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“Feels like we’re backstage at some Parisian den,” he says with a laugh. “Me Toulouse-Lautrec and you…”
“Some anonymous can-can chick?” I fiddle with the knot of my school tie. I don’t know what Danny’s painted behind the easel, but the music is deep and seductive enough that it makes mewantto strip out of my uniform. “I could,” I murmur with a pointed tug at my tie, letting the offer linger in the air.
Danny visibly swallows. “No.” The soft music entwines around us. “Besides, if I’m suddenly painting nude pictures of you, I think Rory would skin me alive.”
“You know he wouldn’t. You’ve been with us enough to realize that now. He’d hang the painting on his wall.”
“I don’t know,” Danny says quietly with a guilty glance at the canvas. “I think what I’ve painted is more intimate than sex, anyway.”
I pause in surprise. My imagination must be limited because I can’t think of anything more intimate than sex. Whatever Danny’s painted, it sounds serious. It seems he really meant it when he said this may be his most important painting. “Do you have a portfolio I can look at?”
“Mmm,” Danny says, resuming his painting with delicate strokes of the brush. “I don’t know if I really want you to see it.”
“Oh, c’mon. Please? It’s not like I can do anything when the badges need to cool.”
Danny starts to smile. “You could sit still and be a good model for one,” he grouches, but then he points to one of the cupboards by the back wall. “You’ll find what you’re looking for there. Be warned, though, none of it’s any good.”
This is the kind of bullshit self-criticism I’d expect from an artist with his head burrowed behind an easel, meticulously mixing different paints to create just the right shade. Averting my eyes from the easel, I bend low and open the cupboard, rummaging through several large plastic wallets with the names of students on top.
I don’t even need a name label to identify Danny’s portfolio. Its front cover is so vibrantly different from all the rest, a burst of noise and color. Danny’s front page is like looking at the front page of a vintage American comic book, and for some reason it’s this more than anything that makes me miss home.
Flicking through his art, it’s all clear lines and shapes. A lot of it is geometry-based and abstract, playing with how lines intersect, changing the perspective of subjects from big to small. In his larger works, his subjects are either deliberately vague or crystal clear — there is no in-between, nowhere where his forms lack detail and could be improved. The crispest are pop art-style female superheroes with flowing hair and fierce expressions, a riot of femininity and power. The vaguest are of male torsos, the lines starting off hard and deliberate but ending up smudged and soft.
“The other chiefs don’t do art, do they?”
“Fin used to but he gave it up for Higher. Said there were too many rules. Said it was messing with his creativity, that he should be able to do whatever the hell he wanted and screw the rules. There was a big debate about it in class — he was full-on yelling at MacGregor.” Danny rolls his eyes. “He likes to whine, that one.”
I grin. “Likes to be the center of attention, more like.”
Returning to my seat, I lift the miniature clay crowns from the baking tray and onto sheets of scrap newspaper. It just so happens that the sheet of paper shows Benji’s assured, smirking face — making badges upon his head, under his cool gaze, in favor of his enemy feels like a subversive act.
The badges themselves are delightfully solid and cool now. I mix the gold paint onto a small porcelain dish and begin to daub at the badges, taking secret delight in splattering Benji.
An enjoyable period of silence flows between Danny and me as we work on our separate art, the soft jazz weaving between us. I sense Danny’s eyes on me for a long time, as though trying to figure something out about how best to detail my face, and I try my hardest not to meet his gaze with a dorky smile. His focus makes me wonder what the painting of me will look like, where on Danny’s portfolio scale it’ll fall — soft and abstract or clean and bright.
The crowns are small enough that it doesn’t take long at all for the paint to dry. When they do, I outline them with a black marker pen and add in little diamond gems. When I’m finished, they look like 3D cartoons and are almost as good as Danny’s originals.
“Fifty-nine-and-a-bit badges,” I announce, beaming down at all the cute pins. Creating things with your bare hands, it turns out, is extremely satisfying.
“Okay,” Danny murmurs. “I think I’m done, too.” He looks exhausted, his gaze heavy as he scrutinizes the portrait in front of him like it’ll never live up to the image he’d carried in his head. “Do you want to see?”
There’s nothing more I want than to look at Danny’s painting of me. There’s nothing more thrilling than discovering how someone else views you, and art is one of the most intimate ways to experience this. I skip over to the easel in anticipation. Danny instructs me to close my eyes as he spins the easel toward me. And when he tells me to finally open them, my mouth drops in awe.
