Unforgettable (15 page)

“Oh my God, I love you guys.” Heath giddily turned on his tiny silver Nokia, his hair hanging crookedly off his head, and Brett gave Kara a wink.

Kara grinned and stood up, stretching her limbs. She strode over to where Brett was standing and touched her on the arm. “Ready?” she asked, her eyebrows raised.
Are you sure?
her eyes seemed to say.

“Yup,” Brett giggled, pushing a loose strand of hair behind her left ear. And their faces moved toward each other slowly, as if they were in a movie, their lips meeting and opening softly against each other. It was kind of … sexy to have someone watch them. It wasn’t like before, when they were alone, but it was exciting in a different way, almost like letting someone else in on their secret had made it that much more electrifying. She pulled away reluctantly.

“How was that?” Brett turned to Heath, her hand perched defiantly on her hip.

He ran his hand across his scalp, forgetting it wasn’t his own. The wig slid to the left, so that the dirty blond hair was perched crookedly on his head. “Is this heaven? Because … someone up there really loves me.” He stared at the tiny screen on his camera and clicked through the pictures.

“Let me see how they turned out.” Kara grabbed the camera from his hands and held it out so Brett could see. Heath had taken about ten pictures of them in the five seconds they had been kissing, and Brett watched images of herself and Kara flick up on the tiny screen. She had to admit, they
were
kind of hot together. After scrolling through them all once, Kara quickly started to delete them.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Heath grabbed for his camera. “You said I could have one!” He lunged after Kara, but Brett held him back until she could finish. Kara hopped onto her bed and stood there, deleting all the saved photos. “
No!
” he wailed, actually kind of sounding like a girl. Which was sort of fitting, considering that he looked like one.

Brett patted Heath’s back. “Listen. How about this? Every day that you keep this a secret, we’ll take a sexy photo together and e-mail it to you. Okay?” She glanced at Kara, who was still standing on top of her bed, barefoot in her tights.

“So for now,” Kara continued, bouncing on her toes, framed by a black-and-white poster of a young Bob Dylan above her bed, “the camera is ours.” “If you send me secret sexy pictures, just for myself”— Heath gulped, as if breathless at the thought —”I promise I will take your secret to my grave.” He put a hand over his heart.

“Deal.” Brett’s heart-shaped lips curled into a grin, and she met Kara’s eyes once again. “You understand, of course,” she lowered her voice to her most threatening register possible, “that if this gets out—we’ll have to kill you.” “Oh, I promise,” Heath said, pressing his hands together as if he were praying. “I really, really promise. I swear on all that is holy.” His normally lazy-looking green eyes were flashing with—what? Was that sincerity?

Or just pure lust?

Jenny set down her art supplies on a table in the center of the studio, and the heavy box of pastels clanged against the metal, resounding in the enormous, totally empty space. The building was open most evenings for anyone who needed more time at the sketching tables, but most students didn’t take advantage of it.

She turned on Mrs. Silver’s boom box to keep her company. It was tuned to some oldies station, but Jenny left it there—it kind of made her think of her dad, and how every morning he’d shuffle around the kitchen in his slippers, making coffee to one of the three Beatles CDs he kept in regular rotation on the portable CD player Jenny and Dan had bought him for Christmas. “Oldies for the oldie,” he liked to say.

As she came back to her desk and began to arrange her art supplies into neat categories, Jenny couldn’t help but smile.

She loved the art building when no one else was around. The huge plate glass windows looked out on the brightly colored leaves, tinges of which were still visible even though the sun was just setting, and the reflections of the track lights twinkled back at her. The windows reminded her a little of the city, of walking down Columbus Avenue at night and looking into the enormous shop windows, the people walking on the street reflected inside them.

Jenny looked up as the studio door clattered open and Julian stepped inside, chewing on an apple. She could see the dimple next to his mouth. She grinned from across the giant room.

“Hey there.” Her voice echoed across the empty studio, carrying over the sound of an old Rolling Stones song. She waved Julian over toward where she was setting out her supplies: a giant block of watercolor paper, pastels, charcoals, watercolors, even a few tubes of paint. She’d come overprepared because she wasn’t sure what medium she wanted to use, exactly. She was sort of waiting for … inspiration. “You made it,” she added with a smile.

Julian took another chomp of his green apple and took in the high, sloping ceilings and the huge dramatic windows appreciatively. Then his eyes trailed down to her and his golden brown eyes widened. “Hey, am I dressed okay for this? I know you love the T-shirts, but …” His shaggy brownish-blondish hair was loose and he was wearing a long-sleeve button down beneath a tight-fitting Raconteurs concert T-shirt and a pair of black cuffed dress pants. “I mean,
you
look really nice. Like someone should be drawing you,” he added.

Jenny willed herself not to blush at the compliment. She had been surprisingly nervous getting ready but had finally decided on her chocolate brown Free People puff-sleeve mock turtleneck made of something super-soft that looked silky in the light, and a pair of dark fitted jeans from the Gap that she’d had forever. Definitely nothing fancy, but it was totally sweet of Julian to tell her she looked nice. She
had
dusted her eyelids with a little Bare Escentuals Eye Glimmer in Fire Light. “Um, thanks. But yeah—you’re dressed fine,” she finally answered, hoping she hadn’t blushed in spite of herself.

“Cool.” Julian hopped up onto the little mini-stage in the middle of the studio, where the models posed during class. His heavy hiking boots clomped loudly against the wooden platform, and with the extra height he towered over Jenny—even more than usual. “Is this where you want me?” he asked with a grin.

“Maybe …” Jenny rubbed her thumb against her chin, as she always did when she was trying to picture her composition. Julian was so tall and gangly—she felt like his portrait should somehow capture that. “Um, what about the chair?” She motioned over to the worn-out velvet armchair that had randomly appeared in the art studio the other day. The theater department had donated it to the art department, and Mrs. Silver had immediately commandeered it for the models to pose on, in her continual search for furniture that was “inspiring.” It was kind of saggy, and the fabric was worn through to bare canvas at some points, but enough of the royal-blue-striped velvet covered the chair to make it seem somehow regal and exciting, like their own personal throne. Julian, King of the … what? Very tall, very cute people? Julian sank into the chair, which suddenly looked small, his knees practically coming up to his chest. Jenny couldn’t help giggling. He coughed and stretched out, yawning, extending his long legs and sinking back into the chair. “I feel like this chair is eating me alive.” “Are you comfortable?” Jenny asked, her pencil already flying across her paper. “That’s a great pose—it really captures how tall you are.” Julian shifted a little in the chair. He looked like a basket-ball player trying to get comfortable in a piece of dollhouse furniture. “S’all right. As long as I don’t have to stay here forever.” “I’ll work fast,” Jenny promised—although she was thinking about how nice it felt to be here with Julian, and she kind of wished she didn’t ever have to leave and go back out into reality. The art studio had to be her favorite building on campus, and Julian took her mind off Easy. And right now, the last thing in the world she wanted to think about was Easy Walsh, and how he was the last guy whose portrait she’d drawn. And how he’d drawn her, in the woods. Maybe drawing someone was a relationship death sentence, like poking a voodoo doll with pins. Her pencil hovered midstroke over the thick white paper. Was she totally imagining the chemistry she felt with Julian? She couldn’t help remembering the way she’d been certain— completely, never-been-more-sure-of-anything-in-her-life certain—that there was something between her and Easy, something real. And then, almost as quickly as it had started, it fizzled out. As sad as she was about losing Easy, she was sadder about the fact that she had so completely misjudged things. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.” Or so said Shakespeare, who seemed to know a thing or two about it. Part of her had thought she’d crumble if she and Easy broke up—yet here she was, days later, already fantasizing about being stranded on a tropical island with someone else.

Julian swallowed a big chunk of apple, hardly pausing to chew. “I’ve never been in here before.” His eyes wandered across the high angled ceilings and the huge walls of windows.

“Sometimes I like to pretend I’m some famous artist and this is my SoHo loft.” Jenny stepped back from her angled desk to look at her preliminary drawing. She’d sketched in Julian’s figure, crouched somehow both awkwardly and elegantly in the armchair. The sleek lines of the graphite seemed to suit him well as a subject—if she were to change to another medium, she’d definitely lose some of the immediacy of him she thought she was capturing. The scene gave her the feeling that it could disappear at any moment: Julian could stand up and stretch out and walk away. The spontaneity of pencil just seemed right for him.

He looked right at Jenny, sending a little jolt through her, like when she was in a hurry and only had time for an espresso shot in the morning. “Except you can see trees outside.” She tried to capture Julian’s sagging shoulders, the relaxed posture of his body that seemed to contrast with his almost uncapturable energy. “They have trees in the city, you know.” “Oh, yeah?” He lifted his chin at her. “Like, five.” “Ever heard of Central Park?” Jenny asked incredulously, trying not to smile. Her pencil soared across the paper. “It’s, like, nine hundred acres of trees.” Julian chuckled and shook his head. “Don’t get defensive. I just like my cities with trees.” “Are you going to start bashing New York? Because I don’t think I can draw anyone who doesn’t realize it’s the greatest city on the planet.” Jenny paused, lifting her pencil from the paper threateningly. “I mean, that would just go against everything I believe in,” she said playfully.

“Well, I kind of already told my mom I was getting my portrait done. So I’d better not screw it up now.” “How could I disappoint someone’s mother?” Jenny sighed with mock resignation and returned to her drawing. How adorable was it that he’d told his mom about their portrait session? “You really do have a great face, you know,” she couldn’t help adding. It was true. After sketching in the framework of the drawing, Jenny finally was able to concentrate on the part she’d been trying hard to avoid staring at: Julian’s face. “Very expressive.” “Girls like the broken nose,” he said a little shyly. “It makes them think I’m tough.” Jenny blew a stray hair out of her eyes. “Are you?” “Depends on your definition.” “I think being tough means …” She held her pencil away from the paper for a minute to think. She could feel his eyes scanning her face. “Means not being afraid to make a fool of yourself.” “Then I’m Rambo and the Terminator rolled into one.” Julian laughed. “I’ve been known to make a fool of myself more than once, and have a good time doing it.” He had a great, goofy laugh—it made his mouth open so wide you could practically tell whether he’d had his tonsils out. Immediately, she tore off the top sheet of her pad of paper and started a new sketch. She
had
to draw his laugh—the way it made his whole body shake with energy, with delight, with pure pleasure in being exactly where he was, at exactly that moment. Jenny could read it all in his body language, and she was determined to try and capture it on paper. She thought again about the assignment Mrs. Silver had given them: to reveal something about the subject’s personality. She wanted everyone to look at her portrait of Julian and think,
Yeah, that is totally what that kid is like!

“Um, would you mind if I drew you while you’re laughing?” Jenny asked, a little tentatively. “I mean, you don’t have to be laughing the whole time or anything—but if you could keep trying, that would be great?” “First you want to me to sit in that baby-bear chair, and now you want me to pose laughing?” Julian stared at her incredulously, looking amused nonetheless. “You didn’t tell me this was going to be
hard
.” And then he laughed again, and Jenny’s pencil flitted across the paper. “You’re going to have to tell me some good jokes.” She groaned. “I’m really horrible at jokes. I always ruin them.”

“Well,” Julian teased, “if being tough means not being afraid to make a fool of yourself …” A giggle came bursting out of Jenny’s throat. His energy was infectious. “All right,” she said, her brain searching way back into its recesses for the sort of witty, creative joke that might impress Julian. Nothing. “Okay … Knock, knock.” He burst out laughing, and the sounds of the two of them seemed to rise up to the ceiling and fill the entire room.

Time passed like nothing at all, and it wasn’t until Julian had to get up and stretch for the fourth time, and made his millionth adorable, funny face for Jenny’s amusement, that she realized, with a shock, that she had completely missed the Women of Waverly meeting.

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From:
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To:
[email protected]

Date:
Thursday, October 10, 8:55 P.M.

Subject:
Uh, hello?