look! You can see all the way down!" he yelled.

"Get out of there, you idiot," Krista screeched in a whisper. "You're gonna fall, Jason."

"The bathroom's down there! You can see the toilet! Somebody! Pee!"

Our bathroom was below my bedroom. It was the only enclosed room in the house, although its door had a stained glass window.

"How do you even get dressed up here?" Disdain curled from Krista's upper lip. "There's not much privacy in this place."

"I have to lie down anyway to do up these jeans," I half joked, smoothing my pants, but Krista didn't laugh. She didn't even smile. In fact the girl was out of the support group. The whole organization was cancelled.

"Bet I could walk across that ledge," said Jason. He'd popped up from the window and was sliding his hand across the low wall.

"Go for it," said Krista. "See if you can do it with your eyes closed. Wait, you mutant. You can't actually climb up that thing." He had one leg over the ledge that dropped straight down to the living room. Krista and I grabbed him, and I could smell the cigarette smoke wafting off her. Suddenly the pure fibres of my quilt and my solid walnut dresser started to reek with their own purity. I wanted these people out of my house. None of them would understand that I had nothing to do with the jumbo-sized crucifix hanging on the wall downstairs. That I actually had other interests, except I just couldn't show anyone.

"I thought you lived in a schoolhouse."

"It used to be a schoolhouse," Krista corrected me. "It has normal bedrooms now." And just as she said that, the guard dog in my brain went on break and her brother slipped to the floor. His legs were sticking out from under my desk like a wicked witch shoved in the stove. All the parents were chatting downstairs in still-polite tones and Krista was staring out her black-rimmed eyes and there I was, about to be stripped naked.

"Hey look!" The kid shimmied back, clotted in dust and holding a drawing of me. I appeared fully covered in shirt, pants and even a pearl necklace. Thank God. Thank the Lord above and have mercy on the children and all that.

"This is you, isn't it?" Jason shook the page. "I can tell it's you. You look mad."

Krista plucked the paper from her brother's hand. "More like you're serious."

"I was just fooling around." I reached for the paper, which only made Krista turn away and dangle it out of my reach. The kid took another dive under the desk.

"Get out of there!" I lunged for him, but he was kicking his legs.

"Score!" he yelled. He swished back out, his hands clapped against the pile. My dignity was doomed. All the religious crap belonged to my parents, but the nude drawings were all mine.

"I can see your boobs! Boo-bies! Boo-bies!" Jason held a drawing high as he chanted. Then he dropped it and grabbed another one-the one with the scrubbed-out holes. He stuck his two fingers through the spaces formerly known as my breasts and wiggled his fingers in a perverted act of puppetry. He was laughing hysterically.

I prayed for the apocalypse.

"Holy." Krista didn't crack a smile. She was still holding the first drawing between her fingers. "You can draw good."

And then the clouds parted. I could practically hear the chorus of angels. So what if she was some stranger I might never see again and so what if she didn't know her butt from Frida Kahlo. She said I could draw good.

"Draw me!" demanded Jason.

"Go watch for people peeing. I want her to do me." Krista stared at me. I pictured her leaning against the wall like James Dean. I'd draw her with a stick of eyeliner that scratched the edges of her bony angles.

"Hey kids! Lunch is on!" my father called up.

I carried the leftover sandwiches to the kitchen. There were plenty. Enough to feed the entire country at least. I didn't know what my mother's problem was. After lunch, Jason started kicking cookies between the legs of a pew. His parents decided to leave.

"Sounds like they ruined the original architecture of the schoolhouse." My mother was clearing the dishes and my father was lingering over his coffee.

"It's a shame. And that girl looked like Trouble. Did you see the makeup?" He grimaced like someone had farted.

"She seemed all right." I set the dishes into the sink. As they sunk into the foam, another idea went ping in my head. I'd start another bunch of drawings. If all those people could wander through our house and stare at us, I could do the same to them. I wasn't so sure I'd continue with the shading method. But I'd be sure to make Jason balancing along the balcony ledge, and Krista with her lip curled up, all disgusted with our church. She'd look good like that.