Sylvia
IT WAS A magnificent entrance—or, at least, it was supposed to be.
It was like a scene from a movie. Sylvia, a brunette with tumbling curls and icy blue eyes hidden behind Ray-Ban sunglasses, sashayed towards the big blue tent. She marched alongside her teammates Paul and Connor, a gangly redhead and a rather average-looking blond. Both of them walked with their hands in the pockets of their sharply creased black slacks, and they wore white dress shirts, black ties, and burgundy blazers embroidered with their school’s colorful coat of arms. They both had their backpacks hanging off of their right shoulders. Sylvia herself was wearing a more fitted version of the burgundy blazer, a pleated black skirt, an untucked dress shirt, and a very loosely tied tie. She glanced at the other two and rolled her eyes; she thought their Aviators were a bit much.
Paul was a full head taller than Connor, and Sylvia was shorter than the both of them. Their varying heights resulted in a sort of human staircase effect, only adding to the cinematic quality of their entrance. The decision to wear the formal school uniform had not been synchronized; it was just an unspoken school policy. The uniform was worn to all nonathletic extracurricular activities. As the overly enthusiastic Principal Wagner liked to say while stroking his graying beard, “The students of Chandler Heights Preparatory Academy represent their school wherever they go.”
Moments later, after the team had reached the sign-in table and told the volunteer who they were, Sylvia was beginning to lose her cool.
“What do you mean we’re painting on the ceiling?” she asked, flabbergasted. She couldn’t believe their luck. Connor remained quiet, but he seemed pretty disappointed, too. Paul simply scratched his head, not quite understanding.
The volunteer sitting at the table looked nervously up at Sylvia, still holding the large, rolled-up stencil for their artwork. Her ponytail bobbed as she ducked her head to look through the team list again. “You guys are from Chandler Heights Prep, right?”
“Yes,” Sylvia answered crisply. This piece of information was usually enough to set things in motion.
“Richmond, Virginia?”
“Yes.”
“Sylvia Ashton, Paul Burk, and Connor Whelan?”
“That’s us,” Paul chimed in, hearing his own name.
“That’s right,” the volunteer told them with a smile. “Y’all will be working at Station Nine-C. On the ceiling.” Her southern accent caught Sylvia off guard. It was like iced tea with too much sugar—sweet almost to the point of insincerity.
“Sweet,” Paul said, enthusiastically, as if he’d read Sylvia’s mind. When Sylvia realized that he was referring to the fact that they would be stationed high above the ground, she shot him an annoyed look. Glancing at Connor, she could see that he was resisting the urge to laugh. Paul was not taking AP Literature like she and Connor were, so he probably had not heard the story about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel.
In class, their teacher Ms. Connelly had read aloud a poem that she’d received in the Poetry Daily email newsletter. The poem, written about Michelangelo’s experience painting the famous Sistine Chapel fresco, was written by the artist himself and translated into English by someone that Sylvia presumed to be another poet. Sylvia was sure that the whole thing would have sounded far more eloquent in Italian, but in English, it sounded like Michelangelo complaining endlessly about the aches and pains he got from stretching upward and twisting at odd angles to paint on the ceiling. To make matters worse, paint was always dripping on his face. He compared the experience to being pooped on by birds.
Sylvia had gotten the impression that painting on the ceiling was not fun. She assumed that Connor felt the same way. Frustratingly, however, he remained silent.
Paul accepted their team’s stencil from the volunteer and led the way into the tent. Connor patted Sylvia sympathetically on the back, attempting to guide her past the registration table and through the entrance. She bit her lip, resisting the urge to kick and scream. As usual, it would be her against the world.
As she followed Paul up the metal rungs built into the platform, Sylvia felt as if she were leaving her heart on the floor. They hadn’t even started painting yet, and things were already starting to take a turn for the worst.
The ceiling turned out to be surprisingly beautiful. Everything was bathed in pale blue sunlight that seeped in through the tent fabric, and everything metal—paint cans, large frames holding white plaster, book bag zippers, and the like—glinted and gleamed. For a moment, Sylvia almost forgot about their plight.
Only one other team, the team at Station 8C, had also arrived on the elevated platform. They were already mixing their paints in purposeful silence. They were scruffy-looking—all three were dressed in old jeans and stained T-shirts. Like Sylvia’s team, this group consisted of two boys and a girl, but that was the only characteristic they seemed to share.
The girl had medium-brown skin, and she wore her hair in long, thick cornrow braids. The neck hole of her oversized T-shirt exposed one of her shoulders slightly, and she wore tiny golden studs in each ear. The two boys differed drastically in appearance; one of them, also African American, was almost as tall as Paul, and he wore his hair in a flamboyant high-top hairstyle that looked a bit like a carefully clipped hedge. The other was a short Asian boy with spiky black hair.
Great, Sylvia thought to herself sarcastically. Inner-city kids. Just great. She really had been hoping to engage with more sophisticated individuals, much like herself. She wanted to meet people that knew what they were doing and presented themselves as such.
When the girl noticed their arrival, she smiled and shook Connor’s hand. “My name is Courtney,” she said, “and that’s D-Dre, and that’s Ben,” she added, first pointing at the taller boy, who was waving, and then the smaller, who did not look up. Sylvia wondered if Ben was right in the head.
D-Dre? What a peculiar name, Sylvia thought, squinting at the name card attached to Team 8C’s metal frame. The name was spelled “Deidre.” She whistled. She had heard of parents trying their best to come up with original names, but this one was ridiculous.
As Sylvia got started on organizing their space, Paul got started on making small talk, and Connor stood by watching for a moment, apparently unsure of how to engage in either activity. Sylvia couldn’t help but overhear parts of the conversation over the rattling of paint cans.
“So, where are you guys from?”
“Arabian Mountain High School,” the tall boy—Deidre—replied, sounding proud.
“That’s in Lithonia, near Atlanta,” Courtney clarified.
“So . . . Georgia, right? Not too far from here?”
Courtney and Deidre exchanged knowing glances. “Um, sure,” Courtney laughed. “What about you guys? Where do you come from?”
“Chandler Heights Preparatory Academy in Richmond, Virginia,” Paul answered with a contrived accent that was probably meant to sound like a British person’s.
“Ohhh,” Courtney and Deidre said in unison, as if this statement explained something they’d both been wondering about. Sylvia wanted to believe that they had recognized the name of their nationally acclaimed school, but she doubted that their reaction was meant positively. Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced up at Connor to check his reaction. He had zoned out entirely—he was just staring off into space. Sylvia cursed the day that she had agreed to come to this competition with teammates.
Finally, she couldn’t bear it any longer. She had to ask. “Why are you guys dressed like that?” she asked plainly. She just had to know. She was sure that even people in the lower middle class could afford to wear cleaner clothes. Connor’s eyes darted back and forth between her and Team 8C as if he were convinced that a bomb was about to go off.
To their surprise, Courtney and Deidre smiled at each other. “We were going to ask you the same thing,” Deidre told them, still smirking. “You do realize that painting can get a little messy, right?”
Paul’s and Connor’s mouths became r
ound O’s. “Oh, crap,” Sylvia heard Paul say.
“Oh, crap” was Sylvia’s thought exactly. Suddenly, things clicked into focus. Suddenly, Sylvia felt like a fool. She looked down at the paint cans to hide the reddening of her cheeks. “Oh,” she said with a sheepish laugh. Inside, she was boiling. There was nothing she hated more than being proven wrong.
“I think we have a couple of extra old T-shirts,” Courtney offered. “We could lend them to you. Free of charge.”
Paul and Connor gratefully accepted. Sylvia didn’t. Deidre tossed the boys the shirts, and they hurriedly pulled off their blazers and ties and pulled the T-shirts on over their dress shirts. As he was making the switch, Connor briefly caught Courtney’s eye, and he blushed, turning to face the other way. She smiled. Sylvia wanted to gag.
Paul was taking a long time on purpose. Connor swiftly elbowed him in the ribs to hurry him up. Paul decided to make a performance out of it, wiggling his hips and imitating club music by saying “nn tss nn tss nn tss” over and over again. Deidre and Courtney erupted in laughter, and even Ben cracked a smile. Sylvia tried her hardest to stifle a giggle. Paul was often a nitwit, but he was an entertaining nitwit.
Sylvia waited impatiently as Connor unrolled the giant poster board stencil that their team had received. As he held it over his head, he was momentarily cloaked in shadow; his face was only visible by the tiny dots of light that outlined the topography of his face. The dots were like stars in a clear night sky. Or like a thousand little lasers focusing on a target.
In an instant, the laughter and companionship dissolved, and the teenagers were competitors once again. The tent was filling up with people and the dull roar of hundreds of independent conversations. At last, Sylvia was in her element. She had come to work—to win—and she now had the opportunity to begin. She arranged the color palettes in order and mixed colors like lightning, just the way she had practiced a million times at school.
Just as she was getting into the rhythm of things, she was interrupted by Connor’s singing. She was stunned. Connor hadn’t uttered a word since they’d arrived on campus. She recognized the tune as an Adele song, an overplayed hit about losing love and moving on. That’s exactly the kind of song he needs, she thought. That’ll be the last time he plays with my best friend’s heart.
Paul looked at him as if he were an alien hatching out of an egg. “Uh, Connor?” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Why do you know the lyrics to that song?”
Connor laughed off his embarrassment. “I feel it on a spiritual level,” he answered, beating his chest emphatically. He spoke with a joking tone, but Sylvia could see the sadness in his eyes.
Even Paul saw through his charade. “Are you thinking about Stella?” he asked, his expression turning very serious.
Connor flinched slightly when he heard the name. “What? No. No, I’m not. It’s just a song.”
“Quit thinking about Stella,” Paul commanded, as if this command would help at all. Sylvia almost felt a little bad for Connor. Almost.
“HEY GUYS,” PAUL whispered, wiping a drop of paint from his nose and making a face. He dropped his paintbrush tip-down in a paint can. “I’m getting kind of hungry. I think there was a Chick-fil-A in the Student Center or someplace like that. Do you guys want anything?”
“Already?” Sylvia asked. “We’ve only been here for, like, an hour and a half.” She soon regretted snapping back. Paul went on about how he had skipped breakfast out of sheer excitement. At last, she decided that she’d had enough. “Fine! Just go already.”
“Do you guys want anything?”
“Get me a milkshake,” Connor said almost automatically. Immediately, he looked as if he regretted saying it. Maybe Chick-fil-A held some sort of significance for him.
“What about you, Sylvia?”
She shrugged. “Just get me a chicken sandwich. With some fries.”
Paul nodded in acknowledgement of their orders before hurrying to the end of the platform and beginning his descent to the ground below.
Sylvia was now alone with Connor. He seemed to be avoiding eye contact.
“Well,” Connor said slowly, attempting to smooth out the wrinkles in the T-shirt, “Where to start, where to start . . .”
Sylvia was about to speak, but something that was happening at the station beside them caught her eye.
Team 8C was dancing quite foolishly to music that she hadn’t even noticed until then. All three were jumping up and down and shaking their heads, and the tall boy was waving his hands and rapping along with the song. He appeared to know all of the words. After listening a little harder, she realized that there were only a few words to know.
At first, Connor seemed to think that she was glaring at him, not the people behind him. When he turned around and saw them, instead of looking equally annoyed, he smiled. When Deidre launched into a verse, Sylvia’s eyes widened at the number of curse words in the song. The music skipped over them, but Deidre didn’t. Connor was doubled over laughing.
“You know, I think I’ve heard that song before,” Connor told her once he’d gotten a hold of himself. “It’s called ‘Versace.’ Most of the chorus is just the word ‘Versace’ over and over again. I guess I should have listened to the rest of the words.”
“I bet they’ve never seen a single article of Versace clothing in real life,” Sylvia scoffed. She disdainfully swirled the tip of a paintbrush around in a can of green paint and touched it to the canvas above, connecting the dots with a long, vertical streak.
Connor nodded. “I think that’s the point. The prestige is what the song is about.” He smiled amiably. “Get with the times, Sylvia,” he added in a funny accent, undoubtedly trying to make her laugh. She was not amused.
Team 8C only became more annoying as the competition went on. Courtney and Deidre were much louder and more enthusiastic than the rest of the painters on the platform, and they were constantly chattering and laughing about a number of subjects. After a while, even Connor seemed to be losing his patience with them.
“Oooo! Hey, guys!” Courtney cried suddenly a couple of minutes later. “You have to see the pictures I took of you guys when you were asleep!” She whipped her cell phone out of her pocket, sliding out the keyboard and pressing buttons at a furious pace.
“When we were asleep?” Deidre repeated, indignant. All three bowed their heads to examine the small screen on Courtney’s phone.
Give me a break, Sylvia thought.
“Oh, Sylvia took a bunch of pictures like that, too,” Connor piped up. She wanted to tell him not to fraternize with the riff-raff, but she knew that they would probably get offended.
Team 8C froze at the sound of a fourth voice. They looked up from the cell phone and saw Connor standing nearby. Suddenly unsure of himself, he scratched his head and looked away, laughing sheepishly. “Yeah,” he clarified, “We were on the plane, and she was snapping pictures like crazy. Probably for blackmail.” He pulled his own cell phone—a white iPhone—out of one of the pockets in his slacks. “I have a couple of pictures, but they’re not as, you know, candid. We actually smiled and stuff.”
“Is that Sylvia?” Deidre asked with eyebrows raised, pointing at her. He didn’t try to hide the fact that he found her to be attractive. Ew, she thought. She turned away to avoid being pulled into the conversation.
“Yeah, yeah,” Connor replied, probably realizing that he’d never properly introduced his teammates. “That’s Sylvia, and I’m Connor. And that redheaded dude you saw—that was Paul.”
“Oh, we met Paul,” Courtney laughed.
“Um, you guys can check out a few of the pictures, if you want,” Connor offered, queuing up the images on his phone. Unable to kick her curiosity, Sylvia drew nearer and peered over Connor’s shoulder to see the screen. Holding the device before their eyes, he scrolled through about a dozen images of Paul and Sylvia making faces and biting into soft pretzels. A few of the pictures—the ones taken with the front camera?
??included him. After scrolling past a photo of Paul standing on the edge of an airport fountain, Connor’s finger landed on an image of him and a girl with short brown hair smiling lazily with their heads touching. They appeared to by lying in the grass.
“Oooo, and who is that?” Courtney asked with a teasing tone, nudging Connor with her elbow.
Stella, Sylvia thought. It’s Stella.
Connor’s expression became grave, as if he’d seen a ghost. “That’s Stella, my ex,” he told them. His voice seemed a little strained. “I told you guys I didn’t have that many photos from the trip,” he added, tucking the phone back into his pocket. “Wow, I never realized how bad my camera is at taking pictures at night.”
“It doesn’t sound like things ended very well between you two,” Courtney said softly, never taking her eyes off of Connor. Sylvia was almost sure that she had the hots for him. If only she could warn her.
“We broke up.” Connor proclaimed it as if he had just beginning to understand the meaning of those words. “She asked for some space.”
Sylvia could see how uncomfortable he was. She actually pitied him a bit. “Hey, Connor!” she cried urgently. “We should be working right now.” She smiled apologetically at the other three. Connor appeared to be grateful for the interruption.
“Yeah, I probably should be getting back to work,” Connor sighed rather unconvincingly. “Good luck to you all.” With that, Connor went to stand by Sylvia’s side, wetting a paintbrush and stretching to reach the canvas. He began to fill in the area beneath Sylvia’s green stalk with gray and tan.
“You’re welcome,” she told him matter-of-factly. It took him a moment to realize what she was talking about.
“Oh, yeah, thanks,” he replied. “Thanks for the save. I am forever indebted to you.” It seemed that, during their short time together on this trip, some of her sarcasm had already begun to rub off on him. She smirked at the idea.
“You are not saved yet. You’ve got to give me all of the gritty details.”
“You couldn’t pay me to—” Connor stopped himself, taking a moment to think. He was probably weighing his options. Sylvia knew that, if she couldn’t get answers from him, she would get them from someone else.
He gave in. “Well, you heard what I told them, right?” he said at last.
“No duh.”
“Alright. Well . . .” He stopped again. “Wait—shouldn’t you have heard about this from her? I thought you guys were friends.”
“We don’t really talk much anymore,” she admitted.
“Why?”
“You know. We just sort of went our separate ways. We have different friend groups and different interests now.” She refrained from telling him about their big fight, or about how her pride kept her from making things right until it was too late. She definitely would not tell him how jealous she was of his friendship with Paul.
“Oh,” Connor said, buying her fib. “Well, my story’s pretty generic. I took her for granted. I was too cool for all the gushy stuff, you know? I left all of the romantic stuff up to her. I never did anything to show how much she meant to me. I even forgot to go to her birthday party.”
Sylvia wanted to chuck a paintbrush at him. She had attended that birthday party, and she was the one that had to comfort Stella as she cried after all of the other guests had left.
Connor laughed a short, spiritless, regretful laugh. “Now that I think about it, it was a wonder that she stuck by me for so long. She was like an entire foreign country, an uncharted island, and I was a tourist that had barely begun to scratch the surface. And there she was, wasting her time fawning over my bad poetry and mediocre paintings.”
At least he’s a little humbler now, Sylvia thought. “Go on,” she said, sensing that he had more to say.
“I wasn’t even that upset when she broke up with me, initially. I was so convinced that she needed me more than I needed her. It turned out that that was not the case.”
Sylvia wasn’t so sure about that. She herself had watched the light go out of Stella’s eyes. Of course, she wasn’t going let him know how much Stella really missed him.
“Well—” she began, but instead of finishing her sentence, she stopped and cocked her head to one side, listening hard. Connor listened, too. Instantaneously, their eyes met, and they smiled in the same confused and vaguely amused way. Connor started to laugh, and this time, so did she. It was another song—she recognized it to be “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”
It was now easy to see that the source of the twanging, upbeat country music was a small boom box resting at the station directly below theirs on the back wall of the tent. The station’s painters were nowhere to be found. The eerily empty station contrasted greatly with its surroundings, in which a few competitors were linking arms and dancing in circles.
The tension in the air had dissolved. Sylvia decided that it would be best not to continue talking about Stella. If they went on any longer, she would risk forgetting that he was the enemy.
Time was ticking, and their progress made on the painting was sluggish at best. She looked over to see how Team 8C was doing. For the most part, all they had done was paint in rows upon rows of red bricks. The short Asian guy was working on what seemed to be a person. Nonetheless, they had still filled up a lot more white space than her team had. With one swift movement of her fingers, Sylvia turned a stray line into a leaf.
It was impossible for Sylvia to tune out Team 8C´s constant chatter. They were the only ones talking on the platform.
“No, I’m not,” she heard Courtney say. “I mean, are you? Do you guys think of yourselves as artists?”
There was a pause. “Yeah,” the other two answered in unison. It was the first time Sylvia had heard the shorter boy—Ben, was it?—speak.
“But, what are you guys going to be when you grow up, though? How are you going to make money and support families? What are you going to major in in college? You can’t just be a painter. Is that even a real career?”
Sylvia agreed with Courtney wholeheartedly. Of course, she herself was the one person in her group that actually seemed to take art seriously, but she didn’t think she could make a living out of it. There was far too much uncertainty.
“No, it’s not a career,” Deidre replied. “It’s a vocation. It’s a lifestyle.”
Oh, so he knows the word “vocation,” Sylvia thought, genuinely impressed. They were exceeding her expectations.
“People don’t make art because they hope to make money doing it,” he continued. “They make art because they can’t stop. If they stop, they’ll go insane, or explode, or, I don’t know, die!”
Was anyone really that passionate about art?
Sylvia paused and sat back on her haunches, staring up at her fresco. Her team’s design had been her idea—a solitary wildflower growing out of a broken glass bottle left on the sidewalk. So far, only the flower’s green stalk, an outline of the petals, and a patch of pavement below existed on their canvas. She was trying really hard to recall the image’s intended meaning, but she was having trouble.
Next, Ben spoke. “That’s all I do,” he said, seeming confused about why Courtney was confused. “Before I got to U.S., I used spray paint on walls, and I got in trouble. I came here, and they told me, ‘No, you can’t use spray paint no more.’ So now I paint on paper, and they give me awards. They smile.” He smiled briefly, glowing with pride, before his expression became grave again. “I mess up my English, and everybody laugh. Nobody give me respect. Even in Vietnam, I was too short. When I make the art, I don’t have to say nothing. Everybody shut up, and they just look. And they know what I am trying to say.”
Sylvia could now see why he hadn’t spoken much to begin with. His story was powerful. She felt a little guilty for intending to use this competition as just another résumé filler. Art was this person’s life. It was all he had.
She didn’t get to hear where the conversation went after that. Team 8C decided to skip out for lunch. Mayb
e they’ll run into Paul, she thought bitterly. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed since Paul had left for Chick-fil-A, but it felt like a year.
Sylvia’s cell phone shivered to life, beeping and briefly lighting up the table it lay on. She snatched it up, surprised that she still had service in Valencia, which was practically the middle of nowhere. She glanced at Connor out of the corner of her eye. He was smirking and shaking his head. No doubt, he was convinced that she was spreading some malicious rumor or something of that nature. You make up a story one time, and people never forgive you for it . . .
The text was from her friend Allison. Actually, Allison was more of an acquaintance than a friend, but Sylvia was sure that Allison didn’t know that.
“Oh my God,” she gasped. “Stella. Oh my God.”
Connor froze. “Stella texted you?”
“No,” she said shakily, meeting his gaze. “Allison texted me. Stella . . . Stella is dead.”
Connor clutched at his chest. “Sylvia, you know that’s not funny. You know how I feel about her.”
“Just read the damn text, Connor,” she cried, shoving it towards him. She had never been angrier with him. Of course she knew how he really felt about Stella. To him, she was nothing more than some sort of groupie.
“I don’t want to read the damn text, Sylvia,” he replied firmly.
“I’ll read it myself, then.” Her hands were shaking visibly. “It says, ‘Sylvia, you won’t believe it. Stella died.’”
It couldn’t be possible. Stella was like them—young and healthy with a million different possibilities for a bright future. Sure, she did get a little depressed every once in a while, but didn’t they all? They were teenagers, for crying out loud.
And now Sylvia would never have a chance to apologize.
“I . . . I can’t . . .” Connor sputtered. “This can’t . . .” He was starting to breathe really heavily.
“Would you shut up already?” Sylvia screamed. “Quit with the acting. You’re not impressing anyone here. You may be convinced that Stella should have come crawling back to you, but let me tell you something, Connor. You didn’t deserve her!” Her voice was breaking. She shouted at him with her entire being. “You broke her! And I told her that you weren’t the one for her, and I lost her as a friend because of it.”
“Of course I didn’t deserve her.” That was the last thing he said before running to the edge of the platform, clambering down the ladder, and taking off.
It was 70 degrees outside, but Sylvia was shivering. She could feel the eyes of everyone on the platform boring through her skin.
The cell phone buzzed again.
“Oh no,” she murmured, reading the screen. “Connor! Connor, wait!” she called, rushing down from the platform herself. The stereo at Station 7D was blasting “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith. She felt like smashing it to bits.
As soon as Sylvia stepped foot outside of the tent, she felt terribly lost. The world around her was eerily silent, and the sun beat down on her mercilessly. Everywhere she looked, she saw only green grass and distant buildings. Connor was nowhere to be found. It would probably take hours to find him.
But she had to try.
She picked a building and marched towards it until her feet hit cobblestone. She peered into the front windows of every building she passed by, calling Connor’s name periodically to see if he would answer. He never did.
College students gave her strange looks. A couple of grubby construction workers whistled at her. On any other day, Sylvia would have walked up to them and given them a piece of her mind—from a safe distance, of course.
But today was different. She felt different. It was time to put all of the bullshit aside. For once, she would have to man up—woman up—and admit that she wasn’t always right. She was so tired of being alone.
After checking all three floors of the library, she ran out of ideas. Feeling defeated, she walked all the way back to the tent on her own. Maybe Connor had returned; after all, it was a competition, and they were from Chandler Heights Prep. In the face of all obstacles, they had a reputation to maintain.
Surely enough, she found him on the platform, paintbrush in hand. She was amazed. It must have taken him a tremendous amount of discipline and maturity just to pull himself together and face dealing with her again, after everything she had said. Maybe she was wrong about him.
Team 8C’s end of the platform looked like a crime scene. Courtney, Deidre, and Ben were standing around their supply table in shock. Most of their paint cans had been knocked over, and she could see some of the paint dripping off of the platform into the grass below. A few of the paint cans had fallen down, too. They must have been devastated; it had probably taken them at least an hour to get all of the colors just right.
“Who did this?” Courtney cried. “Connor, do you know who did this?” All eyes were on him. Deidre was glaring.
“I have no idea,” he told them. Right away, Sylvia could tell that he was being sincere. “I don’t think I was here when it happened. I’m pretty sure I would have heard it.” He looked from face to face, seemingly shocked that they would even consider that it was him.
“Well, what the hell are we going to do now?” Deidre yelled, seething. Half of the painters of the platform went quiet. Courtney tapped him on the shoulder in an attempt to calm him down. Ben didn’t utter a word. Deidre was still livid. “Were some of these rich-ass punks so afraid that they were going to lose that they had to sabotage us?”
Before Connor could come up with something to say in reply, Sylvia came to his rescue. “Connor, I was looking all over the place for you! What’s going on here?”
“Well,” Courtney explained, “we came back from our lunch break and found a bunch of our paint cans tipped over, and—”
“And we’re trying to figure out who did it,” Deidre finished.
“We’re trying to make sure it was an accident,” Courtney corrected, giving him a stern look. “Connor said it wasn’t him.”
Sylvia shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t me, either, but I can’t say you guys didn’t have it coming. Serves you right. I don’t know what made you think you could paint something like that in a competition like this. We don’t condone gang activity here.”
Team 8C’s fresco depicted a two painters standing side by side before a high brick wall. One of the painters was dressed in early twentieth-century attire—he wore a flat cap like the newspaper boys of old, and his pants were held up by suspenders. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and he was poised with a paintbrush in hand, ready to work. To emphasize his old-timey aura, this painter had been painted entirely in the gray scale, with paper-white skin and jet black hair.
It was the other painter in the picture that Sylvia was referring to. The other painter was in full color, and half of his face was covered by a red, triangular, paisley-patterned bandana. This painter wore a black hoodie, a pair of jeans, and some sneakers, and instead of a paintbrush, he was holding a can of spray paint. She could already see the beginnings of the spray painter’s graffiti on the brick wall.
Courtney and Ben exchanged amazed glances as if they saw nothing wrong with their art. Deidre dragged a hand down his face in frustration. “Man, if you weren’t a girl—”
Sylvia laughed coldly. She had heard those words too many times. “I wish you would do something to me. I am a third degree black belt. Girl or not, I would whip your ass in a heartbeat. Oh, and by the way, your name—D-Dre, as you pronounce it—is actually DEE-dree, a common Irish woman’s name. I guess your ghetto parents didn’t do enough research to find that out.”
Deidre looked as if he had heard that before. “It’s a short form of DeAndre—”
She pointed at their fresco incriminatingly. “How could you defile this competition with imitations of graffiti?”
Courtney waved her hands. “Whoa, slow down, ma’am. Sylvia, was it? Sylvia, you shouldn’t bash art that you don’t understand.”
<
br /> “Art? This isn’t art,” she scoffed. “This is a promotion of vandalism.” Sylvia wanted to laugh at herself. She had almost believed that Team 8C was a force to be reckoned with, but now her original suspicions were confirmed—they were nothing but a band of delinquents.
At this point, Courtney looked about ready to burst. Connor stood by and watched. He never spoke up when it mattered.
“You do not understand,” Ben told Sylvia, speaking the way he would to an upset child. Despite his accent, he spoke with such authority that it seemed as if the idea for the fresco had originally been his. “It not finished yet. You see the message when the painting done.”
“I’ve seen enough to know that you’ll probably get disqualified,” Sylvia sneered, poking Ben in the chest.
“Now Sylvia,” Courtney said, keeping her voice low to stop herself from snapping, “we’ve heard enough out of you for one day—”
“GUYS, QUIT IT!”
At once, everyone turned to look at Connor, who was red in the face. “Just stop, okay? My God.” He took Sylvia by the shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. She found that she was unable to shrug him off. “Sylvia, you cannot go criticizing unfinished paintings willy-nilly like that. For Pete’s sake, our fresco is a freaking flower growing out of a broken liquor bottle! Not everybody is going to understand it right away!” He released Sylvia and turned to face the others. “Guys, I understand that you’re upset, but it was pretty rude of you to start pointing fingers so fast. Since we got here, I’ve been sensing this antagonistic vibe from you guys, like you’re convinced we’re a bunch of spoiled brats or something. It’s perfectly possible that my household or Sylvia’s household does have a higher net income than the households that some of your friends back home come from, but you can’t make assumptions about our personalities based on that. You can’t even assume that we’re rich based on our uniforms, you know. Paul goes to our school on a scholarship. His dad lost his job a little while back.”
“Paul is a scholarship kid?” Sylvia guffawed. “Really?” She knew that Chandler Heights only gave scholarships to exceptionally talented kids from families that wouldn’t have been able to pay the tuition fees otherwise. Sylvia had always assumed that he was just another rich airhead.
“Yeah, he is,” Connor continued, “and you’re not going to say anything about it to him, got it? I’ve seen you tear people down with your rumors, and I’m not going to let you do that to him.”
Sylvia squirmed under his gaze. Looking to her right, she saw that the other three were waiting to hear her reply. “I was just going to say,” she began, biding her time, “that I never would have guessed it. I guess I had a twisted view of people from low-income families.” Turning away, she muttered, “His shoes were pretty scuffed up, though.”
Surprisingly, Courtney and Deidre laughed a little at her last comment. She marveled at how quick they were to forgive.
Connor cleared his throat. “Okay guys, here’s what we’re going to do. We still have a little bit of our primary color paint left over. We could lend you some. And if you’ll pull out your color swatches, I’ll try to help you out the best I can with the mixing.”
Sylvia didn’t like the sound of that idea. Team 8C was ahead of them. It didn’t make sense to help them get ahead while their painting suffered. “Connor, we’re running out of time,” she reminded him.
“And so are they,” he responded, picking up a couple of paint cans. Maybe he didn’t care as much about winning as she thought. “Oh, did you say you were looking for me?” he asked. “I ran to some building nearby to, you know, calm myself down a little after—”
“That’s why I was looking for you, Connor! I was mistaken! Stella isn’t dead!”
“What? How—”
“The text message was too long. It ran over into another text. Allison misspelled the word ‘died.’ Stella didn’t die—she dyed her hair red.”
Connor didn’t say a word.
Understanding Connor’s silence to be a sign of disbelief, she whipped out her cell phone. “Here, I’ll pull up the conversation for you. I even yelled at her in all caps and everything. Trust me, Connor, I was just as scared as you were. Stella and I used to be just as close as you and Paul are.” Once again, she held the phone out to him, and once again, he hesitated to take it from her. “We got in an argument about why she was still with you, and I just sort of walked out. And that was the end of it.”
Connor finally took the phone from her and read the rest of the conversation. He smiled. “Red is her favorite color,” he said simply.
Connor spent the next half-hour helping Team 8C recreate their colors. It turned out that, other than a few basic colors from the color wheel, they only really needed a few shades of black, white, and gray. After all, as Ben explained, spray paint didn’t come in a huge variety of colors.
Finally, he joined Sylvia at their station and got to work. They still had a ton of work to do. She wished that Paul could just return already.
“Hey, I never saw you guys take a lunch break!” Courtney called. “You must be pretty hungry. Here, I think I have a few granola bars…” She tossed an entire box of them towards Connor’s head, and he deftly caught it. A bit of white paint was splattered on the box. “Good luck, guys, and may the best team win!”
“We’ll put you in our acknowledgements!” Deidre added, grinning. The temperature was starting to become stifling. Every once in a while, Connor and Sylvia took turns standing before one of the fans at the end of the platform to cool off. They were often joined by other painters. Connor noticed that music was still playing.
It was insane, almost overwhelming, to be in a place where so much art was being created at once. Every bit of available space in the tent was either taken up by painters, painting supplies, or paintings. Color was crawling up the walls. From the ceiling, the frescoes seemed so much larger than their painters that, if a person squinted hard enough, it was as if the paintings were painting themselves. They were just appearing on the plaster. It was a shifting, changing, living museum.
Paul returned at four o’clock with three paper Chick-fil-A bags and a Valencia State baseball cap, totally out of breath. Connor rejoiced as if the cavalry had come riding in. He pulled him into an embrace. “Dude! I missed you, man! You’re not going to believe the day I had!”
Sylvia knew that she should have been pissed, but she was only relieved. She joined them in their embrace.
Paul backed away instantly. “Connor, is she holding a knife?”
“I don’t think so.” He checked. “No, she’s not.”
“Okay . . . Oh, just wait until you hear about my day.” Paul grinned. “I was walking around, right, and then I started to feel my skin baking, and I realized that I forgot to put on my sunscreen, so I went to get some sunscreen, and I totally forgot about your milkshake. Then I ran into those guys”—he pointed at Courtney’s team—“and I went with them to Chick-fil-A. We hung out there for a little bit, and I was about to get your milkshake, but I realized that I had to make sure that I got everything that I wanted to do done before I got the milkshake so that it wouldn’t get all warm and weird. That’s when I split up with their crew, checked out the gift shop and a few of the campus buildings, accidentally walked in on a math class, answered a question on the board, flirted with some chick at the library, almost got punched by her super buff but short-ish boyfriend, grabbed a slice of pizza for free from the cafeteria—they didn’t even check for my ID—and retraced my steps from the Student Center to the tent and back to make sure that I wouldn’t get lost after getting the food. I have the selfies to prove it.” Paul took a moment to catch his breath before continuing. “After all of that, I got the food. I just got whatever, since I figured that you guys would be too hungry to really care what I got. It’s all chicken, anyways. One milkshake, one deluxe chicken sandwich meal minus the drink, and two normal deluxe chicken sandwich meals.” Paul passed out the bags very proudly. “We can work out ho
w much you guys owe me later—I kept the receipt.”
Connor sipped the milkshake. “This is strawberry,” he observed, looking surprised.
“Yeah. I wasn’t sure what kind you wanted, so I got you my favorite flavor. My bad.”
“No, no, this is good,” Connor assured him.
Sylvia finally remembered why the milkshake was significant. She remembered Stella telling her that they always used to go out for cookies ‘n’ cream milkshakes on Fridays. He was probably relieved that Paul got him strawberry.
Sylvia proceeded to tell Paul all about Team 8C, the misinterpreted text, and the mysteriously spilled paint. As she spoke, she watched out of the corner of her eye as Courtney approached Connor. She held a folded piece of paper in her hands.
All along, she’d been suspicious that Courtney had a thing for Connor. She was always so courteous with him, and she smiled whenever he spoke.
“Connor, would you do me a favor?” she heard Courtney say.
“Hmm?”
Sylvia stole a glance as Courtney handed him the slip of paper. He opened it. Sure enough, there was a phone number written on the inside, all ten digits, complete with dashes. Connor was opening his mouth to speak, but Courtney put a finger to her lips, signaling for him to keep quiet.
“Please give that to Paul for me after you leave. Don’t forget to tell him it’s from Courtney,” she whispered. “He’s so adorable.”
Sylvia tried her best to hold it in, but she couldn’t help it. She started to laugh. She giggled softly at first, but her laughter gradually increased in volume. Paul looked genuinely frightened.
“Sylvia, what are you laughing at?” he asked. “Are you alright?”
She leaned against the stool for support, wiping a tear from her eye. “I don’t know. I’ve just been proven wrong so many times today that it’s getting kind of funny now. Just look!” She held out the edge of her shirt to let them see. “I even got paint on my shirt!”
Courtney giggled politely. Connor and Paul silently exchanged concerned glances.
“You know what else?” she continued. “Check this out.” She pointed to the edges of their fresco. “The plaster is going to be dry soon.”
Connor pulled at his hair. “What? How can you tell?”
“It’s getting lighter. Dry plaster is pure white.” She shook her head. “I walked in today thinking that we were going to win it all. No—that I was going to win it all. I was rude to the girl at the registration desk, I bashed another team, and I severely underestimated my own teammates. Meanwhile, the team I was telling off is nearly finished, and their technique is amazing. Graffiti or not, their fresco is fabulous. We’ll be lucky if we finish in time.”
“Well, let’s see how far we can get,” Paul declared. “We have a reputation to uphold. Chandler Heights Prep kids don’t go down without a fight. CHP on three. One, two . . .”
“C-H-P!” the three of them cried, jumping up and putting their paintbrushes to the plaster. For the first time since a little after ten o’ clock that morning, all three of them were working on their fresco at the same time. Paul was filling in the background while Connor worked on the glass bottle, and Sylvia painted in the petals on the flower.
Whether or not they finished in time, it was going to be a magnificent final stretch.
11:31 AM, MONDAY, September 3, 2013
Sylvia read the date and time on the sleek black monitor hanging on the walk at the end of the hallway. School was back in session, and she and Stella were on their way to lunch. Sylvia kept an eye out for Paul or Connor.
“So, how was your summer?” she asked Stella.
Stella made a face and pointed at her spiky, tomato-red hair. “Obviously, it was pretty crazy. But, you know, it was good. Refreshing. I spent some time with my aunt.”
“The skydiving one?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“Awesome.” Sylvia swung her lunchbox back and forth on her finger. “So . . . how are you feeling about the whole Connor thing?”
Stella shrugged. “Every once in a while, I get this sudden urge to punch him in the face. Otherwise, I think I’m feeling better about it. I have goals, you know? Starting a band, writing a book, getting into college. I don’t need romance to help me do any of those things.”
As the two of them passed by an empty classroom, Sylvia glanced through the window in the door and saw one half of a pale, gaunt face staring back at her. It was Connor. She gave him a slight nod before turning to face forward, taking care to never slow her pace. Stella didn’t notice.
A few seconds later, the door audibly swung open and clicked shut behind them. Connor jogged to catch up with them.
“Uh, hey Stella.” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Hey Sylvia,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
Stella glanced at him, her eyes a little wide with surprise. “Oh. Hi Connor,” she replied, unsmiling. She did not slow down, and she went right back to looking straight ahead.
“I like your hair,” Connor said quickly, the words almost stumbling over each other on the way out. She raised an eyebrow, touching a hand to her hair. It looked as if that was the last thing she expected him—or anyone—to say.
“Really?” she asked, daring to look him in the eye a second time.
“Yeah. It’s a good look for you.” Connor offered her a genuine smile.
Stella looked at her feet. She slowed slightly. “Thanks,” she said, smiling a little.
“I guess I’ll see you around,” Connor said as they neared the end of the hallway.
“Yeah, I guess,” Stella agreed. “Bye, Connor.” She and Sylvia turned right while Connor turned left.
Mission accomplished, Sylvia thought. She had promised Connor an opportunity to speak to Stella, and her promise had just been fulfilled.
“What the hell was that?” Stella whispered as loud as she dared. She was blushing.
“I don’t know. Super weird, right?”
“Yeah.” Stella bit her lip to keep from smiling any wider. “What a butthole.”
They burst out laughing, leaning on each other to keep from falling over.