“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” he says.
We smile.
“I may have blown your cover,” I confess. “I saw Ryan.”
Mark’s smile wavers.
“He asked me about a Sylvia Plath essay.”
“Hm.”
“Sylvia Plath wasn’t in our plan. I am all for bending the truth for a worthy cause, but I can’t say it comes naturally to me. But did I get you in trouble? I hope not.”
He leans back in his chair.
“Who knows? At least he asked about it, I guess.”
“Did he ask about anything else?”
“Not in a way that made me want to answer. Did she?”
“Not really.”
“Well,” he says, “it can be our secret for a little longer.”
Ms. Kelly tells us we’ll need to take notes, and soon we’re all unzipping backpacks and digging for pencils.
“Please say you can hang out after school,” I say.
“Definitely,” Mark says.
Ms. Kelly begins her review, and Mark and I turn toward the board.
I stare at equations, copy what she’s written, but soon I drift back to Violet.
7
MARK
When I find Katie after school, she looks completely freaked out.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
She holds up her phone.
“It’s AntlerThorn. AntlerThorn wants me.”
“Wow,” I say. “Antler Thorn, huh?”
She nods. “AntlerThorn’s already sent me a graphic to post to Instagram. So I posted it. This is so surreal.”
“It most certainly is. I just have one question.”
“What?”
“Who’s Antler Thorn? Because I wouldn’t have pegged you as the type to be getting calls from gay porn stars. And Antler Thorn sure as hell sounds like a gay porn star.”
“It’s a gallery. The one Garrison told us about, remember? AntlerThorn. One word.”
She says this as if it makes much, much more sense as one word.
“That’s awesome, right?” I say. I don’t know much about the art world, but having a gallery want you must be like being scouted by the majors, at least.
“It is awesome. Except it’s also weird. Because it’s a lie that’s coming true. The only person who thought I was having a gallery show was Violet. And now a gallery wants me to have a show there.”
As we head to her car, she explains more of the backstory. I do not tell her that I am slightly distracted thinking of some of the outfits that Antler Thorn, Gay Porn Star?, would wear. I’m not sure she’d appreciate that.
I also know that Ryan would. I almost want to text him and ask him what he thinks when he hears the phrase Antler Thorn.
Then I imagine him responding:
Let me see what Taylor says.
I have to stop. I am spiraling into ridiculousness.
We’re at Katie’s car now. She points to this big, big zip-up envelope thing sitting on the passenger seat.
“I want you to look through those and pick the twelve I should show them.”
We get in the car and I tell her, “I’m not sure that’s the best idea. Ryan’s the art person, not me. If you want to go through it, I’m happy to drive.…”
She shakes her head. “If I try to go through it, it will take me about twelve hours, and at the end of the twelve hours I’ll be certain I am the most pathetic excuse for a non-artist in the history of everything. That’s just the way it is. And we don’t have twelve hours—I am supposed to be there by four. Because they’re doing this show of queer artists, and apparently one of the photographers had to take down his pieces because they were all reproductions of his cheating boyfriend’s Grindr chats, pictures included, and the boyfriend is threatening to sue.”
“Fortune does have a strange way of smiling, doesn’t it?” I say, unzipping the carrier. She’s going to have to drive fast if we’re going to make it downtown by four.
I really don’t know anything about painting. I don’t know whether the colors I see are right or if the shapes make sense. I couldn’t tell you which painters Katie is like or what style she’s painting in. But almost immediately I can tell one very important thing about Katie’s paintings: She means them.
I feel like I’m reading her journal. A journal made of poems, where the spaces and word arrangements are just as important as the words themselves. These paintings are not still lifes. There is nothing still about the life within them. Everything she’s pictured has elements that are present and elements that are missing—you feel the presence and the absence and have to figure out whether the figures are almost complete or just starting to dissolve. A rope stretching across the sky, with a girl trying to balance atop it. The rope is solid, but neither end is attached to anything. In another painting there’s a girl peering into a ring of fire. You can see her face all around the hoop, but when you look inside it there’s a starry sky where her eye should be.
A Pegasus with only one wing, turning toward the ground.
A starfish with a missing limb … but it’s the missing limb that you feel reaching toward a comet.