The Astonishing Color of After(24)

This was early on in the time when Dad had started traveling for work. I guessed—hoped—that things would get better as we got used to his being gone. But it stuck in my head, that memory of her sleeping sadly, pining after my father.

Everything in my life seemed to be changing. It felt like things in my house were falling apart in direct proportion to the rate at which Axel and I were crumbling.

My father flew home just in time for Thanksgiving, so Mom went overboard with the cooking. When I showed him the things I’d made for art class, he nodded without smiling. “Is this your last year taking art?”

“No?” I said, thrown off by the question.

“Oh. I just thought maybe you would grow out of it when you got to high school.”

Grow out of it? The words shocked me so much I didn’t know what to say. It was the first time I realized that maybe it was what Dad actually wanted. For me to grow out of art, get over it. Move on to something different. How could I?

The next week, Axel was out sick. Leanne Ryan sauntered into our art class asking for his folder. She saw me but didn’t smile, just let her eyes slide right off my face. No pretense necessary; no Axel around to witness anything.

“He has mono,” she told Dr. Nagori. “So it’s hard to say how long he’ll be out.”

Hearing that made me want to puke. How much more clichéd was he planning to get?

Since Axel was absent, Carolina Renard moved into his chair. I liked her immediately—maybe because we both had a bit of blue in our hair, or maybe because I could tell right away that she was my kind of person. We were partnering for an assignment: an acrylic painting on a piece of shared canvas. The point, Nagori said, was to try to learn from your partner and see through their eyes. Consistency was key. He didn’t want to be able to tell which sections were painted by which artist.

Ours was already getting really intense. Caro—Please don’t call me Carolina; that name was a terrible mistake—was into this jagged pattern like lightning; it split our picture in half. On the left we’d painted a long-necked blue figure on bent knee, offering an anatomical heart. The lover was on the right, holding out hands to receive, except the lightning divided it so that you could see with X-ray vision. Inside the lover floated all manner of orange evil. False promises swirled and toxic thoughts twisted. We made both figures androgynous.

Friday afternoon rolled around and our painting still wasn’t finished.

“You going to turn this in on time, girls?” said Nagori as he watched us pack up.

“No sweat. We’re working on it over the weekend,” said Caro. “I’ve got everything we need at my house. Right, Leigh?”

“Yup,” I said without missing a beat, though this was the first I’d heard about going over. I watched as Caro carefully slid our painting off the table and held it by the wooden frame underneath.

“Can you help me get this into my mom’s car?” she said. “We’ll give you a ride so you don’t have to suffer the late bus. If you could just grab my backpack for me—”

I followed her out to the main parking lot, where she marched straight up to a boxy white sedan.

“Hey, Mom,” she said, sliding into the shotgun seat. “This is Leigh. She needs a ride. Her house is over on Larchmont, right when you make the turn.”

I threw our bags into the back of the car. “How’d you know that?”

Her mom snorted. “Caro makes it her job to know where all the ladies live. Nice to meet you, Leigh. I’m Mel.”

Caro craned her head around to roll her eyes and say, “My mother is convinced I flirt with anything that’s got boobs. Which is not true.” She turned back, checking that she hadn’t smeared the painting. “Anyway, we’re actually in the same neighborhood. And you’re just a few houses down from Cheslin.”

I racked my brain. “Who?”

“You don’t know Morgan Cheslin? She moved onto your street a couple years ago.”

“Cheslin goes to Stewart,” Mel added.

“That explains it.” I was bad enough at keeping track of the people in my high school class, let alone any other schools.

“Cool if Leigh’s over this weekend to finish our painting?” said Caro.

“Of course,” said Mel. She winked at me in the mirror.

Caro saw the wink and made a noise of irritation. “It’s not like we’re going to be making out, Mom.”

Mel shrugged dramatically. “I didn’t say anything!”

They dropped me off and were already pulling out of my driveway—Caro giving me one last eye roll through the window—when I discovered the front door was dead-bolted.

As far as I knew, we never touched the dead bolt, and I didn’t have the right key. Some instinct made me feel the need to do a performative search through my pockets and backpack. Mel had paused the sedan in the middle of the street, and they were watching me. I turned around and waved, shrugging, hoping that that would urge them onward, that as they pulled away, my mother would hear me ringing the bell and open the door in time for Mel and Caro to glimpse me entering my house like a normal human being.

But nobody opened the door. There were no sounds from the inside. I banged louder, and when that seemed useless, I gave the door a few hard kicks.

My embarrassment swelled as Mel rolled back up the driveway and put her window down.