Ade snaps me out of my fantasy. ‘Sometimes I wish I was Tatiana. She’d ask him over.’
‘If you were Tatiana, Theo would see you for what you are — all shiny on the outside, like some amazing ripe peach, but rotten to the core underneath.’
‘You think so?’
I think of how nice Theo is to me, even though it must be obvious that I’m not popular. ‘He seems like a genuine person.’
‘But you guys haven’t spoken.’ Ade sounds curious.
Oops. I never told her that he’s in my art class. I only told her about hot art guy.
I come clean. ‘He’s in my art class. We’ve chatted a little.’
Ade pauses, and for a second I think she’s put the pieces together. I mean, Theo and another super-hot guy in one class? Odds are slim.
‘How could you not tell me?’ she bursts out. ‘I get that you were distracted by that other guy, so I’ll excuse you —’
Suddenly I feel super-tired again, like someone’s added another load to my pack of lies.
‘— for not passing along vital info.’ Ade’s voice is energetic, a complete contrast to my current mood. ‘So what do you think of him?’
I hesitate. I think — feel — so many things when it comes to Theo that I don’t know how to answer her question.
‘He’s not just a pretty face.’ I hope that doesn’t sound weird.
‘Well, that’s good.’ She sounds happy. ‘I was worried about what you’d think. I know you get all suspicious about cute guys — you always think they’re jerks or boring.’
Hearing my own words back, I sound judgemental. ‘He’s not boring. He’s smart and funny. And pretty insightful.’ Why couldn’t I stop at ‘not boring’? ‘Ade, he’s your crush — what I think of him shouldn’t matter.’
‘Em, I trust your opinion. Plus — not that there’s any chance he’d ever be my boyfriend — but in my wildest dreams where he is, I’d want you to like him.’
I don’t want to like him. I look up at the stars on my ceiling and make a wish. Please let me stop liking him.
‘He seems great, Ade. Let’s talk about this tomorrow. I’m stuffed.’
‘Sorry.’ She sounds guilty.
‘What have I told you about over-apologising? Don’t feel bad about your crush!’
After we hang up, I keep wishing the same wish against each ceiling star — all forty-three of them. And think of how when Mum put them up, my wishes seemed much simpler: I wish for ice skates. I wish for sneakers that light up when I walk. I wish for a 72-piece set of Derwent pencils.
I remember how all of those wishes came true, and part of me believes that what I’m wishing for right now can too.
Wednesday is art prac day. When Mr Morrison hands out tubes of oil paint, I’m as excited as the day Ade and I won One Direction concert tickets.
‘The oil paints you’ll be using are the water-soluble type, which means you’ll be able to thin them out with water instead of paint-thinner. The reason we’re using this more modern oil is because it dries much faster than the traditional type. Traditional oils take around one to three weeks to dry, whereas these,’ Mr Morrison holds up a tube, ‘take one to three days. That allows you time to keep working on particular sections of your painting across a few days. Say you paint the wing of a dragon in today’s prac — if you come in tomorrow and decide you aren’t happy with the blending of the colours, there’s no need to completely paint over your previous work as you would have to if you were using acrylics. With these oils, you can blend what’s already there a little more carefully or you can add in other colours from your palette. By Monday’s prac, though, the paint will be dry, so aim to be happy with what you’re working on by the end of Thursday’s class.’
‘You hear that? We must be at peace with our work by Thursday afternoon.’ Theo pretends he’s meditating. ‘That’s a little scary.’
‘That’s probably a good thing,’ I say. ‘Sometimes I don’t know how to let a piece be. When I was little, I’d rub out sections of sketches so many times, trying to get them perfect, that the paper would start wearing away.’
‘Perfectionist?’
‘I’m worse with pencil and charcoals than with paint. With black and white, it’s so obvious if you don’t have the form or the lines right, whereas you can hide mistakes better with colour — it distracts people.’
Theo looks amused. ‘You know the story about Michelangelo and Titian, right?’
‘You mean that they were rivals?’
I know about this because I love Titian. The colours in his paintings are something else.
Theo nods. ‘There’s a funny story that one of the guides in the Louvre told us. So, there was a writer called Vasari who took Michelangelo to see Titian’s latest work, Danaë with Eros. This picture here.’ He brings up the painting on his phone — it’s one of Titian’s lounging nudes. ‘Anyway, while Michelangelo’s there, he and Titian rave to each other about how great an artist the other is. When Vasari and Michelangelo leave, Vasari asks Michelangelo what he really thought of the Danaë. And apparently Michelangelo said something like, “Nice colours, but it’s a shame the Venetians aren’t better at drawing.”’
‘Oooh, that’s a little catty of Michelangelo.’ I laugh.
I remember the conversation at the dinner party the other night. Theo would have fitted in perfectly. I want you to approve of him — Ade’s words float through my head. I think of how, if Theo does become her boyfriend, he and I will always have something in common.
‘Total burn, right?’ he says. ‘Anyway, what you’re talking about — colour versus drawing — was debated way back then. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century critics called it disegno versus colorito — basically, whether an artist will produce a better work if they sketch it out on the canvas before painting, or whether they should start with the colour, and build up the layers to discover the forms of the work.’
‘This is a bad debate to start before we put paintbrush to paper,’ I joke. ‘We’ll be second-guessing our approaches. But now that we’re on the topic, what kind of guy are you?’
Theo’s lips, already smiling, curl up further and he raises an eyebrow. ‘Oh, you know, loyal to a fault, very affectionate —’
‘Oh my god.’ I pretend to flick my paintbrush at him, even though we’re yet to dip them into our palettes. ‘You know that’s not what I was asking.’
‘Hey, I’m answering the question you posed.’ Theo mock flicks his paintbrush back at me.
‘What kind of artist are you?’ I give him a not-amused look, though I know my mouth is a dead giveaway of the opposite.
‘I like to pretend I’m a planner. Leonardo da Vinci is my favourite artist, and he was the master of pre-sketches. If someone is willing to break into graveyards and dig up bodies to teach themselves anatomy, they’re obviously dedicated to getting the forms right.’
‘I hope you aren’t following his lead.’ I pretend to edge my desk ever so slightly away from his.
He grins. ‘My uncle’s a heart surgeon. When I was eleven, I begged him to let me into the viewing gallery above the operating room so I could play da Vinci and capture it all. I ended up fainting.’
‘I’m not much better,’ I admit. ‘I get nauseous if I look at the veins in the crook of my arm. I’m terrified of blood tests.’
‘Leonardo would have thought us pathetically uncommitted to our art.’
Mr Morrison comes up at that moment and hands us each an A3 canvas. ‘Today’s a practice run before you decide on an idea for your major piece.’
Theo turns his head to the side, studying the canvas. ‘Do you feel like this is shouting, “Go ahead, impress me”?’
I shrug. ‘Canvases don’t freak me out — we have hundreds at home. It’s the paint I’m simultaneously excited and terrified about.’
‘That’s any first though, right? Riding a bike, putting on ice skates, kissing someone …’
I nod, even though I have no clue about the
last. My lips have never been close to a guy’s. Suddenly I can’t look at Theo because I feel like he might be able to read my mind.
Thankfully Mr Morrison starts the lesson. ‘You’ll see that I’ve popped a bowl of fruit up the front here. Yes, I know it’s an artistic cliché, but studying the shapes and colours of the fruit and attempting to convey them on canvas is a good way to become comfortable with the oils.’
Working with oils is totally different to working with acrylics, and although my lack of skill slightly annoys me, I love the experience.
‘You haven’t stopped smiling the last forty-five minutes,’ Theo says.
‘Shouldn’t you be looking at your own canvas instead of at me?’ I feel uncomfortable. Even at home, I shut the door while I’m painting. Being watched makes me hyper-critical of my work.
‘I don’t want to look at my own canvas. This banana is a travesty. It looks depressed. I didn’t think bananas could look depressed, they’re like the bright, sunshiny members of the fruit kingdom.’
I laugh, and stop painting to look over at Theo’s work. ‘Oh, Jesus. That banana does look depressed.’ I shake my head sadly.
‘Emily!’ He looks hurt.
‘Your orange is more upbeat.’
‘It doesn’t look like it’s taking the picture seriously.’ He steps back to get a better overview. ‘The other fruit look appropriately solemn — you know, like unsmiling royals in the old masterpieces — but the banana has taken solemn a step too far, and the orange is laughing at me for it.’
‘The banana looks depressed because it’s a little flat.’ I gesture at it. ‘You need to build up darker colours round the edge to inject some life into it.’
Theo looks at me instead of the banana. ‘I think I’ve figured out what type of girl you are. You know, besides honest and funny and incredibly surprising.’
I’m so self-conscious I barely hear the compliments, even though part of me is desperately trying to store them away for later, like a squirrel who knows it’ll need sustenance when the weather turns cold.
‘You’re a start-with-the-colour type.’ He’s walked over to my easel. ‘While I was trying to outline all the forms, you were putting down dabs of blues, purples, blacks and yellow to produce that perfect plum.’
‘If you can name all the colours I used, you spent way too much time looking over at what I was doing instead of losing yourself in that bowl of fruit,’ I tease.
‘Watching you feels like a lesson in itself. I’ve got lucky sitting next to the best artist in the room.’
‘I’m not the best artist in the room,’ I say. When you go to galleries as often as Mum and I do, you feel incredibly humbled by the talent of other artists. ‘I just like these paints. They feel so different to acrylics — they’re beautiful to work with.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that, Emily.’ Mr Morrison has appeared. ‘Very nice forms in this one. Have you worked with oils before?’
I shake my head. ‘I’ve watched my mum use them, and seen the way she applies the paint, but that’s about it.’
‘Ms Collins tells me your mum is Isobel Wood? I know her from the gallery, of course. She’s an excellent curator and artist. But back to the oils — do you have an idea of what you’d like to paint for your major piece? Are you an abstract person, or do you prefer landscapes —’
‘Portraits,’ I say. ‘I love painting people, especially faces.’
‘I’ll be very interested to see what you produce,’ he says. ‘I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the top three works from my classes across Years Ten, Eleven and Twelve will be exhibited in the young emerging artists section of Jefferson art gallery’s biennale in December. Ms Collins has shown me your previous work, and I think you have the potential to aim high with this next piece.’
‘You’ve already impressed him,’ Theo says after Mr Morrison’s walked away. ‘That’s cool you’re going to do a portrait. I love sketching people in pencil, but when it comes to paint I’m not game enough. Landscapes are my thing.’
‘It’s all about patience. It took me aaages to get semi-decent.’
‘Do you know who you’re going to paint?’
‘Ade, of course.’
I’ve painted her so many times over the years, but I’ve never felt a hundred per cent satisfied with the results. It’s hardest with the people you love — you want to do them justice, to show the world what you see when you look at them. None of my pictures captured Ade the way I wanted them to, but now I’m working in oils I want to try again.
‘Ade?’ Theo asks.
‘Adriana, I mean. We’re always Ade and Em to each other for short. The girl you danced with the other day?’
Theo nods in recognition. ‘You guys are friends?’
‘Best friends.’
‘I think she’ll be a great subject. She’s very beautiful.’
Sometimes I’ve watched Mum strip sections of colour from her canvas, seen the chemicals eat away what was there. The compliment Theo pays Ade does the same thing to honest and funny and incredibly surprising. I see him and Ade dancing together, Theo’s eyes focused on her face in the same intense way he watched my paintbrush stroke the canvas.
The quicker the inevitable happens, the less it will hurt.
I nod. ‘She’s perfect.’
Secret Thoughts of Adriana Andersson
My name is Adriana Andersson and I am a what-if-aholic.
In the beginning, Emily assumed this meant I have a big imagination. She over-imagines as well, but she calls them her castles in the air, which means her brain builds beautiful things, not the things that keep me awake at night.
One day she asked me what my what-if looks like, and I told her. It feels like a monster that’s taken up residence inside my skull, and there’s barely enough room for it so it crushes everything around it. What-if doesn’t just stand blocking the road ahead to the future; it dances around me, tapping me on the shoulder, forcing me to turn around so it can point out everything behind me: all my idiotic moments, the times when if I’d said something less stupid or more assertive I’d be standing in a completely different spot right now.
The only place I can’t let what-if take me is: What if Mum never left the house that morning? Because that one nearly sent me crazy the first time it entered my mind, and it took me months to get it back in its cage.
But the Dylan stuff? That’s what-if’s favourite food.
What if we’d never been paired up in animation class? Dylan hadn’t mattered before that. He was one of those guys who’s cute but not ‘hottest guy in the class’ kind of cute; and even though he sat behind me in class in Year Eight, I was pretty oblivious until Ms Hay announced she was assigning pairs for our projects. I was terrified I’d wind up with Tatiana or one of the other Tens, but when Ms Hay said ‘Adriana and Dylan’ and everyone laughed like she was announcing us as a couple, I wondered if being paired with him would be any better. After all, he hung around with the Tens and the other popular guys, so maybe he’d refuse to work with me, or use it as an excuse to embarrass me, like they would.
‘Oh my gosh, poor Dylan’s partnered with Puke-a-rama,’ Tatiana whispered.
It felt like it was an actual shout, but I pretended not to hear her.
Maddy giggled. ‘He’d better stand three feet away from her at all times.’
Emily, who’d headed over to join her partner down the front, sent Tatiana a death stare. The Tens didn’t say anything else, but they kept giggling which felt almost as bad.
Dylan appeared at my desk, looking as awkward as I felt. ‘Hey. Want to go outside and plan the project? Ms Hay said we don’t have to stay in the room.’
He was so embarrassed about being partnered with me that he wanted to go where people couldn’t see us? Then I heard Emily’s voice say in my head, Stop being paranoid. Not everyone’s out to get you like Tatiana.
I followed him out of the room. Even if my worst assumption was true, I didn’t want to stay and be stare
d at like a bug under a microscope by all the Tens. We sat at one of the outdoor tables. My eyes traced the knots in its wood.
Dylan launched straight into things, which I was grateful for. ‘Ms Hay wants two thousand words on a topic related to animation. I reckon we should do the project on the rise of Pixar — you know, the guys who did Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Big Hero 6?’
I didn’t know much about animation even though we’d spent four weeks on it. Most of my classes after Mum died were a blur. But I nodded before I looked weird.
‘I’m super into movies,’ he went on, ‘so I know a bit about Pixar already. We can write about how much animation has changed since the first Toy Story came out. Plus, it’s an excuse to watch a bunch of movies and I can tell my mum and dad that it falls under legitimate studying.’ He sounded excited. ‘So, do you want to do the watching at yours or at mine?’
I looked at him, shocked. ‘You want to watch the movies together?’
‘Well, we’ve been paired up for the assignment.’ He looked surprised that I was questioning his suggestion. ‘It seems a whole lot easier to watch the movies together and then work on the essay. So, your place or mine?’
My cheeks went hot because that sounded like something two characters on a TV show would say after they’d been making out for five minutes.
Dylan was looking at me expectantly. But it was a nice, patient expectance, not the eye-rolling I usually provoked.
I thought of my place and how the walls felt like they were seeped in sadness. How some spaces were completely bare as Dad and I had taken down certain photographs because looking at them felt like a punch in the gut.
‘Yours,’ I said, already wondering what if …?
14
ADRIANA
‘Ade!’ Emily is bolting towards the school gates, where I’m waiting for the bus to swing into the bay. She stumbles as she stops and crashes straight into me. The Year Eleven guys near us start laughing.
A bus pulls in — the 243 — which apparently goes straight by my and Dad’s new place.
‘I have to tell you something,’ Emily says, ‘but let’s wait till we’re on the bus.’
My Best Friend Is a Goddess Page 15