Page 31 of Corruption

“And I’m asking if there’s anything that you wanted to see.”

“We’ll eventually get to it all.”

“Or we can get to it now.”

Alik stares at me for a few seconds in that way that unnerves me because I can’t read him. I can never figure out what the hell he’s thinking, and that bothers me.

“There was something.”

“Where?”

“In the part we’re still in.”

This time I shadow him deeper into the gallery to the piece he wants to look at. It’s a picture of a man, and at first glance, it looks relatively normal. Not to say that the painting isn’t extravagant or lacking talent or skill. Just that there’s nothing remarkable about the piece. That is until I look at it for too long and something seems off. I can’t put my finger on what but…

“It’s like every time I look at it I see something different. Not metaphorically, but literally,” I say.

“That’s the point,” Alik says, nodding to the plaque next to the painting.

Man With a Thousand Faces, it reads.

“Aptly named,” I say, looking at the painting and getting closer. “How did they do that?”

“It’s the blending. They create various tones of the same shade that are so close in color they blend on first glance and then literally paint it with a thousand individual strokes so that every time you look at it, the way the light strikes and the various angles makes it appear that you’re seeing a thousand different faces,” Alik explains. “Or, that’s what I heard. Not sure it’s true. But it certainly has the effect of not being the same. It’s like the picture changes every few seconds but I can’t see how. I wish I could recreate something like it.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Don’t have the time, for one. And I also don’t think I have the hand precision to do it.”

“Maybe with practice.”

“Not enough practice in the world to fix the alignment in my hand. It was never quite the same after it was broken.”

“Broken by who?”

Alik slowly turns to look at me. “Who?”

“You said after it was broken. So who did the breaking?”

“Could have been a what.”

“So it was a who,” I surmise.

Alik doesn’t answer, but I don’t need him to. It’s not relevant to anything. I just wanted to know if I could make him fumble, and he did. Knowing I can make him do that makes him more fallible to me. Makes me not be so nervous around him.

“I’d like to recreate this one too,” I say.

“What’s stopping you?”

“The blending. I haven’t mastered the colors like that yet. I was hoping to get into an art school after I finished my GED program so I can learn color theory. But that’s not happening any time soon.”

“Your GED?”

I falter. Because I can’t remember if that was a detail I was supposed to hide or not. Whether Addy and Adrian created a fake high school diploma for me. Whether or not they told the Vorobevs that I was in college. I can’t remember. But it’s too late to take it back.

“My mother homeschooled me. She used her own program and then died before I could finish and she could make a transcript for me. So when I went to live with my dad, I decided to take the GED instead.”

That is to say my mother pulled me out of school when I graduated elementary, gave me some Christian-based math books and an advanced grammar and writing workbook to teach myself, and didn’t school me at all. As soon as I was settled enough after running away, I enrolled in classes.

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