EIGHTEEN

Dee was sprawled on her bed, working on an essay about the New Deal, when her phone made an ugly buzzing noise, like an insect trapped in a jar. She stared at it suspiciously; very few people called her. Everyone texted these days. Calls were reserved for emergencies, for parents, for pranks. None of those appealed to her.

But it was Friday, after classes, which meant Gremma was in the room. And she would notice if Dee suddenly started avoiding her phone. With a mental sigh, Dee picked it up and checked the caller ID.

It was James. Fear made her tighten up; she’d been dreading another void, but she accepted the call. There was no point in hiding. “Yes?”

“Do you have a car?” he asked.

She squinted at her phone. Of all the weird questions, she hadn’t expected this one. “No,” she said.

A pause; a muffled curse. His voice was taut, and for once she could hear none of his usual breezy demeanor.

Dee didn’t like the strain in his tone. “What happened?”

James let out a frustrated growl. “Someone came through the parking lot and slashed my tires, well not just mine, lots of people’s, but I’ve got a show tonight and I was supposed to have had my stuff there by noon.”

“A show?” It must be something to do with his art. She glanced at the clock; it was half past three.

He sighed. “Listen, Dee, I’ll talk to you later.”

And then he hung up.

For a moment, the sound of her own name rang in her ears.

Dee glanced over at the other side of her room. Gremma had a pair of white earbuds plugged into her phone, and she was reattaching one of her teddy bear’s legs with tight, neat sutures.

“Hey,” said Dee. Said it twice more, and then Gremma finally heard.

Gremma yanked out her earbuds. “Huh?”

“Were you planning on using your car today?” she asked.

Gremma had never been stingy about the use of her Camaro, but then again, Dee rarely asked to borrow it.

“Not really,” said Gremma. “Why?”

Dee looked down at her phone. “I think a friend might need help.”

Something in her voice must have tipped Gremma off, because suddenly her green eyes went bright with interest. “Would this happen to be your dealer? The reason you broke curfew a few weeks back?”

“For the last time, he is not my dealer. Nor my man of the night.”

A grin spread across Gremma’s face. “But you don’t deny the curfew thing.”

Dee hesitated. “He’s got a problem.”

“Gang war?”

Dee threw her a despairing look. “Not everything in my life is sordid and criminal. In fact, nothing in my life is sordid and criminal.”

“I would argue,” said Gremma, “but my SAT verbal scores weren’t as high as yours and I have no idea what sordid means.” She swung her legs over her bed and gave Dee another smile. The kind of smile that birds saw just before a house cat swallowed them whole.

“You can use my car,” she said, ever so sweetly, “but only if I’m driving.”

Dee grimaced and hit the call-back button on her phone. It rang twice, then James’s harried voice said, “Yeah?”

“My roommate has a car,” she said, without preamble. “But she would have to come along. My roommate. Um. You know. Teddy Bear Girl.”

“Have you warned him about me?” said Gremma. She sounded as if she were trying for offended but was delighted instead.

She expected James to hesitate, to think about it, but the words left him in a rush. “Seriously? Oh, thank you. Thank you, thank you. How soon can you get to my apartment?”

“Pretty soon.” Dee glanced over; Gremma was pulling on a jacket.

Dee pursed her lips, heaved a sigh, and hoped she wouldn’t regret this.

The last time Dee had been inside James’s apartment, it had looked normal. Well, relatively normal. It looked transient and half put together, curtains serving as walls, and a kitchen made out of portable shelves and counters and a camp stove.

Now, when Dee pushed the door open, she felt her jaw drop. It wasn’t an apartment, not anymore.

It looked like a museum.

Paintings. Paintings everywhere. Propped up against the counter, the couches, laid flat on the floor. Oil paints were cast across canvases, swirls of color that might have come from the hand of any master painter. Several of them were covered with brown paper—Dee supposed these were marked for the gallery.

“All right,” said Gremma faintly. “Not a bookie, then.” She paused. “He still could be a dealer, though. Imagine all the drugs you could slip inside one of these frames.”

James was counting out canvases. “Will these fit in your trunk?”

“Not safely,” said Gremma, recovering. “But we’ll manage.”

“Good.” James went to the first pile of paintings and picked up two. There were wires attached to the back of the canvas, and he brought two small ones to Gremma and two slightly larger ones to Dee.

It was cumbersome work; the paintings weren’t exactly heavy, but they were unwieldy, and Dee found herself having to angle oddly through doorways. Once they were in the elevator, Gremma dragged a sharp breath between her teeth. “Your boy is an artist,” she said.

“He is not my boy,” replied Dee. “He is a friend. An artist friend. Whose tires were slashed.”

Gremma managed to hold her silence. Until the elevator doors pinged open and Dee waddled out to the first floor, trying to heft the paintings without bumping into anyone. Gremma’s car wasn’t exactly built for carrying storage, but the trunk was just large enough to slide the paintings into. Dee carefully set one on top of the other, trying not to damage anything.

“He’s hot,” said Gremma abruptly.

Dee threw her a look.

“What, because I’m gay I can’t comment on the attractiveness of boys?” said Gremma with a half shrug.

“He is not my type,” said Dee. “He’s…”

“Da Vinci reincarnated,” said Gremma.

“I’d say I’m more Delacroix than Da Vinci,” said James as he passed by. It must have been an art reference, but it went right over Dee’s head. She was too busy trying not to look mortified.

The art gallery was one of those trendy, up-and-coming deals—designed to look fashionable without being stuffy. There was something distinctly hipster-esque about the way all the employees were dressed. A woman wearing thick-rimmed glasses and a worn cardigan spoke to James for a moment, then unclipped the velvet divider for James to step through. Dee hesitated, then followed. The room was dimly lit, with spotlights shining on the paintings. The walls themselves were draped with linen and it gave the room a strangely muffled quality. When she spoke, it felt as if the air swallowed up her words, blunting their sounds.

“Where are we supposed to put these?” she asked. She had a painting in each hand. James took one from her and stepped through the gallery confidently, toward the back.

Near the back of the room, Dee saw where the polished gallery frayed into something half-built and slightly panicked. There was a man with a clipboard trying to count a number of sculptures, a thirtysomething woman trying to reattach a wire to the back of a painting, and a teenager with a pencil jammed behind his ear was on the phone, saying something about a liquor license. There were clumps of sawdust on the floor, and unstrung twinkle lights had been lumped near one of the doors.

“Lancer,” said James, smiling in that breezy way of his. Clipboard Man paused in his counting and heaved a sigh.

“Thank god, I knew we were missing someone.”

“Sorry we’re late,” said James, and they shook hands, falling into an easy conversation about local vandals and flat tires. Dee stood awkwardly to one side. Gremma was still unloading paintings from the Camaro—parked in a wildly illegal spot on the curb—so Dee had no immediate person to talk to. She considered fake-texting someone, so she wouldn’t look so woefully pathetic, but then James was saying, “And this is my personal savior, Dee.”

Dee looked up, realized that she was being introduced, and hastily shoved her phone away. Clipboard Man was smiling in a vaguely disinterested way, but when he saw the painting leaning against her thigh, his eyes brightened.

Gremma appeared a few minutes later, having charmed the bouncer by the velvet curtains into carrying the rest of the paintings for her. “Remember,” Clipboard Man was saying to James, “the show starts at eight. We would love to have you make a personal appearance, Mr. Lancer.” He turned his smile on Dee and Gremma. “As well as your lovely guests, of course.”

They left the gallery in its half-finished state. Gremma immediately strode to the car. A meter maid had pulled alongside the Camaro and was scribbling out a ticket.

James glanced at Dee; there was an expression on his face she hadn’t seen before. It was almost embarrassment. “You can come, if you want,” he said. “To the opening tonight. I mean, I was invited and you pretty much saved my ass today. Getting a cab over here would have probably cost me a limb and I’m already pushing that envelope.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Do I look like I’m dressed for an art opening?” She gestured down at herself.

Green Old Navy flip-flops, skinny jeans, an oversized sweater, and some necklace she’d found in a dollar bin and liked. Her curls were little more than frizz, forced into a braid that kept threatening to break free.

James deliberately looked down at his own hipster-hobo clothing.

“Point taken,” she said. “But I still don’t look like I belong in there. Everyone’s wearing heels and slacks and those chunky glasses.”

“And you’re going to let that stop you?” He was smiling now, embarrassment apparently forgotten.

She crossed her arms. “And what does it matter to you if I go or not? You can still make an appearance, and it sounds like they want you to.”

“Of course they want me to,” said James sourly. “I rarely show at these events and it drives them crazy. If my paintings didn’t sell so well, I doubt they’d put up with me. Young artists are supposed to be accommodating.”

“Then why aren’t you accommodating?” she asked.

His gaze drifted to the gallery, then away. “It’s a waste of time,” he said, with more seriousness than she expected. “I could be working on something new. Creating something, putting another piece of myself into a painting. In two hundred years, no one will remember if I came to these things or not.”

“You’ve got a thing about immortality,” she observed. “Being remembered and all that.”

“Is that so bad?” said James. “I want people to know my name long after I’m dead. I want future art students to have to memorize the year I painted a man with a mechanical heart and I want those students to hate me because they’re going to have to write some essay on whether I painted it because I believed that hearts are useless things, easily replaced by machines, or if I just had my heart broken, or if this was simply the part of my career known as my mecha period.” There was a fervor in him she hadn’t ever seen before. “We’re all just moments and most of us don’t matter. We study less than one percent of all humanity in our history books.”

“And you’re going to be part of that one percent?” asked Dee.

“I just want to matter,” he said, unsmiling.

It was like pulling a curtain back, peering behind a mask made of smiles and quips. This was the real James, this young, bright, desperate thing. There was a burning intensity to his eyes, and she saw for the first time a boy who would sell his heart—not for some hobby, but because he thought it was the only way to live the life he wanted.

They had that in common.

Some of his fire burned away, and then the normal James was standing before her, in his leather jacket and wearing a breezy smile. “You helped me,” he told her. “I’d like to pay you back with a night of culture. It would be the gallant thing to do.”

Her mouth twisted. “Culture?”

“There’s also free booze,” he said. “And—I don’t know. I thought you might have fun.”

Before she could reply, Gremma’s voice rang out. “Come on! I just talked us out of a parking ticket and I’m not sure if I can pull that off again.” Gremma stood next to the Camaro, hands on her hips, tapping one foot expectantly against the ground.

James laughed quietly. “She’s…”

“Forceful?” asked Dee. “Confident? Attractive?”

“I was going to say a budding serial killer, but those work, too,” he replied. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten the teddy bears.”

She shook her head. Somehow, the silence between them felt easy, comfortable. Perhaps it was the fact that he knew a secret about her, and she knew one about him. In the presence of others—those like Gremma—their temporary alliance seemed to strengthen.

“Why’d you call me?” she asked, before she could lose her nerve. “I mean, I don’t mind that you did. But… there had to be someone else you could’ve asked for help.”

He shrugged, suddenly appearing self-conscious. “I thought that’s what you did with friends?”

Friends. The word felt strange. But perhaps that was what this recognition was, this strange connection. Friendship. An understanding.

She’d never had anyone ask her for help before. Well, besides her parents, but those requests were always tangled up with guilt and obligation and a stomach-churning need to do something.

Gremma’s car horn rang out and Dee flinched. “Come on,” she said, and she found herself taking James’s arm, pulling him toward the car. “She will leave us if we take too long.”