The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom

by Jenny Holiday

  But I kept my mouth shut as instructed. So I was shocked when he broke the silence with a whisper. “Speed is the most important thing once you start.” He was struggling a bit to keep the stencil flush with the wall with one hand while shaking a can of paint with another.

  “Let me hold this in place,” I whispered, pressing my hands against the black paper cutout. I couldn’t make out what it was from this close vantage point. He hesitated a moment, and I added, “Won’t it be faster if I hold it?”

  He must have agreed, because he moved like lightning, spraying the openings in the paper with red paint, which would show up dramatically against the gray-painted plywood fence surrounding the site. It took only a minute, and then he stepped back and nodded for me to do the same.

  “Oh!” I gasped. It was Reagan again, but he was holding a lightsaber. “Star Wars!” He had interpreted the president’s sinister plan to arm the heavens as straight out of the movie Star Wars. It took my breath away how a single image could make such a powerful statement. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was silly, but I felt like I helped the tiniest bit, since I’d held the stencil, and been, like, an accessory.

  “Yeah, I’m working on a matching Gorbachev, but it’s not done yet.”

  “It’s…perfect.” It was. It was a simple image that managed to, in a matter of seconds, make you think about a wider political issue in a whole new light. Me, I talked a lot. I wrote—I wrote many, many words. But this? This was something else entirely, something beyond language.

  Then it hit me all at once, a new, astonishing thought replacing the Plan B I had been so doggedly pursing. Maybe I didn’t need Matthew to get to Curry. Maybe I just needed Matthew.

  “Someone’s coming.”

  Oh, crap. Sure enough, I could hear voices at the far end of the block, where the construction site started. I reached down to try to shove the stencil back into the portfolio, but he stopped me, pulling me around so my back was to the fence. “I’m just trying to get this out of sight,” I tried to explain. “So—”

  And then he was kissing me.

  Matthew Townsend was kissing me.

  And, like his art, Matthew’s kisses were jolting. A revelation. There was no lead-in. No windup. He just grabbed the sides of my head and crashed his mouth down on mine. I don’t know if it was the shock or what, but my knees actually buckled a little. Because it felt like my lips—no, his lips—were directly connected to my clit, which was suddenly throbbing and achy. He responded by pressing me back against the fence, using one of his legs between my own to prop me up. When he tilted my head farther back, I let my mouth fall open, and his tongue brushed against mine. I couldn’t help the moan that escaped. It was like I wasn’t in charge of my own body. I might as well have been a figure he was painting, he was that in control—not in a scary way, just that what was happening felt inevitable. So I performed my role, which right now seemed to require me to twine my arms around his neck and shamelessly kiss him back. It was everything I could do not to rock myself against the thigh that was propping me up.

  He made a noise that was something like a cross between and grunt and a groan and tore his lips from mine. He let his forehead rest against mine for a heartbeat before stepping away completely, leaving me feeling exposed. Cold.

  “They’re gone.”

  I blinked, confused. “Who’s gone?”

  “The people who walked past us just now.”

  I followed his gaze. I caught a glimpse of a couple at the end of the block just before they turned the corner. The woman wore heels and the man a suit.

  Right. That had been a decoy kiss, not a real one. I cleared my throat. “Quick thinking.” But oh my God, how mortifying. I felt like he knew that I was wet between my legs, and that he’d made me that way. “See?” I said, trying for a casual, teasing tone. “It’s good I came with you.”

  He just shot me a questioning look I couldn’t quite decipher.

  “Because you can’t make out with yourself,” I added, realizing belatedly that explaining wasn’t helping. “We should go, right?”

  He stooped and rummaged around in his backpack. “Yeah. I just need to sign it.” He produced a can of spray paint.

  “Oh, you mean like tag it,” I said. See? I was cool. I was in the know. I wasn’t a lust-addled college student. Or at least I wasn’t only a lust-addled college student.

  “No, tagging’s not really my thing. I respect it, but to me, graffiti isn’t about marking my territory or anything.”

  “It’s about saying something.”

  He ducked his head like he was embarrassed.

  “It’s using art to make a statement. And you should sign your art.”

  “Something like that.” He made a dot in the bottom right of the picture using gold paint.

  “That’s it? Just a little gold dot?” I made a mental note to start looking for the same mark in his other pieces around town.

  “Just a little gold dot.” He shrugged. “I can’t sign my actual name for obvious reasons. I had this random gold paint on me the first time I went out—this was in my hometown, years ago. I was probably eleven or twelve. It was from some Christmas project we were doing in school. I hadn’t used it for the actual graffiti—because, really, who does graffiti in gold?”

  “Disco graffiti artists,” I said, laughing.

  “Exactly. You’re basically never going to see gold graffiti—or at least it’s going to be rare—so I just impulsively added a gold dot as a way to distinguish the piece.”

  “Like a period at the end of a sentence.” I understood the motivation. Punctuation was my department.

  He laughed then. He actually laughed, and I was absurdly proud to have been the reason he did. “Yep. Like a gold period. And then it just became a thing.” He rummaged around some more and produced another can. “Here. You sign too.”

  “Really? I didn’t do anything.”

  “You helped.”

  I could feel my skin heat. An A on a test or term paper had never thrilled me like his praise. “Okay.” I shook the can like I’d seen him do, aimed the nozzle, and deposited a dot next to his gold one. “Pink!” I couldn’t help exclaiming in delight.

  He just shrugged, put up his hood, which had fallen during our interlude, and turned, silently gesturing for me to follow.

  Matthew

  “Interesting.”

  The word punctured the heavy, smoke-filled silence in Curry’s studio, a silence that had been stretching on as my critic circled the table on which I’d unrolled my latest crack at the “make a picture of something mundane in every medium” assignment. Curry hadn’t told me to do it over. We hadn’t spoken at all, in fact, since my last visit, which was pretty much unheard of. He usually called me midweek and issued mumbled instructions for what he wanted to see at our next session. The fact that he hadn’t worried me.

  Anyway, I was stubborn—and proud. Even though I told myself I just wanted to extract a senior portfolio from this “mentorship” so I could graduate, in truth, I couldn’t stand Curry thinking poorly of my work. So, even though I technically had no assignment this week, I had taken it upon myself to perform a do-over.

  Curry was nodding and sucking on his cigarette as he made another circle, stopping in front of my rendering of the shirt in acrylics.

  I was half bracing for him to dismiss me in disgust like he had last week, but my heart sped up a little when he said, again, “Interesting.” Curry had never said that to me about anything, and tonight he’d said it twice.

  “Where did you get this?” He tapped the image. “It clearly isn’t yours.”

  It was a Duran Duran T-shirt, white, with the woman from the Rio album cover on it, and the sleeves were ripped off in the way that only girls seemed to be into. So, yeah, you didn’t have to be a genius to see that it wasn’t mine. “It belongs to a girl I know.”

  He took a step back and lowered himself into the frayed armchair he sometimes sat in while presiding over my fate. “A
nd how did it come into your possession?”

  Jesus. What did it matter? It was a mundane object.

  Well, technically, it wasn’t. In the context of Jenny’s colorful, over-the-top room, it was a mundane object, which is probably why she’d chosen it to use for the ice pack. But in my room, lying crumpled on my desk with the woman’s red lips and purple earrings visible, it was whatever was the opposite of mundane. Abnormal? Extraordinary?

  Curry was still waiting for an answer. How had the shirt come into my possession? I wasn’t about to tell him I’d stolen it. That I’d dumped the half-melted ice back into its bowl and pocketed the shirt before I left her room. That I had no idea why. “She gave it to me to use as an ice pack—she’d filled it with ice.”

  “And why did you need an ice pack?”

  “I hurt my hand.” I could see the next question forming and preemptively answered it. “I hit someone. Hard.”

  His eyebrows lifted.

  “Someone who deserved it,” I added quickly. Please let that put an end to the interrogation.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and, uncharacteristically, didn’t light another. “What were you feeling when you painted this shirt? What does looking at it now make you think?”

  It makes me remember kissing her.

  But I couldn’t say that. Wouldn’t say that.

  “You don’t have to answer out loud,” he said, drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair. “But go there.”

  Even as I tried to resist his instructions, my mind obeyed. It wasn’t hard—that was where my thoughts had been pretty much constantly since that night. It was like there was a groove worn in my psyche that my mind slipped into by default. The fear of being caught. The full-body shock of that kiss, the purpose of which was supposed to have been to distract the passersby. A couple of kids making out was better than a couple of kids defacing public property, right?

  But then…her lips, soft and pliant. Opening for me as she went limp and heavy.

  The tiniest of rolls she made with her hips against my thigh—I don’t even think she was doing it consciously. The jolting idea that Jenny Fields wanted me. Maybe not for real. But in that moment there, against a construction fence at two in the morning, she did. It was astonishing.

  Curry’s chuckle punctured my little trip down memory lane. Jesus, I was close to popping a woody, too. Time to get my head in the game.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere, Townsend.”

  We were? If I’d known that all I needed to do to impress Curry was paint a stupid Duran Duran T-shirt, I’d have done it months ago. Did I dare bring up the portfolio? I cleared my throat. “I was wondering what you thought about my senior portfolio?” I ventured, hating the way I sounded all deferential.

  “I don’t think about it,” he answered, lighting a cigarette, standing, and brushing off his pants—all actions I could recognize as presaging my dismissal. “Not yet. But bring me more of this”—he waved his hands vaguely toward the shirt images—“next week.”

  “You want more still lifes?”

  Curry reached for his pack of cigarettes. “No, I want more emotion.”

  I nodded, still not sure what that even meant.

  “And I want it in the form of a portrait.”

  Chapter Four

  Jenny

  “It’s for you.” Nessa tossed the phone’s receiver at me. We’d been lying in our beds Saturday morning talking before getting up. Well, she’d been talking. I was trying to screw up my courage to tell her about Royce. Telling the story out loud to Matthew, seeing him react so strongly, made me feel extra guilty about keeping something so important from her. Didn’t she deserve to know what kind of guy she was dating?

  “Hello?” I said as Nessa started gathering her shower stuff.

  “Hey. Rainbow Brite.”

  I sat straight up. That voice I used to think of as sullen was low and scratchy, as if he’d just woken up. And it was frustratingly powerful. How could someone’s voice over the phone make my nipples tingle and tighten? It didn’t seem fair.

  “I haven’t seen you around this week.”

  It was true. I had abandoned my campaign of following him. Our mismatched reactions to that kiss were too mortifying. The fact that I’d thought it genuine made shame flood my gut anew. I hadn’t made any headway on getting him to help with the art building, so what was the point of trailing around after him like a besotted puppy? I had to have some pride, even at the expense of the art building. “Yeah. I’ve been busy.”

  “Too busy to sit for a portrait?”

  “What?” I must have said the word with the same vehemence as the sentiment in my head, because Nessa, in her robe and poised to depart for the bathroom, turned and raised her eyebrows at me. I waved her off and waited until she’d left before turning back to my call. “I’m sorry, say that again?”

  “Curry is making me do a portrait, and I need a model.”

  “What?” Sheesh, I was going to have to think of something else to say.

  “Model,” he said, speaking slowly and enunciating each syllable. “I want to draw you.”

  “But why?”

  He didn’t answer, and I listened for a moment to the soft static on the line. As the silence stretched out, I realized what he wasn’t saying. He didn’t have anyone else to ask.

  “Okay,” I said, partly against my better judgment. “When?”

  When we’d hung up, I opened my closet. What did a girl wear to be drawn? My eyes caught on a flash of blue. Did I dare?

  I dared.

  After I was dressed, I threw my wallet and keys into my favorite purple LeSportsac and opened the small top drawer where I kept my toiletries. There was something I’d been thinking about, even before I met Matthew. Something I wanted dealt with before graduation. And now that I had met Matthew, now that I knew about the sensations he was capable of inspiring, he seemed like he might be just the man for the job. Did I dare?

  I dared.

  Matthew

  An hour later, she walked in the door of the same studio she’d invaded with her pizza two weeks ago, and my breath caught a little bit. It was probably because I wasn’t used to things being easy. Nothing had ever been easy—ever. So the idea that I could just call this girl I hardly knew, and say, ‘Hey, can I draw you?’ And then she would just show up? I…didn’t know what to do with that.

  “I’m overdressed.”

  I had heard the phrase “struck dumb” before, but it always seemed…dumb. But damn, there was Jenny in an electric-blue off-the-shoulder dress with one of those bubble-type skirts that folded over itself instead of hanging straight like a normal dress. She was overdressed, and she was completely not my type, but she was also utterly stunning.

  “This was my prom dress.” She rolled her eyes in a self-deprecating way that almost made me wince. An investigative journalist in a dress like that shouldn’t be mocking herself. “Well, that’s not really true. It was supposed to be my prom dress, but I didn’t actually go to prom.”

  “There’s no such thing as overdressed in a portrait,” I said, wanting to put her at ease, and for her to keep talking. I told myself that if she kept talking, she would relax, but to be honest—and to my dismay—I also wanted to hear the story. “Whatever you want to wear is great.” I settled her on a chair a yard or so away from the easel where I’d set up to do her in pastels—I wouldn’t have to wait for them to dry, and I could take the portrait to Curry and be done.

  So I picked up a peacock-blue pastel, aiming for the insane color of that dress. “Why didn’t you go to prom?” She probably wouldn’t answer, but hey, I had to try.

  She blew out a breath that fanned out her already-poufy bangs. “It’s not some horrible story of being jilted or anything. I was supposed to go with a friend of mine—just as friends.”

  There was something in the way she said it that made me suspect she’d hoped for more. But I couldn’t ask about that.

  She made an exaggerated shrugging motio
n, and the self-deprecation was back in full force. “But then the girl he really liked broke up with her boyfriend, so of course I had to step aside so he could ask her.”

  Idiot. I bit my tongue to prevent myself from saying the word aloud.

  “I should have just returned the dress.” She smoothed her hands down the satiny bodice. It was a nervous gesture, but, Jesus, I had to shift to make sure I was hidden behind the easel so she couldn’t see the effect she was having on me. “But I really loved it. Wearing it made me feel totally bitchin’. So I told myself I’d have an occasion to wear it someday, and I packed it up and brought it to college, which is pretty much the stupidest thing ever.”

  “Nah,” I said. “College seems like it’s going to be a really big deal. And then you get here.”

  She giggled. “Right? So it’s been in my closet for almost four years now.”

  “No sorority formals for you?” I said. I’d meant to tease, but I found myself thinking of Royce and his type, and the lightness left me.

  “Are you kidding me? Totally not my scene.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “I know you think I’m some kind of rich-girl lightweight, but—”

  “I don’t think that.” The interruption was kind of rude, but I couldn’t let her go on without correcting the record. Though I was probably protesting too much. I had thought that, but obviously I’d been wrong.

  She had narrowed her eyes at me the moment I interrupted her, and she silently regarded me through them, until all of a sudden, she grinned. “So when you asked me to sit for you, I thought, what the hell? I love this dress, and I’m obviously never going to have an occasion to wear it unless I make one.”

  She rolled her eyes again, but this time it wasn’t in a mocking way, it was just…joy. Mischievousness. I drew faster, trying to capture the contradictions that constituted Jenny. She was embarrassed but shameless. Timid but brave. It should have been impossible. She should have been impossible.