Breakable Read online

  “I can’t believe you brought that up!” I gasped when I could breathe again.

  Mark chuckled. “I’m sorta proud of it, actually. The first time I got naked with a girl I was seven!”

  “Ugh! Stop!” It was completely innocent, of course. We’d stood across a room pulling our shorts up and down so fast we barely saw more than pink skin, then giggling and shushing each other. I still laughed whenever I thought of it. “It was your idea. Pervert.”

  Mark shrugged. “You could have said no.”

  I smacked my forehead dramatically. “Why didn’t I think of that?! Thank you! Now I know what to do next time you ask me to get naked.”

  In my head it sounded like a joke. Taunting. But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, all I could see was Mark and me back in my bedroom. Except we weren’t young and innocent anymore.

  And Mark must have seen it too, because his laughter died right next to mine.

  Our eyes latched and my pulse thumped in my ears. I wanted to make light of it, laugh it off. But the look on his face…

  There was shock in his half-open mouth, his wide eyes fixed on mine. It made my hands shake. He had no right to look at me like that.

  But he did. He kept staring and I kept imagining him standing in front of me, his hand lifting to touch my face, fingers trailing down my neck to the top button of my blouse. His lips closing on mine. His skin on mine. His breath in my mouth–

  I stood up so fast my chair tipped over. “I’ve got to get some painting done.” The easel room was only two tables away. I grabbed my workbook and fled. But a minute later Mark’s chair screeched. While I wrestled with the screws on an easel, he came up behind me and leaned in, his arms circling my shoulders to grasp the wretched thing. Under his hands it complied, of course.

  “Thank you.”

  Then I was just there, knelt between his arms. I pushed to my feet, but with the easel on one side and Mark on the other, there was nowhere to go. Mark’s hands fell back when I rose, but he didn’t move away.

  I was close enough to see the tiny pin-pricks of stubble in a line on his jaw where he’d shaved too fast. I imagined running my lips along it, touching the rough barbs with my tongue–

  “Stace?”

  Go away. Go away. Go away. You’re hurting me. “What?”

  “Last night, when I found you upstairs…”

  “I told you, it wasn’t as bad as it looked.” Damn! Why did he have to bring that up?

  He grimaced. “No, I mean…” He leaned closer.

  “What?” My heart beat too fast. “What?!” I said, a little harder because I knew what it looked like when a guy thought about kissing you. But Mark wouldn’t be thinking about that. Would he? Oh, God, please let Mark be thinking about that.

  Mark swallowed, but didn’t look away. “It made me mad,” he said softly.

  I waited, but there wasn’t anything else. Just him, standing too close, staring at my mouth.

  He couldn’t be doing this. Was he implying that he thought about an “us”? Him and me?

  Then Mark leaned down, his eyes on my lips. I stopped breathing.

  Just do it, Stacy. Just lean in and kiss him. Just do it.

  I sucked in a breath and started tipping towards him when the door into the art room shuddered and thumped.

  “Stace? You in there?”

  Mark and I sprang apart like a rubberband snapping under too much tension. I almost knocked the easel down and had to twist around to save it. While I worked on steadying it, I cursed my luck. Dex? Now? Really?

  “Stace?” Dex called from behind the locked door.

  I stumbled past Mark, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me to a stop.

  Yes. Yes. Yes.

  I looked him in the eye, but he didn’t say anything.

  The door banged again and I kept staring, waiting. Tell me to ignore it.

  Mark opened his mouth, then closed it again. He cleared his throat and let go of my arm. “You better get that, I guess.”

  Disappointment opened a hole under my feet. My stomach sank with the drop. I nodded, stumbled out of the easel room and across the floor, to the door where Dex had his hands cupped around his eyes, peering through the window.

  Pasting on another sick smile, I waved and, flipping the lock on the door with shaking hands, pulled it open for him.

  That didn’t just happen.

  Mark didn’t just look at me like…

  No. He didn’t.

  Dex gave me a quick kiss, then flashed a gorgeous grin. “I thought maybe you’d left already.”

  “Nope.” Shrug.

  Awkward pause wherein Dex kept glancing at the easel room and I prayed Mark was out of sight.

  Then he smiled at me again. “Well, it’s lunchtime. Hungry?”

  “Famished,” I lied.

  “Great. I’ll take you–”

  “We aren’t supposed to leave the room unlocked.” Mark appeared in the doorway to the easel room, arms folded, no expression on his face.

  “You can stay ‘til I get back. I’ll only be half an hour.” I pulled Dex towards the door before he could figure out something had happened.

  “But–”

  Dex followed easily and I was too busy getting away from Mark’s eyes – from the almost-kiss-that-wasn’t – to want to hear more.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  After an entire weekend wondering what would have happened if Dex hadn’t shown up, Monday was a disappointment.

  First period dragged. Mark acted completely normal in second period, so I wondered if I’d imagined that he wanted to kiss me. At break, by unspoken agreement, Mark left for the rec room and I stayed in the art room to sketch. Except I ended up staring at the wall.

  I couldn’t face running the gauntlet of the halls, so at lunchtime I was back. I pulled my workbook and folders out of my cubby and sat at a table.

  I’d left a pencil between the large pages, so the workbook opened right to the sketches of Mark. Flipping through them, I pretended to examine technique, when really I just wanted the excuse to stare. But eventually I pushed the pages aside and ran into the sketches I’d done in bed that night after the dance.

  Karyn was there. Finn. Mark.

  People were my “thing”. Mrs. Callaghan encouraged me to use the human form in my portfolio as much as possible, because I was good at it. But I felt most vulnerable when I drew people I knew. So I’d largely avoided them.

  Sure, I could get the curve of Mark’s dark lashes right, the shape of his eye… but how did I communicate the warmth beneath his skin in a cold, shades-of-grey sketch?

  I flipped back to the image of Finn and imagined turning the idea into a painting – using a spatula for hard lines to depict the sharpness of his features, heavy thick paint for his rhinoceros skin, fat brush strokes for his eyebrows, like caterpillars over his eyes, his long mouth a venomous slash of red and purple.

  For Karyn I’d use glossy pastels – waxy crayons that shone on the paper. They’d do justice to her hair. I could layer red and white and beige and cream to make her cheeks blush. Then, when everything was done, use a tool to scrape her eyes out of the heavy wax so they cut through the viewer like they did through me. Her dimples would be hard to get right. I’d need to cut them into the acrylic, like her eyes. Holes in a poisonous blanket.

  As her face came to life in my mind, I sniggered and pulled out the crayons to give it a shot. My hand moved quickly, inspired. A snapshot of possibilities sprang up on the paper in minutes – a shiny, waxy, plastic face that hid the darkness beneath.

  I’d run a candle flame along the edge of her paper so it burned unevenly. The sooty remains would leave a dark stain on anyone who touched it.

  My imagination ran away with me…

  I flipped to a new page and Mom emerged in pencil, smudged across the paper, most of her face turned away.

  Dad could be the opposing panel. His face an empty shell, just a few simple strokes without features.

  I
tried Mrs. Callaghan next, but her greying waves ended up looking drab instead of unruly, and I couldn’t quite make her eyes twinkle. She’d need paint – her lined cheeks highlighted with blues and greens, her nostrils black and red. Every color of the rainbow in her face – outshining even the gypsy-clothes she wore. She’d be the only one with color in the background.

  Then I started on Dex, but couldn’t figure out what to do with him. He ended up a vague, two-dimensional representation of himself. If I hadn’t known better, he could have been any good looking, teenage guy. A caricature.

  Starting on Mark felt natural, but as soon as I’d outlined his face, my hand froze.

  I couldn’t do it. Drawing Mark this way would be like cutting my chest open and revealing my heart. The warmth in his eyes would make me feel cold because they always turned away from me. The gold-silver threads of his smile were accusing fingers, pointing, taunting my unrequited love.

  With a shaking hand I flipped back through the workbook to the sketches I’d done of him on Saturday.

  They were rough, piecemeal snapshots of him. But taken together I had almost all his features from the shoulders up. Only his mouth was left unfinished.

  Intrigued, I pulled the paper from the book and ripped around the edges of each sketch until I had seven bean-shaped pieces of paper, each with a disproportionate body part on it.

  Taken together they looked like Picasso’s shot at realism – one eye open and from the front, the other downcast on profile. His nose was too big and his jaw took up the space where his shoulders should have been.

  Chuckling and wondering if I should show Mark, I taped each picture to another piece of paper in the rough arrangement. After punching holes in the side and putting the whole thing back into the workbook, I stood up, intending to grab my paints and start work on something worthwhile.

  But the ‘portrait’ caught my eye. From a few feet away, the overall impression was much clearer. Mark – all mutilated and betwixt – stared at me from the paper.

  I opened the sketchbook again and pulled each of the new sketches out, laying them across the table, envisioning the finished products and sparking on ways to strengthen the impressions from each face.

  Butterflies swarmed in my stomach. I had an idea. But I wasn’t sure I had the courage to back it up. Or the time. It was only a few weeks until the portfolio was due. It had taken a year to get this far. Then again, each piece had been like pulling fingernails because they weren’t real.

  But this?

  This was real.

  To make portraits depicting not what each person looked like, but who they were to me.

  To tell the judges about my predators – and my saviors. They wouldn’t know who these people were. They would judge only the artistic impression.

  No. No, no no… No, I couldn’t. It was too risky. If anyone here saw them…

  But I could work at home. And Mark would keep my secret – especially if he didn’t see me work on Karyn’s portrait. I could do all the planning in my breaks, then use the weekends to draw and paint. I was a lot faster with a pen than a brush. I could use acrylics, colored pencil, normal pencil. It would be harder to impress, but if I could deliver something special, the simple tools would only make the work stand out–

  “Dear Lord, Stacy. This is genius! When did you do these?”

  I shied. Mrs. Callaghan stood to my right, eyes wide, staring at my sketches.

  “I… uh… I was just fooling around…”

  She nodded. “That’s when I do my best work too. But even in these strokes you’ve captured…” she blinked and swallowed, turning to look at me, understanding dawning on her face. “Has anyone else seen these?” she asked, hushed.

  I shook my head. “Of course not.”

  She nodded, then turned back to the table, her eyes flipping from picture to picture, flashing with delight when they landed on the one of her.

  “I think if you can work hard and… Stacy, these will be breathtaking.”

  She leaned over the table and gathered the pictures together like a stack of cards, pulling each from the top to the bottom and examining them individually making small approving noises in her throat.

  Even though it felt kind of violating since she’d know every face there with the exception of my dad, a warm blush spread through me in the face of her approval.

  She stopped leafing through the drawings and looked at me. “Are you brave enough? Because they’re very…revealing. If any of your classmates see them, they’ll understand what you’re saying, I think.”

  “I know. I was just thinking that. It’s risky.”

  “You’d have to keep some of them at home.”

  I nodded. “But there’s so little time.”

  “Yes. But if you’ve done these in just a few minutes… Stacy, if you work hard and get a dozen of these complete, I really think you’ve got a shot at a scholarship.”

  I glanced at the picture of Mom in her hands. “I can’t do all of them at home.”

  She shook her head. “No. You’ll have a bit of a balancing act on your hands, I’m afraid. But I can help. I can let you come in on Sundays too. By yourself. If your mother gives her approval.” She flipped to the next page – Dex. “You’re dating him, aren’t you? The new one?”

  “Dex? No. I mean, I don’t know. But we’ve been out a couple times before. In the past.”

  She nodded. “Strange that his is the picture lacking life.” She glanced at me, tapped her lip one more time, then put the papers on the table and turned to face me. “Okay, this is the bottom line: You have seven weeks to finish your portfolio.”

  Her finger tapped the top picture. “I’ll let you use the art room all weekend for the next month if you go ahead with this concept. You’ll have to use every spare minute because you’ll have to completely rebuild your workbook too. But you’ve already got that nude which would work alongside these. And it looks like those pieces of Mark might make up another.

  “On top of that, you have to do a self-portrait. I know that’s something you were struggling with anyway. In the face of these illuminating pieces, your self-portrait would have to be exceptional.” She glanced at the table again. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Ugh. Yes. “I think so.”

  “Good. Then go into the easel room and get started right now. I’ll get you excused from your afternoon classes, just this once – let inspiration take you while you have it. By the end of the day I want to see at least half a dozen developed sketches, canvas sizes and material lists for each. Do you understand?”

  My heart thumped. “Sure, but I thought most of them would be pencil, charcoal, crayon. You know. That way I can cut and scrape–”

  “You’ll have to paint at least two of them – and there’s got to be a multi-media. Oh dear, maybe this is too much–”

  “No! No, I can do it!” I didn’t know why, but suddenly everything else I’d been working on seemed very pale and boring. “I’ll get the others done first and finish with the paintings when I know how much time I have.”

  “You’ll have to make the self-portrait the central piece. It will have to be amazing.”

  “What?! Why? I thought the Mark stuff…”

  She shook her head. “You’re telling a story with these, Stacy. You’re opening yourself up to the world. It’s what true artists do. But if you hold back, it will give everything else the sense of, I don’t know, plastic. Each of these is telling a story about you. So you have to be the central piece the others orbit.” She held my eyes and her gaze was sharp.

  I swallowed. Could I do that? It was hard enough to imagine someone seeing the picture of Finn or Mark. But me?

  “I tell you what. Let’s not make a decision now. You spend this afternoon figuring this out. You’re going to have to be really organized if you’re going to get this done in time. So sort out what you’d do, what would go where, and how you’d put it together. Then we’ll see if it is even worth pursuing, okay?”r />
  I took a deep breath and nodded.

  Mrs. Callaghan patted my shoulder. “Good girl. The bell’s going to ring in a minute. Get yourself into the other room and I’ll check on you later.”

  Right on cue, the bell clanged in the hall outside and the door flew open to admit a couple seniors who frowned when they saw me but didn’t speak up.

  I scrunched the sketches a little in my haste to get them out of sight, but hustled into the easel room to set up a work station and pray I could convince Mrs. Callaghan to let me go easy on the self-portrait. I’d do something awesome with the Mark one. Knock her socks off. Then she’d forget about me.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  For the first time, Doctor looks troubled. I scan back through everything I’ve just said, trying to figure out which part is bothering him. But then he taps his lips.

  “Stacy, I think I should tell you: I saw your portfolio. Or rather, images of each picture. Given the part your art plays in all this, I asked to see them when you requested to leave.”

  “What–?!”

  “Your last therapist made a note of them. So, I contacted the school.”

  “That’s not fair! I didn’t give those to you. You can’t just go snooping around in my life.”

  Doctor grimaces. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you know sooner, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get them. Your teacher was right, they’re incredibly revealing.”

  “They’re art, not therapy!”

  “Relax, Stacy. I said they were revealing. I didn’t say I was concerned about them.”

  Pause. “You aren’t?”

  “Heavens, no! I wish all my patients could communicate themselves so articulately. I’m glad you did, they give me a very clear picture of your views on each of those people – and yourself – prior to your incident.”

  I swallowed hard. “They do?”

  “Yes. Even more than your recollections of events, I think, because your memories are tainted by your choices to hide things or modify them as you think I want to hear.” His expression is kindly, but there’s a warning in those words.