It was one of Axel’s first experiments with translating his art into music, and it blew me away. There were four MP3 tracks on the drive; I couldn’t believe he had done all of these in just a day. The paintings were numbered to match the tracks, and I stared at them until my eyes hurt. He had captured more than the colors. Each piece was a snow globe of emotion and instinct.
And the music—that was another language entirely.
He’d done the park in heavy splotches of ink. Yellow dashes of merry-go-round turned to the jagged runs of an electric guitar. The imperial-blue playground was sketched out by the spiccato of a double bass. An arpeggiated synthesizer rose out from under the heavy notes, buoyant and energetic like the rouge strokes used for highlights. Thin swirls of aubergine matched the high vibrato, which he later explained was meant to be a solo operatic voice—he’d maybe one day source a real singer because it was the weakest line sampled digitally.
He’d painted me as well: oranges and reds and yellows layered over lines sketched in India ink. And one other color: a Pacific-blue stripe running through my hair. All these were described through the legato of a cello, a solo clarinet wending its way in and out of a swell of strings, a low timpani, and an ethereal bending pitch later pointed out to me as a theremin.
While I had been napping out in that park, while I’d been playing back my memories of him in the low-lit corners of my mind, he had been excavating me, digging to the center of my soul.
I listened to the four tracks on repeat the entire night, certain that it was a confession of love, convinced that the next time I saw Axel everything would be different. I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I woke up wrapped in chrome yellow and Spanish red, feeling like that streak of blue was the core of myself worn as a token of love.
High school started, and I was right. Everything was different.
But not in the way I’d expected.
The second day, I found out through the grapevine of gossiping freshmen waiting to pay for their cafeteria lunches: Axel had asked this girl named Leanne Ryan out on a date.
23
We try so hard to make these little time capsules. Memories strung up just so, like holiday lights, casting the perfect glow in the perfect tones. But that picking and choosing what to look at, what to put on display—that’s not the true nature of remembering.
Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again. A moment of humiliation, or devastation, or absolute rage, to be rewound and replayed, spinning a thread that wraps around the brain, knotting itself into something of a noose. It won’t exactly kill you, but it makes you feel the squeeze of every horrible moment. How do you stop it? How do you work the mind free?
I wish I could command my brain, say to it: Here. Go ahead. Unspool, and let the memories go. Let them be gone.
24
FALL, FRESHMAN YEAR
As I was trying to navigate the strangeness of freshman year, my mother’s moods kept nose-diving again and again, twisting and turning as she crashed to the bottom.
It happened so frequently that it started to feel almost normal. Or maybe that was just a mind trick, a way to convince ourselves everything was okay. But I grasped that normality tightly in my fists and I ran with it. I tried to be a normal teenager. I let myself fixate on the embarrassingly trivial things.
Like the question of: When was Axel going to dump Leanne Ryan? Weeks passed. Suddenly they’d been together a whole marking period.
There was one day when Axel and I were standing in the kitchen while his aunt Tina was showing Mom how to clean off the algae growing on the side of our house.
He hadn’t been over in a while, and watching him drum his fingers in that familiar way against the countertop felt weird. He was telling me how Leanne thought the lemonade he made from powder was disgusting, how she demanded he make “real” lemonade. How she refused to drink from a jar, the way we always did at the Morenos’ house. He told it all like a joke, but there was nothing funny to me about any of it.
“What is it about her?” I blurted.
He held his face very still and turned his gaze toward me slowly. “What do you mean?” he said, which was kind of the exact bullshit he was allergic to, because he knew just what I meant.
“What’s so great about Leanne Ryan?” The real question was, Why the hell are you dating her? She seemed like everything that he should hate.
He waited a long time before he answered shortly, “I like her.”
It turned our conversation chilly. Mom suggested Tina and Axel stay for dinner, but Axel made an excuse about too much homework. I went back upstairs thinking, Whatever whatever whatever, the syllables bouncing in my head like staccato triplets my mother would pluck from the piano keys.
And suddenly, I didn’t see very much of Axel at all. We still had art class, but every time I opened my mouth I was at risk of saying something horrible about Leanne. It was safer to stay quiet. If Axel noticed my silence, he said nothing.
I carried the silence home with me.
One afternoon Dad’s return flight was delayed, and after he called to tell us, Mom slunk upstairs and stayed there. Dinnertime came and went—I inhaled a stick of string cheese and then wandered up to see if she was in the mood to order pizza. She was in bed, cocooned in an oversized quilt. I stood there watching for a long time until she shifted and muttered words that were indecipherable. There was something disturbing about seeing her in that loneliness-induced sleep.
This was early on in the time when Dad had started traveling for work. I guessed—hoped—that things would get better as we got used to his being gone. But it stuck in my head, that memory of her sleeping sadly, pining after my father.
Everything in my life seemed to be changing. It felt like things in my house were falling apart in direct proportion to the rate at which Axel and I were crumbling.
My father flew home just in time for Thanksgiving, so Mom went overboard with the cooking. When I showed him the things I’d made for art class, he nodded without smiling. “Is this your last year taking art?”
“No?” I said, thrown off by the question.
“Oh. I just thought maybe you would grow out of it when you got to high school.”
Grow out of it? The words shocked me so much I didn’t know what to say. It was the first time I realized that maybe it was what Dad actually wanted. For me to grow out of art, get over it. Move on to something different. How could I?
The next week, Axel was out sick. Leanne Ryan sauntered into our art class asking for his folder. She saw me but didn’t smile, just let her eyes slide right off my face. No pretense necessary; no Axel around to witness anything.
“He has mono,” she told Dr. Nagori. “So it’s hard to say how long he’ll be out.”
Hearing that made me want to puke. How much more clichéd was he planning to get?
Since Axel was absent, Carolina Renard moved into his chair. I liked her immediately—maybe because we both had a bit of blue in our hair, or maybe because I could tell right away that she was my kind of person. We were partnering for an assignment: an acrylic painting on a piece of shared canvas. The point, Nagori said, was to try to learn from your partner and see through their eyes. Consistency was key. He didn’t want to be able to tell which sections were painted by which artist.
Ours was already getting really intense. Caro—Please don’t call me Carolina; that name was a terrible mistake—was into this jagged pattern like lightning; it split our picture in half. On the left we’d painted a long-necked blue figure on bent knee, offering an anatomical heart. The lover was on the right, holding out hands to receive, except the lightning divided it so that you could see with X-ray vision. Inside the lover floated all manner of orange evil. False promises swirled and toxic thoughts twisted. We made both figures androgynous.
Friday afternoon rolled around and our painting still wasn’t finished.
“You going to turn this in on time, girls?” said Nagori as he watched us pack up.