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Life wouldn’t be so bad out here.
Waves rolling in.
Rushing away.
By the time we’re back at the house, I feel like I just spent four hours at the spa. My head is like a happy, empty fishbowl. My heart is light. My face feels shiny. The air conditioning is a cool glass of water on my skin. The four of us—Vann, Toby, Kelsey, and myself—sit around a tiny table by the kitchen and eat pizza made fresh on the island and delivered to our door by a cute guy named Xavier. The table is full of laughter, good eats, and sweetness. It’s just what my troubled soul needs right now.
“I saw your newest piece,” confesses Vann.
I look up from my plate, my peace wrecked for a split second. “You did?”
Toby shifts in his chair, appearing guilty. “Me too,” he finally admits with a glance at his boyfriend.
“Yeah, I did, too,” chimes in Kelsey, her mouth full.
I look at each of them, then Vann. “What’s your point? Does it suck? Is it terrible?”
“No, no, no,” says Vann, cutting in—and giving a look to Toby and Kelsey, as if they just betrayed him. “You just left it out from working on it last night—you know, when you stepped out for a short nighttime walk—and I saw it, and then Toby was looking for me and saw it, and then Kelsey was looking for Toby …”
“Okay, so you all snooped on my work,” I conclude on their behalf. “What’s the issue, then?”
“The issue is …” Vann sets down his slice. “I … was moved.”
I stare at him, not following.
“The way you captured Adrian on the beach. Your use of light and dark. The poses you painted him in. The colors you chose … and the sensitivity you took with portraying him and telling a story in such a stirring way …”
“Ditto,” says Toby. “Yep, sums it up,” says Kelsey.
I look at all of them like they’ve lost their minds. “I thought you guys hated Adrian.”
“Hate? No. Harsh word. I just warned you about him,” says Vann. “But to be honest … that one painting alone hit a nerve in me. It made me realize you might’ve been right. About me judging him too soon.” He gazes at me. “I wish I could see him through your eyes. I wish everyone could.”
“Everyone’s about to,” points out Kelsey. Toby snorts.
I pick a slice of pepperoni off my pizza and eat it, then frown. “I don’t know. It feels exploitive somehow, using him as the subject of my work. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Didn’t he give you permission?” asks Vann.
“Well, sort of. I mean, he wanted to be my muse. He even posed for a few of my paintings when I sketched them out, but he didn’t know just how far my professor wanted me to take the whole thing.” I pick off another pepperoni, then just stare at it resentfully. “Art used to be more about feeling happy to me. Why are so many artists focused on the misery and darkness? Why is that so appealing?”
“Everyone’s tired of wearing the rose-colored glasses,” says Kelsey. “Some of us can’t afford to wear them. I speak from personal experience.” She eyes each of us at the table, then shrugs. “Maybe the ugly side of life is more captivating or whatever ‘cause it encompasses all the parts of us we try so hard to hide. So when we see it, we get excited, because we realize that maybe there’s a possibility everyone in the world is just as miserable as we are. Can someone please pass the pepper flakes?”
Toby tosses her a packet, which she promptly tears open and sprinkles all over her pizza before going for a big bite. Vann nods slowly after her spiel. “Well said, Kels.”
I frown at my plate, working it over and over in my head. It doesn’t really matter what they try to make me believe; it still doesn’t feel right, and I’m not sure how to reconcile the truth with my feelings for Adrian.
The canvas never lies, Professor Lawrence said.
But maybe an artist can be wrong. And what’s the poor canvas to do but helplessly reflect the false reality as truth?
Long after Vann and Toby retire upstairs early and Kelsey heads out to meet a friend, I’m on one end of the couch with my sketchpad (the territorial cat is on the other, eyeing me irritably) and I’m tiredly weighing whether or not I should call Adrian to see how he’s doing.
My phone rests on the end table by the couch, face-up, blank as a stone. The TV across from the couch has some late-night game show on I’m not really paying attention to, the volume nearly at zero. Through the window behind me, I see the long road that leads down to the beach, lined with weathered, colorful houses and quirky streetlamps.
