Forever in Blue (13 page)

“They’re my mom’s,” Leo said.

It took her a second to realize that he didn’t just mean that his mom owned them.

“You mean like…”

“She made them. She’s a ceramicist. Mostly.”

“You made these?” she said stupidly to Jaclyn, who was setting glasses on the table.

“Yep. Water with dinner? Juice? Wine?”

“Water, please,” Lena said. She couldn’t help looking at Jaclyn with bald admiration. She was beautiful. She was young. She made exquisite yellow dinner plates. Lena suddenly wondered about Leo’s dad. Was there a dad? There were only three plates.

Lena thought of her own mother with her tailored beige clothes and her shiny briefcase.

Lena’s taste buds were her only sense yet undazzled, and a few bites of dinner did the trick. It was a spicy curry with lamb and vegetables over some eventful and delicious kind of rice. “This is so good,” she said to Leo, her awe undisguised. “I can’t believe you made this.”

He laughed and she realized it hadn’t come out all compliment, as she had intended. “I mean, not because you don’t seem like you could cook,” she added lamely. “Because I’m so bad at it.”

Why was she always putting herself down in front of him? What charm, exactly, did that hold?

“You probably haven’t practiced that much,” Leo said.

“That’s true. Everybody else cooks in my family, so I haven’t needed to yet.” She thought of all her ramen noodles with silent shame. “My grandparents owned a restaurant in Greece.”

The conversation rolled on from there. Jaclyn wanted to hear all about her family and how her parents ended up in America. Lena talked for a while, and when she remembered she was shy and lost, Jaclyn rescued her with a funny story about the time she went to Greece with an old boyfriend, lost him in a market near the Acropolis, and never saw him again.

After that Lena discovered that Leo’s dad was a businessman from Ohio who was no longer in the picture and that Jaclyn had brought up Leo mostly on her own.

“She supported us selling her ceramics and her tapestries,” Leo explained with obvious pride.

Lena admired the tapestries and then all the other lovely things lining the walls and shelves. The whole place was filled with things the two of them had made. Drawings, pots, sculptures, paintings. It was almost overwhelming to Lena.

She thought of the empty beige walls of her house and of the hard, minimal surfaces of metal and polished stone. Her parents, hailing from a romantic, disheveled homeland, had grown up in ancient, disheveled houses. Now they wanted only American sleekness.

You grow up, Lena thought, about herself and them. You leave home. You see other ways of living.

Lena looked around, intoxicated by her sense of longing. She wanted this.

It was late and Bee still had two hands and two knees against the floor. She had cleared several more feet and could not leave it. She’d work through dinner. She’d do it by moonlight if she had to. She could do it in the dark. She’d dreamed about it the past three nights. She simply loved the feeling of finding the floor, inch by inch, under her hands. By now she really trusted herself to know where it was.

The difference tonight was that Peter was kneeling two feet away, clearing next to her. He had not yet learned the floor as she had, but she was slightly proud to note that he had put aside his trowel and adopted her technique. She was faster, smoother, and surer every hour she worked.

“You can go,” she said. “Seriously. I’m fine. I’m a crazy nutjob, I know. I can’t help it. But I swear I won’t ruin anything.”

“I know you won’t,” he said almost defensively. “I’m not staying for you.”

She laughed. “Good to know.”

He had the slightly abstracted look she also wore when she had her hands on the floor. “I mean.” He raised his dirty hands. “It’s addictive.”

“Don’t I know.”

“Worse than pistachios.”

“So much.”

He disappeared briefly to find a spotlight and hook it up to the generator. He hopped back down.

“Hey, look,” she said. She held up a large piece of pottery. “Another one.” They had piles of them. They had left off with the proper labeling as it got later and later in the night.

“From the kalyx krater,” he said.

“I think.”

“Dude. We might find the whole thing.” He was excited. He did what he did for good reasons. She could understand wanting to spend your life like this.

“Dude, we might,” she teased him back.

He left again later to find a few pieces of pita bread and a large chocolate bar and a half-empty bottle of red wine. He gallantly shared them with her.

After the eating were long periods of silent work. Occasionally she heard laughter from over the hill, where the nightly party was rolling on.

“Another sherd,” he said. “It’s from a lamp.”

“Arrrrg!” she erupted. “Say shard! Don’t say sherd.” The word potsherd was the single thing about archaeology she really did not like.

He passed her a challenging look. “Sherd.”

“Stop it!”

“Sherd.”

“I hate that.”

“Sherd.”

“Peter! Shut up!”

“Sherd.”

She reached over and shoved him hard. He was not only startled, he was poorly balanced. He fell over into the dirt.

Even though she felt bad, she was laughing too hard to stop. She walked over to him on her knees. She wanted to say sorry, but she couldn’t get it out.

He reached up and shoved her in retaliation. She fell onto her back, laughing so hard she was practically suffocating. They both lay in the dirt, punch-drunk and wine-drunk.

Once he’d gotten his breath and sat up, he reached out his hand. “Truce?” he said, hauling her up.

She was back on her knees. He was still holding her dirty hand in his. He pulled it toward his chest.

“Truce,” she meant to say, but she started laughing again midway through.

“Sherd,” he said.

“How’d it go?” Julia asked when Carmen joined her for a late dinner after her audition. By Julia’s expression, it looked to Carmen as though she had a specific idea in mind about how Carmen should answer.

It was a disaster, Carmen was supposed to say. I made a total fool of myself.

She could tell that that was what Julia wanted to hear, and that if she said it they could both laugh over it and be close again.

Carmen put her tray down and sat. But if Julia was actually her friend, why did she want to hear that? And if Carmen was so good at standing up for herself, why did she feel the need to say it? Why did Julia require that she be a failure, and why did Carmen go along with it?

“I’m not sure,” Carmen said slowly, honestly. “I couldn’t really tell.”

“Did Judy say anything?” Julia looked impatient, unsatisfied.

“She said ‘Thanks, Carmen.’ ”

“That was it?”

“That was it.”

So cool was the air between them, Carmen figured they’d spend the rest of the meal in punishing silence. But a few minutes later two girls from their hall came up. “Hey, Carmen, I heard you had a great audition,” Alexandra said.

Carmen didn’t try to hide her surprise. “Really?”

“That’s what Benjamin Bolter said. He said that your energy was very fresh.”

Carmen wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. “Thanks. I was nervous.”

“Nervous can be good,” the other girl, Rachel, said.

“Anyway, I really hope you get it. How cool would that be?”

Carmen watched them go, suddenly wishing she were eating dinner with Alexandra and Rachel and not with Julia.

When they were leaving the canteen, Carmen realized that a bunch of kids at the front table were watching her. One of the ones she’d met, Jack something or other, waved at her. “All right, Carmen!” he called out.

She felt herself blushing as she went out the door. She wished she were wearing earrings and some makeup. She felt the drumming of excitement in her chest. It was kind of a responsibility, being visible.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: call me call me call me

*

Hey, you girl of urban mystery. Will you call me? I have something cool to tell you and I’m not writing it here. You have to call me. Ha.

And don’t do that thing you do of leaving a message when you know I won’t be there.

By eleven o’clock that night, Lena was relaxed and happy. Her stomach was full. She knew she was in love. If not with Leo, then certainly with his mother.

“So I asked Nora about posing, even though we’re not supposed to hire her,” Leo said as they picked at the last of the raspberries and the shortbread cookies.

“What did she say?” Lena asked, her elbows on the table.

“She said she’d think about it. I’m not too optimistic.”

“The truth,” Lena said, “is I really want to do it, but I probably can’t afford to. Unless I steal my mom’s jewelry. Which I have considered.”

Leo laughed. “It’s only eight bucks an hour if we split it.”

Lena put her hand to her temple. “I know. But I have no money. I’m kind of on my own with school, and it’s…”

“Ludicrously expensive,” Jaclyn filled in. “Did you try for financial aid?”

“I didn’t qualify,” Lena explained. “My parents have the money, but my dad doesn’t really…support the idea of my being an artist.” Lena usually kept this to herself, feeling ashamed of them. But tonight she said it with a note of pride.

“You should apply for a scholarship,” Leo said. “That’s what I did.”

“Did you get full tuition?” she asked.

“Tuition, stipends, everything. It helps being black,” he said. “I qualify for almost every scholarship they’ve got.”

It helps being the best painter in the school, she thought. “I have a partial one,” she explained. “I’m applying for the big one for next year. I’ll find out in August.”

“I’m sure you’ll get it,” Leo said. “But I’ll help you with your portfolio if you want.”

Lena flushed with pleasure. “Thanks,” she said. She wasn’t sure she could let him see all those drawings she used to think were good. “I just need a few finished paintings, you know?”

Jaclyn got up to clear the teacups. “You should do what we used to do when I was in art school.”

“What’s that?” Leo asked, his feet, in faded blue socks, propped on the corner of the table.

“We used to trade poses with each other. We’d do portraits, figures, whatever. It’s free, it’s fair. Most of my drawings and paintings from my art school years are of my friends.”

“I don’t really know that many people in the summer program,” Lena admitted.

Jaclyn gestured to Leo. “You know each other. You two can do it.”

While Leo was getting on board, Lena was realizing what this meant. She stopped being quite as relaxed. “You mean, like, I pose for Leo and he poses for me?” The way they looked at her, she felt both childish and dumb.

Leo was starting to look eager. “We could split it up however we want. Maybe I could pose for you on Saturday and you could pose for me on Sunday. We could work like that for the next bunch of weekends.”

Lena knew she was gaping. She tried to cover a little more of her wide eyes with her eyelids.

“It’s good for an artist to pose, too. I’ve heard that,” Leo was saying, though his voice sounded distant to her. “It’s good to see the process from the other side. It makes you better at working with models.”

Lena felt her head nodding.

“And you know we could each have a finished figure painting by the end of the summer.”

Lena was alone, trapped in her head with her loud, slow-moving thoughts. He was going to pose for her for a figure painting? The dryness of the shortbread was caked and rough in her throat. She was going to pose for him? “Or a portrait,” she choked out nervously.

“You can do a portrait,” he said, not seeming to register what this meant. “If you want.”

Lena simply could not swallow the cookie. It sat there, choking her. She knew that prudishness had no place in the training and career of a figure painter, but still.

She tried once again to swallow. Maybe her father was right after all.

The next morning Carmen unearthed a pair of red flared pants she hadn’t worn since the end of last summer. She’d worn them to Target, where she’d gone shopping for college supplies with Win. She’d also worn a bandana, do-rag style, and he’d kissed her massively in the parking lot.

God, that felt far away.

She put on a sexy black tank top and big silver hoops. She wore a shade of red lipstick that she knew looked good on her. She let her long, unruly hair out of its ordinary clip. She felt like a completely different person as she walked out of the dorm and into the sun. But like a familiar person.

She wanted to make her way slowly to the theater lobby. She wanted to keep the motor running low, to keep her expectations in check. The chances of seeing her name on the cast list were small, she knew. One out of seven under the best of circumstances, and she knew she wasn’t as prepared or as capable as the other six.

Two days ago, she was in Judy’s office trying to get out of it. Now…what?

Now she wanted it. She had stayed up all night working and thinking and studying, and it had culminated in her wanting it.

As she walked into the theater, she felt the mad walloping of her heart in her chest, so strong it seemed to shake her entire body. In some ways it had been easier not wanting it.

But the wanting felt good. Even if she didn’t get it. Wanting was what made you a person, and she was glad to feel like a person again.

The scene in the theater lobby was dreamlike. It seemed that all seventy-five of the apprentices were standing in there. But instead of noise and chaos, Carmen had the strange impression that they were waiting for her.

So strange it was, she thought her imagination must be firing in step with her perceptions, but this was how it seemed to her: It seemed like the crowd parted for her and made a path to the spot on the board where the cast list was posted. And it seemed like they were all urging her forward to look at it. And when she stood in front of it, it seemed that one character and one name were bigger and bolder than all the rest.

Perdita, it read. And next to that it said Carmen Lowell.