Mean Girls. Louise Rozett

Professor Crawley reached the end of attendance, everyone’s heads turned toward the door. I followed the collective gaze to see—

      “Mr. Holloway, there you are. Don’t let your tardiness become a habit. You go by Max?”

      He nodded his head and sat down on the stool next to mine. I looked straight ahead, suddenly unable to feel natural.

      “So on to class, then. Welcome, all of you. Some of you I know, some of you I don’t.” Professor Crawley looked at me. “But I’m absolutely sure we’ll get to know each other in no time. I’m Professor Crawley. You can just call me Crawley while we’re in the classroom. Too many syllables otherwise. So how many of you have any experience in painting? Or art of any kind, really? Drawing, sculpting, maybe just doodles in your biology notes?”

      A few people raised their hands. He smiled at them. “Right after piano lessons and right before tennis, huh?”

      There was a small titter of appreciative laughter.

      Crawley went on. “I’m just going to assume, for the sake of starting on the same foot, that we all have no experience, which is totally fine.”

      I breathed a sigh of relief, and felt Max’s eyes shift to me. I glanced at him, and saw the smallest trace of a smile. I quickly looked away.

      “So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pair you guys up, and you’re just going to start painting, see what comes out. This is your Gamsol.” He held up a glass pot with a lid. “You rinse your brushes in here. It’s like turpentine, except I’m not allergic to it.”

      Another titter from the girls.

      “You’ve got your brushes, your oil paints, your palette, your palette knife and a rag. Make sure you rinse your brushes thoroughly or all of your colors will go muddy. Squeeze out only the smallest amount of paint. I assure you, this stuff goes far.”

      He paired us off. In this kind of situation I usually ended up partnerless and had to work with the teacher. But not this time.

      “All right, so go ahead and grab a canvas and an easel and then stop off with me to get your box of supplies.

      Once we were set up and sitting across from each other, I gave the boy in front of me an awkward and probably very unpretty smile.

      “Max,” he said, holding out a hand. “We met by the boathouse.”

       Oh, did we? I hadn’t recalled …

      “Yes, I remember, I nearly fell to my death on those stairs.”

      With a sickening lurch, I realized what poor taste that had been in. I wanted to say something to make up for it, but before I got the chance, he just nodded as he squeezed out some blue paint and said, “But here you are.”

      “Here I am.”

      I squeezed out a couple of colors and blended them until it resembled Max’s tanned skin tone.

      “So are you any good?” he asked.

      “Good?”

      He nodded at my canvas. “At painting.”

      “Oh.” I laughed nervously. “I doubt it, I’ve never really done it before. I helped paint a mural back at my old school, but it was basically like painting in between the lines. Like a huge coloring book.”

      “Where’d you go to school?”

      “St. Augustine. In Florida.”

      “Did you grow up there?”

      “Yeah.”

      He gave a small smile. “You’re in for a hell of a winter, then.”

      I took a deep breath and said, “Oh, I’ve heard.”

      “Ever seen snow?”

      I shook my head.

      “You’re gonna see a lot of it here.” He furrowed his brow at his canvas and looked at me.

      “Are you any good?” I asked, indicating his canvas.

      “Not at all. Don’t be insulted by my portrait of you. I just took this class because I needed an elective and Crawley is awesome.”

      “He seems cool, yeah.”

      We settled into a silence I struggled not to fill with stupid rambling. I mixed up some more color to match his dark hair. I laid the brush on the canvas with the blackish color I’d mixed up. But it wasn’t quite right. There was a small tinge of another color in there somewhere. I sifted through the paint tubes and found Alizarin Crimson. I added a tiny bit. Yes, that was a lot better.

      “Look at me for a sec,” he said.

      I looked up. “What?”

      He squinted and leaned toward me. “Green, okay. But …” He stood and came over to me. He put his hand under my chin and lifted up my face. My heart skipped.

      “Trust me,” he said with a smile. “I’m an artist.”

      “Paint me like one of your French girls.”

      Oh, the words spilled from my mouth before I could stop them. I was too used to my group of friends. My cheeks turned hot.

      He dropped his hand and looked at me. “Did you just make a Titanic reference?”

      “Maybe.”

      He smiled and raised an eyebrow. “My older cousin Sarah watched that for the entirety of a family trip at the Outer Banks once. And if I remember correctly, in that scene, he wasn’t just painting her face.”

      “Well, we probably won’t be asked to do that in here.”

      “Probably not.” He smiled. “Now look at me, I need to look at your eyes.”

      He tilted my head so that my eyes caught the light.

      “They’re not just green. They have some brown in them, too. Right in the middle.” I looked at him as he studied my eyes.

      “Really?” I said, even though I fully knew it.

      “There’s also …” He narrowed his own eyes. “Also some blue. They’re like the color of … a pond or something.”

      I laughed, and it echoed in the otherwise silent room. Everyone looked at us. I bit my lip and looked around apologetically.

      Max smiled. “What?”

      “A pond? So, like, the brown is mud and the green is pond scum?”

      He laughed, too, sitting back down. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

      I laughed and focused back on my canvas.

      The end of class came, and we were able to reveal our paintings to each other. I actually kind of liked mine. It didn’t look like a photograph or anything, but it really looked like Max.

      “You ready?” I asked him.

      He furrowed his brow once again at his painting and said, “I guess.”

      We turned around our paintings. I don’t think I’d laughed so hard in weeks. I was one big circle with pink tinge in my cheeks, little dots for freckles, and huge blue-green-brown eyes. I had no eyelids, and my lashes were like little black spiders.

      “All right, all right, so I’m not an artist.” He put his canvas back on the easel. “But at least I got your eyes right.”

      The rest of the week passed by in a frenzy of getting situated in classes and talking about the year full of work that lay before us. I could already tell that the huge studio was going to be my sanctuary, because as far as the other classes went, it was looking like the year wouldn’t be an easy one. Manderley had block scheduling, so one day we’d have four classes, and then the next day we’d have four different ones.