Chapter 4 #2
When I finished perusing the names, I opened the top drawer and shoved them in. It was then that I realized the silence on Kira’s part. I glanced up and was met with a curious look.
“This isn’t my job.”
I could fall into the faraway look in her eyes.
“Artist by weekday, art teacher by weekend?” I teased softly, hoping for some sign of reciprocity. A smile, a slow blink, an open posture. Anything I could use as hope.
Instead, all I saw was a clenched jaw when she said, “I’m not an artist at all.”
The statement sounded fabricated, but Kira was serious. This must have been how she felt earlier: all frantic questions, no coherent thoughts. Why wasn’t she an artist? When did she decide on a different path?
“But you went to school for art.” I settled for a statement.
Kira shoved a box of paintbrushes against my chest, indicating for me to pass them around the desks and workspaces. I followed her lead, leaving a few brushes next to each canvas she deposited. There were fifteen sets in total.
“I didn’t go to art school,” she said with a thick swallow. “Stop pretending like you know me. Clearly, we don’t know each other anymore.”
She spaced out a few paint colors and cups of water. I watched mind-numbingly, trying to rearrange my perception of Kira as a person without art. That wasn’t a fair statement, considering she taught art. Teaching wasn’t the same as creating, though.
I had the difficult sense that this anxious ball of energy in front of me hadn’t created something in a long time.
“What happened to art?”
“It’s not practical. I needed something that would pay the bills.”
I wondered why she thought that. I’d take answers your parents forced down your throat for 200 dollars.
But pointing that out right now would open a whole new wealth of issues I didn’t want to touch.
Her parents had been vehemently against Kira pursuing art almost as much as they had been against our relationship.
Neither was good enough for their daughter.
Art was Kira’s dream. Her passion.
We’d known each other since we were five, forced to sit next to each other in kindergarten.
At the start of every school year, her parents got her a new backpack.
And every year, Kira picked one with a side pocket large enough to fit art materials.
One year, it was charcoal pencils. The next, acrylic paint.
Sure, things had changed since we were eighteen, but passions that strong didn’t.
“And that is…” I prodded, expecting something like lawyer or doctor.
With the extra scrunchie around her wrist, she pulled her hair into a bun. “I’m an actuary.”
“What the fuck is an actuary?”
That question, finally, led me to the one thing I wanted most.
A smile.
It couldn’t be held back now, as a smile with an accompanying chuckle escaped Kira. She rubbed both hands over her cheeks, and when she removed them, the smile was gone. But I had already stained it in my memories.
“I basically do a lot of math to assess risk,” she said, like that combination of words meant something to normal people.
I blinked. “And you enjoy that?”
I tried to picture Kira surrounded by spreadsheets, crunching numbers instead of sketching in the margins of her notebooks like she used to.
She shrugged. “I like it enough. Numbers are reliable. I can always trust them.”
Ah. The implication settled over me.
“I guess you needed that reliability after what I did.”
My chest tightened. The urge to apologize, to say something important, rushed in too fast. I reached forward, brushing my fingers against her arm. Words stacked up in my throat—too many, all trying to get out at once.
Kira flinched and pulled back like she’d just remembered where she was. Or who she was talking to.
Then the classroom door swung open, and a stampede of kids poured in.
“If you want to help,” Kira said, “be a good partner and help me make sure the kids stay on task. We’re using watercolors today, so tell them to keep their paints on the paper and not on the table. We want to encourage them, so just be kind.”
“I can do kindness.”
She pursed her lips for a second before getting trampled by a pair of kids hugging her legs.
Paint. Encourage. Be kind.
How hard could it be?
Famous last words. These kids were terrors. One of them pulled me to the floor and insisted on painting a pink butterfly on my face. Fortunately, Kira saved me and politely encouraged the six-year-old girl to take her energy to the paper.
I had taken on the easier role between the two of us: watching the class for any off behavior and making sure the paintbrushes stayed where they should. If I looked away when the little girl painted the butterfly onto the arm of the boy next to her, well, no one would know.
There was a surprising amount of structure to the class.
Kira had explained that they’d be painting interpretations of the night sky—whatever that meant to each kid.
She managed to sneak in a few strokes of a constellation on her own paper when she had a free moment, but she never got far before someone called her over for help.
As I walked around the room, I took in the chaos and creativity unfolding on each page. Some were just swirling blobs of black and white. Others exploded with color—bright purples, electric blues, a few scattered stars. One kid painted a neon green sun, bold and unapologetic.
I crouched beside him and said, “You know the sun isn’t green, right?”
Without missing a beat, he yanked the paper away from my view and deadpanned, “You just don’t get it.”
I had no response. The kid might’ve been onto something.
Sitting at the edge of the last desk was a girl of eight or nine, hunched over her paper, long paintbrush in between her fingers.
“What have you got there?” I asked.
“It’s a pond,” she said. “But at night.”
“So it is.” I watched as she colored in the pond. Technically, it was a lake, but did kids know the difference at this age? Hell if I knew. “How many stars do you think are in the sky?”
Her eyes widened, and she used her thumb, nail painted hot pink, to count the stars in her picture. There were only three, and yet she answered, “Probably an infinity. My mom once said an infinity lasts forever.”
Just then, Kira paused her round around the room. She stood rigid in front of us, arms crossed, observing silently.
I spoke to the pond-loving girl, but my eyes were trained on Kira when I said, “That’s right. Infinity does last forever.”
Kira took a tiny step back, like my comment had winded her.
It took me back to all our years growing up together.
Trapped in our own little infinity. It started as a joke, a way that people in the hall made fun of us—Landon and Kira, trapped in their own infinity—but we turned it into something just for us.
We thought we had an infinity together.
But when she stepped back, not a word said, we couldn’t have been farther apart.
“Great job.” I gave the girl a high five and resumed my post at the back of the class.
For the next few minutes, we worked in silence, minus the frequent questions from the kids.
To anyone else, Kira would look sturdy painting her night sky. But I recognized the tremble in her hand. She was overthinking. Nervous. Somewhere on the constellation, though, it steadied again. When Kira painted, she couldn’t stop the joy that poured out of her.
It was a privilege to see that joy.
Life imitated art, I’d heard it said. That seemed like a blatant lie because any art I would ever create would imitate her.
This was Kira at her core. Not the actuary who had to fight for the occasional morsel of joy at the community center. The one who deserved so much more.
My plan started now. I would do whatever it took to turn the spark of happiness inside of Kira into a permanent fire. Even if it came at the cost of me getting burned in the process.