Chapter 10

Fitz comes in an hour later with his skateboard in hand.

“How’s your new song doing?” I ask.

“1000 streams,” he says, beaming, and his smile throws me off for a second—it’s not often I see one on his usually stoic face, making him look boyish and carefree. “It’s the most I’ve gotten. Think I’m finally getting somewhere.”

“And your grades?”

“My grades are fine,” he says, smile dimming. “Why you gotta always ask me about that?”

“It’s my job. And guess what happened. I had Eris over.”

“Eris was here?”

“Yep. We’re finally getting to painting. Where’s Dad?”

“Think he went grocery shopping.”

“With what money?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“How am I not supposed to worry? Now that this competition is taking up my time, I won’t even be able to focus on selling more of my art.”

Fitz sighs. “We’ll be okay. But how was it with Eris?”

“Tolerable,” I say. “I made it several hours without wanting to puke in my mouth, so I think we’re actually getting somewhere.”

“Maybe she ain’t that bad.”

“I don’t know how you can stand her. How you can look at her and not be reminded that her family and their little mafia games is the reason we’re in the mess we’re in.”

Fitz shrugs. “That was between her dad and ours. Nothing to do with her.”

“Even so. She’s insufferable.”

He nods. “Aight. Anyway, I’m heading out again. Wanna come skate with me?”

“Absolutely not. And how many times do I have to tell you to bring a helmet?”

“Fine, I’ll bring it.”

He leaves, and the only way I can think of distracting myself from everything is to focus on the painting.

I start slowly at first. I think of all the images and shapes I planned last night, and they come back to me in faded blurs. I go for my usual geometric style, wanting it to contrast against Eris’ parts of the painting as much as possible. This isn’t the time for a relaxed approach. I get out my rulers and measure angles and lines, employing various geometric ratios to make sure it looks as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

First a stroke. And then another. And then another and another, each carefully placed, ensuring its maximum effect. By the time I’m finished, it’s dark outside. I notice my stomach’s grumbling once I snap out of my art-induced trance.

I look at it again, and my face tenses. I thought it was fine before, but now that I observe it from a distance, I see it for what it is. A clash of blue and yellow. Fragmented rays of sun. Eris’ simple realism with my geometry. Contrasts, but not working together. Too separate, too distinct. The parts don’t merge together to make a whole. It doesn’t look good, no, far from that. It looks like two separate paintings jumbled together in a disorienting, haphazard mess.

It’s terrible.

And I can’t stop thinking about it until my dad comes in with bags full of groceries.

“How did you afford all this?” I immediately ask, stepping inside from the porch.

He sets the reusable cloth bags down. “I sold one of my paintings.”

He’s sold most of his paintings in the last few years as we’ve struggled, and there are only a few left.

“What about the money I gave you last week?”

“I gave it to William to help with the rent,” he says.

I stare at all the food that will be gone within a week. With three males in the house, yeah, it goes fast.

“Are you going to paint more to make up for it?” I ask.

“I’m planning on it,” he mutters. “What I’m worried about is that they won’t sell like the other ones did.”

“The other ones only sold because of Iker Lugo’s dirty money,” I remind him.

“Sometimes I miss it. That part of my life.”

“When your paintings were being bought by literal drug lords?”

“Not only them.”

“I understand,” I say. “You miss the attention. The status. The niche articles written about your work, being a topic of conversation at artsy people’s dinner parties. I don’t blame you. I miss when my work was getting recognized, too. You know I know more than anyone what it’s like to work endlessly for crumbs.”

He lowers his head, rubbing his face with his hands—as if he can wipe away years’ worth of grief and exhaustion with that single movement.

“I never told you it would be easy to be an artist,” he says.

“Yeah. Look at me now, resorting to working with Eris Lugo at a shot for the grand prize.”

“You’re going to work with her after all?”

I nod.

He gets up and starts casually putting away the groceries. “Just,” he begins, then stops to clear his throat. “Just don’t let the past repeat itself.”

“It won’t,” I reassure him. “We’re just painting. That’s it.”

“I wish I could take it back. What I did. Even though while it was going right, everything felt so much better than it does now.”

Now there’s a big stain on his reputation, and it’s up to me to redeem the family legacy. His mother was a painter, too, though she never had much success—her paintings are still at one of his brother’s house back in Ottawa, collecting dust.

I go collect the finished painting from outside. “Here’s what we got for round one.” 

Dad stops to inspect it for a moment—in that calculating way artists always do.

“Well,” he says. “It definitely shows the contrast.”

“Admit it—it’s terrible.”

“Not terrible. Just very clear that you two are not quite in sync.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“Maybe you should’ve tried a test painting first. See how the two styles come together.”

“That… probably would’ve been a good idea. I’ve just been in a rush to finish it as fast as possible and get her out of my face.”

“That won’t work.”

The idea of having to patiently work with Eris for hours and hours more, experimenting and even letting her have a say in what we paint, surrounded by the waft of her strong vanilla perfume, the way she reaches up to pull at her hair, watching her whole posture change as she puts a brush to canvas, fully focused and still in a way she never is otherwise… fills me with dread.

“Okay,” I say, dejected. “Thanks for the feedback.”

The next few days are an internal battle. I’m not happy with the painting. The bitch was actually right—it did end up looking messy. But what am I supposed to do? Getting her to cooperate with me was difficult enough, and I don’t think she’ll accept starting the painting over again. I decide to go over my parts with an additional layer of paint, smoothing out the colors and making sure they complement Eris’ side of the painting better, and I wonder if for once in my life I’ll have to put my perfectionist tendencies aside and simply accept.

No. There’s no way I’m doing that.

Instead, I decide to scrap Eris’ parts of the paintings and do them myself. I scrape off the paint and then go over with a layer of white. Erasing her work makes my head spin with a pleasant rush, my heart beating in my ears. It’s like I’m conquering her through the brush strokes, erasing the evidence she was ever in my house, holding my brushes, using my paint.

Over the next two days, I make the painting mine. I keep the color palette and Eris’ overall design, but I split the scenery into triangles, bigger than the ones I used for my side of the painting—in order to keep the whole contrast thing consistent—but what was once a boring desert scene comes to life with geometry.

By the time I’m done, it looks great. A very Persephone-esque painting, yes, but great.

So I turn it in to Montoya. The next week passes at an absurdly slow pace, and I don’t interact with Eris once. I can’t help but think about her situation, the cartel rivals closing into San Diego. I imagine Axel, decapitated and left for dead somewhere in Mexico. I imagine Iker with a bullet through the head. It shouldn’t make me feel nauseous, but it does. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in the sunny hills of California—a whole underworld of blood and money and drugs I can’t even begin to fathom.

I see Eris around school with her friends, and this time there’s a blonde girl constantly at her side, arm wrapped around her shoulder. I know nothing about her other than the fact she’s in the school band, playing the flute at those obnoxious school pride pep rallies. It doesn’t surprise me—it’s like Eris has a little harem of girls on rotation. I have no idea what any of them see in her other than her money. 

I distract myself with other art projects. But even when I paint, accompanied by the visuals of my own internal dream world, this deep sense of solitude engulfs me. I’ve always been independent—never really been one for friendships—but ever since Axel, I’m brutally aware of just how nice it is to have someone to talk to sometimes. I tell myself most people aren’t worth it. Small talk bores me half to death. I can’t stand the “Where are you from?” questions and then the inevitable, “Oh, you don’t look Canadian.” It’s the same thing every time. Sure, I have Fitz and my dad, but other than that, it’s me against the world, armed with nothing but my ambition and my art.

At times, I wish I could verbalize how I feel, but I guess I get that from my dad as well. Unable to get out of my head, expressing myself only through art. I’m so used to being alone, and that can’t be the only problem. So what is? This anguish that hasn’t left ever since my mother’s death, this sense of drowning in my own colors. I haven’t established myself in history yet. All I want is for my paintings to be studied in future art classes, but I’m not at that level yet. If I die, I’ll be forgotten. The idea shouldn’t feel this suffocating.

I worry about Fitz. I see both my dad Marcus’ complacency and William’s recklessness in him—along with a need for something greater than parallels mine. I have my art, and he has his music and his weed and his skating, but one night we end up talking about how it just isn’t enough.

“What we need,” he muses from the top bunk, “is transcendence. Total destruction of the ego. What the Buddhists talk about. Reaching nirvana.”

I laugh. “Oh, and how are you going to achieve that? Fasting and meditating twelve hours a day, going off into the mountains with the monks?”

“One day I’d like to try. But there has to be a way. Something… faster or something.”

“You know, being so impatient doesn’t seem like a sign of enlightenment to me.”

“I’m not impatient,” he’s quick to say. “Just curious.”

I fall asleep, and the following day is the same as the rest. The monotony of waking up, doing my breath work exercises, my stretches, eating breakfast, brushing my teeth and doing my skin care, and going to school. Then coming home, doing homework, thirty minutes of cardio and twenty minutes of strength training, showering, skin care again, then painting, dinner, watching documentaries on my phone, and then sleep. It’s the same thing every day. There’s a tedium that permeates through every minute, this inherent lack of meaning that can’t be filled no matter how many hours I project my soul onto a canvas.

My mom used to be the strongest out of all of us, and now she’s gone. Growing up in Haiti, she didn’t have time to feel bored and mope about the pointlessness of existence—she would scoff at those “first world problems” and say it’s time to get to work.

And that’s what I tell myself, trying to remember her voice echoing those words from the long years of my childhood. Crying was weakness, inaction was weakness, stagnation was weakness. The purpose of life was survival, and here I am trying so desperately to fill her place.

One day, Ms. Montoya calls me and Eris into her office to tell us we passed to the next round.

The relief is immediate. It makes all the late nights spent worrying, thinking over and re-evaluating every stroke of paint… worth it.

“I didn’t even get to see it finished!” Eris exclaims, turning toward me. “You didn’t even send a picture of it to me when you were done.”

I stiffen in my seat. “You didn’t ask.”

And then Montoya pulls it out from behind her desk. And a pit forms in my stomach, and I relish the brief second before Eris takes a closer look and realizes what I did.

Her face falls. Her brows furrow. She stares at the painting, then back at me, and I mentally beg her not to say anything. The competition is about contrasts, and I can’t let Montoya know that I essentially took over round one.

Finally, Eris looks away, and the venom in her voice makes me shudder when she says, “That passed? Damn, Ef, we gotta do better next time, or we won’t make the cut.”

“Well,” Montoya says. “I won’t keep you two out of class. Start thinking of an idea for the next round—the painting is due in two weeks.”

We leave her office, and once we’re out in the hallway, Eris pushes me against the lockers.

“Mind explaining what the fuck that was?”

But she didn’t tell Montoya the truth, so I’m good. I actually think this may work out for me.

“You were right,” I say. “The painting ended up looking messy, so I painted over your parts.”

“Without fucking telling me?!”

“Yes. Without telling you.”

The ripped stockings she’s wearing only serve to make her look even more like a bum. Her vanilla perfume is suffocating, stronger than usual. Probably to mask the stench of all the shit she spews from her mouth.

“What happened to this is supposed to be a collaboration?” she snaps, getting all up in my face—which is funny since I’m so much taller than her. I push her away, but she’s relentless. “Two artists, not one. For you to paint over my work and turn it into fucking triangles—I can’t.”

She’s seething. She’s royally, rightfully pissed. I think of the rush I felt blanketing her strokes in white.

“If you wanted to keep the styles consistent,” she says, “you should’ve just told me. We could’ve come to an agreement. I can paint triangles all day long, pendeja. I can do your style with my eyes shut.”

“Oh, really? I’d like to see you try.”

“There’s nothing of me in that painting. Nothing.”

I lean against the lockers, crossing my arms over my chest. I’m wearing my favorite dress, yellow with little pink roses on it, and it always makes me feel more confident than usual.

“What is you?” I challenge. “You don’t even have a distinct style. All you do is rip off her classics.”

She steps away from me. “Fuck you.”

“That’s all you have to say? You know I’m right. And we passed to the next round because of me. Because of my art.”

“You know what? Fine. Be that way. You need this competition a lot more than I do, and I’m not giving that to you. I’m not going to swallow my pride and let you make me your bitch only for you to spit all over my work.”

Well. I did not expect that.

“Go find some other way to support yourself,” she spits. “Because I’m telling Montoya I’m done.”

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a/n: this chapter is dedicated to ZeroReader09 !! thank you for the comments & patience with the slower updates, it’s much appreciated <33