Legal Bindings

16. Evan

Evan had never played sports,but he understood what it meant to be in the zone. He could feel the weight of the brush in his palm, the surety of his strokes, and the realization that brilliance lay between the paint and the canvas. Nick’s sketch had inspired that in him, and while he wasn’t sure what that meant for his relationship with his roommate, he knew for a fact it had driven him to create something great.

Of course, he would eventually have to take a step back and look at the work critically. It was the looking that killed him when it came to any sort of artistic pursuit. He imagined novelists and composers felt the same way—beauty pouring forth from a pen or an instrument until one regarded the whole and saw all the mistakes.

But no painting was ever done—if Matisse’s reanimated corpse somehow zombied back to life, it would have a stronger desire to touch up Le bonheur de vivre than to eat brains—so when the ancient doorbell hacked out a whine, letting Evan know someone was at the house, he didn’t mind the interruption too much. After taking the stairs two at a time, he was pleased to find Sydney on the stoop with a purple denim backpack slung over one shoulder.

“Hi,” he said like he’d been expecting her because a part of him had. It had been over a week since Nick delivered the bus pass, after all, and they’d both wondered when she would come around. They’d discussed it a couple of times, in fact—they’d had an uneasy truce ever since Nick had posed for him.

“Hey, Evan.” Sydney brandished her bus pass like an FBI agent might hold up an ID. “Nick gave me this. He said I could come over and paint. So, uh, can I?”

“Who do you think told him it was cool if you did?” Evan teased then led her in and up the stairs. “Do you want to work on the same one as before?”

“Yeah.” She dropped her bag to the floor and made a beeline for Evan’s current canvas. “This one’s new. Is that supposed to be Nick?”

“Sort of.” Evan moved behind her, studying the figure half hidden behind a newspaper. “He’s the model, anyway.”

“That’s cool. It looks good.”

“Thanks, kiddo,” he said before helping her get set up with her canvas on the second easel he’d purchased just for her.

Once she was settled, he went back to work. Sort of. Mostly, he stared at the half-finished painting, frustrated, having lost his mojo when the doorbell rang.

“Did you know I have to do community service?” Sydney asked after a few minutes of silence, breaking Evan from his angst.

“I heard something about that, yeah. When do you start?”

“I dunno. They have to, like, present the plea to the judge or something.” She stuck the end of her brush in her mouth. “Have you ever done it?”

“I’ve volunteered, but I’ve never been forced to do it.”

Sydney daubed some neon blue onto her palette then mixed it with white to create a color incongruous with everything else she’d used so far. “It’s so dumb.”

“Why’s it dumb?”

She looked up, surprised, as if nobody had bothered to ask her before. Maybe they hadn’t. He remembered that about being a teenager—nobody took you seriously. “It just is, I guess.”

“You’ll be helping people. That’s nice, right?”

“Maybe.” She held the brush to the canvas, nearly touching it, then reconsidered. “I just wish I knew what I was going to be doing. They said it might be, like, tutoring special-needs kids or something, which would be okay. But my grades are pretty bad, so I don’t know if they’d think I could do that.”

“What’s up with that? Your grades, I mean. You seem smart enough to me.”

“Because I’ve gone to a billion different schools,” she said, scowling at the canvas. “Obviously.”

Obviously. Evan could feel the earth twitching beneath his feet, a fault line ready to cause some damage if he didn’t tread carefully. “That sucks. What do you think you want to do after school’s over?”

She shrugged, settling on a proper place for the blue. “Get a job, I guess.”

“No college?”

“I’m not going to college. I can barely get my homework done, and they get mad that I fall asleep in class.”

Evan frowned. Sydney didn’t have the luxury of a bedroom door she could close or a quiet place to study, and she was surrounded by authority figures who probably assumed the worst of her because of her background. Still, there was always hope.

“I went to school with a girl whose dad got sick, so her grades really suffered. She turned it around junior and senior year, though, and she got a music scholarship to Berklee,” he said.

Sydney’s hand stilled. “No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“Do some schools, like, have art scholarships too?”

Evan hid his smile, focusing on his canvas instead. “Yup. You’re looking at the proud recipient of one.”

“Hmph.” She frowned, turning back to the canvas. “I wanna work on this a minute, okay?”

Evan nodded, going back to his own piece. They painted in silence for nearly half an hour—well, Sydney painted while Evan fussed—at which point his phone rang. He was surprised to see Kelly’s name on the screen, as he hadn’t spoken to her since the gallery opening.

“Evan?” Her voice came through tinny and thin, like she was in a crowd, so he covered one ear to hear her properly.

“Hi, yeah. I’m here. What’s—”

“Why is Reed Barton calling me, asking about you?”

Why is—oh, Reed Barton. The dealer Amara mentioned. Evan hadn’t heard a thing from him, so he’d assumed the guy hadn’t been interested. “He’s a friend of a friend. I don’t know him. But wait, he called you?”

“Yes, this morning. He said that he was researching you and saw that you’d had a show here back when you first moved to Seattle. Anyway, he told me that you’re apparently working on some big new series, and he wanted to get my impression about whether you were serious. So, of course I feel like an idiot, because I don’t know anything, so I told him I’d get back to him and I went on your Insta and saw what you’re doing, and now I’m calling you. Why didn’t you tell me you were working again?”

Kelly wasn’t in the business of being kind, which meant she must have liked what he’d posted to Instagram. “It’s not much yet—still a lot in progress.”

“It’s something. How many pieces do you have?”

“Ah…” He glanced around the room. “Eight and another couple I’m working on and my sketches.”

Kelly fell silent, and if not for the crowd noise in the background, Evan might have thought he’d lost her. “Let’s say I had an opening for a week starting October 28. Would you be interested?”

It was already mid-September. “That’s really soon, Kell.”

“Clearly, but I’m going to have an empty gallery because the woman I had booked suffered a family emergency, and I’m pushing her show to next year. Meaning that I have a gap to fill, and you have eight pieces. Maybe even ten or twelve, if you use the next month to your advantage. Plus, if we have to, we can supplement with your older stuff, the ones you showed before. Make it about your progression as an artist.”

For a moment, Evan wanted to ask why his progression hadn’t been interesting to her last year or the year before, when he’d approached her about a show. But he knew the answer: his work during that period had been worth no more than the coffeeshop walls it adorned, selling in the three figures if it sold at all. The new stuff was different—there was something behind it—and he’d be a fool to let pride stand in the way of an opportunity.

“I’ll do it. We’ll figure it out. Thank you, Kell.”

“You’re welcome.” She paused. “You know, if Reed Barton is sniffing around, that could be very good for you, Evan.”

The conspiratorial way she said it made his stomach twist in pleasant knots. “I don’t understand why he didn’t call me directly. I haven’t even done anything outside of social with this stuff.”

“Half this business is shilling bullshit around someone with a little bit of buzz, and he’s decided you’re buzzworthy, thanks to Amara Apte.”

“Amara… how do you know Amara?”

“I didn’t until I spoke to Reed and went on your Instagram. You know her personally? I thought maybe she was just a fan.”

“She’s the friend of a friend who told him about me, yeah. Or, well, sort of friend. We’ve hung out.”

“Make her a friend—she’s a good one to have. Don’t you ever look at your notifications? She shared some of your pieces on her stories. And she tagged Reed in them.”

“Yeah, so?” Evan was growing more confused by the minute. Yes, he’d turned off his notifications a while back because he hated the clout-seeking aspect of social media, but Kelly was speaking a different language.

“Amara Apte’s got clout, my friend. She’s been on a half dozen Forty Under Forty lists in the past two years.”

Evan frowned. Surely, that wasn’t correct. Amara had been nice and down to earth and friendly, not some high-powered trendsetter.

Telling Kelly to hang on, he opened Instagram and was shocked to find his notifications overflowing with new follows and mentions. “Holy shit. Everything blew up.”

“Yes, it did. And if I were you, I’d be a little bit less of a reclusive artist and start dropping more frequent tidbits.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Anyway, I can’t talk long, but why don’t you text me, arrange a time for me to come by and see what you’ve got. Because you need to strike while the iron is hot, and right now, it’s scalding.”

They said their goodbyes before he turned around and found Sydney—whom he’d nearly forgotten—staring at him with one eyebrow raised. “What was that all about?”

“That was a friend of mine who runs a gallery downtown. She just offered me a show.”

“Because of your Instagram?”

Perceptive kid.“Yeah. Ah, hey, you want to help me respond to some comments?”

Sydney took pity on him, hovering at his side while he made his way through his feed, responding to some people and tagging Amara and Reed in the appropriate replies. She even showed him how to repost a story, though she cautioned him that stories had a time limit.

“You should post something new too,” she said once they were finished, gesturing at the Nick piece.

“That one’s not ready yet. What about yours?”

“Uhh…” A faint blush stained her pale cheeks. “It’s not finished either, but okay.”

Evan took an abstract-angled snap of one corner of her canvas. “How should I caption it?”

She grinned. “Say that it’s new work from your brilliant and talented creative protégé, Sydney… St. Pierre. And you have to tag me.”

“Sydney St. Pierre,” he said, trying not to smile. “Where’d you come up with that?”

“I don’t know. I like it—it sounds European.”

Evan, who recognized the signs of faux sophistication common to most teenagers, said nothing more. Instead, he followed her account, posted the photo, and tagged her before turning his phone off. Popularity was all well and good, but he wasn’t about to get sucked into the vortex of other people’s opinions.

“You should get a TikTok,” Sydney said as he pocketed his phone.

“A what?” he replied just to see the look of disgust on her face. “Jokes! I know what a TikTok is.”

“Then get one.”

“And do what? Stupid dances?” His only exposure to TikTok was in videos on the morning shows he wouldn’t admit to watching, with Kelly Ripa cheerfully extolling him to check out the latest trend.

“No. Oh my God. You need, like… a brand ambassador.”

“Great, you’re hired.”

She lit up then ducked her head, banishing her joy beneath a veil of sarcasm. “Yeah, okay.”

“I’m serious. Five bucks a post. We can do a few every time you’re here.”

“Seriously?” she asked. He nodded, and she grinned, holding out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

Twenty minutes later, he had a TikTok, a Facebook business page—“for old people,” according to Syd—and a Pinterest, which she declared “stupid but necessary.”

“I’m gonna see if there’s a social network just for artists,” she said once everything was set up, passing him back his phone. “Maybe a Discord or something.”

Evan wasn’t going to ask what that was, but he was happy that she seemed happy. “Excellent. Want to get back to the real world and order pizza?”

Another one of those brief, sweet Sydney smiles emerged. “Definitely.”

“I’ll call it in, and you can do homework downstairs, where it’s quiet, and we’ll eat when Nick gets home from work.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “I didn’t know he got a new job.”

Evan swirled his brush around the jar he used to clean them, frowning. “He… doesn’t? Why would he have a new job?”

Perplexed, Sydney looked him up and down. “Because he didn’t have one before?”

“Yes, he did. I mean, he does.”

“No, he doesn’t. He told me he was between jobs, and that’s why he took my case.”

That didn’t make any sense. Nick left the house every morning in a suit and tie—he’d done that even before he’d met Sydney. Why would he lie about something like that? It wasn’t even a big deal, and it wasn’t like Nick owed him an explanation. They were roommates, and as long as Nick kept paying the mortgage, Evan didn’t really care whether or not he was gainfully employed. But then, Nick was a guy who cared a lot about appearances.

Sydney shrugged and pulled out her phone. “I dunno, maybe I’m wrong, but that’s what he told me. I’m going to call the house and check in with the monitor on duty so they know I’ll be late. And… oh shit. The bus schedule changes after six, and I have to be home by seven.”

“I can drive you back,” he said, Nick’s employment situation still buzzing in the back of his mind.

Sydney agreed then made her call before they went downstairs. She started on some algebra homework, and Evan ordered pizza, which arrived at the same time as Nick, who pulled into the drive while he was paying the delivery guy. Evan waved a greeting, feeling a bit like Donna Reed, sans petticoat and pearls, taking care of dinner for hubby while the kid did her homework.

It was the picture of domestic bliss, save for the fact that Sydney had two daddies, one of whom might or might not be lying about his job while the other had once had sex for money. Plus, Evan was pretty sure Donna Reed had never ordered pizza.