How to Be Luminous

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  Imagine inventing a new clay, inventing the world, or a different color—the way I did last week after kissing Felix, when the sun transformed into yellow-violet. I would make

  INTERNATIONAL MINNIE SLOE ORANGE

  Maybe this was what Mum was planning to do with Schiaparelli. She was looking for a new pink—and in doing so, she lost her colors. That’s the risk, isn’t it? If you lean into art, open yourself wide, look for the glow in the stone or embrace the starlight moments, it leaves you vulnerable.

  A vast tsunami of grief comes crashing in.

  Before I know it I’m tearing the books apart, breaking their spines, ripping off the Post-it notes, trying to shake the colors from the pages so they fall into my hands. And I hear a thumping-great orchestra, getting louder and louder; soundtracking the frenzy, playing scary Jaws-style violins that sound exactly, exactly, like green-and-blue music should—

  Black-and-white music.

  The air seems to laugh at me, at how idiotic I’m being—to think there are possibly any answers—but tears don’t come. So, after scooping up the ruined books and stuffing them into the bin, I run around the house, throwing open all the windows; letting autumn flood in. It’s midmorning, the sun high in the sky, shining off the skyscrapers in London’s financial district and, distantly, the buildings of the SCAD campus.

  I’m going to go there now, I decide, finally.

  Find out what I’ve been so afraid of all my life.

  * * *

  Seeing the artheads en masse is a jolt, even in monochrome. There are undercuts and nose rings and glitter; disco leggings and leopard print. I try to picture myself walking among them next year; can’t. It’s too far in the future, too alien. Like imagining myself as a giraffe, or speaking Russian.

  I follow signs to the Ceramic Design building. The place where my mother studied, invented the Rainbow Series I, graduated, taught. A plaque above the door proclaims her fame. I wait for her to stride from the double doors and jump down the steps two at a time, her blond hair flying as she dismisses admirers, saying, “Not now! I’ve got to get home, to my girls.”

  But she doesn’t. It hits me with horror that I haven’t visualized her since that awful moment on the bus yesterday, when she told me I’d only get into SCAD because I’m related to her. She’s right: Everyone else is armed with portfolios, cameras, instruments, and, in one instance, a blowtorch. I didn’t even bring so much as a pencil. Since school started I’ve drawn a few flowers and that’s it.

  And this is prime Niko territory: I could do without her finding out I’m skipping school.

  Drifting from the campus, I wander; not wanting to go home but not drawn to the studio either. Predestination, or lingering guilt, brings me to Ash’s side of the neighborhood. At least, I think this is where he’s living. He texted me the address over the summer.

  How awful is that? He’s folded himself into my life and I’ve never even visited his new student digs.

  I ring the bell, crossing my fingers until Ash answers the door. He’s in bare feet and skinny jeans, a flannel shirt pushed up at the elbows, as cute as the day we met. But totally different too, his face the opposite of a smile.

  “Ash,” I blurt. “Hi.”

  He keeps one hand on the door and leans the other arm against the doorframe, putting a barrier between us. Message received loud and clear: I’m not invited in.

  “I wanted to say sorry,” I begin, already trembling.

  “So then say it,” he challenges.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Wicked, everything’s fine now, then.”

  I look down. His feet aren’t tapping. There’s no song inside him. Who invented the word sorry? Five letters, not nearly enough of an apology.

  I stumble on: “Professor Gupta, your uncle—well, you know that.” Am I imagining things, or was that an eye roll? It’s no smile, but it’s better than the blank face. “He lives next door, which … well, you also know.” I’m wringing my hands, which are sweating. “I don’t want it to be weird, if you want to come to Poets Corner.” No response. “Also, Emmy-Kate is bereft, Salvador Dalí too.” I don’t dare mention Niko’s feelings.

  Ash raises an eyebrow in disbelief. “That’s your fault, Min.”

  I take a deep breath, wishing this were easier, even though I know I have no right to want that. I broke his heart, and what’s worse, I did it on purpose.

  “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that,” I tell him. “I hope you know it wasn’t about you, though.”

  “I know.” His face is softening. “Can’t say it was fun, Min,” he says, “but at least you were finally talking. That part I understood. But that boy you were with…” He shakes his head.

  “Felix.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” he interrupts. “You—”

  “I’m so unhappy,” I interrupt back. There it is, the truth. I am so unhappy. “That’s it, that’s all I have. I’m unhappy and I’m sorry. I wish it was more, but I…” I cover my face with my hands, groan into them. “All those things I said to you, I—I’m so messed up,” I finish, not sure if I’m making any sense.

  When I emerge from my hands, Ash is leaning his head heavily against the doorframe. “I might have understood all that if you’d have ever talked to me,” he says at last. “About anything. Ever.”

  Puny autumn sunshine dapples our surroundings with its soft light. This is it. He’s not going to forgive me, and I’m not sure I deserve to be forgiven. This terrible conversation is all there is left.

  “I’m talking to you now,” I offer, suddenly so, so eager to talk to someone. “And—”

  “Min,” Ash interrupts, firm but not unkind. He lifts his head. “It’s too late.”

  He looks at me for a long, sad second, then closes the door gently in my face. And I walk home. Sunshine behind me, shadows ahead.

  Blue-Gray

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Twilight. A steely blue that appears for less than an hour on a handful of evenings. The Latin name for the color is livid, meaning black-and-blue, a bruise, a cold body in a morgue.

  Peroxide Blond

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Somewhere between white and yellow, like Marilyn Monroe. Her glow-in-the-dark hair.

  CHAPTER 29

  All the Colors in the World at the Same Time (Again)

  It’s the middle of the night and I’m stretched out with Salvador Dalí on the newly tidy floor of the Chaos Cave, thinking about the time Niko and I practiced kissing on our wrists and gave ourselves hickies. When she taught me how to apply liquid eyeliner and poked me in the eye so hard I saw stars for a week. The hand-me-down C-cup bra she bestowed on me with the advice “Stuff it with socks”; the day in Meadow Park when Emmy-Kate was being completely unreasonable and Niko pushed her in the duck pond, midsentence, barely breaking her stride.

  I take out my phone and do something I haven’t since the disappearance: google “Rachael Sloe.” Famous-her is a different person from Mum, but tonight I need to see her, hear her voice, even if it’s only on grainy YouTube videos of awards ceremonies. I scroll through image after image, noticing how there’s not a single photo where she looks at the camera.

  Always, her brilliant white hair blows across her face, her eyes are crinkled in amusement, she’s laughing at someone or something out of shot, a blur moving toward the edge of the frame, disappearing.

  Missing is as gone as dead.

  I wouldn’t dare voice this out loud to anyone—definitely not to Felix Waters—but I think that missing is a little bit worse. There’s nowhere for me to stash these runaway emotions I have. I can’t claw the earth over her grave, because there isn’t one. There’s no stone to hammer my fists on. I can’t tear petals from funeral flowers or hurl handfuls of ashes into the wind or even stand in the sea beneath Beachy Head and catch her body in my open arms. I can’t blame this monochrome existence on cancer, or old age, or a drunk driver, or an
ything but her.

  And it hurts too much to do that.

  I don’t want to hate her.

  The way Ash and Felix both hate me in different ways, the way my sisters hate me.

  Thinking about Niko’s expression in the walled garden yesterday makes me want to crawl out of my window, climb a ladder into tonight’s starless sky, and yank Mum back down to earth, where she should be.

  She is the only person who could make things better between us. She’d know unquestionably that I’m awake, and would drag me from my room to eat ice cream in the kitchen, even though it’s 2 A.M. In the morning she would refuse to let us go to school until we’d fixed ourselves. She’d solve this with a Beatles song.

  Or maybe she wouldn’t do any of those things if she was in the middle of making art.

  Ding. The idea lands in my head like a pebble thrown at my window.

  The perfect paean to my rabble-rousing, peroxide-brilliant, glow-in-the-dark mother, who at twenty-one years old hand-built a brick furnace so she could make a clay bubble as big as a horse; and the way back to my sisters.

  I rummage through the supplies on my desk and gather what I need, then creep down the stairs. Candlelight seeps from beneath Niko’s door; no doubt she’s writing an I-hate-Minnie haiku.

  A big button moon floodlights me as I fly down the road, as fast as I can to my future. I duck under the railway arch to the start of Full Moon Lane, a vast sprawl of lamppost-lit blacktop, take out my paints and brushes and pastels and oils, then spray-paint across the sidewalk in letters as large as I can: I CAN’T BEAR THIS.

  I can’t see the color, but I know it’s an eye-popping, lemony-green citrine, a shade to stop my sisters in their tracks when they leave the house tomorrow.

  I turn to the chalks, checking the labels to scribble I’M SORRY in turquoise, periwinkle, navy, azure, indigo, cyan, International Klein Blue. Halfway through my fifteenth sorry, a taxi comes crawling up the road, radio blasting. I dart into the shadows until it goes by.

  When the music fades, I use pink to ask my sisters, Where is the love story for the girls who are broken? Green for gardens and dinosaurs and jealousy. I cover bins, traffic lights, road signs, the bus stop, sidewalks, even the railway arch, stopping only to check the shade names by the lampposts’ thick glow: fuchsia, copper, mint, lavender, coral, buttercream, silver, yellow, more citrine.

  As I work, I imagine the poem I’m creating, how it will make a lackadaisical exploration of Poets Corner:

  Out of the blue.

  I can’t bear this.

  Sorry, sorry, sorry.

  Where are you?

  We miss you. Come back.

  Where is the love story for the girls who are broken?

  Did you know it was forever?

  Listen. Not even light can escape.

  International Minnie Sloe Orange.

  LET’S FILL THIS TOWN WITH ARTISTS.

  Chalks become stubs in my fingers, paints dry up, spray cans rattle and run out of color. I use the remains of the final one, labeled BLOOD ORANGE, to add a last-minute FELIX + MINNIE on a table outside the pub. Then I close my eyes and turn around toward the road, picturing the colors: red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple.

  In my head, the poem glows neon against the sidewalk. It’s not gray but Technicolor, a vivid explanation of everything I have lost, and the first piece of art I’ve ever completed. Something I could photograph for my portfolio, a companion piece to the Rainbow Series I, the kind of shock-to-the-system debut that makes me a true artist.

  I open my eyes, immediately want to vomit.

  There’s no color. There’s no genius, either. The minicab has smeared sorrys across the road; and with everything in gray, most of my words aren’t even visible to me. They blend with the sidewalk, disappear. But here and there, individual letters stand out in bright, false white against the dark background. Spelling out:

  My reaction is instantaneous. I take off down Full Moon Lane to the studio, trying to outrun my own accusation. I’m going bat-out-of-hell-style, feet pounding across my stupid poem and leaving this mess behind. And as I run, the anger swells. Bigger than any of the mini-Minnie rages that have come before: Why am I the one who inherited Mum’s madness?

  Fury transports me fast to the studio, where I burst through the door—I’ve left it unlocked, unbelievably—and charge to the kilns, pummel at the control panel, lift the handle, jump back as the kiln door swings open, revealing—

  Nothing.

  It’s empty.

  This whole effing long and lonely time, it’s been empty.

  Where there should be a behemoth Rachael Sloe ceramic—one enormous, ethereal, punk, cool, out-of-this-world artwork; ferocious pink—there’s nothing.

  I spin around, panting, still furious. The fluorescent lights are buzzing like bluebottles—I don’t remember turning them on, but whatever—and glinting on the shelves full of test pieces, including stacks of my abandoned tiles. My eye falls on the recycling bucket of dried clay.

  I pick it up, oofing at its heft, then swing it at the shelves.

  The crash is so satisfying I do it again. Smash. For being mad. Smash. For graffitiing that poem. Smash. For thinking I could make astounding art.

  Soon the bucket is as empty as I am and stops being effective. I grab a plaster-of-Paris mold instead and sweep it along another shelf, almost experimentally. Pieces tinkle to the ground. The sensation is awesome, so I lift up a whole pot and hurl it across the room. My hands take on a life of their own, throwing and smashing and breaking and tipping and destroying, storming through my crappy life. Crash. I take a swipe at my missing mother, who could have left a goodbye letter anywhere but chose to deliver it here, where only I would find it. Bang, bang, bang, bang—I work my way along a test series of terracotta, hurling the pieces at the wall one by one, for my secretive sisters. For gifted and gorgeous Emmy-Kate breezing so easily through life. For Niko being in love with Ash. For Ash no longer being in love with me. I crash through ceramic after ceramic for Felix’s hot-cold tempers, send piece after piece to the floor for sex and SCAD and love and madness, and then I turn my raging hands to this terrifying monochrome that I’m afraid I’m stuck with forever.

  This is the big one.

  All that’s left intact: a huge, unglazed pot and a test bubble from the Rainbow Series I.

  I try to lift the pot but I can’t, it’s too heavy. So instead I put all my weight and all my wrath behind it and SHOVE, pushing and pushing and hating and crying, until it goes crashing to the cold concrete floor and breaks into a million huge and ugly shards, along with my stupid, hopeful heart.

  I’m turning to the Rainbow Series I bubble, a Christmas bauble almost as tall as I am, the one Felix called “wow,” when a blur comes racing out from behind the kilns, waving its arms and shouting, “Stop! Minnie, stop it! What are you doing?”

  I pause, chest heaving. Emmy-Kate is in the center of the room in a too-tiny dress, mascara smudged across her face, staring around at the disaster I have wrought.

  “Stop it, Minnie,” she says again, with a tiny, pathetic stomp of her high-heeled foot. And the words make her suddenly shrink, until she’s my baby sister again.

  Rose Gold

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Emmy-Kate.

  CHAPTER 30

  The Color of Sloes

  My every molecule is pressed into the last existing bubble of the Rainbow Series I. Hands and glaze united as one, ready to heave and push and smash it—down to the effing ground. Break. It. All. I want to drop a meteor on the studio and wipe it out like the dinosaurs. Delete our history, delete ceramics, delete my mother, scorch her right off the map. Smash and smash and smash this whole wretched life into dust, until there’s nothing left—no memories, no impossible art to live up to. I can be free.

  But Emmy-Kate is trembling a few feet away, eyes overflowing, and these pieces are as much hers as mine. Mum belongs equally to my sisters. The same way her things
weren’t Niko’s to tidy up, the same way I have as much right to the stolen clothes Emmy-Kate is wearing. She’s in Mum’s sequined cocktail dress, her most outrageous snakeskin stilettos, a lipstick-slathered cigarette shaking in her hand.

  Along with the ludicrous outfit, I see the truth of the past few weeks.

  The studio key falling from its pin in my room, even though it’s my prized possession.

  Emmy-Kate must have stolen it, had a copy made.

  It wasn’t Mum I saw running around the corner that day. The ghost who left wisps of Noix de Tubéreuse in the air, Beatles songs on the stereo, pastel-pretty sugary biscuits by the kettle—drank her coffee, smoked her cigarettes—was Emmy-Kate. It’s all over her tearstained face.

  I take a step back from the bubble, hold up my hands in apology.

  But this small movement is the tipping point. Literally. All the weeks and weeks of rage I have heaved into our mother’s most priceless heirloom sends it toppling to the ground. I watch the ceramic break apart in slow motion, shattering into a hundred unfixable pieces.

  I join the devastation on the floor. There’s nothing left. Not one iota of Rachael Sloe remains. Emmy-Kate begins keening, a low, unearthly wail that sends a chill up my spine, frightens me back into my own skin. The furious Minnie tornado of moments ago, gone. I take a deep breath and stand up, walk over to my little sister, touch her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She shakes me off, sniffling, looking past me to the yard. It somehow seems inevitable that Niko is racing toward us through the dark. Clearly, some Bat-Signal from on high has brought us all here tonight. She windmills to a halt, hands flying to her mouth, absorbing the scene: Emmy-Kate dolled up to the ninety-nines, the fragmented art, me—the diabolical destruct-o-gremlin architect of it all.

  Barely a blink goes by before she advances on me, hands whirring.