Page 22 of Absorbed

“I’m impressed,” Jessie said.

Stacey was breathless and her cheeks hurt from grinning, but she clasped her hands atop her head, kicking her feet hard beneath her.

“I really thought you’d give up.”

“You don’t know me very well,” Stacey said, looking straight at him. “I don’t quit when there’s something I want.”

Jessie squinted and cocked his head, quizzically.

She lifted both eyebrows and raised her chin in response. The sound of the guards panting around her was drowned out by the beating of her heart. She was flirting, and for the first time the guy she was flirting with knew it.

Bob blew the whistle. Stacey tied with Jessie, both making it all the way to the end with their hands up.

They climbed out of the pool. Stacey’s shoulders were on fire and her legs felt like Jello, but she couldn’t remember another time she felt so confident. Without grabbing her towel or her clothes, she stood in front of Jessie in her red swimsuit with her hands on her hips, water dripping into a puddle around her feet. “If you ever need a ride so you won’t be late again, I can pick you up,” she offered.

He smiled. “Thanks, Stace.”

“Anytime. Need a ride home today?”

Jessie’s eyes scanned the length of her body. When his eyes met her gaze, he nodded. “Sure.”

“Hey, Jess,” Chad called from the door of the guard shack. “We’re getting donuts. Wanna come?”

Jessie’s eyes were locked on Stacey’s.

“Jessie?” Chad called again.

Stacey stared back at Jessie. She knew she wouldn’t have to worry about being invisible anymore.

Chapter Nine

Don’t think too much about it,” Ms. Moreno instructed. “We’re just making marks on a page.”

It was Monday night, a week after Stacey attended the first Art Escape, and she and Ms. Moreno were again the only two people in the art lab. An oscillating fan buzzed in the corner, the warm breeze blowing Stacey’s fine hair across her cheeks. Her art teacher’s tight chocolatey curls were suspended atop her head, anchored with a pencil. Stacey swirled her own hair up, shoving the pointed end of a pencil through. The hair unraveled, and the pencil clanked on the floor. Stacey sheepishly picked it up and pulled her hair to one side.

“The idea of abstract art is to capture the essence of something while letting it take on a life of its own. The feeling comes from the color, the unique brushstrokes. Introducing a new way of seeing and representing something.”

Stacey struggled to understand how the squiggly pale pink marks separated by thin white lines would resemble a flower, but she dipped her brush in the rosy hue and touched the tipof her brush to the paper. Imitating her teacher’s gestures, she pressed the brush down as she pulled it in a tight curve, and lifted up again toward the end. The C-shape looked more like a pink slug than a petal to her, but she repeated the motion moving outward, adjusting the length and width for each petal so no two were identical, and the petals grew wider and longer as the blossom spread outward.

“Nice!” Ms. Moreno praised.

Stacey leaned back and squinted. “Something’s off…”

“Good eye. What do you think it is?”

“It’s…too flat, or something.”

“Exactly. It’s a beautiful color, and your brushstrokes are well executed. But without a change in hue, it has no depth. Light and dark hues create shape. The petals connect at a deeper point in the flower, while the outside edges are in the light.”

Stacey looked at the flower Ms. Moreno had set in a beaker between them, and realized that even though she’d accomplished the right shade of peachy pink, the center of the live flower was much darker, and the outside petals were nearly white. She added more magenta and deep yellow to darken her mix, and rewet the edges of her petals near the center of her blossom. Stacey touched the darker color to the inside edges. It spread and faded across the petals.

“Well done, Stacey. That’s a perfect bleed.”

Stacey rinsed her brush and swiped clean water along the outside edges of the outer petals, dabbing them with a paper towel to remove some color.

“You have great instincts,” Ms. Moreno said.

They each added two more blossoms to their paintings, and Stacey studied her trio of pale pink roses fondly.

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