Augustine. In Florida.”
“Did you grow up there?”
“Yeah.”
He gave a small smile. “You’re in for a hell of a winter, then.”
I took a deep breath and said, “Oh, I’ve heard.”
“Ever seen snow?”
I shook my head.
“You’re gonna see a lot of it here.” He furrowed his brow at his canvas and looked at me.
“Are you any good?” I asked, indicating his canvas.
“Not at all. Don’t be insulted by my portrait of you. I just took this class because I needed an elective and Crawley is awesome.”
“He seems cool, yeah.”
We settled into a silence I struggled not to fill with stupid rambling. I mixed up some more color to match his dark hair. I laid the brush on the canvas with the blackish color I’d mixed up. But it wasn’t quite right. There was a small tinge of another color in there somewhere. I sifted through the paint tubes and found Alizarin Crimson. I added a tiny bit. Yes, that was a lot better.
“Look at me for a sec,” he said.
I looked up. “What?”
He squinted and leaned toward me. “Green, okay. But …” He stood and came over to me. He put his hand under my chin and lifted up my face. My heart skipped.
“Trust me,” he said with a smile. “I’m an artist.”
“Paint me like one of your French girls.”
Oh, the words spilled from my mouth before I could stop them. I was too used to my group of friends. My cheeks turned hot.
He dropped his hand and looked at me. “Did you just make a Titanic reference?”
“Maybe.”
He smiled and raised an eyebrow. “My older cousin Sarah watched that for the entirety of a family trip at the Outer Banks once. And if I remember correctly, in that scene, he wasn’t just painting her face.”
“Well, we probably won’t be asked to do that in here.”
“Probably not.” He smiled. “Now look at me, I need to look at your eyes.”
He tilted my head so that my eyes caught the light.
“They’re not just green. They have some brown in them, too. Right in the middle.” I looked at him as he studied my eyes.
“Really?” I said, even though I fully knew it.
“There’s also …” He narrowed his own eyes. “Also some blue. They’re like the color of … a pond or something.”
I laughed, and it echoed in the otherwise silent room. Everyone looked at us. I bit my lip and looked around apologetically.
Max smiled. “What?”
“A pond? So, like, the brown is mud and the green is pond scum?”
He laughed, too, sitting back down. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
I laughed and focused back on my canvas.
The end of class came, and we were able to reveal our paintings to each other. I actually kind of liked mine. It didn’t look like a photograph or anything, but it really looked like Max.
“You ready?” I asked him.
He furrowed his brow once again at his painting and said, “I guess.”
We turned around our paintings. I don’t think I’d laughed so hard in weeks. I was one big circle with pink tinge in my cheeks, little dots for freckles, and huge blue-green-brown eyes. I had no eyelids, and my lashes were like little black spiders.
“All right, all right, so I’m not an artist.” He put his canvas back on the easel. “But at least I got your eyes right.”
The rest of the week passed by in a frenzy of getting situated in classes and talking about the year full of work that lay before us. I could already tell that the huge studio was going to be my sanctuary, because as far as the other classes went, it was looking like the year wouldn’t be an easy one. Manderley had block scheduling, so one day we’d have four classes, and then the next day we’d have four different ones. Fridays we had all of them, but they were cut in half. On A days, I had English, World History, Algebra II and Painting. On B days, I had Gym (a bummer because at my old school we didn’t need to take it in senior year, and also because it’s at freaking 8:00 a.m.), Biology, French II (a breeze, since my Paris-born mother had mostly taught me the language) and study hall (which I could hardly believe was a real thing).
A couple days into this schedule, I approached Blake in the dining hall as we slathered bagels with cream cheese, and she assured me things would settle down soon.
“It’s always like this,” she said. “It’s superbusy and then teachers cool off. Trust me, two weeks from now it’ll be ten times better. It’s like they sprint and then get tired and drag their feet for the rest of the year.”
I saw her and Cam every day in the hallways and a few times during meals. They were clearly a very happy couple, and I got along with both of them. I saw a few other people in the halls that I’d met, but no one said much more than a passing hello. I didn’t see Max as much as I wanted to, but when I did, he was usually coming in from lacrosse practice with slightly flushed cheeks and a sheen of sweat on his sculpted cheekbones.
It was odd for me to be mostly solitary. Back home I was out all the time and did something at least kind of social every day even if it was just watching TV with Leah. I was missing home more each day. Every memory I had of home was suddenly set in a perfect sunny day, whereas Manderley was set to the backdrop of gray rain and cold drafts that seeped through ancient walls.
I was alone and cold, and since the food was nothing like my mother’s or what I was used to, I was hungry. Even the salad, usually a safe go-to, tasted like nail polish remover.
It was really hard to stay positive. And that’s normally a talent of mine.
Unable to simply quit school or even tell my thrilled parents about the mild disappointments of the past week, I sat by myself and read or did homework during meals, went to class alone, and then headed to my room where Dana would look disappointed to see me and then ignore me. Sometimes I wanted to just kick her in the shins and tell her to stop being such an unpleasant cloud of gloom, but then I’d remember Becca—it was hard not to, when my side of the room still displayed a wallpaper of her pictures—and feel guilty again.
So that put me in the dining hall at nine at night on my first Friday evening. I was filling my travel mug with hot chocolate. I’d decided I wasn’t ready for bed and that I didn’t want to spend time in the same room as Dana quite yet. I figured I’d read To Kill a Mockingbird and try to find the deeper motifs in the rotunda until I got tired.
It
