Night Owls

by Jenn Bennett

  I snapped it shut and looped it around my neck. It hung over the top of my breastbone, heavy and polished. I warmed the silver with my fingers and whispered a promise to him: “I will.”

  30

  WHEN THE BIG DAY FINALLY ROLLED AROUND, I WAS A nervous wreck. I’d finished my contest entry and received Jillian’s approval through Jack, and though the paint was barely dry, I got it turned in on time. Now I just had to survive the moment of truth.

  The show was downtown on Geary Street, and traffic sucked. Mom, Heath, and I were stuck in the paddy wagon trying to find a parking space while I was quietly having a stroke over the fact that we were maybe-probably-definitely going to be late.

  I tried to assure myself that I looked good, at least. I was wearing my most flattering dress—black and white polka dots, with buttons all the way down the front and a belt in the middle—along with the gray knee-high boots. I was also wearing Jack’s heart. (When Mom saw it, she asked me where I’d gotten it, and I told her the truth; she’d only said “Hmph,” but that was better than “Throw it in the trash!” so I figured it was okay.) And when I’d stopped by Alto on my way back from dropping off my painting, Ms. Lopez gave me a cloisonné ladybug for luck, which I’d pinned to the collar of my dress.

  But that ladybug was already letting me down, and it only got worse when Heath casually said, “Hey, look at this SF Weekly article on the show tonight,” and passed me his phone. My eyes glazed over as the headline attacked me from the small screen:

  MAYOR’S WIFE TO SPEAK AT MUSEUM-SPONSORED

  STUDENT ART EXHIBITION

  I nearly choked. Heath shot me a wide-eyed look between the seats when Mom was busy complaining to herself about city parking. If this discreet silence was Heath’s way of making up for his massive betrayal, I supposed I’d let him have a few points.

  The article was brief. At the last minute, Marlena Vincent was scheduled to appear at the exhibition. The article described her as a “long-time patron of the arts” and remarked on her extensive art collection. (Her chair paintings? Really?) Apparently, she’d also helped raise a shit-ton of money for Bay Area art education. And of course the exhibition organizers were just “thrilled” to have her on board to inspire the young talent who had entered the contest.

  Yeah. Bet they were.

  It took me several moments of panic to connect the dots to Jack’s “devious and brilliant” plan to attend the show. He had put her up to this! Did she even know I was entered in the contest? Because she definitely didn’t know that I’d painted Jillian.

  Would she recognize her own daughter hanging on the wall? Would she be shocked? Angry? Had Jack even thought this through? He’d seen the photo of the painting, for the love of Pete! He’d merely said it was “perfect,” which already made me nervous enough because he didn’t elaborate, and what if he really didn’t like it but he couldn’t tell me because he’s my boyfriend and he didn’t want to hurt my feelings and this is so different than any other artwork I’ve done over the last couple of years and why in the world did I think it was a good idea to do something so weird for a scientific art contest . . . and, and . . .

  OH, GOD!

  Slow breath in through the nostrils, long breath out through the mouth . . .

  I abandoned the idea of jumping into oncoming traffic and calmed down about the same time Mom found a parking space. Nothing I could do about this now.

  Time to face whatever awaited me.

  The show was being held in a building with several floors of private art galleries, and they were all open late for some once-a-month open house. A guard sat behind a desk in front of four elevators, where signs and a map identified the student exhibition gallery. We wove though stilettos and plastic champagne glasses (private gallery openings) to join the Converse and Sprite crowd (the student exhibition).

  The gallery was pretty big: one room split into three sections with white walls, wood floors, and black track lighting focused on the artwork. A small area at the far end had been set up with a microphone and chairs—for the judges, I assumed. They’d already picked the winners before the show, but the judges were around there somewhere, mingling. I scanned the room for Jack or his mom. Nada. But I did spy someone beefy and muscular and smiling: Noah.

  Heath waved him over, and we all greeted one another.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked him.

  “Long enough to see all the entries. You’re going to wipe the floor, Beatrix.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Saw a couple of the judges looking at it,” he said. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

  Had Noah seen Jack’s mom? He knew better than to mention this in front of my mom, right? Had my fall from grace come up during pillow talk? I imagined it had, and my brother’s shifty eyes confirmed it.

  Heath quickly elbowed Noah and cleared his throat. “Show me where Bex’s painting is, then tell me everything,” Heath said as he pulled Noah away.

  “Good luck,” Noah told me over his shoulder.

  I checked in with one of the organizers and got an artist badge with my name and school listed. Crap. There were more than a hundred entries? When I’d turned in my painting, the person who took it said there were fifty. That was twice as many people to compete against.

  “It’s loud,” Mom said near my ear. “More like a party than an exhibition.”

  “Heathens,” I agreed, eyeing other people with artist badges. They were all boys. Like, nearly every single one. And the artwork was exactly as I imagined: magnified cells, astronomy, close-ups of flowers . . . oh, and one dissection: a frog. It was actually pretty good.

  “A frog?” Mom mumbled. “Please. Amateur.”

  I blinked at her in shock.

  She smiled at me conspiratorially. “Give me some credit,” she said, linking her arm through mine. “I might not be happy about all the crap you’ve pulled this summer, but it doesn’t mean I’m not a proud mama. Where is yours, anyway?”

  I pushed back chaotic feelings and straightened my posture. “Must be in the middle section.” Even wearing heeled boots, I had to stand on tiptoes to peer around the room. When Mom suggested we cut around a group of parents, we turned together and ran straight into the last people I’d ever expected to see.

  Dad and his new wife, Suzi.

  “Hello, Katherine,” he said in his VP voice.

  “Lars,” my mom said in her I want to rip your throat out overly polite voice.

  And before I could filter it, “What the hell are you doing here?” came out of my mouth.

  “Your mother invited me.”

  Oh. Wait—huh?

  Why?

  What was going on here? Just the week before, she was biting my head off and crying over the fact that I’d gone behind her back to meet up with Dad. Now, after a three-year Dad-free zone, she was inviting him to things?

  “This is Suzi,” he said to us, like she wasn’t the woman who’d broken up my parents’ marriage. Then again, maybe she didn’t. What did I know anymore? Relationships were complicated.

  “It’s nice to meet you—formally, this time,” Suzi told me. “It was hard to hear over all that screaming your father was doing.”

  She smiled at me—like, a real smile. She was teasing. No way. I really didn’t want to like her.

  “Ah, yes,” Dad said uncomfortably, then quickly changed the subject. “We saw your painting, Beatrix. It’s very interesting.”

  Interesting. Yeah, that about summed it up. “Where is it? We just got here.”

  “Follow us,” he said, and they began making their way through the crowd like we weren’t all sworn enemies.

  Mom and I sneaked glances at each other. My eyes said, Ten dollars her boobs are fake, and Mom’s said, Not as fake as his smile—why did I marry that jerk, again? She squeezed my hand and everything was suddenly okay. Good, even.

  Until we got to my painting.

  If the room was crowded, the area around my painting was p
acked. I spotted the top of it, with all its bold colors, and my stomach knotted. Maybe this was the worst idea I’d had in a long time. Being grounded and forced into a celibate, Jack-free existence after our single night of spectacular sex had surely rotted a hole in my brain. And speaking of my spectacularly sexy boyfriend, his dark pompadour bobbed above the fringes of the crowd. He spotted me and smiled so big it threw cool water over my roiling emotions.

  In a long-sleeve black shirt, he looked handsome and dressed up, but still very, very Jack. He cut around people and came straight to me, while Mom beckoned Noah and Heath, trying to catch them before Heath spotted Dad—which was a good thing, because all I needed was another public blowout involving my father, if Heath’s reaction was similar to (or worse than) what mine had been.

  But I couldn’t worry about that. I just concentrated on Jack. As he approached, his gaze fell to the anatomical heart pendant at my throat, and a blissfully pleased look settled on his face.

  “You look beautiful,” he said, dropping a speedy kiss on my cheek. But before I could answer, he quickly murmured in my ear, “I need to tell you something.”

  About his mom being there, I assumed. So I whispered back, “I already know.”

  “How?”

  Before I could answer, the crowd opened up to allow someone important to walk through. Jack’s mom, looking stylish in a pink dress, and . . .

  Her husband.

  Jack whispered in my ear, “So sorry. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Mom talked him into coming. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

  This was a total disaster. Why had I done this painting? I could have just made do with what I had of my final Minnie drawing instead of ripping her up in a tantrum. Or I could’ve re-created her. But no. I chose now to do something out of my wheel house, something weird and creative and emotional, which wasn’t me at all. I was all about structure and control. I was black-and-white. Grayscale. This was—

  This was not.

  And it was too late to take it all back.

  Holding my breath, I watched the crowd part like the Red Sea, and Moses himself suddenly stood a few feet away from me. He and Jack’s mom were flanked by security and led by several people in suits, who had to be either the organizers or judges.

  And when the mayor took his hands out of the pockets of his perfectly pressed slacks and crossed his arms, readying himself to look at my painting, I saw the exact moment recognition came. It struck him like a slap to the face. His head jerked back. Body went rigid. Mouth fell open. He worked to move his jaw, but no sound came out. A muscle around his eye jumped.

  The span between two heartbeats seemed to stretch infinitely. I glanced up at my painting and saw what the mayor was seeing:

  Jillian’s round face was painted in quick strokes. I’d copied her hair from old photos, dark and bobbed and swooping over her forehead. Her big eyes were open, and she was smiling shyly. I’d tried to re-create the shape of her shoulders—the painting stopped at her waist—and I’d painted her wearing a T-shirt from her favorite band.

  Minnie’s dissected arm and half-chest were superimposed over Jillian. But instead of looking like the dead flesh I’d originally drawn, I’d painted it to look like the dissections were doors opening to reveal her muscles and organs—like the back of a clock removed to show the cogs and wheels.

  On Jillian’s arm, where the penciled dissection cutaway replaced her scars, I gave the veins and arteries life, painting them in rich red and vibrant blue, extending them into the negative space behind her, where they curled and stretched like the whorls of smoke that floated around her head as she sat at the window, posing for me.

  And in place of the usual anatomical diagram labels to identify the names of bones and muscles, I substituted words from Jillian’s ramblings.

  Memories of her childhood cat. Her first boyfriend. Her favorite book.

  Names she’d given the demons that occasionally spoke inside her head. Things that stressed her out. Regrets.

  Hundreds of words. They filled the space around her, connected by diagram lines and curling veins. They were as precise and neat as I could make them, and lettered with a black paint pen. Jack would’ve done far better, but I liked that they flowed and curved this way or that.

  It wasn’t perfect. And apart from my recycled pieces of Minnie, it wasn’t anatomically accurate. But it looked like Jillian. I knew it. Jack knew it.

  And both Mayor Vincent and his wife knew it.

  “What is this?” he murmured to her in a low voice.

  “This was done by a senior at Lincoln,” one of the suits offered before Jack’s mom could answer. The suit stood next to my painting like a museum guide, holding a flat box beneath a clipboard. Reading whatever was attached to the clipboard, she said, “It’s acrylic and pencil on canvas and paper, and it’s called ‘Hebe Immortalized,’ which I believe is a reference to the Greek goddess of youth.”

  “Hebephrenia,” the mayor confirmed in a flat voice. “It’s another name for disorganized schizophrenia, because symptoms begin during puberty, when schizophrenics are young.”

  A few people in the crowd murmured, impressed with the mayor’s seemingly random knowledge about the subject matter.

  “Who painted this?” he asked.

  “The student’s name is Beatrix Adams.”

  I felt Jack’s big hands tighten around my arms, holding me in place, as if he could read my mind and knew instinct was screaming at me to bolt. But I didn’t. I stood still as a solider and watched the mayor turn around. His gaze flew straight to Jack and then dropped until it connected with mine. If he was utterly unreadable the first two times I’d seen him, now his face was a twenty-gallon tank of raw anguish.

  I inhaled sharply and suffered his stare, which didn’t last long. He swung back around to the painting, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me any longer. Behind his back, Jack’s mom leaned toward me. Her eye makeup was smudged, and she was blinking a lot. Had she been crying? I couldn’t tell whether she was sad or angry, but she put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

  That was good, right?

  Before I knew for sure, before the mayor could burst into a tirade or strike me down with the emotions that made him ball his hands into fists, the suit curating my painting said, “This entry created the most discussion among the judges, and its unusual subject matter and creative use of dissection earned it the number two spot in tonight’s competition.”

  Applause erupted around us as the woman pulled a red ribbon from the box beneath her clipboard and stuck it to the bottom of the painting’s printed identification label before cheerily directing the mayor and his wife toward the next contest entry of interest.

  Second place.

  No scholarship money. No boost for my college applications.

  I had lost.

  31

  IF I HAD MY WAY, I WOULD’VE WALKED OUT, BUT MOM forced me to stay through the ceremony and Mrs. Vincent’s speech about the importance of art in school. I stiffened my spine and graciously accepted my prize envelope, which contained museum passes good for a year, and a bunch of vouchers for art supplies.

  “Oh, gee,” I said out in the hallway with my support team of Mom, Heath, Noah, and Jack. Dad and Suzi lingered off to the side, talking to someone Dad knew; no one had invited him over. “There’s a fifty-dollar gift card for a chain restaurant. ‘Celebrate your big win on us.’ That’s just peachy.”

  Mom took the envelope from me. “I’ll keep this for you, or you’ll likely burn it in some kind of angry ritual.”

  “Wrong child,” I said.

  Heath shook his head. “My burning days are over. Mostly.”

  “I know it doesn’t help,” Jack said. “But even if you’d done what you originally planned, there was no way you were beating Fractal Mitochondria Boy. That was some kind of genius. Plus, you’re just a lady painter, so you’re probably not serious about college anyway. Leave science to the men, whydontcha?”

  I leaned m
y head against his shoulder. “Have I told you how much I like you?”

  “Nurse Katherine is two seconds away from murdering me with her eyes, so maybe you shouldn’t. What? Too soon?”

  “Smart-ass,” Mom said to him, half-serious, half-teasing. I guess one good thing about losing spectacularly was getting Mom to cool her rage against Jack. “Just because you’re charming doesn’t change anything. I’m still mad at you for putting my daughter in a situation that could’ve gotten her arrested.”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Mom,” Heath said.

  Jack sighed. “It’s fair. Guilty as charged, but just for the record, I would’ve taken the fall.”

  Mom rolled her eyes, but it was obvious she wasn’t really angry. “Your romantic heroism doesn’t impress me.”

  A crisp voice floated over her shoulder. “That makes two of us.”

  Crap. I immediately jerked my head away from Jack as the mayor and his wife joined our group. “David Vincent,” he said, introducing himself to Mom. “And this is my wife, Marlena. She tells me you’re a nurse at Parnassus.”

  “No need to worry, David,” Mom said, like he was just some guy or a neighbor down the street and not the local celebrity she’d fantasized about having a secret love child with. “My coworkers are gossips, so I keep family business at home.”

  He nodded at her before turning his mayoral gaze on me.

  Great. This was it. The universe had apparently decided it wasn’t enough for me to waste my summer pursuing something that amounted to nothing more than a pat on the back and endless re-fills of soda at a chain restaurant. No, I was going to have to either eat crow and beg for King Vincent’s forgiveness or defend my painting and risk making things worse for Jack and me.

  Sweat coated my palms. I licked dry lips and looked him right in the eye—which was hard, because he was about the same height as Jack, and about a gazillion times more intimidating.

  “Dad—” Jack started, but his father steamrolled over him.

  “Miss Adams,” he said to me, “I’d like to buy your painting.”