Page 27 of Ruthless Reign

My phone chimed, and I rolled my eyes at the message on the screen from Hardin.

Hardin

You good in there? No new faces?

Becca

I’m fine.

Despite my annoyance that both of my shadows waited for me not five feet outside the classroom door, I did take a glance around the room, but didn’t see anyone I didn’t recognize.

Becca

No new faces. Can I paint, now?

Hardin

Smartass.

I took my time setting up, mostly to avoid actually looking at the canvas. Where it seemed the majority of my classmates were mostly putting finishing touches on their self-portraits, mine had nothing but the vague shape of my face in a light olive tone, a swath of deep brown for my hair, and the blackest black I could find as the background, brushed through with darkest navy and deepest violet.

God.

I was never going to finish in time.

My phone chimed again, and I earned a dirty look from the girl next to me. I grimaced, giving her an apologetic look as I silenced the phone, but read the message on the screen first.

Kaleb

Paint the shit out of that self-portrait, Vixen. You got this.

If I could’ve, I would’ve kissed him through the screen. I took a deep breath and convinced myself to just begin.

I wanted this so badly that it was worth forfeiting all the comforts I grew up with. Now it was time to work for it.

Add some depth.

I readied a brush, trying to clear my mind.

Painting had always been easy for me. Like breathing. But this project had felt daunting from the first moment I started it. Paint yourself. That was it. The whole project. The only additional criteria was to make the artwork honest. Ms. Benchwright didn’t elaborate. She said we could take that to mean whatever we thought it meant. Most of the others took it literally, painting themselves in proportions that perfectly matched their true-to-life reflections.

Some overexaggerated their flaws.

One painted a cloud and rainbows over the top of their head. It suited her, really. She was always tripping over things and spacing out. A girl with her head perpetually in the clouds.

My clouds didn’t have rainbows. Not these days. They hadn’t had rainbows in them since I was a kid being pushed on a swing at a playground by a mother I no longer had.

I switched brushes, switched colors. It needed to be darker.

No.

Not darker.

It needed…

It needed red.

I lost track of time as I painted, letting my muse take me wherever it wanted, remembering the familiar feel of the brush between my fingers. Of drying paint in the creases of my knuckles and the turpentine and formaldehyde smell of old acrylic in my nose.

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