You Know Me Well (8 page)

June and Uma are each nibbling sandwiches while Lehna talks, gesturing grandly about something. I wonder if Lehna and I would become friends if we met each other today. If we hadn’t had hundreds of sleepovers, if we’d never painted murals in my garage, if we didn’t stand next to each other, hands clasped and hearts swelling, at that Tegan and Sara concert in eighth grade.

If Lehna and I were to find ourselves, strangers, standing in a line in an art store or a café, would we each think enough of the other to start a conversation? And would we laugh at the things that were said?

I honestly don’t know.

June and Uma, yes. Now they are changing positions, sitting so that their backs are together, June’s short black curls against Uma’s blond waves, each using the other for support. If I saw them, let’s say, getting burritos after school, I would find them irresistible. But even that certainty doesn’t feel like enough right now. An initial spark isn’t enough to sustain a friendship. June and Uma are the kind of couple who can’t even have a one-on-one phone conversation. They always put me on speaker. And their voices sound so alike that I rarely know who is saying what, which used to bother me before I realized that it hardly mattered. They’re practically conjoined anyway.

Uma catches sight of me. She waves. And guilt crashes in. These are my
friends
. I walk down the steps to the wide, wooden deck and sit next to Lehna without looking at her.

June and Uma turn their faces to the side to look at me, cheek to cheek with their backs still pressed together.

“Hi, Rising Art Star,” June says, smiling at me behind glamorous sunglasses.

“Hi,” I say back, grimacing in a way I hope shows that I don’t take myself that seriously.

Lehna pulls a peach out of her bag and takes a bite. She holds it out to me. It’s such a tiny gesture, but it makes me swell with gratitude, and that makes me want to cry.

I’m so confused.

I take a bite of her peach and hand it back.

“I want to hear all about Candace,” I say.

“She’s totally in love with Lehna,” Uma says.

“I don’t know about that,” Lehna says. “We talked, though. We talked for a long time.”

“Three hours,” June says. “That’s an epic conversation.”

“What about?”

Lehna shrugs.

“Everything,” she says. “College. The future. Everything.”

I nod, but as she tells me more all I think about are the conversations that she and I have
not
been having. About college, about the future. The one where I tell her how afraid I am and how this new fear scares me. The one where I confess that I don’t know how I got into UCLA’s art program, because I’m sure my work isn’t good enough, and once I get there they’re going to find me out. I’ll be laughed at; I’ll be humiliated. And the one where I tell her that
nothing
about college excites me: not the dorms or the dining hall, not the possibility of a great roommate or great parties, not the classes that will supposedly blow my mind or the memories that will supposedly stay with me forever.
Nothing
. I feel like a fraud every time anyone asks me where I’m going. They are always impressed, and I always feign excitement, and all the while I’m trying to stop time from passing, stop summer vacation from coming, stop classes from ending, stop everything.

“She’s going to Lewis and Clark,” Lehna’s saying, “which is great because Portland isn’t that far from Eugene, so we could meet up on weekends. She can’t decide whether she wants to major in history or math. She knows she wants to be a teacher. Can you imagine being just as good at history as you are at math? She’s so smart.”

“Cool,” I say, trying to sound enthusiastic, but I wonder if she can see through me.

I feel like she should, because friendship is about more than facts. It’s about knowing what someone is thinking, or knowing enough to know that you don’t. But I guess it’s also about not letting too much time go by without asking them questions, so you don’t end up looking at them one afternoon, the sun so bright you have to squint, realizing that you hardly recognize the person they’ve become. Maybe, when it comes to friendship, both of us are getting this wrong.

“Holy fuck,” Uma says.

“What?” Lehna and I ask in unison.

June doesn’t have to ask, because Uma is showing her something on her phone. Both of their jaws drop.

“Katie,” Uma says.

“Kate,” June says.

“Have you been on Insta today?”

I shake my head. I’ve been avoiding my phone.

“You have, like, five billion new followers.”

Uma shoves her phone at me, and it’s true. Where I used to have a modest number of followers, mostly people I know in real life and some friends I’ve made online, now the number doesn’t even make sense to me. There are way too many digits. I click on my latest picture—an elephant painting—and there are over three thousand likes.

“What the fuck?” I say. “Look at this.”

I hold the phone out to Lehna. It takes her a moment too long to take it, but she has no other choice. She looks. She frowns. She scrolls through the pictures and comments until she stops and her eyes narrow.

“AntlerThorn says: ‘Rumor has it a show with the fabulous Kate Cleary is in our future.…’” She hands the phone back to Uma. “That gallery was on the list I found. The best new galleries? How did they…? How did you…?”

She stares at me, waiting.

I could tell her about Garrison Kline and his friends and how they promised to work magic for me, but Lehna isn’t asking out of real interest or curiosity. Instead she seems angry, as if the art show wasn’t her idea in the first place. I barely looked at her stupid list.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” I ask her.

She turns away.

The bell rings before I can say anything else, and we all stand up and gather our backpacks and lunch remnants and try to ignore the tension between us.

*   *   *

Today is a studio day in Art. All I have to do is paint. I block out the world with my headphones and Sharon Van Etten.

I begin something new.

Squeeze paint from tubes. Mix the color of a circus tent, a sky at dusk.

Violet
.

Fifty minutes disappear with my brush on the canvas and the thought of her, and then I am washing the colors down the sink and Elsa stops next to me to return a tube of glue to a drawer.

“Finally,” she says. “The tent.”

“What do you mean?”

“All semester you’ve had these circus elements. The elephant with the star; the tightrope; those hoops on fire. And now, finally, the tent.”

“I didn’t know it was so obvious.”

She shrugs.

“I wouldn’t call it obvious. I’d call it a theme.”

“Thank you,” I say. “And, oh, the cover of the journal looks great.”

“I was afraid they weren’t going to get it printed on time. I mean, we get
yearbooks
tomorrow. We have four days and then it’s over.”

I dry my brushes. I try to keep breathing. But the thought of my last yearbook, full of goodbyes from everyone I’ve known almost all my life, leaves me shaken as I make my way to the math hall. Each minute is bringing me closer to a future I’m not ready for.

But then I see Mark. And I feel better.

I sit next to him at the desk where I’ve sat every day for several months, but for the first time I turn to face him.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” he says.

We smile.

“I may have blown your cover,” I confess. “I saw Ryan.”

Mark’s smile wavers.

“He asked me about a Sylvia Plath essay.”

“Hm.”

“Sylvia Plath wasn’t in our plan. I am all for bending the truth for a worthy cause, but I can’t say it comes naturally to me. But did I get you in trouble? I hope not.”

He leans back in his chair.

“Who knows? At least he asked about it, I guess.”

“Did he ask about anything else?”

“Not in a way that made me want to answer. Did she?”

“Not really.”

“Well,” he says, “it can be our secret for a little longer.”

Ms. Kelly tells us we’ll need to take notes, and soon we’re all unzipping backpacks and digging for pencils.

“Please say you can hang out after school,” I say.

“Definitely,” Mark says.

Ms. Kelly begins her review, and Mark and I turn toward the board.

I stare at equations, copy what she’s written, but soon I drift back to Violet.

7

MARK

When I find Katie after school, she looks completely freaked out.

“What?” I ask. “What is it?”

She holds up her phone.

“It’s AntlerThorn. AntlerThorn wants me.”

“Wow,” I say. “Antler Thorn, huh?”

She nods. “AntlerThorn’s already sent me a graphic to post to Instagram. So I posted it. This is so surreal.”

“It most certainly is. I just have one question.”

“What?”

“Who’s Antler Thorn? Because I wouldn’t have pegged you as the type to be getting calls from gay porn stars. And Antler Thorn sure as hell sounds like a gay porn star.”

“It’s a gallery. The one Garrison told us about, remember? AntlerThorn. One word.”

She says this as if it makes much, much more sense as one word.

“That’s awesome, right?” I say. I don’t know much about the art world, but having a gallery want you must be like being scouted by the majors, at least.

“It
is
awesome. Except it’s also weird. Because it’s a lie that’s coming true. The only person who thought I was having a gallery show was Violet. And now a gallery wants me to have a show there.”

As we head to her car, she explains more of the backstory. I do not tell her that I am slightly distracted thinking of some of the outfits that Antler Thorn, Gay Porn Star™, would wear. I’m not sure she’d appreciate that.

I also know that Ryan would. I almost want to text him and ask him what he thinks when he hears the phrase
Antler Thorn
.

Then I imagine him responding:

Let me see what Taylor says.

I have to stop. I am spiraling into ridiculousness.

We’re at Katie’s car now. She points to this big, big zip-up envelope thing sitting on the passenger seat.

“I want you to look through those and pick the twelve I should show them.”

We get in the car and I tell her, “I’m not sure that’s the best idea. Ryan’s the art person, not me. If you want to go through it, I’m happy to drive.…”

She shakes her head. “If I try to go through it, it will take me about twelve hours, and at the end of the twelve hours I’ll be certain I am the most pathetic excuse for a non-artist in the history of everything. That’s just the way it is. And we don’t have twelve hours—I am supposed to be there by four. Because they’re doing this show of queer artists, and apparently one of the photographers had to take down his pieces because they were all reproductions of his cheating boyfriend’s Grindr chats, pictures included, and the boyfriend is threatening to sue.”

“Fortune does have a strange way of smiling, doesn’t it?” I say, unzipping the carrier. She’s going to have to drive fast if we’re going to make it downtown by four.

I really don’t know anything about painting. I don’t know whether the colors I see are right or if the shapes make sense. I couldn’t tell you which painters Katie is like or what style she’s painting in. But almost immediately I can tell one very important thing about Katie’s paintings: She means them.

I feel like I’m reading her journal. A journal made of poems, where the spaces and word arrangements are just as important as the words themselves. These paintings are not still lifes. There is nothing still about the life within them. Everything she’s pictured has elements that are present and elements that are missing—you feel the presence and the absence and have to figure out whether the figures are almost complete or just starting to dissolve. A rope stretching across the sky, with a girl trying to balance atop it. The rope is solid, but neither end is attached to anything. In another painting there’s a girl peering into a ring of fire. You can see her face all around the hoop, but when you look inside it there’s a starry sky where her eye should be.

A Pegasus with only one wing, turning toward the ground.

A starfish with a missing limb … but it’s the missing limb that you feel reaching toward a comet.

A lion with a whip for a tail.

An elephant trying to curve its trunk around a crescent moon.

And then, in the next painting, the crescent moon trying to curve itself around the elephant.

She’s painted these things as if every single one of them is real.

“I should turn the car around, shouldn’t I?” Katie says when I’ve been silent for too long.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” I reply.

Katie seems satisfied by this.

“It’s just a lot for me to take in,” she says. “It’s one thing when your friends are seeing it. Or people at school. But with strangers—it opens up something else. It gives a whole different dimension to it. Because suddenly the art has to stand for itself. That’s weird to me.”

“You’ve had plenty of scrimmages with your team, but now this is the game,” I say.

“Yes. This is the game.”

I sense there’s something else she’s not saying. So I go, “And?”

“And … I can’t help thinking it’s tied to her. None of this would have happened without her.”

“None of it would have happened without you, either.”

“I know. But I guess my point is that it’s the combination. Her and me equals this. However directly or indirectly. This.”

We drive a while longer, letting Sky Ferreira and Lorde do the singing for us. I finish looking at her art—even though I’m strictly amateur, there are some pieces that can be eliminated easily. Rough sketches that are rough because they haven’t found their subject yet. Assignments that feel like assignments. A collage that’s supposed to be political but only ends up being obvious.

“Have you made your choices?” Katie asks.

I can’t believe she trusts me. But I nod anyway.

“Good,” she says. “Keep those in the portfolio and throw the rest in the backseat.”