Painless (37 page)

“Have you tried looking for work as a sex slave?” Romeo asked.

“Who wants a tainted sex slave?” Madison joked.

I glared at her, “Thanks a lot, Mads.”

She smiled, “Do you really want to work as a sex slave?”

“If the pay is good, I’ll do anything,” I sighed. “But I already checked the sex slave want ads. All the sex slave masters are looking for someone with experience.”

“Slave experience, or sex experience?” Romeo asked innocently.

“I’m assuming both,” I joked. “Most of the ads mentioned ball gag
and
whip experience. I’ve never used either.”

“If you need any pointers,” Romeo said, “let me know.”

“Yeah, Sam,” Kamiko smiled, “if you need practice whipping someone’s ass, I can demonstrate for you on Romeo.”

“Is it just me,” Romeo smirked, “or would Kamiko make a good dominatrix?”

I looked at Kamiko, who had her hands in her lap while leaning over her drink cup, which was sitting on the table, while she sucked on her drink straw. She looked like a little kid. The only thing missing was a twirly crazy straw. I said, “Maybe a cartoon dominatrix.”

“Butter lettuce?” Romeo said to Kamiko suggestively, like he was trying to seduce her. “Locally grown?”

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.
 

Neither was Madison.

“You mean the butter lettuce party?” Kamiko asked. “Those weren’t dominatrices. Those were male stripper unicorns.”

“DominatriCEES?” Romeo enunciated forcefully. “When did you become Ms. Dictionary, Kamiko?” Romeo asked skeptically, as if Kamiko’s word pronunciation was weirder than male stripper unicorns.

I was so lost.

“Yes,” Kamiko said, “dominatrices is the primary spelling for the plural version of the word.”

Madison frowned at me, “What are they talking about?”

I shook my head, “Cartoons? The dictionary? I have no idea. My friends are insane.”

“Butter lettuce party from Bravest Warriors?!” Kamiko suggested with maximum frustration. “Episode three?! Season one?!” She slapped the table top for emphasis. “Don’t you guys watch the internet?!”

“Yeah,” Romeo glared at me and Madison sarcastically, “Duh!”

“Mads,” I said, “I can’t decide who is more cray cray. Them or us.”

“I’m just eating my fish tacos,” she giggled. “I don’t know any of you.”

===

I plugged my debit card into one of the ATMs on campus near the Student Center. I needed to check how much cash I had left in my account because my monthly tuition payment was barreling toward me at the speed of light. I was going to owe more than $5,000 to SDU in a few short weeks.

After I entered my PIN, I pressed Check Your Balance. Instead of a number, the ATM machine laughed at me and told me to get a job. I’m surprised it didn’t shred my card and flash the words YOU’RE BROKE repeatedly.

There were people waiting behind me in line to use the ATM, so I canceled out and took my card.

Where the hell was I going to find five grand? I had combed through the job search websites with a microscope and hadn’t found anything yet. Maybe I needed to go back to Grab-n-Dash and beg for my job? A scent memory of hot dogs and urine colored polyester wrinkled my nose.

Maybe not.

Short of selling a kidney or other parts of my body to the highest bidder, the only other thing that occurred to me was checking online for scholarships.

I walked to the Main Library and set up my laptop near a window on the seventh floor. I sighed as I logged onto the library’s wi-fi network and searched through scholarship websites. It didn’t take long to realize that most of the application deadlines had already passed. Not that it mattered. Most of them didn’t pay any money until the fall.
 

I sat back in my chair and sighed. I glanced out at the amazing view of San Diego. I’d always loved the Main Library’s wrap around windows. From the seventh floor where I sat, you could see for miles.

Usually, the view lifted my spirits. Too bad nothing short of a construction crane could lift my spirits today.

I sighed and went back to my job hunt. Trying to remain optimistic, I narrowed my internet search by application deadline. There weren’t many scholarships left on the list.

I found one for bagpipe majors. It paid seven thousand bucks! Bagpipes couldn’t be too hard to play, could they? I would totally double major in bagpipes if it meant seven grand. The only problem was I couldn’t even afford a set of bagpipes. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be surprised if Christos or Spiridon kicked me out of the house for taking up the fartbags. But I would play them every damn day if it meant $7,000. Crap. Who was I kidding? I don’t think I could deal with all that quacking.

Next.

There was one scholarship for people studying the Klingon language. I’d watched Star Trek. Didn’t Klingons just grunt? I could grunt.
 

There was also one for the American Nudist Research Library. No, seriously. I read it on the internet. What did nudist researchers research, anyway? Increased incidences of skin cancer among the nude? Early onset droopage, for both men and women? Because you know drooping was the biggest problem faced by nudists. I seriously would’ve applied if it wasn’t for the fact you had to live in a nudist colony to qualify. I didn’t even know where to find a nudist colony, unless you counted art models. Hey! Maybe with all the girls coming to Christos’ studio every day, the Manos house qualified! I was totally submitting an application.

I searched the scholarships for another two hours and applied to a dozen more. With any luck, I might actually get picked for one, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

I had to assume that I was no closer to covering the $5,000 I owed SDU than when I started.

Droopyballs!

Ew.

===

My spring classes consisted of: Sociology 3, History 3 (which focused on 20th Century America), Plein Air Painting (which Kamiko told me to take because she was), and Drawing the Costumed Figure (which Romeo and Kamiko both were taking).

I’d managed to gets B’s in Sosh and History during Winter Quarter, much to my surprise. I think all the cramming I did for mid terms and finals made up for my tendency to doodle in my sketchbook during class. With my current financial problems, I vowed to pay total attention and take notes during Sosh and History this term. No more doodling. The last thing I needed was a bad GPA making my financial aid situation worse than it already was.

I met Kamiko outside the Visual Arts building for our first Plein Air Painting class. It only met once a week, on Wednesday afternoon. How awesome was that? We both held portable easels that collapsed into the size of a suitcase. I’d borrowed mine from Christos. He had several in the studio. I couldn’t afford to buy one, and it was a requirement for the class, so I was in luck.

“Why do we have these easels?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” Kamiko grinned as we walked into the Visual Arts building.

“You know,” I wrinkled my nose, “Plein Air sounds kind of boring.” I was pronouncing it like ‘plain’ because I had no idea how to say it. “Are we going to paint plain things? Like vanilla ice cream and white rice? Because I don’t see how we could paint plain air. Unless we paint the sky? And because it has to be plain, we only paint cloudless skies? Isn’t that just squeezing blue paint on a canvas?”

Kamiko smiled at me indulgently as she held the door open to the classroom. “No, silly.”

Unlike my previous art classes, which had taken place in rooms that were obviously artist’s paradises, the Plein Air room was small and bland. The walls were blank. There was a teacher’s desk at the front of the room, one of those ancient metal ones that looked like a gray battleship that had seen several wars. And of course, a bunch of student desk chair combos with mustard yellow plastic seats crammed together. I had been right about the plain thing. This looked like any random high school classroom in America. Wasn’t this supposed to be a University?

“Why do I feel like we’re going to spend the next three hours in detention?” I asked Kamiko.

She arched her eyebrows, but said nothing.

A few students stood against the walls with their portable easels. There wasn’t much room to set them up. Maybe that’s why we had the portable easels, so we could squeeze them into the scant remaining available space?

A few minutes later, a middle aged woman walked into the room. She had curly hair and a big smile. She wore a wide brimmed hat and a khaki hunter’s vest with a bunch of pockets over a long sleeve shirt and jeans. Hiking boots completed her outfit. Were we going on a safari?
 

“Hello, everybody,” she said. “My name is Katherine Weatherspoon, and I’ll be your Plein Air instructor for spring term. If you haven’t figured it out by now, we’re going to be painting outdoors for the next ten weeks.
En plein air,”
she said it with an accent that sounded like she was saying ‘on plain air’, “is a French expression that means ‘in the open air’. Everyone, gather up your easels. We’re heading out.”

The students picked up their easels and followed Katherine Weatherspoon out the door.

I leaned over to Kamiko and whispered, “I was right, we’re going to be painting the blue sky all quarter.”

“It’s worse than that,” Kamiko whispered, “we’re actually going to be painting air, like oxygen. So it’s just clear. Did you remember to bring a tube of transparent acrylic glaze? Because that’s the only color you’re going to need.”

“What, like see through? We’re just going to put clear paint on canvases?”

Kamiko shrugged her shoulders.

This was going to be really boring. I guess not every aspect of painting was a winner. “Where are we going?” I asked Kamiko as we filed in behind the last of the students.

“I have no idea,” she said.

We walked across campus, through Adams College, and out to North Torrey Pines boulevard. We crossed at the light when it was green.

“Are we going to the cliffs?” I asked.

“I guess,” Kamiko said.

Sure enough, we ended up out at the cliffs west of the SDU campus. They overlooked the beach and the Pacific Ocean. There was lots of plain air for the painting. Yay.

“Here will be good,” Professor Weatherspoon said, setting her portable easel down. “Everyone, find a place to set your easels up, then I’ll begin a demonstration.”

Kamiko and I found a spot together. It didn’t really matter where I set up because there was oxygen in every direction.

A few minutes later, the professor had us all gather around her easel. She had a very small canvas mounted on it, about four by six inches. With her portable palette already covered with little dollops of oil, she began painting. She used a little metal spatula, which she kept referring to as a palette knife, to mix colors on her palette and smear them onto the canvas. It didn’t take long for her to cover the canvas with colors. I realized half way through that she was painting the curve of the Torrey Pines cliffs to the south, the beach, the ocean, and the sky. Her painting was really amazing, resembling a sloppy photograph made of cake frosting. If I squinted my eyes, it looked like the real thing.

When the professor was finished, she turned to the students and smiled, “Now go ahead and start your paintings. I’ll be walking around helping everyone out.”
 

Kamiko and I walked over to our easels. Now that I realized we weren’t going to be painting invisible oxygen all term, I adjusted my easel so I was facing the south cliffs, like the professor had.

I didn’t have a palette knife, so I just used brushes. I wasn’t used to working on such a complicated subject likes cliffs and waves. There were ten million different things to paint in my field of vision. I was getting a little flustered. I set my brush down and rubbed my forehead with the back of my wrist.

“Having troubles?” Professor Weatherspoon asked.

I was so used to Marjorie Bitchinger’s bitchiness and sarcasm last quarter, I was afraid to say anything for fear of incurring Professor Weatherspoon’s wrath.

“It’s okay,” she said in a kind voice, “there’s a lot to figure out all at once,” she smiled. “What you want to do is focus on the big shapes first. Work from big to small and add detail last. May I?” she asked, reaching for my brush.

“Yeah, totally,” I smiled.

She picked up my brush, dabbed it in some raw umber on my palette, and blocked in a few lines for the cliffs. “Since you’re using a brush, paint thin. You don’t want too much paint making a mess all over your canvas.” She rinsed the brush in my little jar of Turpenoid, then went in with a thin mix of white and ultramarine blue. “Put in the horizon line, like this,” she painted a faint blue horizontal line, “so you know where it is.” She cleaned the brush again, dipped it in some yellow ochre, and scribbled in the line of the beach where it met the water. My painting now looked like colored outlines of the view. “Now all you have to do is fill everything in,” she smiled and handed me my brush before walking away to help other students.

My good mood was back. I turned to Kamiko, “Is this even a real class? It seems like way too much fun.”

“I know, right?” she grinned while she mixed a pile of phthalo green with cerulean blue on her palette.

“Maybe we can both drop out of school and be Plein Air painters for the rest of our lives.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” she grinned as she applied her blue green paint to her canvas where the greenish waves met the golden sand of the beach. “We can hitchhike across America and paint whatever we see.”

“Then we can publish a book of our paintings,” I suggested.

“Totally,” Kamiko grinned.

Plein Air Painting was awesome. When class was over three hours later, we packed everything up and walked back to SDU.

I had totally forgotten about my financial woes the entire time. And for that, I was grateful.

But they hadn’t forgotten about me.

===

Five people stood in front of me in line for the teller at the bank in Del Mar when I walked in the next morning.

From what I understood, if you handed a note to the bank teller that you had a gun and wanted money, they gave it to you. They didn’t ask if you had a gun. They just assumed you did, and paid you, which meant I was in luck because I had no gun. I’d considered stopping at a 99 Cents Only store to buy a toy gun, but I didn’t have 99 cents to spare, so I decided to wing it.