And We're Off

by Dana Schwartz

  The sea could be dark and stormy and turbulent and terrible, but there, in the corner of the canvas, there’s a ray of light coming out through the clouds, piercing the painting like a sword. It’s like he was able to paint the confusion and anxiety that goes on inside a person’s head. Maybe I can too.

  I’ve never painted water before, or at least I’ve never painted water like this before: the sea spanning out to the horizon, ebbing with light and dark spots and tiny plopping fish and capping waves that crest and disappear. I put everything that’s bothering me in this painting: My fears that my mom can’t seem to get a life of her own are represented in a looming wave that’s ominously close to crashing; my anxiety about not being a good enough artist are the craggy cliffs by the shore, casting a shadow on the rest of the work; and my loneliness is in the tiny sailboat I paint in the distance, a ship that’s not actually there but only in my imagination, manned by a girl who decided to leave all of her expectations behind and just try to live on her own. Maybe if my mom could empathize with this more, our relationship would be defined more by interactions like the one we had this morning and less by conversations that always turn into fights.

  “Hey, Picasso!” Callum climbs up the hill behind me.

  Just seeing him is enough to make me smile involuntarily. I wish I were the type who could hold a grudge, but I can’t help myself. My stomach does an entire gymnastics floor routine. Silver medal to America!

  “I’m painting the sea,” I say back. “You should be saying, ‘Hey, Turner.’”

  “And imagine you as Timothy Spall? Never.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He’s so casual. He’s acting like I didn’t just storm out of the studio like a maniac. He plops down in the grass and crosses his legs. “Timothy Spall played Turner in the movie Mr. Turner. And you two look nothing alike.”

  “You watch a lot of movies.”

  Callum cracks his knuckles. “Well, I’ve spent a lot of time on buses traveling back and forth between Donegal and Dublin. Visiting Mum, then Dad. Trying to make nice.” He cracks the knuckles on his other hand. When anyone else does that it drives me crazy, but for some reason, when Callum Cassidy does it, it’s the sexiest thing alive.

  I sit down in the grass next to him. “How long have your parents been divorced?” I ask, a bit worried that I’m overstepping my boundaries.

  “Since I was four,” he says, looking out toward the water. He doesn’t elaborate.

  “I get it,” I say, scooting just a little bit closer to him. “My parents got divorced two years ago. My dad just got remarried. I think it’s screwed up my mom.”

  Callum doesn’t say anything.

  “Oh,” I add, “and my dad married my former math teacher.”

  He still doesn’t look at me, but he does smile, and his hand inches closer to mine.

  “My dad thinks that after uni I’m coming straight back here to work on the farm with my uncles,” he says. “My mum hasn’t told him I’m applying to law programs. He’d be furious—he thinks I want to be just like him.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “He’s never left Ireland in his entire life! He has lived in the same house since he was born. I just . . .” He trails off and looks at me. “What’s your dad like?”

  “Well, the truth is, my dad isn’t even my biological dad.”

  “What do you mean? You were adopted?”

  I start slowly. The only person who knows about this is Lena, but I feel so comfortable with Callum that I want him to know everything about me. “My parents got married when I was three. My mom got pregnant with me when she was in college, and she dropped out to take care of me. Then she met my dad.”

  “But you still call him your dad?”

  “Well, yeah. He’s my dad. He raised me. He legally adopted me when he married my mom, and he’s still my dad even though they got divorced.”

  “But do you know who your real dad is?”

  “My dad is my real dad. The other guy is like . . . I don’t know, like a sperm donor. My mom said if I wanted to get in contact with him when I was sixteen I could, but . . . I don’t know. I have a dad. I never really felt the need to meet some stranger who shares half of my DNA.”

  We’re quiet for a few minutes, just holding hands, looking at the water. I feel Callum’s thumb trace up my palm and then back down. He turns to me, grinning.

  “So, how weird was it that your dad married your math teacher?”

  “So weird. But as bad as it was for me, I don’t think it can compare to how my mom reacted. She walked around the house like a zombie for a full month before the wedding. I swear, the only time she opened her mouth was to tell me to choose a more practical career than being an artist.”

  “She doesn’t want you to be an artist? But you’re so good!”

  “I mean, I kind of get it,” I say. “She’s had to take care of me since she was, like, twenty-two, and my grandpa is an artist and didn’t become successful until he was already old, so she was really on her own for most of it. And now that Dad left, she has to make sure I have everything, and it’s hard, y’know? I think she doesn’t want me to have to go through that. She wants me to always be able to take care of myself.”

  Callum kisses me, soft, right on the lips, his mouth parted just enough to let through a hint of wetness. He’s close enough that I’m filled with his smell: peppermint toothpaste and wet ground and clay. He pulls away, just an inch, and I can feel his cheek soft against mine. “I have a feeling you’re always going to be able to take care of yourself, Picasso,” he says quietly, right into my ear.

  I am weightless. Dizzy in the best possible way. Desperate to keep him this near to me forever, his voice always so close to my ear that it sends tingles through my brain, neuron to neuron, firing back and forth until I can’t think of anything except him, that smell, that taste.

  Why can’t all of life be like this? I make a mental promise to try to paint something that’s able to capture this moment—when you open up to your crush and he opens up too, and then the two of you lie in the grass listening to the water, waiting for the moment when you can kiss each other again.

  20

  IT’S JUST ME and Bartholomeow at five A.M. in Studio A, the earliest I’ve ever voluntarily done anything in my entire life. I was up even earlier, consumed by eagerness to begin a painting that would sum up how I felt about Callum. Free studio time is a privilege, Áine reminded us at the beginning of the session, a privilege given to students in their last week of the program to display the skills they have gained and apply them within their own creative framework. Whatever that means.

  Áine talks so much about the link between emotion and art. Thinking about the quadruple backflip my stomach landed when I saw Callum come up the hill by the cliff, I know that he’s my key. The painting is going to be abstract—I know that much—but the details of it aren’t quite perfect. I decide to make the canvas green, like the grass we were lying in, but I try to swirl a dry brush in the paint while it’s still wet on the canvas in order to create texture. It’s something Declan showed us a few days ago.

  I look over at Maeve’s canvas; hers already looks close to finished. It’s a self-portrait done all in orange, her features blocked into cubist geometry. It’s not enough that Maeve has to be a gorgeous painter; she’s also plain gorgeous.

  I force myself to rip my eyes away from her canvas and instead look at the words Áine painted in curlicue letters on the studio wall: THIS ABOVE ALL: TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE.

  You got it, Polonius. I turn back to my own canvas, which, in the previous six and a half seconds, seems to have gotten far worse. But I take a deep breath, get lost in the heavy metal music, and paint.

  “Start winding down,” Áine calls a few hours later, turning down the music. Bartholomeow weaves between our feet, rubbing himself against us as if he knows he deserves
a reward for not distracting us while we were working.

  My painting isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely pretty good. It feels good to break out of my rut and create the kind of art that could actually be in a museum rather than on a Tumblr page. I’ve never painted anything abstract before, but with every heartbeat I’m replaying the words Declan emphasized the other day: structure, using the space on the canvas, creating contrast, having a visual focal point. The words that were once so confusing and vague now seem to make sense. I’m thinking back to how I felt with Callum and putting it on the canvas. Maybe this is what being an artist is. Maybe I actually can do it.

  Áine paces behind us, commenting on our work. Tess tore up old newspapers and painted them onto the canvas, creating a really interesting texture.

  “That’s wonderful,” Áine says. “I can’t wait to see how this comes along.”

  Tess beams. Hers is good, but I’m secretly impatient to hear what Áine says once she gets to me. My improvement is obvious. This is the best thing I’ve done since I’ve been here. It’s like my brush is acting on its own, just swirling colors and patterns in ways I couldn’t have even fathomed before this program.

  “Nora,” Áine says, and she swallows once. “Hmm.”

  Her beaded necklace jangles ominously. Someone coughs.

  “What do you think?” I ask.

  “Well. I think you might be able to add some depth.”

  Depth? What does that even mean? This is an abstract painting. What kind of depth?

  “It’s abstract,” I say.

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  I don’t say anything, so she continues.

  “I’d say that if you’re really serious about making artistic progress in the long haul, you have to sacrifice immediate results for the good of creating something worthwhile that takes a little longer.”

  Tess looks over sympathetically, and I want to punch her in the face. I want to punch everyone in the face.

  “Oh” is all I can manage to say.

  “It’s not bad!” Áine says quickly, reading my face. “I just think you should refocus on exactly what sort of artist you want to be.”

  “Oh,” I say again.

  “I’m just anticipating you hitting an upper limit to the amount of progress you’ll be able to make if you keep thinking of art as so . . . linear.”

  I don’t know what her words mean, or maybe I’ve just tuned them out, shut down my brain against someone actually saying what the tiny voice in the back of my head has been whispering to me my entire life.

  I haven’t heard Áine criticize anyone’s work yet. The harshest thing she’s said is when she told Rodger that he should use a warmer color palette on his sunrise. And now she’s practically telling me that I shouldn’t be an artist. I fight the instinct to splatter my palette on the canvas and ruin it completely. Áine gives me a smile, like she did me a favor, and moves on to look at Maeve’s fucking perfect painting.

  My eyes and cheeks burn. If I had a magic genie, my first wish would be to sink through the floor and disappear completely. My second and third wishes would be the exact same thing, just to make sure he heard me. I know if I stay in the studio, I’ll cry. I have to get out.

  “I don’t feel well,” I mutter, and I grab my canvas and run toward the studio door, getting wet paint all over my T-shirt. I don’t care. All that matters now is getting as much distance from Áine and the studio as physically possible. I’m running from something inevitable. I don’t have what it takes to be an artist.

  Bartholomeow trots behind me, and I resist the urge to kick him. I make it out of the studio and walk down the eerily silent hall until I burst outside.

  “I spent twenty years learning to paint like Raphael . . .” I think back to the slides Declan showed us in workshop of Picasso’s early work. By the time he was a teenager, Picasso was sketching photorealistic bodies and painting portraits that looked like they were done by a Renaissance master. I’m seventeen, and I can’t even do an abstract painting. All I’m good for is little cartoons on the Internet. I almost have to stop myself from laughing. Some of my most popular posts on Ophelia in Paradise are cartoonified versions of famous characters and paintings: Mona Lisa, The Scream, Grandpa’s The Reader and the Watcher. That’s all I’ll ever be good for—not creating anything original, just sucking like a parasite on artists with real vision and hoping that my mediocre ability to use a stylus on an iPad can get me a few hundred responses from strangers online.

  I see it clearly: If I decide to be an artist, I’m choosing a life in Evanston, commuting to my job making pamphlets and tweeting for the marketing department of some soulless company that makes honey barbecue peanuts or yoga pants for dogs. I will wear a wardrobe from Ann Taylor that I don’t iron often enough, and I’ll join a gym that I’ll never go to, living at most forty minutes from the home I grew up in, able to drive back at a moment’s notice to take care of my mom whenever she gets lonely or wants me to be there for dinner.

  I don’t realize how hard I’m crying until I stop running and gasp for breath. I must look like a mess: dripping with tears and snot, covered with paint. And I have nowhere to go.

  Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back to the cottage to talk with my mom; Evelyn took her on a trip to Galway, and they won’t be back until tonight. Maeve is still in the studio. The only person I want to see now is Callum. He had so much faith in my work, and the painting was supposed to represent something we had together. He’ll understand it, maybe—or even if he doesn’t, he’ll hold my hand and make me forget all about Áine and my nightmare of spending the rest of my life in a cubicle, drinking lukewarm cups of coffee and saving up vacation days to squeeze in a week to see the rest of the world before returning back exactly where I started.

  I don’t know where Callum is, but I have a hunch. Even if he’s not there, I want to go back to the spot in the cemetery where we spent the night. I want to sit on that stone bench and look at the painting I made to represent the two of us together.

  My heart swells when I see a figure on the bench—Callum is there. He’ll put his arm around me, and I’ll close my eyes in the crook of his soft leather coat, and he’ll tell me that I’m not hopeless.

  The cemetery seems empty except for him, facing away from me, his shadow bigger than I would have expected up against the tree. I hear female laughter from somewhere I can’t quite place, which seems odd because I haven’t seen anyone else in the cemetery. And then I get closer, and my throat tightens up, and I forget to swallow. I see the mass of Callum’s dark curls, and I see long, red hair leaning against his shoulder, in the crook of his soft leather coat, where I should be. Their backs are to me, and when I hear the girl—it’s Fiona, it has to be Fiona—laugh again, the sound is like a weapon, hurting my head and tightening my chest.

  All I can think of is getting out of the cemetery without them seeing me. The worst thing in the world right now would be them turning to me, Callum with the shadow of his falling smile on his face, trying to pretend everything is okay, that he wasn’t just sitting in our spot with his arm around his ex-girlfriend. And Fiona would have to look mock concerned, maybe put on a condescending, exaggerated frown. Oh boohoo, the little American girl with a mucus-green streak in her hair thought she was something special? Callum likes gorgeous redheads, not mediocre wannabe artists.

  The last time I felt this way was when Lena texted me that she and Nick had hooked up, and then an hour later, when Nick texted to tell me he was now going out with Lena. I made him swear not to tell her what happened between us, and he swore, but now every time I think of Lena I imagine her furious at me for keeping this secret, sitting with Nick, them laughing together about how pathetic I am, how I had sex with Nick thinking that he’d be interested in me and how he ignored my texts for the next four days because he thought I was great, really, but he just wasn’t interested in me like that.<
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  And now Callum is back with Fiona. I run away. I’m still holding the painting, I realize—the one I made to represent how I felt with Callum. The corner of it digs into my side. From far away, I think I hear someone call my name, but it’s too late; I’m already running as fast as I can toward the cottage, throwing the painting I made into the dumpster behind the studio with a satisfying clang.

  The clang is still ringing in my ears when the crying stops.

  21

  OH, THESE WERE the moments angsty pop music was built for. I imagine when Taylor Swift wrote “Forever and Always” she knew that somehow, years later, a girl would be alone in a cottage on the rural north coast of Ireland and be blasting it on her laptop speakers while she mixes together sugar, oil, cocoa powder, and flour in a mug and eats the resulting brownie-batter monstrosity straight out of said mug with a spoon. And, for that matter, why would Thirty Seconds to Mars ever have recorded “Kings and Queens” if they didn’t know that I, Nora Parker-Holmes, would be singing it alone, dead sober, while drawing doodles of sad girls lying on couches and standing in showers and hiding under blankets?

  By the time I hear my mom and Evelyn unlocking the back door of the cottage, I’m already hoarse from singing and nauseated from the makeshift desserts I’ve poured into my gullet. I’m sitting in my bed, wearing a tear-stained sweatshirt and rereading the first book in the Categories trilogy, Blood Chosen, hoping I can disappear within the familiar worlds, rejoining Val in her oppressive, comfortable, easy Colony where the boys are always handsome and love you more than anyone else. I’m just at the part where Val is talking to Ermias about how nervous she is for the Test when my mom opens the door to my room.