“Actually, I think this town is already full enough of artists,” I interrupt Emmy-Kate. She’s still not looking me in the eye. As if she’s afraid I would actually want to talk about her nocturnal visitor!
Niko has been watching our hands. She jumps in, signing, “I agree.”
Whoa. We exchange fleeting, dumbfounded expressions. She and I on the same page about something? Emmy-Kate lifts her cereal bowl and tips it to her mouth, slurping. Milk sploshes to the floor.
Niko clears her throat as I sit down. Her hair is in pin curls beneath a headscarf. Today’s slogan sweatshirt: REPEAL, from last year’s Irish abortion referendum.
“Speaking of artists…” she begins. Then pauses as she takes a long sip of coffee. “I was thinking…” she continues, her hand movements stretchy and languid. “We should think about getting Mum’s things organized. Clean her room, box up a few things.”
“What! Why?” The questions fly from my fingers.
We can’t get rid of her stuff. When someone goes missing, it’s not the same as a death. You can’t cancel bills or shut off phones or give away shoes. Every day, mail addressed to Ms. Rachael Sloe lands on the doormat and there’s nothing we can do about it. Glittery gowns and stained smocks billow from her wardrobe, saturated in her smell. Tubes of her pink lipstick fall from the bathroom cabinet whenever I open it; the shower caddy holds a half-used bottle of purple shampoo to stop her hair going brassy.
The house is holding its breath for her return. If she walked in right now, she could pick up where she’d left off—take her handbag from the back of her door or throw herself onto the sofa and pick up the book she left there, turn to the page where she last folded down a corner.
If we pack these things into boxes, she won’t be able to come back.
I ignore the voice that says, But, Minnie—if she does walk in, this very second … isn’t what she’s done unforgivable? I doubly ignore the voice that tells me this is irrational because she’s not coming back anyway.
“What things?” asks Emmy-Kate, hyperalert.
Niko sits up straighter. “The house is a mess,” she tells us, looking down her patrician nose. “I don’t want the social workers to come round and see it a pigsty. There’s stuff on the floor everywhere, I can’t invite anyone over. Let’s have a tidy up.” She pauses, flipping open her watercolor pad again and jotting something. Then puts down her pen and adds, “At least we should wash her sheets, do her laundry, clean her room.”
Although Emmy-Kate visibly sags with relief, I notice her eyes flit to Mum’s mobile phone, which is plugged in on the counter, all of us waiting for the day it rings. “Whatever,” she signs, hopping down and grabbing her swimming bag. “Mum’s only going to mess the place up again anyway when she gets back.”
She bangs the back door as she leaves for the pool, her last sentence staining the air.
I squirm in my seat, picturing Niko clearing up Mum from around me. Rolling up this rag rug from beneath my toes, putting away the gardening flip-flops she kicked off by the back door, taking down her ceramic vases from the mantelpiece. Tidying this mess she left us into neat boxes.
“Perhaps we should burn down the garden,” I tell her, “and stop drinking coffee.”
“Don’t be obnoxious, Minnie,” Niko signs, then drums her fingers on the table, her eyes a nonchalant challenge.
Neither of us signs anything else. The room swells with a hundred things unsaid, unsigned. Things that, actually, have nothing to do with Mum. Our eyes are still locked when my phone starts playing “All You Need Is Love”—otherwise known as the ringtone I have set for Ash.
“Saved by the bell,” I tell Niko, waving my phone. “It’s Ash.”
* * *
In the hallway, I look down at my phone. The photo I have set for Ash’s calls is one I took last spring in Meadow Park: He’s wearing sunglasses and eating soft serve, the ice cream daubing his nose. For some reason, my fingers hit the END CALL button. I’m freaked out after Niko’s bombshell. After last night.
I go trudging up to the Chaos Cave and sit at my desk, feeling twitchy. Then, picking up yesterday’s abandoned paper and pencil, I begin to draw.
At first, drawing feels rough and rusty, like I’m a bicycle that’s been left too long in the shed. The pencil is as unfamiliar in my hand as a chopstick; I’m holding it too tightly. Then, little by little, I loosen up. The work starts to flow. Thinking of Ms. Goldenblatt and her tooooool kit, I draw circle after circle until my fingers relax and the pencil transfers fluidly to the paper.
Then I draw flowers. The cliff-bend curves of my favorite spring blooms: frilly bearded irises, frothy sweet peas, sweet-scented nemesia. I can’t make the versions in my head come out right, so I move to my bed and look out of the window to draw from life. The garden is on the wane—hydrangeas and roses are all that’s left of summer, but they’ll do. My pencil versions blossom on the page, tight cups of petals and thorny vines, until I get hand cramp and have to stop.
I rub my hand, flexing my fingers. There’s a thick gray pencil smudge on the side of my palm. The paper is covered with flowers, fine as porcelain, around which I’ve unconsciously doodled the words:
WHERE IS THE LOVE STORY FOR THE GIRL WHO IS BROKEN-HEARTED?
Not my line—Niko’s. From her graduation art exhibition. A dark-goth-emo-poetry paper cutout she made the summer she left Poets Corner High. It hung like bunting across the gym. I’m trying to figure out how her words came out of me when I hear Ash’s bright voice calling my name, his footsteps on the stairs.
My heart flies out of the window.
I don’t know why, but I don’t want to see him yet. I’m not ready to talk about last night, or roll around this bed doing more of the same, or listen while he plays guitar. This minute, I’m happy sitting here in silence, teaching myself how to draw again.
I flip my sketch pad shut and peer out of the window, wondering if I can pull off an Emmy-Kate and climb down the trellis.
My room is too high up. And in a fit of insanity the other night, I googled it—Beachy Head. The cliff is dinosaur-ancient (an era I happen to love), formed so long ago it sounds like a joke: a hundred million years. Five hundred and thirty-one feet high.
Three stories below me, the garden zooms in and out of focus.
My mother’s body appears, lying broken on the grass, covered in seawater, then disappears.
The terror is incandescent. Every part of me lights up like a Christmas tree.
Bodies are so vulnerable. If I fell, I would break. The bus Niko takes to SCAD could easily crash. Emmy-Kate might be drowning in the pool right now; a psychopath could strangle Salvador Dalí.
I cringe away from the window, nauseous, as Ash’s voice sounds from right outside the door. “Miniature? You decent?” A soft knock. “Can I come in?”
Pause, I think desperately. Pause, pause, pause.
I want to take the Earth in both hands and hold it still, Superman-style. Stop the spinning for a little while so I can breathe. I need a small bit of space.
Before I can overthink what I’m doing, I hide under the bed.
Barely in time. From my vantage point among the dust bunnies—also the real bunny, who turns out to be down here too—I watch as the door swings open, and Ash’s giant sneaker-clad feet saunter into the room. The floorboards squeak, then fall silent.
Psycho Minnie psycho Minnie psycho Minnie. The words thunder in my ears, so loud they scare Salvador Dalí into hopping away from me, out into the bedroom. He starts sniffing Ash’s ankles.
“Hello, you,” says Ash, crouching down to the rabbit. I catch a glimpse of his longish hair and the familiar whorl of his ear. A guitar pick tumbles from his shirt pocket onto the floor. If he glances to his right to pick it up, he’ll see me. I hold my breath as he stands up, out of sight.
A few seconds pass, then: “All You Need Is Love.”
The ringtone blares out above me, my phone still on the bed. Ash taps his foot in time. When the mu
sic cuts out, he starts talking.
“Hey, Miniature, it’s me.” Pause. His shoes squeak, turning and picking their way back to the door. “I’m at your house, but you’re not here, so … Okay, call me later?” Pause.
It sounds as though he wants to say something else, but he doesn’t. I hear the faint click as he closes the door, the heavy tread of his feet going down the stairs. And I let out the sneeze I hadn’t known I was holding. Salvador Dali turns his head and regards me with solemn distaste.
Twelve weeks since my world ended, and here I am, totally effing unhinged.
CHAPTER 10
The Sun Is Bleaching Everything in Sight
The next morning I trail Emmy-Kate to school, dawdling in the sun. I might not have color, but at least I still have light. It pours from the empty sky, all over my upturned face; pooling on the sidewalk, dripping from the railway line and the trees. Their leaves are beginning to curl at the edges like old sandwiches.
As I walk, I text back and forth with Ash.
Minnie: Hey … Sorry I missed you yesterday
Ash: S’all right! Where were you anyway?
Minnie: At the pool with Emmy-Kate
Ash: Nice. So …
Minnie: So?
Ash: So, when am I seeing you? :)
We’re coming up to our one-year anniversary. Here he is, a troubadour with music in his fingertips, five-foot-ten-inches’ worth of charm in skinny jeans and a flannel shirt. My boyfriend, who loves my sisters and Salvador Dalí and me, maybe. He’s the only constant in my life. So how come I’m avoiding him instead of telling him about my whole monochromacy deal?
Three little dots appear on the screen as Ash types, so I quickly write—
Minnie: The weekend? Come over for dinner on Friday
Ash: Count me in ♥
Ten paces ahead, Emmy-Kate sashays in nonuniform satin platform shoes—stolen from Mum’s wardrobe—hair damp from an early swim. Her skirt is rolled up, the shirt untucked to cover the lump of fabric. As she air-draws, it wafts from side to side like a duck’s tail.
Usually she’d be bugging me all the way to school, but today we’re not walking together. I suppose she’s still avoiding me in the aftermath of the boy in her room. But she does occasionally glance not so surreptitiously over her shoulder to check I’m not going anywhere.
Every time she does, I stumble. Two conflicting desires are rising: to catch up to her and confess everything—that Mum isn’t necessarily missing and that’s why Niko’s intent on boxing her up. That I’ve inherited the broken portion of her brain. That I think I know what a sinkhole looks like, and it’s an artwork called The White Album.
But some part of me likes that Emmy-Kate doesn’t know about the letter, doesn’t know what a sinkhole really is. It makes me feel as though Mum belongs to me more. I’m in on her secrets.
“Earth to Minnie.” Emmy-Kate bounds in front of me, singsonging and yoo-hooing and wiggling her arms in my face. Pale gray, she’s a spectral jellyfish.
I blink. I’ve sleep-followed her into the cafeteria. A place I didn’t set foot in last week. With good reason—already, people are turning to stare. Open curiosity marks the faces that look up from early-morning homework and coffee. Whispers are exchanged behind hands held in front of mouths: the Sloe girls. The redheads. Their mother is missing. You know, the famous one.
I shrink. Unlike my queen bee of a sister, who’s preening, air-drawing with artful self-consciousness. Here under the fluorescent lights, her dark bra is obvious beneath her white uniform shirt. Jealousy caterpillars through me the way it so often does when I’m confronted with Emmy-Kate’s looks, her beauty presented as though she’s handing the world a giant bunch of lilacs.
“Cup of tea?” She doesn’t do the official BSL hand shape, but homesigning. Growing up, the whole family had weekly lessons, but inevitably we added our own signs to the mix: secret passwords and shorthand. Not quite our own language, but unique.
My stomach is already doing the jitterbug; tea won’t help. And it means sitting at a table with Emmy-Kate, who’s peering at me with plaintive bug eyes and is possibly now ready to talk about her boyfriend. Or, more likely, Niko’s plan for a tidiness blitz. Ugh. I shake my head.
“C’mon, Min.” Emmy-Kate pigeons her toes, blinking heavily mascaraed lashes. When I don’t answer, she signs “Fine!” and huffs away, a hum of chlorine in her wake.
I wonder if she would still swim if she knew our mother had potentially taken a swan dive into the English Channel. The second I think this, fragments of the conversations around me drift to the surface like seaweed:
I was so wasted I wanted to die.
Urgh, kill me now.
Mr. Wong’s lessons are so boring I want to overdose.
Mate, if she doesn’t text me back I’ma slit my wrists—
I’m shaking. The pale room begins to darken.
I glance up, expecting to see a blown bulb. The strip light is buzzing above me as per usual, but the room is turning soft black at the edges of my vision. I feel as though I’m sinking deep under the sea, unable to breathe. I open my mouth to speak, to call after Emmy-Kate and ask her if it’s getting dark in here or is it me? and my lungs fill with salt water.
I choke on it. Thrash out my arms and touch nothing but ocean, a cold that constricts my ribs and makes black blink in front of my eyes until that’s all I can see.
Then there I am, drowning in the dark.
* * *
“Minnie?” Ms. Goldenblatt almost trips over me when she emerges from the art room. I’m crouched in a ball in the empty corridor outside. She ducks down, puts her hand on my shoulder. “Is everything all right?”
“Ah—” I gasp out this nothing of a reply, unable to answer through this mouth full of seaweed, or explain what’s happening to me.
“Deep breaths,” she says. “Breathe for me? In one-two-three, out one-two-three. Good.” She takes her hand back, pushing her bracelets up her wrists. “Come on.”
Ms. Goldenblatt leads me back through the classroom, which is filled with easels, then into her office, where I wash ashore. She hands me a glass of water.
“Want me to send you to the office, see if you can go home?”
I shake my head and she kicks her foot onto her opposite knee, leaning back in her chair and rattling her bracelets again as she fixes me with the pity eyes. I look away. Her desk is as cluttered as mine; there’s a stack of portfolios on the floor, reference books everywhere. It’s a little like the studio—organized chaos, the same smell of paint-turps-dust—but peaceful. Niko says Ms. Goldenblatt has a different aura from Mum.
“Are you seeing the school counselor?” she asks, owl-eyed.
“No, I, um—” I start coughing. The thought of talking about my monochromacy, about visions of my dead mother, makes my whole body constrict.
“You okay there?” Ms. Goldenblatt waits for me to finish coughing. “Look, Minnie. You’re my next lesson. I’m happy for you to hide out in here for the hour if you think it’ll help. Read a book. Curl up. Get started on the homework. But you know what I think might be good?” The bell rings and she waits it out, ponytailing her hair in her hand, then letting it fall. Then she smiles—it’s one step away from jazz-hands. “Art! Like, art therapy. We’re doing self-portraits. Tons of tonal color mixing, deep focus on the proportions; it could really soothe you.” She’s still raving like a kook as she stands up, encouraging me out of the door and back into the classroom. “You know, to think about something else. How is your portfolio coming along?”
I mumble something noncommittal.
The classroom is filling up, my classmates piling in and jostling each other and lunging for seats. Ritika waves hello from the melee as I plop into the nearest seat, which turns out to be next to, ugh, Felix Waters. Ms. Goldenblatt gives her signature whistle, clambering onto her desk, and everyone settles down. I glance at Felix. He’s sitting underneath his own personal rain cloud. Our moods match: We’re a couple of sad
sacks, drooped behind easels. His eyes shift to mine, then away, grunting a wary hello.
“Before we begin,” Ms. Goldenblatt announces, “you have homework! Find a partner, pick a gallery. Choose something—anything—to draw. A sculpture would be good, or other visitors, the staff. I want a series of speed sketches by next week: thirty seconds, a minute, five minutes, half an hour. Try a few of each. Everybody clear? All right. It’s self-portrait time. Aprons on and show me what you’re made of.”
She winks at me and I turn to my easel, examining it through brain fog. Everything’s hazy and distant, like I’m swimming through thick glass. A sheet of paper has been pretaped to the board, alongside a tiny hand mirror. It’s cracked; I can’t see my reflection properly.
But it doesn’t matter. I know how to paint a portrait of me: I’m the sound ice makes when it breaks. Wind rushing up through rotten floorboards, and short winter days when leaves kiss goodbye to dying trees. I am clay that cracks in the kiln.
I breathe in and out, one-two-three, and concentrate on laying out my palette like a clock: red at twelve o’clock, yellow at four o’clock, blue at eight o’clock. The color wheel. The tubes are labeled, so it doesn’t matter that all I see is gray, gray, and gray. I can paint by numbers.
“So … we’re working together, I guess.” Felix’s dark voice breaks into my thoughts.
He’s tilting back in his chair, balancing it on two legs, shoving both hands through his curly hair. Classic tortured-artist pose. I stare at him blankly and he adds, “On this homework thing?”
I rewind to Ms. Goldenblatt’s words—find a partner—look around the room in alarm. Everyone else is already paired up: Ritika and her best friend, Bolu; David Christie with Jim Parkinson; Isabelle O’Carroll and Alex Fong; and so on round the room, like Noah’s ark.
“We could meet after school,” says Felix, as though our partnership is a done deal.
I dip my brush in what I think is yellow. Say quietly, “That’s okay, we don’t have to go together.”
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