“It’s not just that.” I feel myself diving into all sorts of opinions I may or may not be able to describe to Vic. “It’s not just my weird neighbor possibly telling me I suck, or my mom looking all disappointed and frightened about Food Poisoning #1. It’s the work itself, I think. I love it, but the art doesn’t love me back.”
Vic is quiet. Quieter. Still quiet. I slump against the stack of pillows on my bed, to where I can see the Picasso posters I hung on the wall in a fit of “needing inspiration” a few days after I won the county show. The tape is coming loose on Three Musicians, to the point that it looks like one musician, the guy with the clarinet, is shortly going to be stuck with the task of keeping the other two from falling, falling, falling onto this tired girl’s decidedly noncubist bedspread.
“I know that sounds weird, but it’s true. I create these things, and they fight back against me.”
In the living room, Angela starts a new song. New as in I don’t recognize it, as in maybe this song is coming into being right here, right now.
“Well,” Victoria says slowly, “I’ve never felt like that.”
And I guess that’s fine. I mean, if anyone, she would know. Her feet have been chewed up by pointe shoes, and she’s spent more than one movie night with ice packs tucked around her ankles and shins. She’s told me the various ways that dance teachers have sniped at her, and through it all, she seems most hurt by the time one of the few straight boys at Summer Intensive turned down her hookup request. She loves the struggle of dance, and the struggle loves her, too.
“Keep painting,” Vic says. “Let Angela deal with the creepy teachings of Lilia Solis. Go and work on something of your own tonight.”
“Yeah, maybe I will.”
“Aw, come on, dearie. Promise me you’ll do something that seems hard, like painting what smoking feels like, or trying to draw the perfect foot.”
“I hate drawing feet.”
“I know! So, promise me.”
“Fine. I promise.” Except I have been lying to Victoria for a long time now, and sometimes I think I’m being struck with a tiny punishment for this, like each of my days ending exactly one second too soon. I won’t notice this break in time until a day I try to tell her something important, and she’ll be gone before the words slip through space to reach her.
“Ah, success! And for my next trick, I’ll get Mercedes Moreno to listen to Broadway show tunes for fifteen solid minutes.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
“You’ll do it for me. You know you will.”
She’s right, and it’s wonderful. I let her go so that she can get ready for her class. I nudge my phone off the bed and slide out of my jeans and underwear and lie back and consider her. That’s what I’ve been calling it lately—considering her.
One thing I’ve held tight in my mind is the day last spring that I realized I liked Victoria. But I wonder if that was really the day, the moment, or was I realizing it a little every day, for months, for years? The day she was the new girl in English class and when I stared at the back of her head and wondered how we could ever get to be friends. The day a few weeks later when she found me at lunch (I was waiting for Bill) and asked what I thought of English, and I tried to be clever and say something like, “The language? It’s not so bad,” and then Bill interrupted me but Vic stayed anyway. The eight hundred times I’ve watched her twist her hair into a ballet bun. The phone videos she sneakily took for me at MoMA and PS1 on her last trip to New York. All the little things and all the big things and all this time, time, time. It expands and contracts. It waits for her but not for me. And if I told her, I think it would stop entirely. She will never never never—
She will never know.
six
OH, LOOK—RIDER is absent today. It’s just Gretchen Grayson and me having a stare-down here at the Orange Table. As in, she stares at my piece, and I stare at hers, and not a word is spoken. It’s not that she doesn’t want to ask: the words “Um, Mercedes, what are you making?” are hanging so precariously over the Orange Table that I expect them to come crashing down into my watercolor palette any minute now.
Gretchen has made more progress on her lizard painting since yesterday. It is definitely more than a mood piece. Every time I look at it, I snap away from it, and then glance back. Damn those green lizards staring straight into me, with their creepy black eyes, and everything so bold and well-shaded, brown walls bleeding into yellow Gretchen bleeding into the light-and dark-green lizards. Lizard Gretchen is folded into herself, her chest and head slumping, and her little lizardy arms in front of her.
There’s a new detail on lizard Gretchen, one that’s not even dry yet. Lizard Gretchen’s arms are covered in blood.
Shit.
I glance at actual Gretchen, with the long-sleeved cardigan she wears all the time, and our eyes meet.
“Is this finished?” I point to an inconsequential, lizard-free spot at the top of the painting.
“I think so.” Gretchen smiles a little. “Something about the color in the upper corners seems weird, but I’m afraid I might ruin it if I try to change things now.”
I shut my sketchbook on top of the aimless lines and shading I’ve been working on for the past few classes. “So is that what you’re going to enter?”
Gretchen nods. “But I’m scared.”
There’s a perfect sentence to be said to her, but I don’t know what it is. I want to tell her I understand, but it’s hard when I don’t. Luckily, Mrs. Pagonis wanders over and sits in Rider’s seat.
“Ladies! I haven’t checked on your progress since last week. How are your projects coming along?”
Gretchen and I exchange looks, and I keep my hands on my sketchbook. Mrs. Pagonis has her moment of losing herself in Gretchen’s painting. Oh man—she’s about to get the same reaction out of our teacher as she did out of me. I mean, a louder, less resentful communicating of that reaction, sure, but the same in-the-gut feeling that no matter how much you resist being caught in the lizards’ stares, you get stuck there anyway.
“It’s glorious!” Mrs. Pagonis says.
Then she asks to see my sketchbook.
I want to open it and find something finished, something beautiful. But what would that even be? For the first time ever, I want to find myself totally laid bare on the page. If I could open the book and find that, maybe I’d be okay with holding it up to the whole class. Look, I’d say. Look, this is me. But for that to be here, I’d need more than one moment of wanting that.
My hands sweat. The moment’s gone.
I flip through my sketchbook for Mrs. Pagonis, and apologize for page after page, and promise her that the real stuff is at home.
Here is what’s at home.
One ridiculous canvas that I’ve left sunning on the porch too long.
One ridiculous canvas that I’ve been trying to forget about, and that I maybe-unconsciously tried to sabotage by way of Florida weather, and even that didn’t work.