But when she sat down to attempt work, back came the shame, filling the room like smoke, and Adelaide’s impulse was to flee. She went to see Mikey, who made her feel beautiful and clever.
Adelaide knew she was wasting this super-fancy education, at least in part, and she knew she was messing up the grades she needed to get into college, but she did not know how to make herself do anything different. The pull of distraction, and distraction by Mikey in particular, was irresistible.
Her favorite part of being a student at Alabaster was the Factory Center for Contemporary Arts. The Factory was technically one town over from Alabaster, a twenty-minute bike ride away. Students could sign out of campus and visit the museum for free. The art history and studio art classes were always going there.
It was built on the grounds of what used to be a paper mill and only featured art made by living artists. Most of it was extremely weird. You entered through an imposing iron gate, and once you were inside, there was a group of mammoth brick buildings. Most of the grounds were concrete, with sculptures scattered about.
Adelaide loved the Factory’s large artificial spaces. They tapped something in her. When she stood in those rooms, her world
expanded. Beyond
Toby’s illness and
Mikey’s sweetness, beyond
her classes and her family.
She felt awe. That’s what it was. Human beings were capable of
creating beauty and strangeness far beyond what nature offered. Their minds could be
weird and grandiose. They could conceive of
more than what was in front of them,
more than facts they’d learned.
Example: An exhibit of dioramas, each about the size of a couch. Each glass diorama box contained a silver mobile home. Underneath the mobile homes, you saw the earth in a cross-section.
Look closely, and in that earth, you saw a rabbit’s burrow and the roots of trees.
There were worms in the dirt.
In one diorama, the earth hid a dinosaur skeleton.
In another, a dead body.
The artist’s name was Teagan Rabinowitz.
Adelaide left that room feeling different about her feet on the ground.
Another example: A room of skeletons. They were bone white and displayed like exhibits in a natural history museum. But they were the skeletons of monsters. There was a minotaur. A griffin. Two dragons. A three-headed dog.
Alongside each one was a card. The one next to the griffin read “Unearthed in a tar pit outside San Diego, California, in 1952 by Gerald Booker and his archeological team. Estimated date of death: 1451. Note the incomplete left wing.”
The art was attributed to the Society for the Excavation and Preservation of Biological Wonders.
The exhibit gave Adelaide a thrill. Maybe such things are real.
There’s no proof they aren’t.
After Jack left the dog run, Adelaide went home and took a shower. She went grocery shopping in her father’s car. Unloading everything into the fridge, she made herself two sandwiches of toasted bread and strawberry jam. She drank a can of seltzer.
Then she looked for Jack. She collected EllaBella from Byrd’s house and walked the old dog around, hopeful of running into him. The Alabaster campus was largely empty. The town was pretty small. Maybe she’d feel Jack’s presence inside a building, pulling her toward him. Or maybe he’d be looking for her.
Then she remembered he had access to the art studio. Adelaide tied EllaBella up outside Blitzer Hall and climbed the stairs.
* * *
The studio was on the top floor. It had sloping ceilings and smelled of paint and turpentine. Because it was summer, most of the easels leaned against the walls. The tables were covered with canvas tarps. Adelaide found Jack sitting there, halfway illuminated by the sunlight that streamed through the window.
“What’s up.” Jack said it like a statement.
“Oh, hi. I was just— I need some paint. For my Set Design project.”
“In the closet.”
“Sorry to interrupt.”
“It’s okay. Closet’s right over there.”
Adelaide took a jar of white paint and a jar of black, not needing either of them. She wanted to talk to him, to be witty, to get him to go somewhere with her, to make him flirt with her again. Somehow, her charm would not turn on. She couldn’t always access it.
“See you around,” she said. Stupidly. Ineffectually.
“Bye then,” said Jack.
* * *
Adelaide found Jack sitting there, in the art studio, halfway illuminated by the sunlight that streamed through the windows.
“What’s up.” Jack said it like a statement.
“I came by to see you,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d want to get lunch.” She had already eaten two jam sandwiches, but it didn’t matter.
“Can’t. Sorry. I have plans.”
“You do?”
“Yup.” He wasn’t looking at her. He was still painting, leaning forward to see exactly where his brush was touching the canvas.
“You could at least look at me,” she said, feeling a rush of anger that was more at Mikey than at Jack. “You could at least see me, here, talking to you.”
He looked up at her. “I just met you this morning,” he said. “I don’t owe you anything. I don’t even remember your name.”
* * *
“I came by to see you,” Adelaide said. “I thought maybe you’d want to get lunch.” She wasn’t hungry, but it didn’t matter.
“I could eat.”
It wasn’t an enthusiastic yes. Adelaide stood in the doorway, uncertain of her welcome. “There’s a diner with a bacon and egg sandwich,” she said. “They wrap it in foil.”
Jack got off his stool and came over. His backpack was on a table by the door. “Sure, if it’s wrapped in foil, I’m there.”
“Or we could do the cafeteria,” she said.
“No, no. Foil all the way.”
* * *
She stood outside the art studio, looking through the window in the door.
Jack sat in there, half-lit by a shaft of sunlight from the window, painting. Adelaide was filled with longing—to touch him, to take care of him, to learn his secrets. His deep brown eyes with their thick, silky lashes—she wanted them to look at her rather than at the painting. They were filled with a complexity that made her curious about him in a way she’d never been with Mikey. Mikey never seemed to have secrets, or pain; he wasn’t an artist.