Picture Us In The Light(50)
It’s more crowded inside than it was the last time we were here. It takes a few seconds for the faces to emerge from the blurry crowd, come into focus, but then all at once they do: Aaron Ishido and Edwin Chen, Steph Sakamoto and Annette Lu, Noga Kaplan.
I can feel the shock etch itself into my face. It’s at least five minutes of greeting everyone before I can whisper to Harry, “What the hell?”
He’s smiling. “I, uh, may have told a couple of people about this.”
“There are like thirty people here.”
“Thirty? That many? I swear I only told one or two.” He thumps me across my shoulders. “Good thing you suck at math.”
The guy I remember from last time is there to shake my hand and take the portraits I brought in and fit them into gallery frames. We watch. The first piece is one of my mom. And then there it goes, up there on the wall: my art.
It feels like someone gently peeled back my skin and muscles, my rib cage, and carefully lifted out my heart and made copies of it and pinned them all over the building. My eyes well up, and I turn away so Harry won’t see. He punches me on the shoulder.
“Damn, Danny,” he says. “Look at you.”
And everyone watches with me as the next one (this one’s Harold Chiu) goes up. The portraits lit up in the clean, bright quiet, all of us held in a shared stillness—I feel it then, that power I think some part of me is always after. Or maybe it’s not power after all, this feeling, and instead it’s just a place to rest.
This is what Vivian Ho meant when she said you have to choose what’s important to you and how far you’re willing to go for it. When the universe zooms in on all that space I take up inside it and asks me why, this is the only answer I’ve ever known.
At home after the gallery showing, as soon as I’ve come in to tell my mom I’m back home, I go to my desk and pull out my Bristol pad.
I’m going to do it. This is all I am. I’ll do this for myself and for my class and for Regina, who wasn’t there today, but messaged me as we were driving home: Hope it went well, sorry I couldn’t make it. Harry spent like all week orchestrating this.
I go back into the kitchen and make myself some coffee and then come back and roll a piece of paper into a blending stick, sanding the edges with a nail file I stole from my mom. I fold the pad to an empty page, and for a second the blankness of it sucks all the air from the room. These used to be the best moments, that wide open space where the whole page was possibility still, where it could be anything at all before I narrowed it into one thing only. I miss how alive and expansive it always made me feel.
But maybe it’s like seeing a friend after it’s been a long time, how you trust that when you brush away those webs of awkwardness the old friendship’s still there underneath, the way I’ve always kind of thought it would still be with Ethan.
You have to start somewhere. I imagine a light source coming from behind her—all the lines dark and shadowed, Sandra backlit. It’s been so long since I’ve drawn anything my strokes are choppy and short at first, feathering the lines and blurring her outline. I tear out the piece of paper and start over. It’s the most expensive kind of paper I use and I almost never sketch on it, but I tell myself it’s fine, even if I go through the whole pad it’s worth it to be back in the game. This time—I haven’t had to do this in years—I practice the strokes through the air first before I lay them down.
My palms are clammy. I drink some of my coffee. It’s now or never, isn’t it? All of today at the gallery still coursing through my veins—I feel wired. I feel buoyant. And everything you take in from the world becomes a part of you that flows back through you into whatever you draw, I know that. There won’t be a better time than now.
I don’t like to look at photos of people I’m drawing; I like to hold them in my thoughts and reach past any one static image of them, and I call her face to mind. I draw her eyes. I tilt the pencil and arc wide swaths of lead to color her ever-present eye shadow, lightly stipple in the dark circles under her eyes she always tried to makeup over.
It’s ten minutes later that my heart squeezes against itself, drops off a beat, and then pounds back against my chest so hard it knocks my breath away. It’s a different panic than the one that’s started to feel like home to me these past months. It’s not that it feels empty or that it doesn’t look like her—those things I expected, those things I could manage—it’s that it does.
I put my pencil down and toss the blending stick into my trash can, a queasiness vibrating like guitar strings through my heart. I could’ve done it if it didn’t look like her. But it does, and I can’t.
On Monday Mrs. Mosher lets us out a few minutes early for lunch, and I park myself outside Ms. Sharma’s classroom to wait for Regina. She comes out talking animatedly with Joel and Rachel Pruitt, the twins, and after they head for the cafeteria I say to Regina, “Walk to my locker with me?”
“I have to go see Mr. Renato.”
“Can I walk you there?”
She hesitates a second too long, and I feel that closed-offness again. “Sure, if you want.”
Part of me wishes she’d said no—I’m not exactly looking forward to this conversation. I reach out to take the books she’s carrying. “What do you have to see him about?”