A Million Miles Away(58)

She nodded at Mrs. Wallace, who changed the slide on cue. The slide showed a photo of the man, hair bleached white, sunglasses on indoors, sitting next to the girl she was dressed as, whom she had seen in many of his short movies.

“I first learned about Andy Warhol from someone I loved very much, who is now gone. My sister. She used to paint these beautiful scenes, like perfect paintings of our backyard, or our house, or the KU campus, but she did them in these wacky neon colors. I never understood why. I used to ask her why she didn’t paint them as she saw them. I thought she was just trying to be annoying.”

There were a few titters from the class.

“Then I saw this.”

She nodded at Mrs. Wallace, who changed the slide to show three identical rows of the old movie star Marilyn Monroe, each square a copy of her face, but the hues switched in each one, all displaying different, Technicolor combinations.

“This is called Pop Art, something Andy Warhol is famous for, which takes commercials or brands and turns them into art. Michelle was doing the same thing, sort of. She was taking something that everyone could recognize, like a house, or a porch, and using color to make people think about it differently. To make people realize what they were seeing every day was special. Andy Warhol did it through repeating the famous images over and over, or changing their color, and it made me think, well, anyone can do that.

“And I used to think that was bullshit, but actually, it’s exciting.” She glanced at Mrs. Wallace, hoping she hadn’t offended her. The teacher nodded, urging her to go on.

“As long as you have something that people recognize, just any ordinary thing, like the pop songs and dance moves I do, for example…” Kelsey felt herself blush. “You can tweak it a little bit, and suddenly it’s very special. Or you can tweak it a lot. The point is, you’re making people look at it twice. They latch on to something they know, but they think about it more deeply. They don’t have to love it, but it’s there.”

Kelsey had stopped reading off her notecards now.

“We let so much go by without acknowledging it’s there,” she said, and realized she was talking about a lot more than Andy Warhol.

“Anyway,” Kelsey said, clearing her throat. “People say Warhol was doing it for money and celebrity, and maybe he was, but he didn’t stop working after he became rich, so I don’t think that was it. He just wanted to make people look twice.”

She still couldn’t see the faces of her classmates, but she didn’t care if they had listened. She had said her piece.

“The end,” she said, and right then, Kelsey felt a sense of completion. She was done with high school. She had tried to keep her hopes up, but Peter’s silence had numbed her. She might not get the best grades, but none of her teachers would fail her, and she had gotten into KU. Most important, she was pretty sure she had found what she was supposed to find: that she could be an artist someday, too.

On her way out of the classroom, as the next student made their way to the front, she stopped at Mrs. Wallace’s desk. “Thank you,” she whispered to the teacher. “I’m going now.”

Mrs. Wallace whispered back, “Your presentation was a little short for my taste, but well done. Good luck, Ms. Maxfield.”

Kelsey roamed the empty hallways, not bothering to change out of her sixties outfit. At her locker, she took out her phone to text Gillian and Ingrid, but paused, seeing the email that waited there.

She opened it, read it, and read it again to make sure.

Then, slamming her locker closed, she ran.

She ran through the back lot, dodging her fellow seniors, who stared suspiciously at her, running in her fake eyelashes and go-go boots. She found her car and rolled down the windows, stomping on the gas to reverse out of the parking space, and flying into the street, letting her hair-sprayed bun blow out in the May wind.

She parked haphazardly on the street in front of her house and ran up the stairs to open her laptop.

Peter had already called twice. She answered on his third try, tapping the screen with her cursor over and over, begging it to show the face she had dreamed of every night, every day, every second.

“Hello?” she said, her ears buzzing, her face hot from the rush.

Nothing but scrambled sounds from the other end, and when he finally did appear, he was frozen, a wooden background where a green tent used to be. He must be in a new location, and this one had a bad Internet connection. She cursed the place, wherever he was.

But Peter looked happy to see her. Unless he was denouncing her with a smile on his face, he was happy to see her. His image moved again, but only slightly.

“Did you get my video?” she called, hoping she could hear him.

His sound cut in, only for a second, then out again. “Connection’s bad—” she heard, then, “I—Got your video—I knew it.”

She waited, barely breathing.

“It’s okay—” Peter said, and though the sound dropped out again, goodness grew from her center, outward. His mouth formed words as he rubbed his head, explaining something.

“Try again? I can’t hear you!” she called.

Suddenly, she heard the two syllables she had been longing for.

“Kelsey—”

Kelsey. Kelsey. He had said her name. Finally, he knew her for who she was and not who she was pretending to be. I’m Kelsey, and you love me.