Kiss Kill Vanish (6 page)

But then he jogs back with an actual scythe—metal pole and gleaming blade curled like a smile—and rests it on my shoulder. It's heavy and cold. I loathe him all over again. He repositions it on the same shoulder, then moves it to the other one, then the first again, frowning as he adjusts the neckline of my dress, pushing the cape behind my shoulders, taking my fingers and bending them around the freezing pole. His confidence should remind me of Emilio, the way his hands rearrange me like I'm his to rearrange, but Emilio's touch never made me cringe.

Eventually he goes back to his easel and sits. I stare at nothing while he paints. Gray sky. I don't want to think about stained glass anymore.

“What did you and Marcel talk about the other day?” he asks after a few minutes of silence.

It takes me a moment to remember. At first I just see Marcel's black fingernails and greasy blond hair, feel my skin prickle under his leering eyes. But then I do remember. We talked about Lucien. We talked about what happens when Lucien's models become more than just models. We talked about what I would and wouldn't do for money. “I don't remember.”

Lucien snorts. “Well, he does.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means he wanted to know what instrument you were playing when I saw you outside the Metro. And about a dozen other things.”

“Like what?”

He squints at me, and I wonder if I asked too quickly—if that's jealousy in his eye. “He thinks you're younger than you say you are. He thinks you're a runaway.”

A crow caws from above. It's flown back, inched closer and closer without my noticing, close enough to see the blue shimmer on its oily wing. It jerks as it walks along the branch of the naked tree. “Why does he even care? Why am I any of his business?”

“You're not,” Lucien says. “He was high, and when he's high he thinks he's God. My parents will be back from New York next week, his bender will end, and if I have anything to say about it, he'll be moving back in with them. He only stays with me when they're out of town.”

“I'm guessing he won't be too heartbroken. No offense, but he doesn't seem to like you all that much.”

Lucien snorts. “He likes living with my parents even less. My father is a domineering, self-righteous jerk, and Marcel is Marcel. They make each other miserable. Oh, and my mother can't stomach conflict, so she'll be miserable right alongside them.”

Fascinating. Our fathers are filthy rich opposites. His is a vile mogul and mine is a genial murderer. I wonder whose is easier to love.

“Stop biting your lip,” Lucien orders.

I stop biting my lip.

I don't know if I love my father anymore. That would have seemed impossible before last summer. Everybody loves my father. He's huge and warm and expressive, and he talks with his hands like his voice isn't already booming loudly enough to make his point. He's the king of grand gestures, and who doesn't love a surprise trip to Grand Cayman or a Tiffany's box on their pillow? It's not that I never noticed he made people nervous. I noticed. I thought it was because he's important.

But love him now? I don't know. I do know I hate him, and it doesn't seem like the two should be able to coexist.

I miss him. And Ana and Lola too, so much that I'm hollow. I feel like I left myself in Miami, dragged my shell up here to grieve. It's more chilling than wind or snow—the emptiness of being a costume.

“My parents are going to freak when they find out Marcel hasn't been going to school,” Lucien says. “I'll be surprised if he graduates this year, although I'm sure my dad will be willing to make a sizeable donation to grease that wheel.”

School. I don't miss that. I should be a senior, but all of that seems so blurry and inconsequential now. Prom dates and pop quizzes and locker gossip.

“They should be used to it by now,” he goes on, “but they always look at him like they can't figure out how things got so bad, how the golden boy got so unlucky. If they spent less time in Manhattan and London, and more time here, it wouldn't be such a huge surprise.” He grinds his brush into the glob of gray paint on his palette. “Of course my father never has a hard time noticing
my
faults. His disapproval can span the globe to find me.”

“Maybe he'll be preoccupied with Marcel now.”

“So I should be thrilled Marcel's such a loser?”

I shrug. Lola's chronic spending and Ana's horrific grades had certainly made me free. I could skip school whenever Drea felt like dragging me to the beach, and I never even had a curfew to break. Papi never batted an eye, because I wasn't the one charging thousands on my card in a single afternoon of purse shopping, or repeating algebra and US history. Of course, favorite-child status wouldn't have been hard to procure anyway. My sisters care less about the Klimt in the living room than the latest edition of
People
, which makes them idiots in Papi's eyes.

Of course, Lucien doesn't know I have sisters. From the beginning I told him I'm an only child from Los Angeles, and thankfully he's too self-absorbed to ask questions.

“Marcel did have one good suggestion,” Lucien says.

“What's that?”

“He said I should paint you playing the mandolin.”

Too much. The intrusion is worse than his hands positioning my clothes and his endless orders and his demeaning compliments. The fact that I play the mandolin is the only real thing he knows about me, and I wish he didn't. It should be just mine and Emilio's. “I lent it to a friend.”

Lucien stops painting and gives me a long, cold look. When he continues, it's without the chatter. My scattered thoughts are my own to rearrange. They go to Soupe au Chocolat, where everything is warm and I can suck on squares of chocolate and play the mandolin with nobody looking at me.

“Your expression isn't working.” Lucien's voice cuts my thoughts. “Lose the tragic look.”

“You want me grinning like a maniac?”

“No. But death isn't supposed to look forlorn.”

I set my jaw and stare evenly across the horizon of tombstones. He's right. When I saw death it had three faces, and none of them was forlorn. I rotate through them, again and again until they blend and spin in a horrific kaleidoscope.

On the man from the dock, death was fear—fear so huge and hopeless the panic was infectious, seeping out of him and into me like a disease through that skinny little crack in the closet door.

And on Papi, death was cruel, but he wasn't the one dying. The cruelty was death's inverse, the other man's mirror. He looked so harsh. I should have closed my eyes so it didn't burn itself into my brain, but I didn't, and it did.

On Emilio, death was hidden—at first because he was facing the other way, but then, when he turned, he was composed. A perfect mask with dead eyes. His nothingness was worse than the other two faces combined.

I roll the scythe back and forth between my numb palms and try to replace the last memory with one from the yacht, one of Emilio's warm hands and soft lips telling me I'm more beautiful than music. I can't.

I do hate my father.

“For the love of all that is holy, will you please stop thinking about drowning puppies?”

I growl loudly enough for Lucien to hear. “But I'm the grim reaper! Isn't that what I do? Kill things?”

“The grim reaper
enjoys
killing things.”

“Who says?”

“Me.”

So God says Death enjoys his job.

And like a bolt of electricity, the question strikes and a shiver rolls down my spine: During those horrible seconds when I couldn't see Emilio's face—was he enjoying his job?

“Think
victorious scowl
,” Lucien suggests.

“Victorious scowl,” I mumble. As if there is such a thing.

I can't do this. I break the pose, turning my whole body to stare at Lucien. A pout is pulling his lips out and his eyebrows down. It's the face of a child who's always indulged, confused as to why he's not currently being indulged. I take a step backward.

“Are you going somewhere?”

Yes. To Spain to start over, where I can be Valentina again—wiser than the old one, but not just a shell. A person again.

If only freedom weren't so expensive.

I shake my head and turn my body back into the position he placed me in. I give him my best victorious scowl. He shuts up and paints.

Three hours and two thermoses of coffee later, we're both shivering and blue-lipped. Even with car breaks, my body is aching from the cold and my ears are stinging with exquisite pain. Lucien packs his easel and supplies into the back while I climb into the front. I have to pee, but I'd rather hold it than go into the cathedral and delay the hot shower I've been fantasizing about for the last three hours.

“You were brilliant,” Lucien says as he joins me, flipping on the seat warmers and blasting the heat.

I close my eyes, bring my knees to my chest, and try to heal myself with warm thoughts: white-hot sand, roasting bare skin, burning rays. Lucien is full of it, as usual. I wasn't brilliant. I was a scowling shadow of myself. All I did was stand there.

We peel out of the parking lot, tires squealing. Lucien is a terrible driver, all screech and lurch, like a boy who's stolen his father's Porsche.

Emilio was an excellent driver.

“This painting is going to be exactly what the collection needs,” he says. “The exhibition is going to be a shock to those hacks from art school. My teachers and my parents—they're all finally going to see what I've been trying to do. And Hugo is going to feel like a complete idiot.”

“Who's Hugo?”

He cracks his knuckles, and I fight the urge to grab the wheel. “A guy I knew in art school. He's showing his collection this weekend, actually.”

A rival. I'm not sure why this strikes me as funny—maybe the cold is affecting my brain—but I have to clamp my jaw shut to keep from laughing. Lucien has a nemesis, a real artist, one who didn't get his panties in a twist and quit art school, one who maybe isn't filthy rich but honestly struggling. Maybe this Hugo's bedhead is authentic and his glasses house prescription lenses.

“Are you going to see it?” I ask.

“I don't know.”

Unexpectedly, I feel that twinge of pity in my stomach again. If he weren't so transparently needy, this wouldn't be happening.

“Come with me,” he says.

“What?”

“Come to Hugo's art show with me.”

“This weekend?”

“Yes.”

A string of questions I can't ask rush up my throat. Go with him as what? His model? His friend? His date? Since that first day outside the Metro, I haven't spent a single unpaid second with Lucien. But I can't get paid for walking around a gallery and drinking champagne with his arm around my waist. I'm not an escort.

Anger builds as my skin starts to sting from the car's heat. I turn my vents away from me. I can't believe he's putting me in this place—having to choose between being his paid date and his something else, something voluntary.

Lucien's a freak.
His muses are only good as long as they keep their halos intact.

I close my eyes and force Marcel out of my brain. If I refuse to go with Lucien, then what? He's humiliated and he fires me.

“Jane?”

“When is it?”

“Saturday night at Les Fontaines. Black tie.” He sounds confident, sure I'll say yes, sure that I've already said yes, which makes me think maybe I have. “It'll be fun.”

I doubt it. It's not like I have a choice, though. It seems like a long time since anything I did with Lucien was voluntary. “What's Les Fontaines?”

“A gallery.”

“Where is it?”

“It's one of those historical mansions up on the mountain. It used to be the home of a wealthy British diplomat around the turn of the twentieth century.”

An art show. An actual gallery. I might even see something beautiful, which makes the line being crossed a little less terrible.

“Jane?”

“I'll go.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

H
ugo LaFleur's website is easy to find. The library computer groans, burdened with the searches of the un-interneted poor, but it gets me there while I try not to think about why the mouse is so sticky.

I click on the bio link, and Lucien's rival stares at me from a black-and-white candid. Dark, wavy hair that reaches his shoulders and a scraggly goatee make him look suspiciously like a pirate. I can't read his expression. It's ennui. Or confusion. Or indigestion.

I skim the short blurb for vitals: twenty-two years old, originally from Lyons, France, the recipient of some awards and a scholarship to McGill's art program. I move on to his work, navigating slowly from piece to piece. Jars with eyeballs painted onto the sides. Jars with lips painted onto the sides. Jars with ears painted onto the sides. Jars with nipples painted onto the sides. Jars with toes painted onto the sides.

I don't dislike modern art, but Hugo's jars seem contrived. He's trying too hard, saying too little. My father would smile—a sure sign he's untouched by whatever piece he's looking at—and move on. I have to assume that the ugliness of the jars is part of whatever point Hugo is trying to make, but that doesn't mean I want to look at them.

Or maybe Lucien's competitiveness has infected me, and I want to think Hugo LaFleur's work is pedestrian out of loyalty. I really hope not.

The thought of feeling loyalty toward Lucien is mildly painful, so I make myself defend Hugo's jars with everything I've got. Maybe they're more powerful in real life. Art isn't meant to be viewed on a computer screen—there's something wrong about dissecting someone's passion with a few clicks of a sticky mouse, isn't there?—and this particular screen looks like it could be older than me.