Ezra shrugged it off and acted like he wasn’t really hurt. He decided to move on. But I’ll admit it: Declan really made me feel like shit. I know he made Ezra feel like shit, too. I’ve never forgiven him for that. I probably never will.
Ezra tests the chicken out again, breaking a wing in half. “I’d ask him, you know, about his family, or what it was like growing up in upstate New York, but he’d just sidestep all of those questions. Trying to get a secret out of him is a good idea,” he says again, “but I don’t think Declan would tell anything to a stranger he met online.”
Crap. I know Ezra’s right. “But I don’t know what else to do,” I tell him. “I’ll just have to try.”
He shrugs. “All right,” he says with a Good luck tone.
I pull out my phone. “What should my username be?”
“Shit, this chicken’s so fucking good,” he says, mouth full.
“That might be a little long.”
He takes a second to think. “Felix is a thing in Harry Potter, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, racking my brain, trying to remember—it’s been a while since I read the series. “It was that thing Ron thought he drank for luck in that Quidditch match.” Felix means “lucky” in Latin. Its meaning is why I chose it to be my new name in the first place. When I figured out that I’m not a girl, and I started making all the necessary changes, I knew I’d lucked out.
Ezra nods at me. “How about Lucky?”
“Oh—what about Lucky?”
“That’s what I just fucking said.”
I type on my phone, trying a bunch of different iterations of Lucky, until I finally have a username that hasn’t been taken: luckyliquid95.
“Sounds dirty,” Ezra says with a smirk.
“Whatever.” I enter the username. I hate that I remember Declan’s username, but I do—I type it in the search bar: thekeanester123. (Honestly, that name should’ve been a red flag for me and Ezra from the start.) I swipe through Declan’s images. A bunch are pretentious black-and-white photos of himself, set up with severe lighting from antique lamps and gauzy curtains. A couple are of food, cityscapes with the sun shining in between buildings, some of him and James standing in front of graffiti, him and Marc at Yankee Stadium.
But most of the posts are of his illustrations.
I hate Declan Keane. Like, really freaking hate him. But even I have to admit that the guy’s got talent. Real talent. The kind that can’t be taught. The kind that can’t be imitated.
I’ve always leaned more toward acrylic portraits, and I know that I’m good. But Declan’s artwork is . . . indescribable. There’s no label to put on it. Collage, maybe? He uses so many different mediums. Charcoal sometimes, pastel others, simple pencil or ink. But it’s really his use of negative space that’s so stark. It seems simple, at first glance—but it’s the kind of negative space that reminds me of looking up, through the branches of trees, to see the sky shining behind it, or the space that’s between something as fine and intricate as lace. The subjects of his pieces are always interesting—a bird with a broken wing, a woman with traditional neck rings and modern hoop earrings, a simple hand. But it’s always—always—the negative space that he builds around the subjects with his designs and pieces of newspaper, leaves or crumpled-up tissue, what seems like literally anything he’ll find on the ground—that puts his artwork above everyone else’s.
What makes him a better artist than even me, really.
It pisses me off to admit it. I hate that it’s true. But it is. Declan’s a better artist than me.
With his artwork, and his Ivy League pedigree, and his impeccable grades, Declan is definitely going to get a spot at Brown. He’ll probably get that scholarship, too, even though he doesn’t need it. Even though he’s an asshole and he doesn’t deserve it.
I scroll through his artwork and start liking a bunch of the posts at random. I comment on one piece. Great use of negative space! I comment on another. What materials did you use for this?
Ezra’s decimated an entire carton of chicken and fries and begins to start in on mine, so I grab a wing. “I don’t know if I want to look at my dad for at least another twelve hours,” I tell him. Especially now, after the gallery—if my dad calls me by my birthname, I might just flip out on him. “Okay if I stay over tonight?”
“You ask that literally every time,” Ezra says, “and literally every time, I say yes.”
“I don’t want to be presumptuous,” I say. “What if you—I don’t know, have a special friend coming over or something?”
He lets out a barking laugh. “Special friend? Felix, you’re with me twenty-four seven. When am I supposed to meet this special friend?”
I shrug. “Or what if you get tired of me, but don’t know how to say it?”
Ezra rolls his eyes, grabs my phone, and turns it to Spotify. The Fleetwood Mac station is still on, so “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum begins to play. Ezra gets up and starts pirouetting around and around—he’s been classically trained since the age of five. I pick off a couple leaves of the weed, grab some of the paper that’s waiting beside the TV, and roll while Ezra kicks his leg all the way up to the beat, toes pointed and all. The lighter is at the edge of the counter in the kitchen—I click, click, until the paper sizzles and smoke wisps into the air. Ezra slides to my side, and I pop the bud in his mouth. I yank open the window that faces an empty alleyway, and we crawl out onto the fire escape, legs dangling. The sun is starting to make its way down. The sky’s darker, purple hues off on the horizon.
“You ever wonder,” he says, squinting up at the sky, “why we’re here?”
Oh, God. High philosophical Ezra is the literal worst. “There’s no reason why we’re here. We just exist. That’s all. That’s it.”
“No. Not like that.” He screws up his face in frustration. “Why here, in Brooklyn? Why this program? Why art?”
“Uh—”
“Why any of this?” he asks a little too aggressively. “Seriously, Felix. Why not science, or business, or—literally anything else?”
“I think you’re a little young to be having a midlife crisis, Ez.”
“What if this is my midlife crisis?” he demands. “What if I’m going to die in exactly seventeen years and I’ve wasted my life on this, on art and painting and fashion and all this creative bullshit, because I thought it was my passion, when really, I’m meant to be doing something else?”
There’s a spark of frustration in my chest. Ezra gets to have a midlife crisis at the age of seventeen because of his privilege and his family’s wealth. Me? I have to figure out what I want to do and work my ass off for it if I want to have a chance of any sort of future. I’m never going to have anything handed to me, the way that things are just handed to Ezra. But I try to push those feelings aside—and maybe it’s the weed, but Ezra’s paranoia sinks into me, too. I mean, who’s to say that I shouldn’t be an astrophysicist? Or that I’m not actually the next Bach?
“You know those people who get into car accidents?” I ask Ezra. “Or who get hit by lightning? And then they’re in a coma or something, but when they wake up, they’ve become this genius in something they’d never even tried before?”