Victoria is quiet, because she knows about Abuela Dolores in the hospital in San Juan, and because she knows our mom’s going to be away for a lot longer than planned, and because she probably knows that we don’t know how to feel about any of this yet. She’s good like that, most of the time. And maybe Victoria senses, like I do, that if Angela and I unsettle the air too much, Abuela could die.
Angela is in the back, her biology book yanked up in front of her face. Vic, sitting in the front, hasn’t put on her sunglasses yet, and her dark hair is down, settled in still waves on her shoulders. She comes from a small family where the only people who ever die are the tangential ones: the great-great-uncles in Brooklyn, expiring quietly under a blanket of smiles and stories.
“Still alive?” she finally says.
“Who?” Angela asks. “Us, Mom, or Abuela?”
“All of the above,” Vic says. She glances at me sideways, our eyes lock, and then the sunglasses go on.
“All accounted for,” I tell her.
“I can’t even believe you guys are going to school today,” Vic says. “You should stay home and work on your painting, Mercedes.”
I wanted to see you, that’s all. I could tell her this, because the sedan in front of us is taking its sweet time making this left turn—and then, God, if she liked that I’m only here because she is, we could take Angela to school and head back to the Moreno half of the duplex for the day. Sure, she would insist on getting to her dance class on time, and I’d still have to sneak back into school later to pick up Angela, but we’d have the whole morning. All that time. And the drive to the dance studio, her bare feet gripping the curve of the glove compartment, her hand lying in that brilliant space between our separate gray seats, her fingers playing at the place I burned the fabric with a long-ago Parliament Light before I understood what it was like to have her in the car with me.
“You always say you paint better at home,” she says.
I tug at my hair instead of diving for another cigarette. She’s tied tightly into her trench coat, and now her hands curl around the red purse on her lap. I know she wants to say the right thing, the thing that comforts and sympathizes, the thing that cat-nuzzles your leg and then walks confidently away. But if she knew what that was, she would have said it already.
“Yeah, well, I have a German quiz today.” I think maybe I do. “And I really do need to go to art class. We’re supposed to hear about the county show.”
I’m the last one to get out of the car, because I’m double-wrangling my art toolbox and a big sketch pad. Victoria pops up behind me and grabs the toolbox, which is the same red as her purse, and she swings it by her side as though it belonged to her all along. I shut the car doors lightly, as though I’m placing a new piece of pottery into a kiln. Maybe I’ve kept a little bit of this morning in the car. We’ll probably need whatever leftovers we can get by this afternoon.
Angela trundles ahead to the science wing. Vic stops swinging the toolbox and falls into step with me as we head up to Sarasota Central’s main entrance.
“You look like you’re freaking out.” Vic gives me a small smile, like she’s not sure I can handle a full one. “Name a place.”
“Umm . . . the Hospital del Maestro in San Juan.”
“Okay, fine. How many people at the Hospital del Maestro are saying some form of the word shit right now?”
My mother is one of them, if I know her at all. “How many people,” I begin, “at the Hospital del Maestro are saying some form of the word shit because they can’t remember how they wound up in the emergency waiting room?”
Vic hands my toolbox to me as she considers this. She unbuttons her trench coat—it’s already getting warm. She has a purple dress on underneath. “I pass. Everything I can think of is gross. Start a new one. Same place.”
“Okay. How many people at the Hospital del Maestro are having an out-of-body experience right now?”
“Hey, let’s not get supernatural here.”
“The unwritten bylaws of this game say I can do whatever I want.” I try to make a grand gesture, Abuela Dolores–style, with my free hand. “Infinite possibilities!”
“We know them all, don’t we?” Vic says.
“We do,” I tell her.
two
THE TABLES IN the art room are color-coded, for no reason besides Mrs. Pagonis’s keen and pointless interest in organization. Since I started taking studio art at the beginning of junior year, I’ve been sitting at the Orange Table with Gretchen Grayson—that’s almost four hundred school days of not becoming friends with Gretchen Grayson. This semester, we’ve been joined by a dude with the name of Rider, who is always shooting meaningful glances in my and Gretchen’s direction, in some misguided attempt to become the Rebellious Artist Boyfriend of one of us. I kind of want to tell him, I’ve tried your kind. Have you ever heard of Bill Stafford, former king of the SCHS unaffiliated Smoking Corner?
Gretchen doesn’t notice Rider’s look today, but she is up to her elbows in art mess, as though she’s been here since dawn.
I open my sketchbook and try drawing the piano, but the outline is stubborn about being a misshapen rectangle. I try shading the left side with a light brown, but it starts to look muddy and I let the half-brown rectangle chill out on my sketch pad rather than turn it into something worse. Screw it, I just want the piano to tell me how to draw it, to start playing itself at night in a way that says, yes, make me abstract, make my corners rounded, give me snakes as keys.
“Snakes,” I whisper at the sketchbook.
“What?” says Gretchen.
“Nothing.”
Gretchen doesn’t flinch when I drop the brown pencil on the table and lean back in my chair. She has been concentrating hard for the last few weeks on the canvas in front of her. As awful of a day as yesterday was, what with the news about Abuela hitting me like a Ford Focus to the chest, at least I spent first period being proud that I had deciphered the subject of Gretchen’s picture, finally. It is: Gretchen Grayson, as a yellow lizard, surrounded by a bunch of anthropomorphic green lizards in some sort of ornate dining room. I figured out the yellow lizard represented the artist herself when a couple of telling details appeared yesterday: Gretchen’s pearl flower-shaped earrings, and one of her ever-present gray cardigans.
I think I hate the picture, especially this almost-finished version of it. I hate how, even with the earrings and the cardigan, the yellow lizard doesn’t match Gretchen at all. I hate how the green lizards are staring directly at the viewer. And I hate how I can’t put a real word to how it makes me feel.