If I Was Your Girl(10)

“Insanely na?ve, but I’m bored so I’m still with you.”

“Okay, so I spent last night on Pinterest getting ideas,” I said, pulling out my phone.

“Of course you’ve got a Pinterest. I bet you’ve already planned like three different wedding themes.” Bee grabbed the phone from my hand and swiped at the screen, her brow knitted. “Half these are pinecone jewelry. This isn’t art,” she said, handing me back the phone. “This is crafts. They’re different.”

“It’s called arts and crafts.”

“Art,” Bee said, slipping her feet back into her shoes, “expresses something deeply personal and private. Art shares your world with other people so they can feel even a momentary connection with you. Crafts are pinecone hats.”

“I didn’t pin any pinecone hats,” I said indignantly, reaching into my backpack and pulling out an old sketchbook with a few blank pages left. Bee sat up and looked over my shoulder. “I sketched some designs you might like more—”

“Go back,” she said. I went back one page, to a piece of Sailor Moon fan art I’d drawn two years before. I thought it looked amateurish and tried to turn the page away, but Bee put her hand over mine and stopped me. “You drew this?”

I nodded. “It’s just fan art. Nothing original.”

“Stop,” Bee said. “There are enough people waiting to crap in your cereal without you doing it for them. You’re talented.” She stood up and scratched her back where her bare skin had touched the grass. “Come with me.”

I took a deep breath and followed her to the parking lot. She unlocked a worn-looking red pickup truck and hopped in the driver’s seat.

“Where are we going?”

“You want to make art,” she said. “So let’s get serious. Art is about exposing yourself. I’m going to share some things with you. You don’t have to share anything with me unless you want to, you know, create something worth creating.” She lit a cigarette as she started the car and blew a gray cloud into the wind.

“You can’t tell anybody what I’m about to show you,” she said as we pulled inside a cemetery gate. “I mean you can, obviously, but I’m trusting you not to.”

We parked and I followed her up the hill along the main path. Eventually it opened onto an overgrown clearing. I shielded my eyes and saw a run-down plantation house, its windows shattered and its paint long peeled away.

“This is my place,” Bee said. “I come here to get some privacy and develop my photos.”

“It’s creepy,” I said, rubbing my arms despite the pleasant weather.

“I know, right? I looked it up in town hall—nobody’s lived in it since the ’50s.”

The grass pushed back like water as we walked. “Why was it abandoned?”

Bee lit another cigarette, cupping her hand around the flame as a strong wind kicked up. Her cheeks sucked in as she shrugged. “Damned if I know.”

The wind gathered strength, rippling across the grass. I looked up at the second-floor balcony, with its darkened windows and pillars disintegrating from rot. For the first time all summer the cicadas’ song completely faded. The world felt bigger and lonelier than it had a moment before.

“I found some graves out in the woods last year,” she said.

“You think they buried slaves there?”

“Or soldiers. They turned it into a hospital before the war ended. Can you feel it?” She sat on the porch’s groaning top step as she finished her cigarette and removed a professional-looking camera from its case.

I stood a few feet away from the steps, still waist-high in the grass. Bee pointed her camera at me and clicked the shutter four times in quick succession. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I told her.

“I didn’t ask if you believe in ghosts,” she said. She flicked her cigarette into a rusted-out bucket near the door and headed inside. An anxious shiver ran up my back as I followed her. “I asked you what you feel. You can’t have art if you spend all your time forgetting pain.”

Broken glass littered the floor inside. A small plastic table and a camping chair stood to the left, an electric lantern casting a bright ring in every direction. I wondered if Bee knew how privileged she was to be able to feel anything at all, if she knew just how scary numbness could be. How it felt, sometimes, like a darkened room with no way out.

“I want you to play the honesty game with me.” The sky flashed outside and thunder rolled across the sky. I looked up and saw white and gray clouds hurrying past the sun as a shadowy line rushed across the clearing. Storms always followed a heat wave. The hotter it burned and the longer it lasted, the worse the storm would eventually rage. “Probably foreshadowing. The honesty game is intense.” She walked into the other room and returned with a stool, gesturing for me to take the camping chair.

“What is it?” I said, already certain I didn’t want to play. Outside, rain began to fall in a slate-gray sheet.

“It’s Truth or Dare without the dirty shit, pretty much. How it works is we take turns telling the other person something about us they probably don’t know. You do it five times, starting with something dumb, then you escalate and, by the end, you share something you never thought you would tell anyone. The challenger—me—goes first. No matter what you say to me, you’ll know I can’t blab because you’ve got all my dirt.”