How to Be Luminous by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

Author:Harriet Reuter Hapgood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

Silver

(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

Her earrings. Metallic marker pens. The mirror, tarnished with watermarks and crud from weeks and months and years of art.

CHAPTER 18

The Color of Chalk

When we emerge from the yard, the city’s nighttime yell has arrived. Up and down the main road, buses scream their horns, the last call to prayer rings out from the mosque a few streets away, and music blares from hipster bars beneath the station, filled with crowds of SCAD students. London is alight.

We run through the rain and win a table in the window of a family-run Italian place Mum and I used to come to sometimes after the studio. I’d try to make my half of the tiramisu last for hours, watching the clock, counting down to the point I’d have to share her with Emmy-Kate and Niko again. But there was always a moment when she’d reach out with her fork and scoop up the last bite, ready to get moving.

Ash and I sit side by side in the radiance of twinkling Christmas lights and hundreds of candles, choosing buttery garlic bread and pizzas the size of bicycle wheels from laminated menus.

“Min!” Ash beams brighter than the candlelight as our table is overloaded with food. “Look at all this. Makes me want to go to Italy.”

Caught in the spotlight of his brilliant Ash-meets-Elvis smile, I’m right back to being the girl who met his eye in the National Gallery. And the cinder block in my chest becomes a little less heavy. It’s strange. I keep expecting it all—grief, sadness, hope, happiness—to happen in a straight line. But life lately is more about tiny moments like this. Pockets of ups and downs.

I say, “Imagine, Italy. We could visit Rome, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. See Botticelli. And da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo…”

“All four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, if you like,” Ash teases, and there it is, moment gone.

Because I immediately start thinking about Felix in the kitchen on Saturday, raving to Emmy-Kate about Michelangelo and telling me he wished he could see The Kiss. If I went to Italy with Felix, we would lie underneath a hundred sculptures.

I’m unforgivable. I’m on a romantic date with my boyfriend and I’m thinking about someone else.

Ash hums happily, sucking butter from a piece of garlic bread and discarding the crust. Between each bite, he drums the fingertips of his other hand on the tablecloth. “This is fun, Miniature. Pizza was a good call.”

“It is fun,” I manage to say. At least, it beats the frozen version, eaten at Niko’s mandatory sit-down Saturday nights. “Thank you.”

“Good. And you’re welcome.” He smiles to himself, body-bumping me gently, then lifts a slice of pizza. It trails white cheese strings that remind me I once had a macramé-making phase but didn’t finish a single piece then, either. “So, we should go to Italy for real, though.”

“Obviously,” I say through a delicious mouthful. “Everyone should go to Italy.”

“Yeah?” Ash starts chair-dancing. “We could do the backpacker thing through Europe.

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