Chapter 35
I look down at my phone for the hundredth time in an hour.
It’s silent. Just like the noise in my dorm. But all I can see is the world’s most pathetic timeline of me trying to convince a boy who is clearly ignoring me to text me back.
It’s not until the following day, when Linden comes home, that I finally know what’s going on. I know something’s wrong as soon as she speaks.
“Max says you keep texting and calling him?”
“He won’t call me back.”
“But—” Now she looks confused. “Since when do you and Max text?”
I laugh, but something acidic is creeping up my throat. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re doing that project together, but you’ve both made it very clear you’re not friends. And on the way home from Florida, you rode in the car with him, after making such a big deal about it on the way down. You’re acting weird.”
“I—” But I don’t finish my sentence, because I know what happened. And it makes my heart break and rend and fall apart.
Time has shifted. Again.
I call my mother, just to make sure, and I steel myself for the loss of the mom I had grown comfortable with. She doesn’t answer, and that’s all the proof I need that she’s gone.
I’ve been replaying the car ride in my mind. Examining everything for cracks and fissures. Everything I said. Everything I didn’t. But I can’t seem to find the places where Max and I broke. The place I went too far and caused time to correct itself.
I’d thought everything was going to be okay.
But time was patient. It waited for me to feel comfortable before it struck.
I look at my phone, the sad list of texts evidence of how desperate I’ve become, and decide I’ve had enough. “I was messaging him about the project. The one I didn’t even want to do in the first place.” I grab my book bag and head out the door.
The studio isn’t far, and it only takes me a moment to find him in the back. The light filters in through the room from the high windows, catching on the paint on Max’s hand. The same painting he was doing before. His face is so determined, almost angry.
And it’s hard not to notice how he ignores me.
But he can’t avoid me.
I pull out the drawing of me since we’re supposed to trade. I’m not done—I could probably work on this forever, but this is the perfect excuse to make Max talk to me.
I close the flap over the drawing and start walking toward him. He has on noise-canceling headphones, and his fingers are covered in black paint this time.
Eventually, Max notices me, looking a little surprised. He pulls his headphones off, not caring if he gets paint on them, and stands in front of his work.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” Max is trying to pretend like this is normal, like he hasn’t left me on read for the past three days for no reason.
Every time I get close to him …
I look for signs of the Max who kissed me and asked me to tell him what I liked. I look for that Max hiding in the down-turned corners of his mouth, or the creases next to his eyes. In the tightness of his jaw, which is rigid and set.
Maybe Max was someone I was never supposed to have. Just like Carter.
God. What was I hoping for?
I’m just a stupid, sad girl.
My head tilts to the side and I want to ask … Why?
Instead, I ask, “Are you ready to trade?”
It looks like it takes him a minute to figure out what’s happening. But finally, he says, “Yeah.” He reaches back and then turns, looking for something. “I don’t have it here. I’ll give it to you later.”
I wish he would go back to ignoring me. Or yell at me. Or laugh in my face. But this Max—the one that pretends nothing’s wrong—makes me feel ill.
I hand him his picture of me, feeling oddly protective. The idea that the girl drawn against poetry might not be recognizable feels tragic. “We have to wrap this up soon. I need to have those turned in so I can finish the mural.”
“I know how this works, Nieve.” He sounds annoyed. He’s back to the old Max.
But before I’m brave enough to say something, Max leaves to go wash his hands.
At the coffee shop down the street where I don’t know anyone, I open it.
Max has used watercolor to paint around himself.
The original sketch that I did is untouched.
Only the world around Max has color. It’s …
striking. The main image on the paper, still in pencil, and everything in soft, beautiful colors that blend against each other framing it.
Something about the original drawing feels sacred. Important. I take the colored pencils I’ve been working with, and instead of coloring Max in, I start to color on top of the background he’s already painted.
And that’s how this week with Max goes. Trading pages instead of words. Max’s drawing of me is the same, which feels like a cruel joke as much as it relieves me.
I call my mother on a Tuesday just to hear her voice, but again, she doesn’t answer, so I call Grandee, who does. She tells me she’s busy and asks if I want to come dye wool because she’s behind. I try to explain that I have finals, and she says, “Can’t you draw anywhere?”
“Gran—”
“I’ve got to go. Logan is trying to wander off again with half a shear. Goddammit, Log—”
The line goes dead, and I press my phone against my forehead.
The door to our room opens, and Linden stands there with a frown. “There you are.”
I sit up and tell myself not to groan. I can’t listen to Linden complain about Carter again. “Here I am.”
“Let’s go out. Off campus. Anywhere.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“Who are you avoiding?” I can’t help my suspicious tone.
“No one.” She’s using her lying voice. So, I wait. “I’m avoiding Carter,” she says, finally relenting.
“Great. You should hang out with Max. He’s avoiding me.”
“What? Why?”
The truth is, I’m not sure, because I don’t know what’s real with Max and what isn’t. “The same thing as always.”
“He’s so weird.” She narrows her eyes, considering further. “Did you say something to him?”
I wish I knew. “I have no idea, because he won’t talk to me.”
“Come on; let’s go up to the roof and stare at the stars.”
It’s what we would do when we were little and needed to clear our heads. I’m grateful, not for the first time, that Linden is here at the school with me.
We head up the spiral staircase that creaks and moans underneath our footfalls, and when we get up to the roof, Benji stands there with his back to us. In his hand is a notebook.
“What trouble are you getting up to?” Linden asks him.
He turns around as if he’s been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. “I’m just … practicing.” He holds up the book and points down to the scattered pages at his feet. “I can’t seem to find … it.”
I smile, because we’re a school full of artists all trying to find … it. The muse, creativity, the thing that takes the places inside our hearts that are secret and makes them knowable—defined.
Linden doesn’t ask. She just takes a seat in one of the empty lawn chairs and looks up at him. “You can practice with us.”
Benji shakes his head, moving to sit next to her. I sit at his other side. “I think I’ve lost it.”
Again, we don’t ask what it is … we know. When inspiration leaves … she goes without warning.
“I’m stuck, too. I can’t seem to figure out what the faces on this stupid mural are supposed to be. I feel like they’re something I need to finish. Like they are an unfinished piece of me.”
Benji lets out a little laugh. “Well, you could do what my advisor keeps telling me to do … just let it all out.”
“Yeah, except, poets have this great thing called backspace.”
“Maybe you should draw like you have backspace?”
It feels like a stupid suggestion, but maybe all our suggestions are stupid. Until they aren’t.
“Nothing ever changes.” I can hear the melancholy in my own voice.
“No,” Benji says sadly, looking up at the stars. “But you do. Which is the whole problem. Feeling like you’ve become a different person with the same people, the same place, the same circumstances.”
What if everyone changes but you feel the same?
One week later, Benji stands in the center of a stage, a spotlight shining down on him as he folds and unfolds a paper in his hands. Pinned to his chest is a laminated name tag with his school number on it. He swallows, nervous.
But all I can feel is happy for him. This is what he’s been working toward. What he’s wanted. He’s going to speak his truth, finally.
Because he found it.
The inspiration that hides in the cracks and breaks with our self-doubt, the thing that pushes us forward, even when we don’t think we have it in us to keep going.
With a roll of his shoulders, he clears his throat.
My world speaks in colors.
Bright Pantone that reminds me who I am,
shouting in chroma and whispering in pastel.
It’s the language spoken in a new land,
one that accepts everything about me, as long as I change unconditionally.
In these colors,
I fall in love.
He smiles at me like a purple flower in bloom,
a blossom of violet unfolding.
She laughs, and it’s the green grass of a field dancing in the wind,
an endless rolling thing.
She cries in tandem with a never-ending and stretching gray sky,
water falling from somewhere unseen.
He lies in the golden sunlight,
it dapples on his face, shining around him.
I stand in shades of blue among them,
denim-colored skies that always seem near but untouchable,
indigo flowers opening up, ready to be noticed,
the rarest blue butterfly fluttering from person to person,
abysmal and forgotten, like the darkest parts of the ocean.
And as I sink deeper and deeper down,
my world loses color.
But I don’t mind.
None of these colors were mine.
I swallow and look over at Linden, who has tears in her eyes. Benji … I don’t even know what to say to him. He’s perfectly captured the feeling we are all experiencing.
The way we all feel like we stand a little outside of the things we are so desperate to touch and be a part of.
What a rare gift it is to be understood. What a blessing that we can do it through art.
Benji is the color blue.
The color of all creatives.