The shadows of sound seep in from other pockets of this building. Somewhere there’s music and conversation and glasses clinking, like the noise of the sort of party that makes your head hum for hours after you’ve left. It’s happening behind other doors, and I pause in the hallway to see if any of them open for me. Two seconds, three, four.
The brush of footsteps. Someone rounds the corner a few doors down the hallway and approaches me. A girl, maybe a few years older than me, with fair skin, short blond hair, and all black clothes. In this dim, crumbling hallway, she is striking. She’s a flashlight. She stops a few feet from me.
“I was invited.” I jab back at the door to Lilia’s studio. “Right there. I was working right there.”
And yet, this place is full of possibilities. Like the possibility that I could open the door to Lilia’s studio and find a blank beige space. Or the place restored to typical Sarasota condo chic, complete with an elderly woman reclining in the orange light of a TV game show.
But the girl just nods in recognition at the door. “Cool. So you must be good.”
I don’t know how to answer that.
“Should I go out the way I came in?” I ask her.
She nods toward the stairway door, which hangs open under an unlit red exit sign. “That’s the only way,” she says. “But you shouldn’t stay gone for too long, okay?” She smiles, but it’s a first-day-of-school smile. Friendly but wary. It says she’s not going to ask me any more questions right now. It says she’s not going to walk with me down the stairs.
I let her go. She heads to the stairwell and shuts the door behind her. It sounds like she’s going upstairs.
My purple sandals, which usually look so worn-out and dingy, positively gleam against the thin gray carpet in the hall. How many people have walked down this hallway, have leaned against this wall to find their keys in a handbag, have slammed one of these doors for the last time, have run away and then come back?
How many people are here right now, painting walls red or climbing stairs or playing songs that seemingly never end or begin?
The music again. It is guitars and horns, and it stops and turns back and picks up a few of the notes from before but then swirls off into something new. It’s live. And even for all the sound, I feel alone here. It’s time to go home.
eight
SHIT. ANGELA.
She’s still pissed about the piano. I don’t think she noticed or cared that I wasn’t home until after midnight. She hardly said a word to me in the house this morning, and so far in the car, all she’s asked is for me to play “that piano song” on the Firing Squad album. She left the front seat open for Victoria.
“Can we just put that on repeat?” she asks as we pull up in front of Vic’s house.
I do, because why not? The palm trees wave in front of the Caballinis’ house, and they’re so relaxing that I wish I could sit in the yard for the rest of the day and absorb what I did last night. Vic comes out wearing a brick-red shirt and a black skirt, with her trench coat draped over one arm. Her walk lately has been her ballet duck-feet stride, a rhythmic reminder of Juilliard and how much she’s been practicing for her audition.
“Hi, Victoria,” Angela says, as soon as Vic shuts the Ford’s door. “Can you please ask my sister to promise not to destroy my stuff anymore?”
So this is how it’s going to go. Vic makes a terrified face at me and stays quiet.
“Ange, I said I was sorry. And anyway, the piano’s still fine, isn’t it?”
“Yup,” Angela says. “But the point is that you wanted to mess with it. You tried to.”
“I don’t know why I did that.” I brake to let a school bus in front of us. It’s a gorgeous morning, and I am going to be slow and deliberate in it. “And I feel different today. Play to your heart’s content tonight.”
“I don’t trust you,” Angela says.
“Okay, seriously,” Vic says. “If you two don’t stop, I’m going to replace your precious Firing Squad with my Broadway playlist for the next month.”
Angela is silent for a minute. We pass this cool house at the end of Victoria’s street that looks like a castle. If it lit up like the sun one evening, what would Vic do? I can’t imagine her feeling pulled there. She’d probably shut the blinds in her bedroom and go back to reading whatever book she’d pulled from the big stack of paperbacks on her nightstand.
Maybe that’s the way to go. I could tell Rex to watch out for his renter. I could leave the secret painting unfinished and forget it ever existed.
“Mom called from the hospital last night,” Angela says over the last quiet chorus of “Always Something Left to Love.” “Nothing’s changed with Abuela. I made up something about where you were and I probably wasn’t very convincing.”
“Hey.” We’re at the stoplight at Orange Avenue. I turn around and try to meet Angela’s eyes, but she’s staring out the window at an elderly guy riding a bike down the sidewalk. We used to call guys like that Sarasota’s Official Mascots. Actually, we called someone that a few weeks ago, when we were passing Jungle Gardens on the way to the art supply store. It feels like a hundred years and a couple of versions of ourselves ago. “I said I was sorry. I’ll be home tonight. I promise.”
Mrs. Pagonis has a sore throat, so she’s written the plan for today’s art class on the whiteboard: thirty minutes of independent projects, and ten minutes of constructive criticism with the other members of our color-coded tables. Next to the whiteboard, the photo of the late Food Poisoning #1 has fallen off the wall. I don’t bother to pick it up.
Gretchen, having set her lizard painting to the side for now, opens her sketchbook to start something new. The scratch of pencil on fresh paper. Thumbnails, outlines, ideas, possibilities. Lines with no color. I get chills, and I don’t know if they’re bad or good. I settle on watching Rider for a minute as he continues to shade his paisley pattern. He’ll notice me soon—ten seconds tops before he looks up and smiles and sends a practiced eyebrow raise my way.
Mrs. Pagonis paces the room while clearing her throat, and Gretchen shoots thick gray lines across the paper, and the only thing I can think to do is throw open my toolbox and take out my watercolor set. With the paints and brushes and everything ready, I face the first blank page in my sketchbook and make a stroke of red. And another. The brush wobbles in my grip and paint streaks onto the table.
Gretchen’s eyes go wide with the realization that I could be bringing down the otherwise sterling reputation of the Orange Table. I keep going, pushing my way down the sheet of paper, covering it like the whiteness of the paper is my biggest secret.