She walked out the back door of her home.
“Did you do this?” I pointed at the painting.
“Yeah.” She looked at me warily. “It sucks.”
“It’s perfect. It’s…so different.”
I turned my head to look at it from another angle, absorbing the details, the life throbbing in it, the confusion. She had painted the landscape there out front—the curved branches of the trees, the oval leaves, the thick trunks—but it wasn’t a real image; it was a distortion, as though she had grabbed all the elements and mixed them in the blender of her mind and then thrown them out all jumbled, with her own special interpretation.
Leah blushed and stood in front of the picture with crossed arms. Her sweet angel face frowned and she looked at me reproachfully.
“You’re kissing up to me.”
“I’m not either, damn it. Why would you think that?”
“Because my father asked me to paint them,” she said, pointing at the trees, “and I did this, and they don’t look anything like them. It started out right, but then…then…”
“Then you did your own thing.”
“You think?”
I nodded and smiled at her. “Keep doing that.”
In the months to come, every time I went to see my parents or the Joneses, I would spend a while with her looking at her latest work. Leah was… She was her. There was nothing else like her. She didn’t have influences; her lines were so distinctive I could have picked them out anywhere. She was light, and there was something that drew me to her, as if her pictures compelled me to keep looking, keep discovering…
8
_________
Leah
I got out of bed with a sigh when Axel shouted that dinner was ready. He had made some vegetable tacos that were steaming on his so-called coffee table, a surfboard with four wooden legs in front of the sofa. Apart from his desk covered in junk, it was the only table in his house, unless you counted the old trunk where he kept his record player. Everything there was very him, with that furniture that matched despite being so different, the order in the disorder, the reflection of inner peace in the small things.
I envied him. That way of living, so unworried, so relaxed, always looking ahead without stopping to look back, always focused on the now.
I sat on one end of the sofa and ate in silence.
“So you’re taking your bike to school tomorrow.”
I nodded.
“Would you rather I drive you?”
I shook my head.
“Sure, your call.” Axel sighed. “You want some tea?”
I looked up at him slowly.
“Tea? Now?”
“I always have some at night.”
“It’s got caffeine,” I whispered.
“Doesn’t bother me.”
Axel took the plates to the kitchen. I looked at him over my shoulder as he did. His hair was dirty blond, like ripe wheat or the sand on the beach at dusk. I looked away from him quickly, confused, pushing aside the colors, burying them.
Axel called me a few minutes later, cup of tea in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in another.
“Come out on the porch?” he proposed.
“Nah, I’m going to bed. Good night.”
“Good night, Leah. Get some rest.”
I got under the sheets even though I wasn’t cold, and hid my head beneath the pillow. Darkness. Just darkness. In Axel’s house, you didn’t hear a single car pass down the street, no distant voices; there was just silence and my thoughts, which seemed to shake and shout and try to break out. When I felt anxiety bearing down on my chest and my breathing turning irregular, I closed my eyes tight and grabbed the sheets, wanting everything to be gone. Everything.
* * *
The next morning, I found him in the kitchen.
All he had on was a wet red swimsuit. He was making toast. He smiled at me. And I hated him a little for that, for smiling at me like that with those perfect lips and that gleam in his eyes. I tried not to look at him and opened the fridge to take out the milk.
“Sleep well?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I lied. I’d had nightmares again.
“You sure you don’t want me to take you?”
“Sure. Thanks though.”
I left there, him, not long afterwards, and didn’t stop pedaling till I’d reached school and left the bicycle chained to a fence painted blue. The wooden building was small with a patio surrounding it. I looked down when I walked through the door and didn’t talk to anyone. Before, this had been my favorite moment of the day: getting to class, finding my friends, telling each other the latest gossip, and walking together to class. But I couldn’t do that anymore. I had tried it, I really had, but there was a barrier between them and me, something that wasn’t there before.
When I walked past Blair with my head low, hair partly covering my face, I wished she hadn’t gotten a job there. Probably that’s why I kept my hair so long, to avoid attention, to hide the feelings I knew everyone could see in my eyes. If I could have had a superpower, I would have chosen invisibility. That way I could have escaped those looks of pity, the ones at first and the ones that came later, the ones that seemed to scream that I was weird, that no one understood me, that I wasn’t trying hard enough to come back to the surface and breathe…
I spent the whole morning sitting at my desk, tracing spirals in the corner of my math notebook, concentrating on the ways the lines curved and on the soft movement of the black pen. When class was over, I realized I’d barely heard anything the teacher said. I was putting my books into my bag when Blair entered the room timidly and came over. Almost all my classmates were already gone. I looked at her restrained, wanting to escape.
“Could we talk a sec?”
“I…uh, I gotta go.”
“Just for a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
Blair took a breath.
“I heard your brother’s got to go to Sydney for a while and I wanted you to know if you need anything, anything at all, I’m still here for you. I always was, honestly.”
My heart started thumping.
I wanted that, I wanted everything to go back to the way it was, but it couldn’t. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the car turning over and over, a blurry green furrow that meant we were no longer on the road, a song that cut off suddenly, a frozen scream. And then…and then they were dead. My parents. I couldn’t forget it, I couldn’t get away from the scene for more than a few hours, as if it had happened last night and not almost a year before. I couldn’t walk next to Blair and smile every time we crossed paths with a group of surfer tourists or talk about what we were going to do in the future, because all I wanted to do was…nothing, all I could think about was…them, and no one could understand me. At least, that was the conclusion I came to after several sessions with the psychologist Oliver sent me to.
“It doesn’t have to be the same, Leah.”
“It can’t be,” I managed.
“But it can be different, new. Wasn’t that what you used to do when you painted? Take something that existed and interpret it differently?” She swallowed nervously. “Couldn’t you do that with our friendship? We wouldn’t have to talk about anything if you didn’t want to.”