Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle (i am malala young readers edition .TXT) 📗

can’t get the branches to distinguish themselves, so I add black for definition and end up with bigger blobs. I’ve got enormous, washed-out black blobs on either side of a blue smear that’s supposed to be a waterfall.

“What do you think?” I ask aloud. It gets lonely, so I like to imagine that Violet and Victor are hanging around, keeping me company. Victor’s finally out of his stuffy old bedroom I still can’t bring myself to enter, relaxing with some ghost magazines in the library. Good Housecreeping and (After)Life. Victor loved his magazines. Whenever I see a TV Guide at the grocery store checkout, I’m transported back to the ottoman at Victor’s bedside, reading him the “Cheers & Jeers” section. His favorite show was The King of Queens and he told me, every single time I watched an episode with him, that nobody has range like Jerry Stiller.

“Perfection,” I reply to myself, because that’s exactly what Victor would have said about my disaster mural.

Violet, I think, would gently tell me I’d done a good job, and then at one in the morning I’d walk in on her redoing my efforts. “Thought I’d help just a tiny bit,” she’d say guiltily. Then she’d distract me with spontaneous chocolate chip pancakes. She made them for dinner sometimes, as a special treat, which I thought was the most incredible thing. Chocolate chip pancakes for dinner! In our pajamas! Don’t tell anybody, she’d mock-whisper, even though the only other person at home was Victor and he loved to encourage the indulgence in special treats.

“Violet, I think I should have hired a professional for this,” I say. The summer I lived here, I found a Garfield comic book in the library and promptly zipped through a comic-drawing phase. Violet and Victor were overly complimentary of my clearly plagiarized comic strip about a lazy rat who loved spaghetti, and made me believe I was a genius. Maybe Violet asked me to paint a mural because she thought I’d grow up to be more talented.

The sky in my mural looks like the sea, and the lagoon looks like . . . someone who doesn’t know how to paint tried to create a lagoon and didn’t take her time with it. I don’t have the patience to nurture the skill required for this.

When I was a kid, this room was the one and only fragment of Falling Stars I privately thought could be improved. When you tell a ten-year-old you have a ballroom, she’s going to picture the one from Beauty and the Beast. And then when she finds out the floor has shaggy peach carpeting, the windows are adorned with heavy floral drapery you’d find in a Best Western, and the piano isn’t even an old-timey-looking piano but rather an upright piano that belongs in a church—well, that child is going to be underwhelmed.

“We’ll get a proper grand piano,” I murmur, dabbing my paintbrush into a blue puddle. “Or a harpsichord. The carpet needs to be ripped out, for sure. You can’t throw a lively masquerade ball in these conditions.”

“A lively what?”

I twist on my stool, paintbrush dribbling cerulean across my skirt. Wesley needs a goddamn bell around his neck.

“Uhh . . .” I cast about for a good lie. You can’t have a ballroom and not throw a holiday masquerade ball—the idea is madness—but he needn’t know this particular event is on his horizon until the day he walks in and gets a load of me and my forty finest guests outfitted in Regency attire. Because yes, costumes are absolutely necessary. “A baseball. I want to throw a baseball.”

He raises his eyebrows. I smile with all my teeth and start estimating how much work it would be to put down a baseball diamond on the property. Everything I know about baseball can be traced back to that scene from Twilight.

Then his gaze skids onto the mural.

Okay, so it doesn’t look like an expert did it. I’m not an artist, except when it comes to flavors, icing, and sprinkles. But he doesn’t have to look at my painting like that, with his lips closed around an unspoken Hmm.

“At you,” I snap. “I’m going to throw a baseball at you, if you don’t change your face.”

Wesley endeavors to change his face. “Are you using watercolors?”

“Yeah.”

He appraises the wall as if in pain.

“Why? Does it matter?” I love watercolors. They’re so dreamy and serene.

Groaning deep in his throat, he throws his head back and walks straight out of the room.

I stare after him. “Does it matter?”

I squint at my painting, straining to view it through someone else’s eyes. It isn’t recommended. I slip back behind my own eyes again and ponder the merits of paint-by-numbers wall hangings. Would that be considered cheating?

Wesley returns with a large, rectangular plastic tub loaded with bottles of craft paint. “Whoa!” I paw through the rainbow of colors, some brand-new, some a quarter full, with rivulets of dried paint encircling the caps. “Where’d you find all this?”

“Upstairs.”

I shake a bottle of sunflower yellow. “These are fresh, though. Do you think Violet—”

“These are acrylics,” he interrupts quietly. “I think you’ll find them easier to work with.”

“Okay, great.” I squeeze some admiral blue onto a paper plate. “Thanks.”

Wesley leaves, and he’s right, the acrylics are a way better medium. The paint stays where I ask it to, thick and vibrant. I begin to hum, swishing my brush, until Wesley reappears and plucks the brush from my grasp. I frown at my empty hand, still in midair, until he prods a new brush between my fingers.

“Use this one,” he tells me, and disappears again.

But not for long.

Every time I turn around, he’s hovering in the doorway. I can’t focus while he’s doing that. “What?”

He looks like he wants to backseat-paint so badly and can barely hold it in, pressing his knuckles to his lips, other hand cupping his elbow.

“Nothing,” he mutters.

I lower my brush, which has smoother bristles than the last one and applies paint more evenly. “Come on, spit it out.”

“It’s just . . .”