“It’s too small. See how thin it is compared to the orange?”
“But that’s because it’s farther away,” she said. “I was trying to show perspective.”
“You’ve got the right idea,” I said, “but you’ve taken it too far. Do you have any scratch paper?”
She found some blank paper and a couple of pencils and pulled an armchair up to the desk beside me. I quickly sketched a copy of her drawing but with the fruit in better proportion to each other.
“See?” I said.
She leaned over my paper. I could smell her shampoo as her hair fell over her shoulder, a sharp, sweet smell like nothing that existed in nature, and tried to focus on the drawing instead. “Yeah, but how do you do that?”
I’d never had to explain this before, and I struggled. “You just . . . look at the lines of whatever’s in front of you and then copy them,” I said.
She laughed. “No kidding, but how do you make sure it’s right? I can’t translate what I see onto the paper just by looking.”
“You’ve got to . . .” I looked around the room and spotted a vase containing a small, tasteful arrangement of flowers on her bedside table. “Hand me that, would you?”
She grabbed the vase, and I put it on the far end of the desk.
“Okay, so let’s start with the lily on the far left,” I said. “For me, at least, I can’t look at the whole thing at once. There’s too much going on to deal with. So, I break it down. Just look at that one outside petal. Got it?”
Ren frowned in the direction of the flower. “Yeah.”
“Now break it down further,” I said. “Just look at the very tip of the petal.”
“Okay.”
“Now look just at the line where the tip of the petal meets the air. Don’t look at the whole petal. Just that line.”
Together, working line by line, petal by petal, we drew the flower.
“This is hard,” she said as we worked. “How do you concentrate on such a small piece?”
I shrugged. “Practice, I guess. Use your hands if you have to.”
“Huh?”
“Like . . .” I turned to her and put my hands on either side of her eyes like blinders.
She looked right at me, her eyes closer than I expected them to be. I was suddenly very aware of the places where the skin of my fingers met the skin of her face.
A thought pushed itself to the front of my mind. You could kiss her. That was something people did, normal people.
I dropped my hands and turned back to my drawing.
“I’m going to feel really silly doing this in class,” she said, peering at the vase with her hands cupped around her eyes. “Have you always liked to draw?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I smoothed out a line with the side of my thumb. All I was thinking about was that line, my entire attention focused on it.
“What do you like about it?” she asked. “Maybe it’s just because I’m bad at it, but I don’t get the appeal.”
I shrugged. “I always liked to study things and see how they worked. With drawing I could use that to actually create something.”
“That’s kind of profound,” she said as she erased a line she wasn’t happy with.
I snorted. “I guess. I’ve always liked drawing people the best. I used to draw my mom when she—”
I stopped.
“Yikes,” Ren said. “Did we wade into painful territory?”
“No, I . . . it’s okay.” I hadn’t been thinking Jessica, of course. I’d been thinking about my mother. How I used to sit on the floor and stare at her as she sat in her chair, chain-smoking and arguing with the TV, studying each line and curve of her face. Like understanding the shapes could help me understand her and why she hated me so much. I had a whole notebook full of drawings of her face, which she’d found and thrown out, yelling at me for wasting paper.
I didn’t mean to tell Ren that. I never told anyone anything true about me. It was rule number one, and for good reason.
“I’d better go,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “My sister’s going to be pissed.”
Her eyes narrowed a little bit as she looked at me. I couldn’t decipher the expression. It could have been confusion or disappointment or annoyance or a dozen other things. For someone who seemed like such an open book, sometimes I couldn’t read her at all.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll take you home.”
? ? ?
Lex was pissed.
“I don’t know what you were thinking,” she said as she ushered me into the kitchen. “You couldn’t have even called me first? Who was that?”
“Just a girl I go to school with,” I said. “She’s new.”
Lex looked down at the floor, and when she looked up at me again she was wearing a faint smile. “Well . . . I’m glad you’re making friends.”
But I wasn’t sure I’d be able to talk to Ren again. I was still shaken from what had happened, the way I’d slipped out of Danny’s skin and into my own without even realizing it. I couldn’t let that happen again, ever. I felt the precariousness of my position here in a way I hadn’t before, not even the night I thought Jessica had seen through me.
I went to find Nicholas. I had to fix whatever had gone wrong between us, and I had to do it now. Making sure he believed I was really his brother was the only thing I could think of that would make me feel safe again.
I searched the house but found no sign of him. I knew he had to be here, though, because his car was in the garage, and, as I’d learned, people in California don’t walk anywhere.
“Hey,” I said when I found Mia in the rec room, watching a movie about a talking horse. “Have you seen Nicholas?”
She shook her head. “Sometimes he likes to hide in one of the chairs out by the pool though. Don’t tell him I told you.”
“I won’t. Thanks.”
I stepped out onto the back patio and scanned the pool area for Nicholas. I wasn’t sure how he could hide in one of the lounge chairs until I noticed that one on the far side of the pool was angled away from the house so that only the back was visible. Then, in the faint glow from the underwater lights, I saw a blue trail of smoke rising from the chair. Either it was on fire, or I’d found him.
I walked out to the chair, and Nicholas looked up at me.
“Shit,” he said.
“To be fair, it’s not the best hiding place ever,” I said.
He took a drag off the cigarette between his fingers. “No one’s ever found me here before.”
“They must not look very hard,” I said. True to my word, as I occasionally was, I didn’t give up Mia.
He didn’t respond to that, just blew a lungful of smoke toward the stars.
“Mind if I sit?” I asked.
He didn’t look at me. “Whatever.”
I sank into the cool grass beside the lounge chair. Nicholas went back to smoking and contemplating the sky.
“Sorry I was a jerk this afternoon,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m actually surprised you didn’t go off on me sooner.”
“Yeah, I guess I’ve been a little more stressed out about going back to school than I realized.”