The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  My left hand twitches, and I grab my wrist out of instinct.

  Just start.

  The thought is thick and urgent, like when I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, convinced I missed my alarm. It occurs to me that Lilia doesn’t have any canvases or paper in her kitchen—I guess I’m supposed to join her in painting the walls.

  I dump a small can of red paint into a pan and unwrap the new roller. Does the building make me want something? Yes, yes, it does, at last. I want something, and for now it’s to cover these four walls in paint.

  Red is the color of blood, of apples, of the T-shirt I bought on our last, worst all-Moreno family vacation to Key West. Red was Victoria’s face that time I went to see her modern dance company’s performance and I met her backstage and brought her flowers because Connor Hagins sure wasn’t going to. Red was the cover of the first sketchbook I ever filled, when I would sit on the bench outside my middle school in Naples and draw the palm trees, and people’s faces and their shoes. There are red hands and a red tide. Red is flame and fury. Red is a smack on the cheek. Red is thin and shallow and covers everything. Red loves you back.

  By the time Lilia pokes her head into the room, I have painted an entire wall.

  I don’t want to tell her this, but it’s the most I’ve ever painted. The most paint I have used in a day. The most space I have ever dared to cover. It’s the equivalent of thirty big canvases, at least. I drop my roller in the pan and stand back as Lilia takes a walk around the room.

  “So this is it,” Lilia says. “This is what you most wanted to paint.”

  I shrug. For once, I’m not feeling apologetic about my work. “Yeah.”

  “Well.” She runs her hand along the red wall. The paint is already dry. “It’s bold.”

  “Thank you.”

  She leans against the wall, my wall, and her hair and skin are a striking contrast to the red, so much that I almost want to ask her to step aside so I can paint her portrait, right in the place where she was standing. But I think that might weird her out. I’m not even sure if we’re friends, this odd girl and I. She let me into her studio, but I hardly know a thing about her. In the great school cafeteria of life, I feel like she’s perpetually blocking the seat beside her, unwilling to let me in.

  “Who’s your favorite artist?” I ask her.

  “Who’s yours?” she shoots back.

  “Rembrandt,” I say.

  “Liar.” Lilia moves away from the wall.

  “Fine,” I say. “Kahlo.”

  “Nice,” Lilia says.

  “How long are you going to be here?”

  She looks worried about my question, and after hearing Mom cry on the phone tonight, I don’t want to have to deal with a crying Lilia again. But then, she softens. “A few more hours, I think. I just want to make some more progress on the ceiling. You can keep working too, if you want.”

  “I might.”

  Lilia heads to the doorway. “Oh, and if you see any of the others on the way out, be sure to tell them I let you in, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  And from the hallway, she calls, “Your wall is perfect, Mercedes!”

  I don’t think I should be scared of the others. Maybe they’re fellow high school seniors who need motivation and a place to work. Maybe they are fellow veterans of art destruction. Maybe they’re just people who like nighttime and old buildings.

  Still, I’d rather keep painting than risk meeting someone else right now. Brushes, rags, a refill of red paint. A cool, wet towel for my sweaty cheeks. Back to it.

  Another white wall.

  Perfect. Just like Lilia said.

  The red goes on so easily, and when I’m finished with the roller I pick up a thin brush and start working on the corners and edges, making them straight and clean.

  But there is something else this time, something beyond the neatness of my red walls. A pattern appears on the still-white spots of the wall. Something curvy and abstract, maybe. The lines are barely visible—it’s as though they’re being projected in dim light from somewhere just behind me. I grab one of the edging brushes, dip it in red paint, and follow the lines.

  It is so easy.

  The brush, a tough one without much give to the bristles, glides along the lines and leaves a precise, even trail of paint behind. I curve with the line, and where it ends I finish it off with a twisting flourish of the brush. I try it again. The brush makes a pleasant swish—the nicest a brush has sounded in a long time—and I create a perfect circle.

  This is me doing this. I think. I hope. Even though the projection of the pattern seems to come from nowhere but the wall itself, the brushstrokes are completely my own.

  I wonder if this is how Picasso felt when he was working on Three Musicians. Or Frida Kahlo when she was re-creating herself as a work of art. Or, okay, to bring myself back down to earth, how Gretchen Grayson feels as she works on the lizards in the dining room.

  There’s something here. Something for me. A painting that wants to reveal itself.

  I keep going, curving with the brush as an outline takes shape. The soft half-moon of a smile. The sturdy sweep of a neck and chin. The only thing abstract about this painting is what’s going on in the background. The foreground of it is oh so real.

  I hate drawing faces. I think I always have. The feeling of creating something that gets closer and closer to staring at me creeps me out. Should I go further with this painting? The push-pull of the question prickles the skin of my arms and cheeks.

  Mercifully, the lines on the wall fade away. I flop onto the carpet, belly down, arms and legs out, my face way too close to this place that seems to have seen a thousand pairs of shoes and feet. Cleanliness be damned—there could be a clue here to whisper to me about this place, this Red Mangrove Estate, a piece of dust or hair that could show me the whole of this world. It’s like when you meet a new person and you want to scrub away that first layer of awkwardness to get to the one thing that makes them make sense—Oh, so that’s you.

  But right now, this is me. Lying on the floor.

  I guess it’s true whether you’re painting in a classroom or a back porch or a supposedly abandoned beachfront condo—after a couple of hours, you get tired. The paintbrush won’t lift anymore. Lilia has left the front room, and I wash all my stuff and put it to the side of the sink, the same way I’d do at home or in Mrs. Pagonis’s class. I’ve always called it “putting the brushes to sleep.”

  Stepping into the hallway, I want to tell someone what I did tonight: I found this place, I came inside, I started something, I finished something.

  The shadows of sound seep in from other pockets of this building. Somewhere there’s music and conversation and glasses clinking, like the noise of the sort of party that makes your head hum for hours after you’ve left. It’s happening behind other doors, and I pause in the hallway to see if any of them open for me. Two seconds, three, four.

  The brush of footsteps. Someone rounds the corner a few doors down the hallway and approaches me. A girl, maybe a few years older than me, with fair skin, short blond hair, and all black clothes. In this dim, crumbling hallway, she is striking. She’s a flashlight. She stops a few feet from me.

  “I was invited.” I jab back at the door to Lilia’s studio. “Right there. I was working right there.”

  And yet, this place is full of possibilities. Like the possibility that I could open the door to Lilia’s studio and find a blank beige space. Or the place restored to typical Sarasota condo chic, complete with an elderly woman reclining in the orange light of a TV game show.

  But the girl just nods in recognition at the door. “Cool. So you must be good.”

  I don’t know how to answer that.

  “Should I go out the way I came in?” I ask her.

  She nods toward the stairway door, which hangs open under an unlit red exit sign. “That’s the only way,” she says. “But you shouldn’t stay gone for too long, okay?” She smiles, but it’s a first-
day-of-school smile. Friendly but wary. It says she’s not going to ask me any more questions right now. It says she’s not going to walk with me down the stairs.

  I let her go. She heads to the stairwell and shuts the door behind her. It sounds like she’s going upstairs.

  My purple sandals, which usually look so worn-out and dingy, positively gleam against the thin gray carpet in the hall. How many people have walked down this hallway, have leaned against this wall to find their keys in a handbag, have slammed one of these doors for the last time, have run away and then come back?

  How many people are here right now, painting walls red or climbing stairs or playing songs that seemingly never end or begin?

  The music again. It is guitars and horns, and it stops and turns back and picks up a few of the notes from before but then swirls off into something new. It’s live. And even for all the sound, I feel alone here. It’s time to go home.

  eight

  SHIT. ANGELA.

  She’s still pissed about the piano. I don’t think she noticed or cared that I wasn’t home until after midnight. She hardly said a word to me in the house this morning, and so far in the car, all she’s asked is for me to play “that piano song” on the Firing Squad album. She left the front seat open for Victoria.

  “Can we just put that on repeat?” she asks as we pull up in front of Vic’s house.

  I do, because why not? The palm trees wave in front of the Caballinis’ house, and they’re so relaxing that I wish I could sit in the yard for the rest of the day and absorb what I did last night. Vic comes out wearing a brick-red shirt and a black skirt, with her trench coat draped over one arm. Her walk lately has been her ballet duck-feet stride, a rhythmic reminder of Juilliard and how much she’s been practicing for her audition.

  “Hi, Victoria,” Angela says, as soon as Vic shuts the Ford’s door. “Can you please ask my sister to promise not to destroy my stuff anymore?”

  So this is how it’s going to go. Vic makes a terrified face at me and stays quiet.

  “Ange, I said I was sorry. And anyway, the piano’s still fine, isn’t it?”

  “Yup,” Angela says. “But the point is that you wanted to mess with it. You tried to.”

  “I don’t know why I did that.” I brake to let a school bus in front of us. It’s a gorgeous morning, and I am going to be slow and deliberate in it. “And I feel different today. Play to your heart’s content tonight.”

  “I don’t trust you,” Angela says.

  “Okay, seriously,” Vic says. “If you two don’t stop, I’m going to replace your precious Firing Squad with my Broadway playlist for the next month.”

  Angela is silent for a minute. We pass this cool house at the end of Victoria’s street that looks like a castle. If it lit up like the sun one evening, what would Vic do? I can’t imagine her feeling pulled there. She’d probably shut the blinds in her bedroom and go back to reading whatever book she’d pulled from the big stack of paperbacks on her nightstand.

  Maybe that’s the way to go. I could tell Rex to watch out for his renter. I could leave the secret painting unfinished and forget it ever existed.

  “Mom called from the hospital last night,” Angela says over the last quiet chorus of “Always Something Left to Love.” “Nothing’s changed with Abuela. I made up something about where you were and I probably wasn’t very convincing.”

  “Hey.” We’re at the stoplight at Orange Avenue. I turn around and try to meet Angela’s eyes, but she’s staring out the window at an elderly guy riding a bike down the sidewalk. We used to call guys like that Sarasota’s Official Mascots. Actually, we called someone that a few weeks ago, when we were passing Jungle Gardens on the way to the art supply store. It feels like a hundred years and a couple of versions of ourselves ago. “I said I was sorry. I’ll be home tonight. I promise.”

  Mrs. Pagonis has a sore throat, so she’s written the plan for today’s art class on the whiteboard: thirty minutes of independent projects, and ten minutes of constructive criticism with the other members of our color-coded tables. Next to the whiteboard, the photo of the late Food Poisoning #1 has fallen off the wall. I don’t bother to pick it up.

  Gretchen, having set her lizard painting to the side for now, opens her sketchbook to start something new. The scratch of pencil on fresh paper. Thumbnails, outlines, ideas, possibilities. Lines with no color. I get chills, and I don’t know if they’re bad or good. I settle on watching Rider for a minute as he continues to shade his paisley pattern. He’ll notice me soon—ten seconds tops before he looks up and smiles and sends a practiced eyebrow raise my way.

  Mrs. Pagonis paces the room while clearing her throat, and Gretchen shoots thick gray lines across the paper, and the only thing I can think to do is throw open my toolbox and take out my watercolor set. With the paints and brushes and everything ready, I face the first blank page in my sketchbook and make a stroke of red. And another. The brush wobbles in my grip and paint streaks onto the table.

  Gretchen’s eyes go wide with the realization that I could be bringing down the otherwise sterling reputation of the Orange Table. I keep going, pushing my way down the sheet of paper, covering it like the whiteness of the paper is my biggest secret.

  “I just . . . I want to have something for the county show,” I tell Gretchen, which seems to satisfy her, even though the county show has flown to some faraway corner of my mind.

  Once the red page is done, I tear another sheet out of my sketchbook and dive into the blue paint. Blue like my mother’s bathrobe that she was wearing the morning she left for San Juan, that’s still draped over the armchair in her bedroom. Blue like the mac-and-cheese box. Blue like the houses in Old San Juan. Like track three of the Firing Squad album. Like the daisy-print dress Victoria had on for her birthday last year—worn once, and never seen again. Like that pair of shoes I had with the stars on them, the ones I begged my mother for and then left outside in a hurricane. Can anyone look at blue and not wonder, for a moment, if they’re going to fall into it?

  But as hard as I try to experience the colors, painting here is nothing like painting at the Estate. The red page especially looks so . . . flat. There’s no urgency behind it, no danger, except for the possibility of making Mrs. Pagonis regret those recommendation letters she wrote for my college applications a few months ago.

  Mrs. Pagonis taps on the board to signal everyone to switch to the constructive criticism portion of the class period. Oh, yay.

  Rider pushes his pattern into the center of the table first, and Gretchen takes the lead on the critique, pointing out Rider’s use of detail and some places where his lines could be cleaner. I confess I’ve never thought much about Rider’s work, but I wonder if there’s a central theme to it all that I’ve missed. I wonder what he’d say if I tilted my head and said to him, “Who is Rider, really?”

  I snicker at this, then straighten up and stare into his picture.

  “It’s honest,” I tell him, by which I mean, it is what it is. It is tiny angles and microscopic dots of color. It’s repetition. I kind of want to turn it into a shirt or a tablecloth. This isn’t a bad thing, but I still don’t think I’m going to say it.

  And then Gretchen’s lizard picture hits the table with a clatter. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, have at it.”

  “I have a question,” I say, meeting Gretchen’s eyes instead of the lizards’.

  “Sure,” Gretchen says.

  “How did it feel to paint this?”

  “Horrible.” Gretchen glances over to be sure Mrs. Pagonis is occupied at another table. The Yellow Table, where everyone creates appropriately cheery pieces. “Every moment of it was terrifying. I’ve never had a paintbrush feel so heavy, you know?”

  I don’t really know. But I nod.

  “Anyway.” She puts on a smile. “Like it or not, this is going to be my submission for the show.”

  “Well, I like it!” Rider says. I try to shoot Gretchen a look that says, Hey, can we get this dude trans
ferred to the Yellow Table? But she’s busy taking the lizard picture to a shelf in the back of the room.

  When the bell rings, I fumble with my paints and the wet, messy slices of red and blue. Mrs. Pagonis comes over and taps me on the shoulder.

  “Nothing for critique today?” she whispers.

  “Not today.” It’s hard to talk normally when the other person’s whispering.

  “You’ve been off task a lot lately.”

  “I’m putting a lot of ideas together.” I point to the blue-painted paper, the paper part of which seems like it’s going to collapse under the weight of all the paint I slathered on it. Is it even worth setting this page, and the red page, on the back counter to dry?

  “Ideas are fine, Mercedes.” Mrs. Pagonis walks away to cough, and on her way back she grabs the fallen FP #1 picture and tapes it back into place. “But I need to have something to grade you on. I’d love to see you do something like this piece again.”

  “We’ll see.” I drop the red and blue pages in the trash can on the way out the door.

  The Dead Guy’s memorial bench is not quite long enough for Vic—her arms and legs dangle off. But she makes it look comfortable. She even manages to keep her legs together so that no one walking by is able to see up her skirt. Her eyes are closed. It’s always weird when you close your eyes at school—it sticks you in an uncertain place, like when you wake up in the middle of the night and the power has gone out. I try not to get to that place very often.

  Victoria’s tired, though. I know this. Last night was her late practice. The Juilliard people are coming to Miami in less than two weeks, and she’s got her end-of-the-year show to practice for.

  “Gershwin again,” Vic says. “Just like last year’s show. Wait! No, sorry. That was two years ago. You know I never got Rhapsody in Blue out of my head? I still hear it when I’m trying to fall asleep.”