It’s a nearly impossible undertaking, but it’s also the perfect excuse to avoid Lehna. Instead of heading to the senior deck, I go to the art studio, thankful to find my teacher eating lunch in her classroom while browsing the Internet.
Have to spend lunch in the studio, I text Lehna. Just found out I have to give another painting.
Whaaat? she writes back. Because she knows better than anyone that my paintings take days. All the layers of paint that need to dry. All the details I like to add. All the colors I devote hours to mixing as I search for the perfect shade or hue. But as I set a blank canvas onto my easel and open the lid to my box of paints, I think about what Violet said. Art is about creation.
So I create.
I’m making good progress, working faster and looser than usual, not worried about getting anything right. But the lunch period is still too short. I call across the room to Ms. Gao. I tell her that it’s an emergency. “Any chance you could get me out of Ms. Rivera’s class?” Everyone knows that Ms. Gao and Ms. Rivera are friends. We’ve even seen pictures of them on Facebook in normal clothes, drinking cocktails on the weekends.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She disappears and then comes back with her cell phone extended.
“Kate, I am so proud of you!” Ms. Rivera says. “Carrie—I mean Ms. Gao and I are totally going to your show tonight. Of course you can take this time to work on your painting! I’ll announce your event to the class. Just review the last unit of the book before the final if you can. But you’re already getting an A, so don’t worry too much. But just review it in case. Okay, back to work for you!”
I dip my brush in red paint and put my headphones on as Art 2 kids fill the room. I try not to feel their stares.
It might be my best work, and it might be my worst. At two o’clock, I barely look at it. I find a cardboard box and set it inside and walk it out to the courier. I have felt the strange sensation of being the focus of the collective student body’s gaze today already, and the fact that there is a black town car with a man standing in a suit outside of it holding a sign that reads KATE CLEARY doesn’t exactly normalize things.
“Hey,” I say.
“Good afternoon.”
“So, um, the paint is still wet. So if you could just, you know…”
He takes the box from my hands. He looks inside.
“I can assure you that the utmost care will be taken,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you at this time?” he asks.
Teach me how to talk to my best friend again, I want to say. Keep me from fucking things up with the girl I’ve been waiting for. Tell me what to say to someone whose heart has been broken. Because by now, I know that Mark is not being punished for having great sex last night. It was a nice theory, but the harsher truth has been seeping in and soon I’m going to have to face him and do my best to be the friend he needs me to be.
I may not know how to help myself, but I hope I’ll know how to help him.
The courier waits in patient expectancy for my answer.
“Nothing,” I say.
He nods. When he drives away, he takes the speed bumps in slow motion.
* * *
After a period spent feeling the emptiness of Mark’s desk next to me, I look up directions to his house and then head over. He lives on the other side of town from me, in a modest ranch house similar to my own. Instead of the generic green lawn, it’s expertly landscaped with succulents and flowers and vines. As I walk up to the door, I pass a few Adirondack chairs around a tiled outdoor table with a cut-flower centerpiece.
I knock on the door. Wait. Ring the bell. Wait.
Desperate, I try the knob, and it opens.
So now I’ve let myself in, which I never would do under normal circumstances, and I make my way through the tastefully decorated living room and down the hall, in search of Mark’s room. It isn’t difficult to tell which is his: Only one of the doors is decorated with a baseball jersey.
I knock lightly.
“I’m trying to sleep!” he calls from the other side.
“It’s Kate,” I say.
He’s quiet at first. Then, “Kate?”
I open the door. It’s dark inside, so it takes me a moment to focus on him, curled on his bed.
“You found me,” he says.
“Well, yeah, I was desperate. I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” I sit next to him on the edge of the bed. “Way to keep a girl guessing.”
He turns his face toward mine, and my breath catches.
I expected real sadness, but I did not expect this: His face is puffy with crying; his eyes are pink and swollen. I see none of his easy charm, or even his hurt or his worry.
I see no resemblance to the boy who has become my friend.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t text.”
“No,” I say. “Please don’t say you’re sorry.”
“I hid my phone in my hamper. I didn’t want to know if he called me. Or if he didn’t.”
“That makes sense.”
“Katie,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“It was terrible.”
I lift my hand from the bed. We haven’t touched many times, but once I lower my hand onto his arm it feels right.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “It was our fault.”
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was only the truth.”
“I didn’t think it would go that way.”