Sixteen
Silver balloons and banners guide the way to the art center, in typical Havenwood fashion. It’s hard to decide whether the
decorations are impressive or just overly pretentious. Teachers wait by the entrance in stiff suits, fake-friendly smiles
glued to their faces, no doubt waiting just to greet Mr. Howard when he arrives and then retire for the evening. Professional
photographers weave their way through the students with their heavy equipment, taking pictures of everything except the actual
art on display, most likely so the school can use the photos for future advertisements and promotional newsletters.
And then there is the exhibit itself.
Art on every white wall, every surface, every stand. Oil paintings and sculptures and charcoal sketches.
“Surely you miss it?” Aaron murmurs under his breath as we make our way around the room.
“Miss what?”
“Doing this,” he says, gesturing to a framed painting I recognize instantly as Leela’s. It’s of her mother, brushing her little sister’s hair. The colors are subdued, the background drawn in simple strokes. But golden sunlight streams in from a window just beyond the frame, and I have to marvel at how she’s done it. How she’s found the exact shade and color of the sun itself and captured the precise way it changes fabric and marble and illuminates every strand of glossy black hair. Her mother is focused, not necessarily smiling, but one look and you can tell how gently she’s holding the brush. There is something so peaceful about the piece, a quiet, tender quality I’ve come to observe in Leela herself. Like dawn air, or lake water.
I wish I could do that, but I’ve never known how to paint from a place of happiness. I only paint what I want to change or
what I don’t already have.
“I can still paint,” I say quietly, and hope he can’t hear my voice falter.
“The way you used to?”
“Sure.”
“Have you tried?” he challenges.
“Well, who cares if I can’t? Painting isn’t a useful skill,” I continue forcefully, repeating the same words people have flung
at me a thousand times before. “The only way to be valued as a painter is by being the very best there is, and I simply can’t
be, even if I were to spend the rest of my life trying.”
The girl admiring the painting next to us shoots me an offended look.
“Sorry,” I stutter. “Not talking about you—I’m sure your skills are very useful....”
Aaron scoffs.
I spin back to face him, my face heating. “What?”
“I just find it incredibly fascinating,” he says. “How you can say something you don’t believe in with such conviction. Were
you always such a good liar?”
“I’m not lying,” I insist, stepping past Leela’s painting to a still life of a broken porcelain vase. Instinctively, I find
myself assessing the brushstrokes, noting how the artist has layered the shadows. What appears to be plain black at first
glance is in fact a collection of colors: midnight blue and navy and lavender. “Art can’t give me the kind of validation I
want. It’s too subjective, too unstable, too temporary. Even if someone likes your art, they’ll inevitably move on.”
“I would never move on,” Aaron says softly. “I would never take your paintings down.”
I pause, and almost lose my next thought in the depths of his eyes. Aaron, as my first and final audience. Aaron, as my muse.
It sounds so tempting, but—
“There’s no point,” I say, “if my paintings are not known and loved by everyone.”
“I see,” he says, without judgment, but without agreement. Then he catches sight of someone in the entrance, and his brows
rise, just as a burst of high-pitched laughter travels toward us, cutting through the lukewarm chatter. “Looks like Mr. Howard
is here.”
I’ve only seen Mr. Howard in formal photos and that painting of him they’ve hung outside the assembly hall, which always gives the misleading impression that he’s dead. He’s much shorter in real life than I would have thought, with a jovial face and uneven brows, and unlike the teachers, he hasn’t bothered to dress up for the event at all. He could have dropped by the school on his way back from the local pub.
That doesn’t stop my muscles from tensing when Ms. Lewis leads him inside and waves me and Aaron over.
Because even if Mr. Howard came here dressed in a garbage bag, it wouldn’t change the fact that he’s important. His approval
matters.
“...our best student,” Ms. Lewis is saying excitedly. “Just got accepted into Harvard not too long ago, had to turn down
a bunch of Ivy Leagues—they all wanted her, you see. She’s won a bunch of awards too; I lose count of them all, honestly.”
She points to Aaron next. “And this is another one of our best students. He was chosen for a very selective medical program in Paris—you know the one—and came back recently. The very pride of our school, these two. Both
will go on to do incredible things, we’re all sure of it.”
Mr. Howard barely seems to be listening. “Is that so?”
“It’s lovely to meet you, Mr. Howard,” I say, smiling Jessica’s best smile, the one that could make world peace possible if
she directed it at the right person.
“Nice to meet you too,” he says, then pauses. Looks at Ms. Lewis in question. It’s a quick look, but I catch it, because I’ve
seen it hundreds of times before. “Jessica... Choi, was it?”
A sinking feeling hits my gut.
I don’t know why I’m still smiling, why it’s so important to maintain my facade of politeness. “Jessica Chen,” I say.
“Jessica Chang,” he says confidently. “Right, right. Actually, I believe we’ve met before—aren’t you also the one leading the orchestra? The violinist?”
My smile threatens to collapse. Jessica plays the cello and the piano and the guzheng, but not the violin. He’s thinking of
Cathy Liu. “No,” I tell him. “Sorry, that wasn’t me.” I don’t know why I’m apologizing, either.
“Ah, really?” He frowns, like he’s wondering if perhaps I’ve suffered a brief lapse of memory and forgotten that I am, in
fact, the same violinist he’s talking about. “I could have sworn... We even shook hands.”
“Must’ve been another person,” I manage.
He shrugs. Looks toward something over my shoulder. “Well, keep up the good work, yes? Study hard.”
And that’s it.
He brushes past me to speak to Sarah Williams, and I catch pieces of their conversation. “At your aunt’s old beach house”
and “How is dear Susannah?” and something about a Christmas party and the club on the other side of the city. He looks infinitely
more engaged, laughing outright at whatever Sarah is saying. He remembers her name, and her mother’s name, and even her family
friend’s name.
I feel like I’ve missed the instructions on a test. Like I’ve done something wrong, made a fatal miscalculation. Wasn’t this
supposed to be the moment I was proven right? That I became worthy at last, having received approval from the person in power,
the man at the top of the school? But there’s no vindication here, no sense of satisfaction. Only confusion.
Aaron tugs lightly at the corner of my sleeve. “Let’s keep moving,” he says. “There’s not much left to see here.”
I follow, unsteady, my mind clambering around for clarity that isn’t there.
“What, are you really that surprised?” he asks me, but his tone is gentler than it was before. “You could win the Nobel Prize,
and I’d bet he would still have trouble remembering who you are. All that matters to him is that they can market your results
and encourage more students like you to enroll in the school.”
“I understand that,” I say, frustrated. “I mean, on some level, I obviously understand that it’s a business. But I still...
I don’t know.” Humiliation singes my throat. “I just thought it’d be different.”
He doesn’t say anything.
At first I think he’s given up on trying to reason with me, or perhaps he’s preparing to laugh at me for my naivety, but then
I realize he’s staring at the series of paintings on the wall before us.
“They’re yours,” he says. “Aren’t they?”
They are.
Or they were, once. I had painted a collection of self-portraits, close-ups of my face at different angles. I can remember
every stroke, every shade. There should be a portrait where I’m staring directly at the sun, another where I’m holding up
a hand as if reaching through mist, another where I’m resting my head against my forearm, my eyes dark and weary.
In order to capture my features, I’d spent way too long scrutinizing my appearance in the mirror, until I grew unbearably bored of my own face and hated what I saw—and that had come through in the paintings. I didn’t look remotely happy in any of them, and the colors I’d chosen were just as depressing: the deep blue of an ocean in the storm, the silver of a jagged mirror edge, the maroon of a rusted door.
But now, in all of them, half my face is gone.
Erased.
As if painted over with dark acrylic, hiding my eyes and nose.
It’s a self-portrait of a stranger, someone unrecognizable, someone who might not even exist anymore.
There’s no artist statement underneath it either. No name.
“Excuse me,” I say, turning to the closest art teacher I can find—Ms. Wilde, a woman with glittery butterfly clips in her
graying hair and huge emerald rings on both bony hands. She was always hanging around when I’d go in to work on my pieces
during lunch breaks and after school. “Excuse me, sorry, but I was just wondering about these paintings. Do you know who they’re
by?”
Ms. Wilde shakes her head. “They’ve just been lying around in the art room. We figured we would put them on display. They’re
not bad, huh? There’s something just slightly ominous and unsettling about them.... I can’t quite put my finger on it.
A shame that we don’t know who the artist is.”
I swallow. My voice comes out shrill, shaky. “I hear... I hear it’s by Jenna Chen.”
She stares at me, mystified. Blinks twice. “And... who is that?”
My stomach drops.
“An art student here,” I try.
“Never heard of her,” she says mildly.
“Jenna Chen,” I repeat. “You must have seen her around the art classroom. She knows who you are.”
“You’re mistaken, my dear,” she tells me. “Now, I have to go check on the others....”
“What will you do with them?” I blurt out. “If—if nobody comes to claim the paintings?”
“Throw them away, I suppose,” she says. “It would be a waste, but we certainly can’t keep them stored around forever.”
Ice creeps through my veins. It’s happening even faster than I thought—I’m disappearing. Every trace of me, every memory,
everything I’ve made and left behind. And then something else dawns on me. Another way to check what’s going on, to confirm
my worst fears. I’m trembling when I take out my phone and scroll through my photos and find the one I took of the painting
in my bedroom, and my breathing stops. It’s changed, the same way the other portraits have. Most of my face has been covered,
the smudge far bigger than it was before.
My eyes go back to the paintings on display before me, and I understand what Ms. Wilde meant about them being unsettling. They’re wrong, eerie in their anonymity, almost sinister looking.
This is all wrong.
“I need to go,” I tell Aaron, who’s been following close behind me this whole time, his eyes sharp, his mouth closed. “I—I
need to see something at my aunt’s house. Can you drive again?”
He tilts his head a little, then holds out his hand. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not entirely sure what you’re planning,” Aaron says as he walks me up the stairs back at Jessica’s house, “but I just think we should talk it over.”
I kick the bedroom door open. “Sit down,” I tell him, pointing to the spare chair next to the desk.
“What?”
I take out my earrings and unclasp my necklace and run a rough hand through my hair to loosen it. My high heels are discarded
by the closet. My heart is discarded in the corridor. “I said, sit down. I’m going to paint you.”
He looks bemused. “You’re going to—”
“Yes. Paint you,” I say impatiently, trying to calm my thudding pulse as I fumble around for brush and paint. Jessica barely
has any art supplies, just a half-dried tube of dark blue paint, but it’ll have to do. “I haven’t drawn anyone in ages, and
I need to prove that I still can.”
Somehow I am convinced that this is the answer to everything. That if I can still paint, if I can still hold a brush the same
way, then I will still exist. I won’t have to give anything up.
Greedy, a voice whispers in the back of my head. I thought we’d established that a long time ago, I retort silently. That’s the problem. I’m not sad because I don’t love life enough, but because I love life too much. I always want more of
it.
“How should I pose?” Aaron asks, lowering himself into the chair. He has one long leg stretched out in front of him, his arms
crossed casually over his chest, his chin tipped up to look at me.
“Whatever makes you comfortable,” I say. I sit down as well, one of Jessica’s notebooks flipped open to a blank page and balanced against my knee, the brush in my hand. I’ve done this god knows how many times before. There’s no reason for me to feel so unsteady, so unsure of myself. “Just hold still.”
He obeys.
He goes so still he could be a sculpture, and I let myself study him like a painting. I take note of the orange glow of Jessica’s
bedside lamp, how it softens the line of his lips and turns the ring of his irises warm brown, how it stretches across his
collarbones and deepens the creases of his shirt. I collect with my eyes the bluish hues of the night sky beyond the curtains,
the way a few strands of hair fall free over his forehead, the shadows draped over the rug beneath him.
But when I lower the brush to the paper, all of that is lost.
The difference is almost laughable. The beauty is gone. It’s nothing but a collection of messy, haphazard strokes. I hold
the brush tighter, as tight as I can, the muscles in my fingers aching from it, but it doesn’t work.
“It’s not working,” I whisper out loud, gazing at the sketch in despair. It’s so ugly I have the violent urge to rip it apart.
“I can’t get it right.”
Even though I know exactly what the painting should look like. I can picture it so clearly in my head it’s maddening. Why can’t I just transfer
the image onto paper? It was never this hard.
“Have you tried painting something else?” Aaron asks. “Or someone else? Maybe—”
“No,” I tell him, certain of this, at least. “If I can’t paint you, I can’t paint at all.”
I don’t realize what I’ve said until his expression flickers. What I’ve just confessed to. Because I have all of Aaron’s features memorized; I could conjure up his face with my eyes closed and the curtains drawn and the sun down in the distance. I paint him privately, with just my mind, every time we’re together. I know him better than I know anyone.
He clears his throat but says nothing.
“You’re not rubbing it in?” I ask.
“Now’s not the time for that,” he says.
“Saving it for later then.”
A faint smile. “For later, yes.”
I throw the brush aside and bury my face in my hands, rubbing my palms into my eyes until my vision goes fuzzy. “Aaron?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know what to do,” I admit.
“I know,” he says quietly.
Silence settles between us like sediment. There’s only the faraway sound of cars rolling through the suburbs and this room
I didn’t grow up in, this house that isn’t my own, this boy who can’t be mine.
Suddenly Aaron stands up—to leave, or to comfort me, I can’t tell. But before he can do anything, he knocks the leather journal
off the corner of the desk, the pages falling open with a loud flapping sound. The sound startles us both.
I pick it up first, the blue paint on my fingers smearing the page.
“This is Jessica’s,” I tell him, meaning to close it, but my eyes land on a few lines written in the margins, now half smudged with oil color. I must have missed it before; it’s so short it hardly qualifies as its own entry. But it’s dated to the night Jessica received her Harvard acceptance. The night of the gathering. The night where everything changed.
And this too will change everything. I realize it as I read over the words, my whole body frozen, my blood churning faster
and faster, a building roar in my ears.
“Sometimes I get so tired,” she’d written, her usually neat handwriting almost illegible in her haste.
Everything gets so heavy. I wish somebody else would just come and take over my life. Live it for me. Please. If the universe
is listening; if the stars could grant me any impossible wish, then all I ask for is this:
I don’t want to be Jessica Chen anymore.