THE SURFACE of the canvas smooshed and dimpled around Olive’s face. To someone who had never pushed her face into a painting, this might have felt abnormal. To Olive, it not only felt normal, it felt delightful. It meant that her painting was working. She had done it right. As though she were diving through a doorway made of warm Jell-O, Olive squished her body into the canvas.
One moment, she was crawling across her own rumpled bedspread. The next moment, her hands and knees were scraping against the rough surface of a canvas floor. Being short on time, Olive hadn’t painted much of a background for Morton’s parents. The room they waited in—if you could call it a room—was just an off-white square of slightly crooked lines. But the background didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Morton’s parents were there, smiling and posing, just as Olive had painted them. Their eyes followed her as she got up off her knees and stepped closer.
“Hello,” she said shyly. “You’re—um—you’re Mr. and Mrs. Nivens, aren’t you? You’re Morton and Lucinda’s parents?”
The smiles on the painted faces didn’t waver.
“I’m Olive. Morton is my friend.”
Olive waited for Morton’s parents to answer. Morton’s father took his hand off of his wife’s shoulder, where Olive had painted it. Now that both arms were dangling at his sides, Olive realized that one was stumpier than the other. And it wasn’t just a little bit stumpier. It was a lot stumpier. Olive always did have trouble with foreshortening.
Morton’s mother merely stared at Olive, her smile affixed to her face like something pinned to a bulletin board.
Neither of them spoke.
“Umm…” said Olive. “Morton has always just called you ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa.’ Is there something else I should call you? Your first names, maybe? Or is ‘Mr. and Mrs. Nivens’ all right?”
The painted people didn’t answer. But they nodded enthusiastically. Morton’s father went on nodding quite a lot longer than was necessary.
Olive took a step closer, studying their smiling faces. She’d made Morton’s mother’s eyes a touch too big. Olive had a habit of doing that in her artwork. All of her people turned out looking as though there might be at least one lemur hanging on the family tree. And, if she was honest with herself, Morton’s father’s neck was just a smidgeon too short. If she was really, really honest, she might admit that his collar appeared to be trying to swallow his head. But his face was fine, Olive assured herself. The features looked just like they had in the photograph. Morton would recognize him. He would recognize them both. He would be so happy to see them.
“If you’ll come with me, I’ll take you to Morton. He still lives in your old house. Sort of.” Olive struggled on while the portraits watched her, smiling and staring. “So, if you could just hold each other’s hands and follow me…”
Morton’s mother tottered unsteadily forward. Olive suspected that she had made Mrs. Nivens’s lower half a bit too long, as she often did in drawings where there was a trailing, puffy skirt involved. And perhaps the ruffled silk of the skirt had come out rather stiff…but it was hard to paint realistic-looking cloth. Olive eyed her work, trying to convince herself that Mrs. Nivens didn’t look like a big black funnel with a head and torso dribbling backward out of the top.
She glanced at Morton’s father. Fortunately, he was already standing, and his legs didn’t seem to be too long for the rest of his body. However, Olive had forgotten to paint the outline of knees inside the solid black tubes of his pants. When he stepped toward Olive, he had to swing from one straight leg to the other, like a pair of walking chopsticks.
“Okay,” said Olive, in a voice that had gotten a bit wobbly. “Now hold on to my hand, and hang on to each other, and do what I do. We have to move fast.”
Olive reached out toward Morton’s father. He took her hand in his big painted one. There wasn’t time to study it for long, but Olive noticed that his hand looked a bit stiff and sausagey, with all its fingers poking out in different directions, like the limbs of a starfish.
Holding on to the portrait’s hand, Olive crawled back out of the canvas and onto her squishy mattress. Morton’s parents followed her without too much trouble, although his mother did have to squirm a bit to get her massive skirts through. Olive tugged them both across her bedroom and into the upstairs hall.
There, standing in the dusty beams of daylight just outside the painting of Linden Street, Olive got her first clear look at her handiwork. And, as she looked, the realization flooded over her that what looks fine in a painting might be terrifying in real life.
The portraits’ faces were uneven and askew. They were flat where they should have been rounded. They were bumpy where they should have been smooth. Their limbs were rigid and awkwardly angled. Morton’s mother’s eyes, which had looked just a little bit too large from farther away, looked gigantic up close. Their color was flat, dark, and empty, without a reflective spark of light to bring them to life. And Morton’s father’s mustache, which Olive had formed with such careful brushstrokes, didn’t look like hair at all. Instead, it looked like some small, furry animal that had collapsed beneath his nose, but which might regain consciousness at any moment. Olive wasn’t sure if it was how she had mixed the paints, or if it was simply her lack of artistic skill, but even the hues of their skin and hair seemed impossibly bright, inhuman, and wrong.
She swallowed hard.
This was the best that she could do. Perhaps she was just being picky. Olive knew that she was always her own harshest critic. Even the time when she’d won the purple Grand Champion ribbon at a school art fair during third grade, Olive hadn’t felt happy at all—she had only seen the gap in the middle of her masterpiece where one macaroni noodle had come unglued. Maybe Morton would think that his parents looked fine. Maybe they had been a bit lopsided and bumpy in real life. And having parents—even lopsided, bumpy ones—was better than having no parents at all.
“Hang on tight,” Olive told Morton’s father in a shaky voice. She climbed over the edge of the picture frame, pulling her painted companions with her.
With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Olive led Morton’s parents up the misty hill toward Linden Street. The sounds of shuffling and clomping that came from behind her only made the sinking feeling worse. Morton’s neighbors peered out from their windows and porches, their once friendly faces now watchful and wary. By the time the trio had reached Morton’s tall gray house, the sinking feeling in Olive’s stomach had turned into the kind of watery tornado that forms around the drain of a very full bathtub.
Morton was seated on his porch railing, trying to keep his balance while kicking his legs and rocking back and forth. When he spotted the three of them, he froze so abruptly that he almost slid off the railing into the tulip patch. As they got closer, Olive could see that Morton had put on the big T-shirt she had used to carry the torn papers over the top of his nightshirt. The T-shirt belonged to Mr. Dunwoody. I’ve got logarithm, said the front. Olive knew that if Morton turned around, she would see the words Who could ask for anything more? printed across his shoulder blades. But Morton didn’t turn around. He stared directly at his three visitors as he teetered forward from the railing onto the lawn. Then he shuffled very slowly toward the sidewalk.
“Hi, Morton,” said Olive. Her heart gave a little leap—whether from nervousness or hope, the rest of Olive wasn’t sure. “I brought you something. And I didn’t need three whole months to get it either.”
Morton stopped a few feet away. He stared up at the two painted people. Their smiles were fixed in place. Their mismatched limbs hung stiffly at their sides.
“Here’s Morton,” Olive told them.
Mr. Nivens’s face seemed to be fighting against itself. “Arrrr,” he said. But his mouth didn’t move the way an ordinary mouth would. Instead, it twitched sideways, while the teeth remained clenched. “Raaaa. Ara. Reeeee.”
“Mmmmmm,” said the painting of Morton’s mother. It looked as though she was trying to speak with her lips closed. “MmmmmMMMMmmmm.”
Olive glanced back and forth between the three family members. Her painted people looked just as they had a moment ago: like two figures from a wax museum who had been briefly microwaved.
Morton, on the other hand, looked horrified.
“Take them away,” he whispered, backing toward the porch.
“But—but I painted them for you,” Olive said, following him. The painted people stayed put. “It’s what you wanted. That’s why I borrowed the photograph, and why I had you tape all the paint-making instructions back together—so I could use Aldous’s paints to bring back your mama and papa.”
“Those ARE NOT Mama and Papa!” shouted Morton. He whirled around and bolted into the house, slamming its heavy wooden door behind him. A moment later, Olive saw his round white face peering out at them from the corner of a downstairs window.
Olive turned back to her creations.
“MMMmmmmm,” said Morton’s mother.
“Rarrrrrrrr,” added his father.