Swimming for Sunlight by Allie Larkin

Author:Allie Larkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The conversation I’d planned to have with Nan about how I was fine with Isaac sleeping over probably didn’t need to happen. I got home from work the next night to a note that said, Bowling with Bitsie. Staying at Isaac’s. XO Nan.

Luca hadn’t called. Not hearing from him meant I could honestly say I didn’t know how to get equipment and we’d have to take photos on solid ground. But I was disappointed anyway. I wanted more of him. I wanted him to want more of me. I made a concerted effort to stay away from Facebook. The risk of sending him a dopey late-night message was too high.

Nan and Bitsie wanted to start shooting for the calendar in a few weeks. At the theatre in Rochester, costumes were my only job. Now I was committed to working at Isaac’s full-time and helping Mo two nights a week, and I felt a little frantic about all there was to do. I decided to take full advantage of the night alone.

“Okay, Bark,” I said. “What music should we listen to?”

Bark got excited, like maybe he knew the word music. I didn’t want him to think we were going to dance in the living room and not make it happen, so we started my brainstorming session with a good jump around to “Barracuda.” If Bitsie loved that song, maybe there was something in it that would send me in the right direction.

I flailed around the room, Bark following in a goofy gallop.

Rock and Roll Mermaids? Sharp barracuda teeth? Long hair like Ann and Nancy Wilson? Should these mermaids have long hair? Nan and Bitsie looked great with their spiky pixie cuts, and I didn’t want to shove them into the image of youth normally attached to mermaids. I’d never seen a depiction of an old mermaid. Were they were supposed to be eternally young like vampires? Did they have a short life span? Whatever the standing myth was, it had to change. These mermaids were about wisdom, not youth.

When the song was over, I scribbled Wisdom! in my notebook and underlined it. But wisdom brought to mind flowing gray Earth Mother hair, muted pinks and purples. It wasn’t the right word. I crossed it out and wrote Vitality! Strength! Joy! and something clicked in my head. I always felt self-conscious doing artsy-fartsy, free-thought stuff, but I never got anywhere without it. If I failed to do the inspiration work, I usually got stuck later in the process. The design started to feel false, and moving forward would get harder and harder, like I had to drag along the weight of all the wrong choices that snowballed from the first one. It was more productive to do the amorphous creative thought work first, even if it felt silly.

I sat on the couch with Nan’s mermaid photo album, flipping through the pages. There was a picture of the ladies in dresses and high heels. Hannah’s A-line dress had bold circles along the hem, like bubbles.

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