“Sure.”
“When you finish the work here, you’ll be able to get up to the top floor,” she says.
“Which key is that?” They’re all pretty much the same.
“Ahh, the one with the green tape on it, I think. I haven’t been up there in a while. Once I finish a piece, I try not to look at it again.”
“Your work is up there?”
She is turning to go. “Yes. And yours could be too, if you like.”
“What, is it some kind of museum?”
Lilia considers this. “I suppose that’s it. It’s for those of us who are making decisions here, about what kind of work we need.”
“How long have you been here, Lilia?” I ask, looking up at her. Her long hair. Her strange but familiar face.
She turns away, comes to a stop in front of the biggest blank patch of wall, runs her hands over it as though testing its strength. “I don’t really know. Feels like a long time.”
She leaves me with myself, and with the keys.
Oh man. It’s almost nine. Victoria is for sure on her way to the audition right now, if she’s not already warming up. I type out a text to her, wrists and palms and fingernails aching as I do: I am breaking both of my legs for you at this very moment!
She says nothing back.
It’s weird how we got to be here—the one decision after another that led to us knowing each other. My parents getting divorced and my mother thinking she could “start over” up the coast from our old home, Vic’s parents deciding to ditch their previous careers in corporate real estate to sell medical equipment in Florida, the school deciding to put us both in Ms. Donohue’s third-period English class in sophomore year (although I like to think that even if we hadn’t had any classes together, we would have spotted each other in the hallway and detected our Friend Chemistry, would have walked toward each other while working out the least awkward way to ask the other to hang out at Starbucks sometime). And I like to think that I’m more to her than someone she knows on her way to going somewhere else, but I’m not sure. I don’t want this to be the end of us.
How does she fit into my self-portrait?
What is the first thing about her that comes to mind?
Lilia dropped off some newly sharpened drawing pencils, so I grab one and take to a clean space of wall. Pointe shoes. The stern face of Martha Graham. The sleek field of pink comforter I have woken up to at her house. Maybe I could draw the whole city of New York to represent her. Anything but her kissing me. I’ve already given that to the Estate once—no way am I leaving it here again.
I wonder how long I can keep this pencil raised, poised at the wall, unmoving.
“Hello in there!” comes a voice from the doorway. Angela.
“Come on in,” I call back.
She bounds into the room and sits on the floor without even noticing its state of filth. “Oh my God, Mercy, can you believe it?”
“No.” I really can’t. Every time I think about Angela onstage with Firing Squad, I have to stop and be sure that I didn’t dream it. It’s exactly the type of thing I would dream up.
“We kept playing.” The grin on her face is as wide as the gulf. “They showed me how to play some of their songs. They said I was really good.”
“So, what’s next? Are you all going on tour?”
“Don’t be silly.” Angela’s old shyness brushes her face. “They said they’ll be here for a little while, and they asked me to keep practicing with them. Oh, and they asked about you, too.”
“What about me?”
“How long you were staying.”
“Ange, sit on this lovely rug with me, please.” I scoot over and she takes the side farther away from the big blank space where all the important things are supposed to go. “They want me to stay here, don’t they? Just like Lilia and Edie and apparently everyone else.”
“Who’s Edie?”
“Another artist. She lives here.”
“That could be us!” The grin again. “We could live here, in our own apartment, and you could work on your projects and I could keep playing piano and Mom could come visit us here and we wouldn’t have to bother with anything else.”
“You would like that?”
“I think so.” She looks around. “Lilia told me you were working up here now. This is your assignment?”
“Yes. It’s a self-portrait. I mean, that’s what it will be.”
“I can hardly see it.”
“You have to get right up next to the wall. It’s all in pencil for now.”
Angela gets up and walks around the room, kneeling down every so often to see the details of one picture or another. She stops in the corner nearest to the window. “Hey, is this supposed to be me?”
“Yup.”
“Cool,” she says. “In a band and immortalized on a wall, all in one day.”
It’s nice to see her happy, so nice that I wish I could have her sit cross-legged in the center of the room for the rest of the day, a humming little jar of joy. But I realize I can’t ask that of her, not that she would accept even if I did. She finishes her tour of the room, checks the time, tells me I should take a nap eventually. And then she’s gone, off to practice with my favorite band, which is still the weirdest thing in the world.
I keep drawing. I clean more areas of wall and stand on a folding chair to reach the higher parts and the corners of the room. I snap a pencil in two and fling it toward the doorway. I grab another pencil, and use it and sharpen it and use it some more until it is shorter than my pinkie finger. I’ve got shiny gray pencil stains on both hands and elbows, and my wrists feel tired and heavy. I guess it’s time to stop for a while.
Back in the second-floor studio, Lilia or Angela or someone has left a plate of cheese and crackers out on the counter, and there’s a pot of warmish soup on the stove. I have some of both, and then I collapse in the purple room, on the untouched bed next to Angela’s bed. If I were to take Angela and Edie and Firing Squad’s suggestion, I wonder which apartment would become mine. Would I have to wake up in this purple room every morning (or afternoon, if I was left to figure out my own schedule)? Would Mom come to visit, or even be able to visit? Would Vic laugh at me and completely blow me off for planting myself here in Sarasota?
Angela shakes me awake. “She’s got a flight. She’s definitely coming home.”
The purple room, still.
I stretch out my arms. My wrists have stopped groaning at me—it’s time to start working again. “When? What time?”
“Monday afternoon,” Angela says. “We don’t have to pick her up. She’s going to take a shuttle from the airport.”
Angela saying that has a strange way of bringing Mom closer already, as though her plane ticket has brought a ghostly presence of her into the room. She’s the type who asks questions after missing five minutes of a TV show—I can’t imagine how much she’d flail around in the unfamiliar context of the purple room if she was able to see us now.
I stand up, put my shoes back on, and grab my phone from my back pocket.
It’s actually here. A text from Vic:
I made it through all the dance parts of the audition.