The Gallery of Unfinished Girls by Lauren Karcz

Author:Lauren Karcz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

fourteen

I COULD TELL her about the kiss.

It’ll be at her house, the two of us sitting by the pool, the sun streaming in and dancing off the water. Dance. Shit. The Juilliard audition has to be kept in mind—should I, as she put it, throw off her foundation before the audition, or after it?

I tap my paintbrush against its palette in a bossa nova rhythm. When Tall Jon gets into his amateur music critic mode, sometimes he refers to a beat as a tattoo. I like that. But Gretchen and Rider clearly do not find anything inspiring about what I’m doing. Well, fine. Back to my absentminded work on this week’s assignment, which is to create a piece about an early memory.

“Green carpet,” Rider says to me, pointing at his sketch pad. I guess I’ve been staring. “The absolute first thing I can remember.”

My earliest memory is of my mom telling me not to climb the ladder to the slide at the big playground in Naples, and of me doing it anyway, and getting to the top, but then being too afraid to attempt the slide.

I remember her yelling my name over and over. Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes! Mercedes, no!

It’s so easy to say what you need to say—to yell it, even—when it’s that crucial.

It should be easy to tell Victoria.

By the pool. Or at my house, whispering it to her in the kitchen while Angela pounds on the piano. Maybe even during lunch this afternoon by the Dead Guy. In any of these places, the words will be the same: I kissed you, Victoria. And you kissed me back. And it was perfect.

But it was perfect because the Estate made it perfect.

Can we ever get back there?

It’s possible that telling her could screw everything up, that the memory was taken from her for a good reason. I spent so long planning to never say a word, and now the Estate has worked it out for that to be reality again. Maybe I shouldn’t disturb that.

Rider finishes another dizzying corner of his green carpet sketch. I drop my paintbrush and work on a rough pencil sketch of the slide’s ladder. I want the focus of the picture to be the insistence of my mother’s words. The viewers should have a sense of being shouted at to run away from the picture, but—I hope—a couple of them will make the choice to stick around and climb the ladder.

How do I accomplish this?

The ladder looks disproportional and weird. I start an outline of my mom on the left side of the paper, but no, it’s not the physical presence of Mom that stuck with me, it’s the sound of her.

Maybe there is a cloud of sound coming from that side of the picture, a distracting smoke bomb of Mom’s favorite shade of blue.

Maybe Mom’s voice comes through in a barrage of M shapes.

Maybe this idea won’t work at all. The viewer could sense that something’s wrong by the mixed-up proportions of everything else in the painting, and the skewedness of it could be the distraction.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.