I tell Mom that if Angela doesn’t get better soon, then maybe I’m going to take her to urgent care? Or maybe I don’t let a question mark hang in the air when I say this. We sit on the floor in front of the couch, drinking tea and staring at the opposite wall, where Mom hung my and Angela’s school portraits up too high. That’s my last-summer self, she who was still high on the victory of Food Poisoning #1, and who had just been blown away by the realization that she loved Vic. I can see it in her eyes, as she’s holding it, her one big shining secret. And I’ve never noticed how stressed she looks—there’s a certain anxiety to love, the way your mind and body wear down to make up for your heart beating so furiously all the time.
And I feel like that again now, but it’s for all these other things. For Angela. For Abuela and my mother. For my huge painting sitting alone at the building, waiting for me to return and be sure I still want it to look the way it does. For Lilia, and hoping she’s okay, and wondering what the hell her secrets are and what she’s going to do. For all the other artists at the building, working away, but never able to have everything they want.
“Mom, you can go to bed,” I say. “I’ll take her.”
“Ay, bendito, you’ve got school in the morning.”
“Yeah, I know. But we got in sort of a pattern when you were away, staying up late and doing things together. This is just, you know, another one of those things.” I nudge Angela’s shoulder. “Hey, let’s go.”
She sits up.
Mom stares at her. “What kind of medicine did that girl give to you?”
Angela’s eyes get teary. “She taught me how to play the piano.”
“She’s kind of delirious,” I say. “Come on, Ange.”
We don’t waste any time getting to the Estate, which is all lit up again. She seems to gain some energy as we park and head inside. Going up to the second floor, there’s color returning to her face, and opening the door to Lilia’s studio, she’s looking a lot more like herself. The floor lamp hums in the corner, waiting for us, and Angela heads straight back to the piano room. I check the fridge for some water, and not only is there one of those fancy water filters, but there’s also an unopened carton of orange juice.
I figure we have maybe an hour or an hour and a half, max, before Mom starts freaking out and calling us. Yes, of course we’re at the urgent care place, I’ll tell her. Maybe an hour is all Angela needs. Maybe that’ll take her through the end of the week, or even just through tomorrow after school.
Angela’s playing is quick and insistent, like she’s a mad scientist at the piano. On another floor, someone is dancing to her music, and someone is drawing to it, and someone is tuning up their saxophone before starting to play along. Everything goes on here, and on and on.
twenty-two
THE DOOR TO Mrs. Pagonis’s room is shut even after the late bell rings. We hang around outside, a bunch of studio art misfits with our supply boxes and portfolios, forced away from our color-coded tables for the first time in ages. It’s Thursday, it’s spring, and people are appropriately restless. I make eye contact with some of the Yellow Table people I’ve hardly spoken to all year. And I feel a particular allegiance with Rider, for once, who keeps taking glances through the door’s thin window.
“She’s in there with Gretchen,” he whispers to me.
“Oh man.” I scrape at a slick of dried glue on my art toolbox. It reminds me of Lilia and the ceiling art. I figured I was going to spend most of today silently willing Angela to make it through seventh period, but now, this worry about Gretchen is lumped on top of it. “Maybe it’s nothing bad. I heard Gretchen got into SCAD, you know.”
Rider nods. “I know. Good for her.”
Mrs. Pagonis opens the door without a word, and all of us flood in. Gretchen’s situated in her usual spot at the Orange Table, setting her supplies out neatly just as she would on any other day. But as I sit across from her, it’s clear that she’s been crying.
“What’s going on?” I ask her, trying to weave my voice under the morning announcements.
Gretchen shakes her head, grips a drawing pencil, and slaps a fresh, blank piece of paper in front of her on the table. “Just starting my piece for the county show.”
“What happened to the lizards?”
“Mrs. Pagonis said it was too much. Too confessional. She couldn’t have that representing her class.” She snakes a line across the paper, sort of like the traditional “here’s the ground” line I used to draw as a kid. “She recommended me to a counselor. I told her I already see one. I just—I don’t even know what to make now. Maybe I won’t enter.”
“No.” I fling my sketchbook open. “I don’t have anything either. Let’s do this together.”
Gretchen smiles. “Is it time for some more food poisoning art?”
“Nah. I never knew what that was about, anyway.”
The blank sketchbook page looks like a door or a window to me this morning, an opening to a world of possibility that could be treacherous, but could be great all the same. I don’t know what I’ll find there, but at least it’s a clearer path than the scuffed-up white walls of my studio in the Estate. Rider joins in, and the three of us are off, in our separate worlds, but with the scratches of our drawing pencils whispering to one another. I draw some lemurs, one napping, one with her tail wrapped over her shoulder, and one sort of jumping. Do lemurs actually jump? I don’t care. It’s my truth, and I’m happy to be living with it, at least for a little while.
I have so much energy from the lemur drawing that I go up to Victoria after lunch, after the fifth-period English girls are out of earshot, and tell her that I’m going to drive her to her dance class today.
“Sure,” she says, as though this was a totally natural thing between us again. She doesn’t ask if Angela’s going to come with us, and I’m glad, because I have no good way to explain why an old minivan’s going to show up and take her to the Estate. Vic, in her blue-and-white-striped dress and yellow sandals, standing with easy poise in front of the notoriously toxic front-hall girls’ bathroom, looks exactly like someone who has always known what she wants to do with her life. She doesn’t look like someone who has occasionally had that balance thrown off, or like someone who’s about to have it thrown off again.
It’s raining when Victoria and I head out. I have to do the thing Mom taught me where I turn the AC and the defroster on full blast to get the windows to stay unfogged.
Vic doesn’t say anything about her playlist. I don’t put on Firing Squad.
“It might be warm enough to swim this weekend,” Vic says. “I mean, if you’re up for that.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Have you talked to Tall Jon since his party?”
We’re at a red light, and Vic starts twisting her hair into a bun.
“Nope,” I tell her.
“Dearie.” Vic faces me, or tries to, but the light turns green and I’m straight ahead again, pretending not to be side-watching her as she looks away from me and grabs her usual tangle of bobby pins from her dance bag. One, two, three, four, in they go. Good Lord, I think even I could do her hair in the dark at this point.
“Dearie.” A little louder this time. “If there’s something going on . . . with your new project, with Lilia, with anything, you know that you can tell me about it. Actually, let me rephrase that, you better tell me about it, because I don’t want to see your picture on the news in a few weeks just because I didn’t bug you for details.”