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“What do you think about painting?”
Van’s question breaks a thick, comfy silence. She’s lying on her back on the carpeted floor of Tai’s bedroom, staring up at the ceiling and wondering if Tai ever had those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that you could stick up there. Van got a set from the planetarium, it must have been for her fifth or sixth birthday, and her dad promised her they’d climb up on the stepladder and put them up together. They never did. Her ceiling remained and still remains blissfully unmarked by cheap putty.
Tai lies on her stomach, cheek propped in one hand as she peruses some AP test prep book, even though she hasn’t even picked classes for senior year—hence Van’s question, which is still unanswered. The fan on Tai’s desk swivels, straining against the August heat while it waits for reinforcements from the house’s air conditioning.
“I said—”
“I heard you.” Tai doesn’t look up from her book. Her neck is stretched long and thin, a droplet of sweat beads just below her hairline. Not that Van notices, not that she stares. “I guess I don’t know what you mean. Like, painting as a medium?”
“No, like, Painting I,” Van says. “The class.”
Tai makes a noise. The sweat droplet quivers. “Easy A, I guess.”
“You think so?”
“It’s painting,” Tai says. “It’s subjective, right?”
“I guess.”
The door creaks, and Tai pauses. Her dark eyes find the two-inch crack between the bedroom door and its jamb. Van’s eyes find Tai’s, like always.
“Can I help you?” Tai asks.
“No, honey, just doing some laundry.” Tai’s dad is nice enough, always pokes his head in to say hello to Van. Van doesn’t even mind that he always calls her Vanessa, no matter how many times Tai corrects him, because it feels less like her mom trying to shove her into tulle or taffeta and more like…well, Van doesn’t know what it feels like, just what it doesn’t. Maybe Van just likes when Tai speaks up for her.
Not that she can’t speak up for herself, everyone from Mrs. Lemay to Coach Martinez can vouch for that. But it’s still nice when Tai does it.
It’s a little less nice when Tai snipes about the two-inch gap, the way her dad always leaves the door ajar when he pulls it to. The Turners don’t yell at Tai, they don’t get frustrated—but Tai does. God, Tai does. Van sees it when her jaw clenches and cord-like muscles in her neck tense and relax, the way she works a retort around her mouth like a jawbreaker before she lets it fly.
Tai’s words are rolling around her mouth now. The droplet of sweat clings to Tai’s skin the way that Van would like to, maybe, just a little, even though there’s a two-inch crack between the door and the jamb that’s meant to forestall this very thing.
What are the Turners worried about? It’s not like Van is going to get Tai pregnant.
Van said that once, just once, the first time they hung out in Tai’s room after Sectionals back in April—the first time since Lottie’s Better Luck Next Year Bash, where Jeff Sadecki gave Jackie a piggyback ride through Lottie’s entire backyard and Shauna got so drunk she puked until she cried and Laura Lee danced until she was red in the face and, oh yeah, Van and Tai made out in Lottie’s laundry room (“Literally the last place Lottie will look for us,” Van said. “I’m not even sure she knows where this is.”) and since then they’ve been friends who are girls but also girlfriends.
Tai’s dad retreats, and Tai exhales.
“Why are you asking about painting?” Tai asks.
Van sighs. “Because someone forgot she has to take a fine arts class to graduate.”
“Does that someone have a name that rhymes with Shmanessa Schmalmer?”
“Shmanessa Schmalmer?” Van makes a face. “Is that the best you could come up with? But yeah, it’s her—me. Whatever. I was going to do creative writing, but that sounds like—”
“A lot of listening to sad sack teenagers’ poetry about their suburban ennui?”
“Hell, I was going to say hell.”
“So, what I said.”
“But more efficient. Less words.”
“Fewer.”
Van grins and rolls up until she’s kneeling beside Tai’s bed. She pushes herself up, resting her elbows on the quilted bedspread. “Have I ever told you that I find your commitment to proper grammar weirdly sexy?”
Tai finally looks up from her book, looks at Van with that mix of wariness and hunger that makes Van feel that thrill, chasing and being chased, lioness and gazelle. It’s no different than it was at Lottie’s, or since then, or even before then at away games and tournaments and weekend-long clinics that Van had to borrow from her dad’s Schlitz fund to afford, back when looks were as far as it could go and they were both hungrier for it.
“No,” Tai says. “You haven’t.”
Van leans in, a magnet exerting enough force to gently part Tai’s lips by proximity. Then Van grabs Tai’s pillow and thwacks it softly against Tai’s head.
“You ever think there might be a reason for that?”
The painting classroom is brightly lit and oddly chalky, and three rings of easels surround a dais in the middle where the teacher stands. It reminds Van of crude stick figures dancing around a fire, a social studies textbook’s approximation of a cave painting. The light makes garish blurs of the paintings that hang on the wall—student work, that much is obvious, but Van can’t begin to guess if they’ve been exalted or abandoned.
Ms. Ammendale stands on the dais in a floral peasant skirt and a flowing blouse and a paisley print bandanna trying and failing to conceal her abundant curls. She’s familiar to Van, but not in any way that she’s going to spend her woefully uncaffeinated energy unpacking.
“Set up wherever you’d like,” Ms. Ammendale says. “Wherever you feel you’ll do your best work.”
Like Tai said: easy A.
Not that Tai is here to say it. Despite Van’s best efforts (and Van means that only slightly euphemistically) Tai has opted for AP Rocket Science or whatever the fuck instead of taking Painting I with her girlf—with her friend.
(They should keep it to themselves at school, Tai said, and Van nodded along like she didn’t feel a little like she’d been chewing broken glass instead of Big Red. It’s not that Tai is wrong, and it’s not like dumb, dykey Van Palmer doesn’t know that even better than bitchy, bratty Taissa Turner. It’s not like Van knows more about all of it than Tai, she’s just done more years in the suburban penitentiary of Wiskayok, New Jersey. It’s easier to keep it straight, no pun intended, if she tries to make her brain play along too.)
Van opts for an easel in the middle ring, not too close to the door or the dais or the desk that sits in the corner of the room, mostly to support a giant pile of blank canvases buttressed by assorted art supplies. There’s nothing to set up, despite what Ms. Ammendale says, so Van just drums the beat of a Danzig song on the easel until the classroom fills up.
“Hi.” The girl next to Van is breathless as the bell rings, her voice reminds Van of nothing so much as fried bananas and peanut butter. “Lucky I wasn’t late, huh?”
Van looks over at Jackie. “Uh, I guess so.”
It’s not that she doesn’t like Jackie. Everybody likes Jackie. It’s like pledging allegiance to the flag: you do it because you’ve always done it, because you know how to do it, because everybody else is doing it. Van’s not exactly a conformist, her fingernails are too short for that, but she knows when it’s easier to go with the flow.
And it’s not just the gravitational pull of peer pressure, either. Van actually likes Jackie. She’s nice. Not in the way where she smiles to your face and calls you a carpet-muncher when your back is turned, she’s actually nice. She’s the first one to stick her hand into a Tupperware of tumorous cookies fresh from Laura Lee’s kitchen (all-natural ingredients, Laura Lee doesn’t even get a Carvel on her birthday) and the last one to tolerate Becky Martin or Steph Phillips spreading rumors about Lottie or Nat or, hell, even Misty.
Back in freshman year, Becky told everyone who would listen that Misty let Robbie Delgado do her up the ass in the janitor’s closet. Nobody believed it for a fraction of a second, but more than a few budding sociopaths decided to repeat it to see if they could make Misty cry. Personally, Van wouldn’t have risked the possibility that traumatizing Misty Quigley might unleash some latent telekinetic power and carnage would ensue, but that’s why she’s her and not some shit-for-brains JV baseball player. Van doesn’t even remember the ringleader’s name, just that by the end of the month everyone was talking about how his dick was so diseased he couldn’t use the same showers as the rest of the baseball team. No one ever said they heard it from Jackie, but everyone found out who started it one way or another.
(Van figured out what happened from the way that Nat stopped making fun of Jackie behind her back, the way she passed to Jackie whenever she was open, even when they were just scrimmaging with the varsity team.)
So yeah, Jackie is all right in Van’s book, but that doesn’t mean she’s up for an extended conversation in second period on the first day of school. Not with her stomach already rumbling for lunch and the promise of mass produced cheeseburgers on the horizon. Jackie’s considerate of that, though: she carries the whole conversation on her skinny shoulders.
“I can’t believe we have to take an art class to graduate,” Jackie says. “Like, you think you’re never going to use trig in the real world? Try painting.”
“Who knows?” Van says, like she hasn’t said Jackie’s exact words to Tai. “Maybe it’ll be fun.”
Actually, maybe it will be: Van sees a couple of people she knows, and Nat has already set up in the easel closest to the door. Van spares a slight nod and a thumbs-up; Jackie waves with her whole arm and nearly knocks over her easel.
Ms. Ammendale gets their attention by—and Van can already imagine Tai’s face when Van relays this particular detail—ringing a no-shit dinner bell.
“Painting,” Ms. Ammendale says, “isn’t just about representing what’s in front of you, superficially. It’s about discovering the truth of things, what lies beneath the surface.”
That’s about when Van zones right the fuck out, already thinking about her regular Friday trip to Heron Street Video. She’s pretty sure she can get Tai to tag along, maybe even help her choose a movie to watch as long as they can make it seem like Van’s asking for a recommendation and not like they’re trying to pick out a movie to watch, together, hands mingling in the popcorn bowl and—
Van snaps out of it, and it’s a good thing, too. They have homework.
“Your first assignment is to come to class next week with a portfolio,” Ms. Ammendale says. “Something you’re proud of, something that says you’re proud of what’s inside of it.”
And that sounds easy enough, like Tai’s assessment was even more correct than Van is willing to admit to her not-a-girlfriend-between-homeroom-and-last-period friend, like maybe they’re all going to get out of second period unscathed, except then Ms. Ammendale starts talking about coming to see her if they need any help getting a portfolio—financial help, she makes clear, and she looks right at Nat as she does it.
“Excuse me.” Nat raises her hand so that one pale, bony wrist sticks out like an open fracture from the sleeve of her leather jacket.
“Oh, yes, um, Nat—”
“Yeah, uh, why the fuck were you looking at me when you said that?”
Nervous laughs prickle along the back ring of easels like goosebumps. Maybe it’s the profanity, maybe it’s the brazen challenge to a teacher, or maybe it’s the ridiculousness of the idea that Natalie Scatorccio wouldn’t know exactly why Ms. Ammendale was looking at her when she was talking about kids too poor to buy a portfolio.
Ms. Ammendale does the worst thing possible under the circumstances, and laughs nervously. Nat’s face twists like a wrung-out washcloth, blood rushing to her face.
“Fuck this,” Nat says, and she shoves off her easel and sets sail. The flimsy wooden frame teeters back and forth before settling back on its three legs, and by that point Nat has already burst through the classroom door.
If Nat’s earned herself detention for her little outburst, it can’t be much of one—the bell rings as soon as the classroom door swings shut. A low murmur accompanies the trudging migration from class to class; by lunch, it will be accepted fact at Wiskayok High that Nat accosted Ms. Ammendale with her fists or some kind of improvised stabbing weapon.
Jackie looks like someone has rocketed their fist right into her solar plexus, her giant eyes fixed on the empty easel where Nat once stood. She turns to Van.
“I’m going to, um, see if she’s—”
“Yeah, cool.” Van shrugs. If Jackie wants to get chewed out by Nat for showing anything like a human emotion, that’s her ass. Everyone knows that Nat doesn’t tolerate pity, and everything like kindness translates as pity to her these days.
Besides, Van has other things to do. She waits until Jackie leaves, and then she approaches the dais.
“Ms. Ammendale?” Van asks. “I was hoping I could talk to you, maybe, about—well, the portfolios?”
What, is she supposed to ask her mom and dad for money? Her mom, who has graduated from spending half her paycheck on red wine (Cab fare, she called it, because Van got her smart aleck streak from somewhere) to dropping two-thirds of it on shit you can’t even pass off as well liquor at the worst bar in Wiskayok? Her dad, who’s just starting to realize that maybe the world doesn’t find a tomboy daughter who plays sports and never dates quite as charming as he used to? For a fucking folder?
Yeah, fat chance.
Still, when Jackie comes to next week’s class with an elegant tan leather portfolio that looks like it was shipped in from Italy, or at least Manhattan, Van squirrels her oversized buff folder, glossy paper scarred by a crease at the right-hand corner, behind her backpack.
By October, Ms. Ammendale lets them choose their medium. Jackie goes for watercolors, and she gushes about the pale, pretty effect of the pigment on the paper. Ephemeral, Ms. Ammendale says, and Jackie nods with just a hint of practiced hesitation—like she knows what ephemeral means, but she doesn’t want everyone else to think she does. Van yawns just watching it. Besides, everyone knows Jackie chooses watercolors because they wash right out of her designer clothes.
Van opts for oil paints. She likes how vibrant they are, the way they pop from the canvas like they’re real, like Van could reach out and touch them. Sure, they stain the hell out of her rugby shirts, but she doesn’t mind, not even with—
“Hey, Palmer,” Becky Martin says as Van walks to second period, her brushes (her brushes, because she got a raise for picking up Saturday shifts at the Multiplex and brushes are just a little different than a portfolio, a little more serious) tucked under her arm in their rolled-up cloth bag. “You’ve got shit all over your dyke uniform.”
That’s about as inventive as Becky Martin gets when someone’s anus isn’t the topic of discussion, so Van musters the effort she deserves.
“Yeah, sorry, your mom’s a messy woman,” Van says, turning to give Becky the finger.
If that gets around, she’s going to hear it from Tai. Tai hates the way people gossip, and she hates even more the way Van seems not to care at all. It’s not that Van’s looking to catch shit, or call attention to herself. She just sees the same face in the mirror that everyone else sees walking by, the same broad shoulders and thick waist. She plays goalie, after all.
And that’s not a bad thing: she likes playing goalie, she’s good at it. But no six-year-old starts playing soccer to stand in front of the net the whole time. The coaches would talk about her frame, the way she’d wrestle possession from the pixie stick midfielders when she played away from the goal, the way they’d wilt to the ground like dandelion fluff. They stuck her in front of the goal so girls like Jackie Taylor didn’t trot home with fresh shiners and split lips, and they told her she was strong in front of the goal (too big) or well-suited for defense (too broad) or just, as Coach Martinez told her, built like a brick wall (too fucking butch)—
(Actually, Tai saw the way her face dropped when Coach told her that last one, and whispered in Van’s ear that she was built like a brick something all right, and Van went as red as she had ever gone before.)
She knows the score, she’s known it her whole life: The World, one; Van, nil. She’s damned if she dykes and damned if she doesn’t.
Fuck it, it’s senior year and it’s nearly Halloween. Van’s going as a cat, not that anybody has asked. Specifically, she’s going as Ellen Ripley’s cat from Alien, and Tai’s going as Ripley. Van talked her into it. First of all, cinematic philistinism—God, Tai is rubbing off on her, and that turn of phrase makes Van blush to her roots—is basically Wiskayok High’s governing philosophy. She’s willing to bet she can count everyone in school who has seen Alien on one hand. Second of all, it’s obscure enough that even people who have seen the movie won’t get it. It’s as close to a couples costume as either of them are willing to try, and not just because she heard a rumor that Jeff and Jackie are going as JFK and Marilyn Monroe and it made Van sick to her stomach like she’d tried Shauna’s cocktail of choice.
Speaking of being sick to her stomach and Jackie Taylor, Ms. Ammendale’s dinner bell is drawing Van closer to her second period class. She leaves Becky gawking, or maybe just hurling rejoinders at her back, and escapes into the painting classroom. Her nemesis greets her: a bowl containing two apples and a pear atop a stool that sits on the dais.
Jackie already stands at her easel, admiring her latest masterwork in progress as Van glares at the oily blur that she spends every class trying to salvage. Van tries to keep her eyes from narrowing as she glances over at Jackie’s pastel interpretation of the fruit, which isn’t lifelike—photorealistic, that’s what Ms. Ammendale calls it—but seems all the realer for it. Meanwhile, all of Van’s vibrant greens and reds dry to drab dullness on her canvas.
If Ms. Ammendale tells her she has to feel the fruit in her heart one more fucking time, she’s going to shove one of her brushes—
“Wow, Van, that’s really coming along,” Jackie says. When it comes to shoving brushes where they don’t belong, Van’s glad she bought a five-brush set. But Jackie isn’t fucking with her, she isn’t poking fun or comparing them. She’s just being nice, kind, complimentary. She’s just being fucking Jackie.
“Thanks,” Van says. “So’s yours.”
“Oh, this?” Jackie smiles like the compliment genuinely surprises her, like she’s not Ms. Ammendale’s favorite. If Nat were here, she’d gag—maybe mockingly, maybe for real. But Nat switched into Creative Writing with Lottie, where Shauna apparently took refuge once she realized that she, too, had been dumb enough to wait until senior year to fulfill her Fine Arts requirement. (It still surprises Van every time she sees Jackie in class without Shauna at the easel next to her, and not just because Van was half-convinced that Jackie picked classes for both of them. Maybe Shauna wanted to branch out, or maybe Shauna prizes her flannels more than Van guards her rugby shirts.)
“Yeah, seriously, you’re really good,” Van says. “How much do you practice?”
“Practice?”
“Yeah, like, paint at home.” Van frowns. “Practice brushstrokes, stuff like that.”
“Paint at home?” Jackie says. “Oh my God, my mom would kill me. My dad once tracked mud in from shoveling the driveway and I thought she was going to divorce him on the spot. I don’t think she’d put food in the fridge if she could get away with it. Too much stain risk.”
If there’s something that scratches at Van’s brain beyond the realization that Jackie paints like that with just fifty minutes of practice most days of the week, it’s lost beneath the howling unfairness of it all. But what else is new?
“Are you seriously going to paint that all night?”
Tai has AP Physics spread out on her bed: textbook, class notes, a budding stack of flashcards that reminds Van of the summer they all learned that a double whip Cruyff turn wasn’t something you ordered at a coffee shop. The bed is Tai’s territory at Van’s house, just like it is at Tai’s. She looks good in repose, which is something Van can say after nearly a whole semester of art education.
What looks less good is the paltry assortment of fruit on a plate atop Van’s narrow bedroom desk: a banana that seems like it’s threatening to turn brown before her eyes and an apple that was soft to the touch when Van grabbed it off the kitchen counter. What looks even worse is the broad paper canvas fixed to her window frame with pushpins to serve as a makeshift easel.
“Don’t you have studying to do?” Van asks.
“I can study at my house,” Tai says. “I thought we were going to….”
She trails off, because even here where there’s no one to pry or overhear them or insist the bedroom door be kept anything other than firmly shut, Tai doesn’t talk about things like that. When they first started dating—even if Tai can’t say it, even if they just do the same fucking shit Shauna and Jackie do after school and on the weekend, the only difference being that Shauna and Jackie don’t make out or stick their hands down each other’s pants or think about saying things like I lo—Van found Tai’s reticence kind of charming, cute even. Like, here’s this badass, future Division I athlete, and she can’t even talk about kissing without blushing. But lately, Van’s not sure it’s the thing itself that’s making Tai clam up. Maybe it’s who she’s doing it with, maybe it’s Van.
Van knows they’re not exactly well-matched, even beyond the obvious. Tai lives far enough east of Manasquan Avenue that Van feels awkward driving her boxy, clapped-out Toyota down her street, and Tai thinks Van’s neighbors are watching her from between the slats of their blinds to make sure Tai doesn’t decide to swap her mom’s Volvo for a beat-to-shit Buick on her own initiative. But it’s more than that, these days.
Tai is destined for bigger and better than Wiskayok, New Jersey. Tai is Tai, wherever that takes her, and while Van is pulling for Princeton she’s not stupid enough to miss how Van talks about Howard and Spelman. And if Tai is Tai, then Van is Van, with a desk drawer inhabited solely by a letter from Monmouth Junior College and not much to look forward to besides a senior soccer season where they have a pretty decent chance of winning States.
Van blinks away a blur in her vision, and sees what she should have seen a moment ago: a streak of red that she shouldn’t have slashed across the canvas.
“Fucking piece of shit.” Van sets her brush down on the windowsill and rubs the heels of her hands into her eyes as she turns around. “I suck at this.”
Tai rears up, her back muscles working beneath her thin T-shirt like they’re trying to cheer Van up, or at least distract her. They’re not entirely unsuccessful. She slithers off Van’s bed and takes the half-stride to Van, arms slipping around Van’s middle.
“Hey, nope,” Tai says, like Van’s botched an answer to one of Tai’s flashcards. “Nope, that’s not right at all. You don’t suck.”
Van scoffs. “Uh, look at my painting.”
Tai looks over Van to the paper canvas, resting her chin atop Van’s head. “I’m not saying you’re good,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean you suck. You’re just not good at this yet.”
“Well, I’m never going to be good,” Van says. “Because I fucking suck at it.”
Tai pulls away, looks into Van’s eyes. “Do you care?” Tai asks.
“No,” Van says.
“I mean it,” Tai says. “Do you care about being good at painting? Because if you do, then yeah, keep practicing. But if you don’t…well, who gives a shit if you’re not good at it?”
Van shrugs, which only makes Tai tug her just a little closer. Van tilts her head up, and Tai takes the invitation. Tai is Tai, and she’s always going to be Tai—that much Van knows. But she likes to think there are parts of Tai that only they know about, the two of them, and only then because Van coaxed those parts out of her. Sure, Van knows that Tai’s just marking time. Van was the obvious choice, the sure bet. The only approachable girl in school where Tai might have had a shot, unless she believed the rumors about Lottie and the field hockey team. But just because she was the obvious choice doesn’t mean she was any less the right one, or that’s what she tells herself. Even if she wasn’t the right one, at least she wasn’t as boring as her obviousness might have suggested.
Tai kisses soft. Softer than the boys she kissed when she didn’t know better, or when she did and pretended otherwise. Okay, it was just one boy, singular, the summer before eighth grade at the Wiskayok Community Pool, somebody’s pool party. Maybe Shauna’s. Tai kisses gentle, but she doesn’t hesitate to use teeth when she wants to or when she thinks it will get a noise out of Van, which to Tai are about the same thing. She likes to let her hands wander, but she’s never rough or grabby or careless. She just enjoys Van, and Van can’t remember ever feeling like anyone enjoyed her before, especially not herself.
“Sorry,” Van says, when Tai breaks away with a grin on her face that’s goofier than Van will ever tell her. “I just get—”
“In your head, I get it,” Tai says.
“It’s just that she’s fucking good at it, you know?” Van says. “Like, you don’t know what it’s like to work at something as much as you can, and then Jackie fucking Taylor swans in and is just better at it than you’ll—”
She feels Tai before she sees her, the tension radiating off her like a nuclear power plant in meltdown. Van doesn’t clap a hand over her mouth, doesn’t widen her eyes and pretend innocence. She just grimaces.
“Of course you do,” Van says. “Sorry.”
It’s not something they’ve talked about, Coach Martinez’s decision to pin the yellow C on Jackie’s chest and not Tai’s, even though Van could name three players better than Jackie just off the top of her head and Tai is the best of all of them, not that Van is biased.
“It’s cool,” Tai says. “I’m over it.”
That’s Taissa Turner for I am not, nor will I ever be, over it, but Van isn’t going to argue with her.
“If it helps,” Van says, knowing it won’t. “Jackie is actually better than me at this. It’s not bullshit politics or whatever.”
Tai smiles that thin, dry smile that just confirms Van’s unhelpfulness.
“You know,” Van says. “Since I suck so bad at this, I think it would be a good idea for me to boost my confidence by, you know, doing stuff I’m good at.”
She slides a little closer to Tai.
“Oh, yeah?” Tai stays still, letting Van draw nearer.
“Uh-huh.” Van bobs her shoulders a little as she nods, urging Tai to slide her arms over them. “Like, you know, when you practice penalty kicks. You’re really good at them, you know that?”
“I am?” Tai’s grinning, verging on beaming, but she makes her eyes big like this is the first time she’s heard this. “God, that’s such a relief. Do you think you could tell me more?”
“I don’t know, I was thinking maybe instead I could—”
The front door slams, loud enough to carry through the house. It’s not as far as it would need to carry at Tai’s house, but that just means that Van hears the unmistakable sound of a stumbling collision with the trash can in the kitchen.
“Fuck,” Van says. “You should go.”
“Out the fro—”
“Out the window,” Van says. “You parked down the block, right?”
Tai blushes, which makes Van feel a little better about asking. Plenty of people in this neighborhood go to school with them, and even if it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for Tai to park her mom’s Volvo in front of the Palmer house, it’s attention that Tai doesn’t want. Van’s willing to indulge it, not in the least because it gives Van a way to sneak Tai out without parading her past Van’s blitzed dad or, worse, her mom in the middle of a bender. She doesn’t want to put Tai through the slurred questions and inappropriate exclamations. She doesn’t want to see Tai’s face afterward, not just how she looks toward the house but how she looks at Van. Van knows she could handle the disgust, the shock—everything Tai could show, except the pity Van knows Tai would.
It’s not the first time, it’s not even the fifth. She tears her paper canvas free of the window frame and lets it slump to the ground to sleep off the night. This time, Tai is on her way home before the yelling starts.
The semester flies and crawls at once. As the middle of December approaches, Ms. Ammendale proclaims a surprise for their final class. Van almost asks if the surprise is that they all get As, but Ms. Ammendale shushes the class’s murmurs before she can make herself heard.
(By the way, they do all get As. Tai is right about a lot of things, and that Painting I is an easy A is one of them.)
“We’ve been working on still life all semester, and I think that, to encourage you all to stretch your wings, we should try something different.”
Jackie shows up late, something about her Trig teacher tearing her a new one, and almost misses the announcement as she props her portfolio against her easel. The surprise comes in soon after her: a pretty brunette in her twenties, wearing a zipped-up raincoat. She unzips the raincoat to scattered giggles and one ill-advised whistle, and mounts the dais in just a leotard.
“A live model,” Ms. Ammendale says, and for once her breathless exclamation gets a measure of the enthusiasm she thinks it deserves. “What do you think?”
The model, whose negotiated compensation probably didn’t account for being ogled by high school seniors, gives Ms. Ammendale a bored look. Someone in the third ring of easels raises his hand, and Ms. Ammendale points at him.
“Yeah, uh, about her.” The voice belongs to someone who hangs around the guys who hang around Nat, the kind of guy that Van knows doesn’t actually hang around Nat as soon as he opens his mouth and asks: “Shouldn’t she be naked?”
Laughter erupts, even Van chuckles. The model smirks as Ms. Ammendale flushes—the only face redder belongs to Jackie.
“Well, that wouldn’t be appropriate for this class,” she says. “Take it up with the governor.”
“I mean, I could, Becks,” the model says. “It’s not like I haven’t before.”
Van glances at Jackie, who carefully arranges each of her brushes just so, even more meticulous than usual. The red of her face has faded to a gentle pink, but it lingers.
“You good?” Van asks.
“Oh, just a long day,” Jackie says.
“It’s second period.”
“Is it?”
Somehow, despite the new and exciting presence of a new and exciting subject—a real, live woman on the dais, which Van is pretty sure is the closest some of the mouthbreathers in the class have gotten to one, at least if there’s any justice in the universe—the class settles down long enough to paint. The sound of brushes on palettes, on paper, on canvas replaces any murmurs or giggles or chatter. It is, for just under an hour, peaceful. Van’s attempt is shitty, but it’s recognizably her brand of shitty, like how Nat will smoke some cigarettes but not others. Maybe Van is developing a style.
The bell rings—the school’s bell, not Ms. Ammendale’s bell, which is the first time she’s stayed focused through Ms. Ammendale’s five minute warning. Van blinks, and starts to pack up her brushes. Jackie has already flung herself out the door, leaving only a faint citrusy scent as evidence that she was ever there.
That, and the leather portfolio still propped up against the easel’s legs. Van grabs it before she heads out the door, holding it close to her chest. She knows where Jackie’s locker is and, if she hurries, she can catch her and avoid carrying around something Jackie Taylor-fancy for the rest of the day.
The buffed linoleum floors gleam between the resigned footfalls of hundreds of high schoolers, and Van worms her way through unfamiliar hallways and even less familiar crowds until she spots Jackie’s familiar honeyed curls. Her carnation red blouse stands out, and Van waves.
“Jackie,” she says. “I have your—”
The hallway springs like a mousetrap, the floor getting right in Van’s face as the worn sole of her sneaker slides too far back. This is what her mom would call taking a spill, what Tai would call wiping out, what Nat would call eating shit. All feel like accurate, appropriate terms for something she never wants to experience again.
Her hands thrust out, portfolio flung forward and instantly forgotten as she tries to avoid fucking herself up irreparably a month before the soccer season starts. The leather folder spreads bat-like wings as it takes flight, spraying the guano of dozens of easel-sized sheets of paper along the floor. They form a watercolor road to Jackie’s feet, and as Van pushes herself up she sees them.
They’re all the same, just like everything they’ve painted during the semester, but where Van expects to see tens of pears and dozens of apples, instead there’s just a pair of eyes. Big, soft, brown eyes, usually looking straight ahead but sometimes out a window, sometimes over her shoulder, always beneath the same head of brown hair. Not all of them are complete, some have flanneled collars and some are no more than eyes, like some paperback cover to the Great American Novel. But the eyes are as identical as they are recognizable, even with the yearning in them that could be a trick of the light if Van didn’t suddenly, irrevocably know better.
Van looks up at Jackie as she scrambles to help gather the paintings. They don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say, not as Van hands over what she’s gathered, not as Jackie shoves the whole stack of portraits into the portfolio, not as she shuts it on the watercolor eyes of Shauna Shipman. All that’s left is for Van to give Jackie a smile that aims for understanding and comes out rueful.
Jackie really is fucking great at painting.