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“Nah. It’s not my exhibition. Eddie is a friend, and he did me a favor. I didn’t even tell my parents about it. What’s the opposite of grand opening? Unimpressive finale?” She chuckled, her lips hovering over the straw in her drink. Never in his life had Finn been so jealous of a straw.
“You should tell them, and you should attend; see your work presented, talk to people. You should be proud.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I kinda lost the nerve.”
“You? The girl who eventually convinced the band to play ‘Dancing Queen’?”
She laughed and buried her face in her palms. “Ah, don’t remind me.”
But he loved that memory. It somehow signified more to him now than it had back then.
“I can go with you.”
She removed her hands from her face. “To the gallery?”
“Yes.”
“Why would you do that to yourself? As I recall, you never really liked art.”
“I like art. The kind I understand. You know, the kind I can tell what I’m looking at, like yours.”
She chuckled. “I wish more people like you bought my paintings. I was told to choose a different path, another technique, another style, paint with oil instead of acrylic, or do something groundbreaking,” she mimicked a posh male voice and pushed her eyebrows up at that last word. “When I did, I was told that I wasn’t giving it my all. I guess I just couldn’t feign doing something I didn’t love just because it’s the current taste.” She played with the straw in her smoothie then looked up at him. “That was my quitting speech, by the way.”
They laughed in tandem, leaning toward each other in the process.
“Then you stormed out?”
“Nah, the gallery’s door was too heavy. At the risk of sounding like a whiney ‘no one understands my vision,’ I just bullshitted something about how my style was so backward that it was actually groundbreakingly forward. Then I walked myself dignifiedly out of there.”
They laughed again, and he wanted to grab and hug her right there and shut that self-deprecating mouth of hers with a kiss.
“But he was right,” she said, her gaze drifting to the beach view outside.
“Give it a chance,” he said. “Will you go if I go with you?”
She hesitated for a moment, bringing her eyes to his. “Okay.”
“See you tomorrow?” he asked when they parted.
“You will.”
He picked her up the next day, and they drove to Wayford. She wore a floral dress that tied around her neck, and her legs looked so long, and her skin so fair that he wondered if she tasted like buttercream.
“So, where’s the gallery?” he asked as they walked into what looked like a depressing office space from the seventies.
“You’re looking at it,” she said.
“But it’s an office.”
“You’re supposed to think that. Wait.”
They passed through the space and into a bigger room that looked like a gallery with warm lights, paintings hanging on the walls, a few statues in the center.
“Why waste the room they have there?” he asked, squinting at a statue whose shape didn’t remind him of anything except an oddly-shaped, crumpled piece of paper.
Jane laughed. “Eddie’s boyfriend had this idea to first get you in a certain mood, and then break it.”
“Oh, I’m going to enjoy this,” he said, scoffing and gazing at the well-dressed Wayforders who strolled holding wine glasses. “Do you think it’s champagne?”
