Mary McCoy - Indestructible Object

Indestructible Object

Mary McCoy

Printz Honor Author

Dead to Me

Camp So-and-So

I, Claudia

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Childrens Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text 2021 by Mary McCoy

Jacket illustration 2021 by Beatriz Ramo

Jacket design by Krista Vossen 2021 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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Interior design by Hilary Zarycky

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCoy, Mary, 1976- author.

Title: Indestructible object / Mary McCoy.

Description: New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2021. | Audience: Ages 12 up. | Summary: In the city of Memphis, eighteen-year-old Lee and her boyfriend Vincent make a popular podcast on artists in love, but Lee learns that stories of happily-ever-after love do not always mirror real life.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020030125 | ISBN 9781534485051 (hardcover) ISBN 9781534485075 (ebook)

Subjects: CYAC: LoveFicton. | Dating (Social customs)Fiction. | BisexualityFiction. | PodcastsFiction. | Memphis (Tenn.)Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M43 In 2021 | DDC [Fic]--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030125

To the people I love

ARTISTS IN LOVE, EPISODE #86:

I Hope I Gave You a Good Love Story

Hosted by Vincent Karega and Lee Swan

VINCENT KAREGA:

The first time we met, you told me I had the kind of voice youd follow down a dark alley.

LEE SWAN:

Oh yikes, did I? I cant believe you had any romantic interest in me after that.

VINCENT:

I liked it. It was the first time anyone had ever suggested that I might be trouble. I liked that someone like you would think that about someone like me.

LEE: (laughs)

I think what I meant was, you have a trustworthy voice. I wouldnt have followed a dangerous voice down an alley. What did you think the first time you met me?

VINCENT:

You were wearing a T-shirt that said, THERE IS NO MUSIC UNDER LATE CAPITALISM . I thought it was really pretentious.

LEE:

Because I am really pretentious, Vincent.

VINCENT:

Only about things you really care about. That was what I liked about you right away, Lee. Thats what I still like about you.

Every week for the past two years, Vincent and I have met in my attic to record our podcast, Artists in Love. This episode, we are the artists in love. And we are about to break up.

VINCENT:

Have you heard about the performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay? They were lovers, and they made art together for over a decade. For their last piece, they walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, and met in the middle, and then they broke up. Thats what this feels like to me.

LEE:

So is this performance art, or is it life?

VINCENT:

Cant it be both?

Twenty-four hours before Vincent and I went up to the attic to record Episode #86, I Hope I Gave You a Good Love Story, I knew what my life was going to look like for at least the next four years.

Wed been accepted to the same college, right here in Memphis, and the plan was that I would major in recording technology, with a minor in music business, and he would major in creative writing, with a minor in graphic design. We would funnel everything we learned back into the podcast. He would write our stories, and I would make them sound beautiful. We would get an apartment together. And after that, who knows? We talked about starting a new project together, or traveling the world, or moving to New York.

We talked about how wed avoid turning into our parentshis, so traditional and conservative and terrified of anything outside the airtight corridor between their home and their church; mine, a pair of feuding conjoined twins, too miserable to stay together, too codependent to mercy-kill their marriage.

Case in point: my parents had announced their separation the day after I graduated from high school, and now two weeks later, neither of them had so much as packed a suitcase.

I will not lie, there were times during my relationship with Vincent when I might have flaunted our love a little bit, as if to say to my parents, For fucks sake, Im eighteen and Im better at having a healthy relationship than you are.

Shows what I know.

LEE:

I have an artist breakup story for you, too, Vincent. Its very self-serving. Its about Lee Miller and Man Ray.

VINCENT:

Ah, your namesake, to whom you would dedicate every episode of this podcast if I would have let you.

LEE:

Well, ha. Last episode, and you cant do shit to stop me now.

VINCENT:

I wouldnt dream of it.

In the South, people name everything Leestreets, schools, parks, entire neighborhoods. People plaster Robert E. Lees name on so many things here, its like they forget he was the bad guy in this historical narrative.

Thankfully, I am not named after a Confederate general. My parents named me after the photographer Lee Miller, who started off as a model in Vogue, before she decided she wanted to be on the other side of the camera. She moved to Paris, joined the Surrealist artists, and had a series of passionate and scandalous love affairs, then became a photojournalist on the front lines of World War II. Nobody here knows about her, however, and people tend to assume I was named after Robert E. Lee like everything else around here is, so I guess my parents cheeky little joke backfired.

I do like being named after her, though. She went where she wanted to go, lived how she wanted to live. She was the kind of person who would photograph her lover in a gas mask or organize a topless picnic in the woods for all her friends. I guarantee you that Robert E. Lee never once organized a topless picnic.

LEE:

In 1923, the artist Man Ray attached a photograph of an eye to a metronome. He set it in motion and painted to the rhythm. The eye on the metronome tracked his every move in the studio, letting him know if the work was any good or not. He called it Object to Be Destroyed.

When Lee Miller broke up with him a decade later, he remade the object using a photograph of her eye, and included the instructions for its use, which read: Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to set the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.