Page 56 of The Love Simulation

“Everything. Sheba. My bed. Colors. Ugh, I am so tired of red.” I throw my hands out. I don’t have to point to anything in particular, because it’s all red. “My brother said I should bring some paints or something. I should have listened to him.”

Roman finishes eating and gets up. “I have an idea. Don’t go anywhere.”

I don’t know what Roman has in mind, but he’s all over the place. He grabs cups from the kitchen and fills them with our water rations. He moves to our tiny lab and takes some of the dirt samples. He rushes to the greenhouse then comes back out with a small handful of leaves. He even grabs blue and black pens from our supplies, opens them with all the focus of a trained surgeon, and dumps the ink into two cups.

When he goes to the drawer with the manuals, he regards me. “Vacuum or dishwasher?”

“Um, dishwasher?”

He nods, flipping through the pages and tearing two out.

“What are you doing?” I finally ask.

“You said you miss colors. Now you’ve got some primary and then some.”

I inspect the cups. He made black and blue with the pens, green with the leaves, red with the dirt, and yellow with packets of mustard, all mixed with water.

The way I want to kiss him right now. But to do that, we’d have to go to our room, and all his hard work would go to waste.

“The only things we don’t have are brushes,” he says. “We’ll have to use our fingers.”

I dip my finger into the cup of diluted mustard, testing the consistency, and think of what to paint. When I have an idea, I pull the paper toward me and begin. Roman starts on his own, and we work in silence with the cups of paint set between us as a makeshift barrier so we don’t see what the other is doing. It goes without saying that this is absolutely a competition and we will be seeing who has the best picture when we’re done.

“Anything else you miss from the outside?” Roman asks.

I like how he’s turned this into a therapeutic session for me to paint and complain.

“I know this is bad, so don’t come at me, but I miss gossip.” At his taken aback look I laugh. “Before I was vice principal, I used to gossip with the teachers at my old school all the time. Well,Ididn’t gossip. Just listened. But it’s different as a vice principal. Everyone keeps all the juicy stuff to themselves so they don’t get in trouble, I guess.”

“For what it’s worth, they don’t gossip around me either,” Roman says, and I instantly feel ridiculous for complaining. Of course the teachers wouldn’t gossip around him. They’d think he’d tell his dad everything.

“I’m sorry, that was inconsiderate.”

He goes on, ignoring the apology. “But I still pick up onthings. For example, I have it on good authority that a certain teacher who raps and another teacher who likes birds have been dancing around each other all year.”

I gasp, loving the juicy tidbit. He’s talking about his friends Kareem and Raven. I had no idea there was something simmering between them.

Roman wipes his finger on a damp cloth he brought over for us. “All done. Let me see what you made.”

“Wait! I need more info on the teachers first. Do you think either of them will make a move?” I am fully invested.

Roman shrugs, but he knows I’m hanging on his every word and is loving it. “I heard a very cool, very handsome science teacher tried to get one of them to make the first move and offered up date ideas, but nobody wants to listen to him. Let me see your picture.”

“Hold on. What date ideas did the science teacher suggest? Maybe they were bad.”

He levels his gaze at me. “Not only is the science teacher very cool and handsome, he’s also a romantic.”

“Hmm, what are the chances that someone who calls themselves a romantic actually is one?”

“This science teacher is the real deal. One of the dates he suggested to Karee—um, the teacher who likes rap—was dinner and painting. You can’t tell me, or the science teacher, the ladies don’t love that.”

I look at our table with its paints again, and my heart melts. “You know, you—make that the science teacher—may have a point.”

“Yup. Now quit stalling and show me your picture.”

When he uses that tone, how can I resist? I lift my picture to him, and Roman’s eyes widen.

“Wow, Brianna. That looks just like me.”

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