Kelsey jumped on the silence, trying to get it out as fast as possible. “I’m so sorry—I went because he invited me—Well, not me—But I went and while I was there—”
But as she spoke, Gillian stood, leaving her tray, and walked toward the cafeteria exit.
“Ingrid,” she called from the door. “I need you.”
“She needs me,” Ingrid said, avoiding Kelsey’s eyes. “We’ll talk later, okay?”
“Tell her I’m sorry!” Kelsey called, and watched her walk away.
She fought the urge to bang her fist on the table. It seemed the only people who would listen to her were so far away. The only person, rather. Maybe she wasn’t saying the right things. Or maybe she just wasn’t saying them to the right people. Should she follow her friends?
No point, she decided. No point in trying to wrangle their anger into understanding.
She unwrapped the bottom of her 3 Musketeers bar and put the rest of it in her mouth in one bite, trying to savor its sticky richness until it was all gone. Michelle loved sweet things, too. Michelle and her hot chocolate. She would never tell her sister that sugar was bad for her. She would never tell her to give up something or someone she loved.
Ingrid had said it herself. It’s love, you know? If you are, you are.
She was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Weeks passed, embedded in routine. The sun got higher in the sky, up earlier, out later. As graduation grew closer, the seniors at Lawrence High School were starting to anticipate the leap they were expected to take, equally itching for it and fearing it. They flocked in the cafeteria and the courtyard like inquisitive birds around bodies of water, disseminating at the slightest ripple of responsibility.
Kelsey kept her head down. She cleaned her room. She dragged herself out of bed to practice her routine for the Rock Chalk Dancers audition. And she wrote.
She wrote to Peter as often and as deeply as if she were writing in a journal. Since the company’s loss, security had tightened, and he wasn’t able to Skype until they moved bases.
4/2
Dear Peter, I was in the locker room and I put my right shoe on my left foot because I was thinking of how the end of one of your eyebrows is somehow a shade blonder than the rest of your hair. Did you know that? Did you get a lemon in your eye at a young age?
xo
Michelle
4/20
Michelle—Abstract Expressionism is in fact the vomit of a sea creature. I mean that in a really good way. Think of it as an orca having just ate a school of angelfish, then he gets sick, and the pool of sickness is suspended in water. I’m writing that here because I don’t think Mrs. Wallace would appreciate it like you would.
Yours,
Peter
She was still Michelle in his eyes, but besides the name, she was Kelsey in every way. She would tell him the truth when his tour was over. And then, well, she didn’t know what would happen then.
Today, Kelsey was returning to the main doors of the high school from lunch, which she now opted to eat downtown. She waved at a car full of classmates and they waved back, their music fading as they squealed out of the parking lot.
She felt the itch and fear as much as anyone else, wishing she could duck out of the gymnasium doors and pile into a car bound for Clinton Lake. But she had said no for too long. There were friendly hellos from the dancers in the hallway, condolences about the breakup, and nods from the fringe of ordinary faces who used to cheer for her team at pep rallies and guzzle beer in her house.
Her phone lit up, and she grabbed for it, hoping to see Peter’s name, but it was just a text from Davis: It’s hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch, it said. Kelsey smiled. She typed, It’s hotter than two cats fighting in a wool sock, then deleted it. He was always better than she was at them, comedian that he was.
And she couldn’t keep going back and forth. She remembered what Davis had last thought about their breakup: For now, he had said. She shouldn’t give him any ideas.
At her locker, she could smell Gillian before she saw her. Hair spray. She turned, finding Gillian there, trying to look at anything in the surrounding hallway but Kelsey. Next to her, Ingrid froze.
“Please ask Kelsey if she wants to have the dance team meeting at four or four thirty tomorrow,” Gillian said, her eyes locked on Ingrid.
Things between Kelsey and Gillian had turned from bad to worse. Gillian had even requested to move desks in Chemistry, the only class they had together.
Ingrid, meanwhile, was trying to remain neutral, but found herself more on Gillian’s side because Gillian was the one who, literally and physically, yanked her there.
Ingrid looked at Kelsey, saying sorry with her eyes. “Did you hear that, Kels?”
“Four,” Kelsey said. “And, Gil, please, just talk directly to me. This is so immature.”
“Tell Kelsey she doesn’t know the definition of mature.”
“Forget it,” Kelsey said, unable to stop herself from rolling her eyes. “I have to get to Art History.”
“Hear that?” Ingrid said, talking to Gillian as they walked away. “Kelsey has to go to class.”
As usual, the room was already dark when she got there, and half empty now that the year was winding down. Mrs. Wallace was bathed in the light from a slide featuring a complex orange-and-pink flower shape. Below it were the words “Feminist Visual Culture.”
“Good afternoon, Kelsey,” Mrs. Wallace said. “You’re late, but I’ll let it go this time.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Wallace,” Kelsey said, smiling sheepishly, because she was late most days. But she was always there, and never fell asleep, like she would have had this been any other year, any other time.
“The first slide is of a painting by American artist Georgia O’Keeffe.”
Kelsey’s eyes followed the lines of the painting slowly, taking in every detail from top to bottom, as she had been taught.
“But before we get into that,” Mrs. Wallace continued, “we have to go back to the beginning. Well, a little after the beginning. We have to go back to 1848. Who can tell me what happened in 1848?”
“Pre-Raphaelites,” someone muttered.
“Exactly,” Mrs. Wallace said, pointing her remote to the projector with a dramatic wave, moving to the next slide. “The Brotherhood, as they say. Kelsey, read those names.”
Kelsey stumbled through the list.
“This is a list of people in Rossetti’s salon, one of the most exciting places to be if you were an artist at that time. They were rebelling against flat, conventional composition. People standing still in perfect portraits: boring! They wanted layers, asymmetry, backdrops, romance!” Then Mrs. Wallace smiled, pacing back and forth in her corduroy jumper. “And what do you not see?”
Kelsey’s eyes scanned the pale faces in the frame, burning to answer the question, but nothing popped into her head. She was stuck.
“Let me put it this way,” Mrs. Wallace said. “What does Rossetti’s salon and a boys’ locker room have in common?”
Kelsey cried out, “Oh! No women!”
“Bam. Right on the nose. And there’s your problem right there.…”
The rest of the class, Kelsey was riveted. Mrs. Wallace had a way of talking about the most minute details of what they were seeing so that they expanded into very big, important facts. The facts didn’t just relate to whatever time period they were studying, they were facts about the way a person looked at anything: a movie, a billboard, her mother’s decorating style. All of these types of seeing influenced one another, and they all found their root in the past.