Just start.
The thought is thick and urgent, like when I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, convinced I missed my alarm. It occurs to me that Lilia doesn’t have any canvases or paper in her kitchen—I guess I’m supposed to join her in painting the walls.
I dump a small can of red paint into a pan and unwrap the new roller. Does the building make me want something? Yes, yes, it does, at last. I want something, and for now it’s to cover these four walls in paint.
Red is the color of blood, of apples, of the T-shirt I bought on our last, worst all-Moreno family vacation to Key West. Red was Victoria’s face that time I went to see her modern dance company’s performance and I met her backstage and brought her flowers because Connor Hagins sure wasn’t going to. Red was the cover of the first sketchbook I ever filled, when I would sit on the bench outside my middle school in Naples and draw the palm trees, and people’s faces and their shoes. There are red hands and a red tide. Red is flame and fury. Red is a smack on the cheek. Red is thin and shallow and covers everything. Red loves you back.
By the time Lilia pokes her head into the room, I have painted an entire wall.
I don’t want to tell her this, but it’s the most I’ve ever painted. The most paint I have used in a day. The most space I have ever dared to cover. It’s the equivalent of thirty big canvases, at least. I drop my roller in the pan and stand back as Lilia takes a walk around the room.
“So this is it,” Lilia says. “This is what you most wanted to paint.”
I shrug. For once, I’m not feeling apologetic about my work. “Yeah.”
“Well.” She runs her hand along the red wall. The paint is already dry. “It’s bold.”
“Thank you.”
She leans against the wall, my wall, and her hair and skin are a striking contrast to the red, so much that I almost want to ask her to step aside so I can paint her portrait, right in the place where she was standing. But I think that might weird her out. I’m not even sure if we’re friends, this odd girl and I. She let me into her studio, but I hardly know a thing about her. In the great school cafeteria of life, I feel like she’s perpetually blocking the seat beside her, unwilling to let me in.
“Who’s your favorite artist?” I ask her.
“Who’s yours?” she shoots back.
“Rembrandt,” I say.
“Liar.” Lilia moves away from the wall.
“Fine,” I say. “Kahlo.”
“Nice,” Lilia says.
“How long are you going to be here?”
She looks worried about my question, and after hearing Mom cry on the phone tonight, I don’t want to have to deal with a crying Lilia again. But then, she softens. “A few more hours, I think. I just want to make some more progress on the ceiling. You can keep working too, if you want.”
“I might.”
Lilia heads to the doorway. “Oh, and if you see any of the others on the way out, be sure to tell them I let you in, okay?”
“Okay.”
And from the hallway, she calls, “Your wall is perfect, Mercedes!”
I don’t think I should be scared of the others. Maybe they’re fellow high school seniors who need motivation and a place to work. Maybe they are fellow veterans of art destruction. Maybe they’re just people who like nighttime and old buildings.
Still, I’d rather keep painting than risk meeting someone else right now. Brushes, rags, a refill of red paint. A cool, wet towel for my sweaty cheeks. Back to it.
Another white wall.
Perfect. Just like Lilia said.
The red goes on so easily, and when I’m finished with the roller I pick up a thin brush and start working on the corners and edges, making them straight and clean.
But there is something else this time, something beyond the neatness of my red walls. A pattern appears on the still-white spots of the wall. Something curvy and abstract, maybe. The lines are barely visible—it’s as though they’re being projected in dim light from somewhere just behind me. I grab one of the edging brushes, dip it in red paint, and follow the lines.
It is so easy.
The brush, a tough one without much give to the bristles, glides along the lines and leaves a precise, even trail of paint behind. I curve with the line, and where it ends I finish it off with a twisting flourish of the brush. I try it again. The brush makes a pleasant swish—the nicest a brush has sounded in a long time—and I create a perfect circle.
This is me doing this. I think. I hope. Even though the projection of the pattern seems to come from nowhere but the wall itself, the brushstrokes are completely my own.
I wonder if this is how Picasso felt when he was working on Three Musicians. Or Frida Kahlo when she was re-creating herself as a work of art. Or, okay, to bring myself back down to earth, how Gretchen Grayson feels as she works on the lizards in the dining room.
There’s something here. Something for me. A painting that wants to reveal itself.
I keep going, curving with the brush as an outline takes shape. The soft half-moon of a smile. The sturdy sweep of a neck and chin. The only thing abstract about this painting is what’s going on in the background. The foreground of it is oh so real.
I hate drawing faces. I think I always have. The feeling of creating something that gets closer and closer to staring at me creeps me out. Should I go further with this painting? The push-pull of the question prickles the skin of my arms and cheeks.
Mercifully, the lines on the wall fade away. I flop onto the carpet, belly down, arms and legs out, my face way too close to this place that seems to have seen a thousand pairs of shoes and feet. Cleanliness be damned—there could be a clue here to whisper to me about this place, this Red Mangrove Estate, a piece of dust or hair that could show me the whole of this world. It’s like when you meet a new person and you want to scrub away that first layer of awkwardness to get to the one thing that makes them make sense—Oh, so that’s you.
But right now, this is me. Lying on the floor.
I guess it’s true whether you’re painting in a classroom or a back porch or a supposedly abandoned beachfront condo—after a couple of hours, you get tired. The paintbrush won’t lift anymore. Lilia has left the front room, and I wash all my stuff and put it to the side of the sink, the same way I’d do at home or in Mrs. Pagonis’s class. I’ve always called it “putting the brushes to sleep.”
Stepping into the hallway, I want to tell someone what I did tonight: I found this place, I came inside, I started something, I finished something.