Devils' Day Party: A High School Bully Romance - C.M. Stunich Page 0,104

glass door that leads to the backyard.

She has no idea how much her comment means to me.

The small canvas sits in front of me, mocking me with my lack of intent. When I started this, I had no idea where I was going with it. There's the black sky, the silver stars, the crescent moon, and the lone tree. As I study it, basking in the sunshine that fills the room, meaning begins to appear between the carefully painted lines, a feeling that I didn't understand until just now.

“I feel like I'm starting to understand my own intentions here,” I say as Cathy sits down at a potter’s wheel and begins to throw a new bowl. Jane pauses on my right side, studying the piece with a critic's eye. “Before now, I actually thought I had no intent whatsoever. But now I'm getting it.”

“Sometimes we create art; sometimes art defines us. You might not know what it is that you need until you start to put brush to canvas, pen to paper, or hands to clay. The truth is in the medium.” Jane kisses the side of my head and moves away, through a sea of green plants, the fresh fragrance of flowers wafting in with the breeze.

The moms' art studio is really a modified greenhouse, filled with canvases of all sizes, acrylic and oil paints, a pottery station, a woodworking station, and even a desk with a computer and a Cintiq drawing pad, for digital art. If you can dream it up, you can create it in here. One whole wall is reserved for bookcases filled with Mama Cathy's poems, all handwritten in her calligraphic penmanship.

Before picking up my paintbrush, I move over to my phone and start Toxic Thoughts by Faith Marie, closing my eyes as the music drifts softly from the Bluetooth speakers around the room. The moms are big into art, as any medium. Sometimes they play movies, sometimes audiobooks, sometimes they just sit and listen to the drone of cicadas in summer.

As Faith sings about writer's block, I sit down on the paint-spattered stool and take a deep breath, knowing my phone's in airplane mode, that I'm alone, that nobody can bother me in here.

And then I start to paint.

A fever starts inside of me, hot and burning, as the hours swirl away into oblivion, the quiet of the afternoon broken up the shrieking giggles of my sisters as they wear their matching Devils' Day masks and play hide-and-seek in the studio while the moms and I work.

“Karma, come paint with us,” Emma blurts, repeating a line she said to me on the first day, almost exactly. “We’re making a mural in the carport. It’s the Horned God.”

“Can I help tomorrow?” I respond automatically, wrapped up in my work, carried away into an artist's euphoria, this brilliant moment when the rest of the world falls away and there's nothing left but you and your art. It happens with any medium: sculpting, writing, painting. It’s known as creative euphoria, and it's a real phenomenon.

“Tomorrow is soooo far away!” Emma drawls dramatically, but I can't stop. My hand won't let me stop, not until the next layer of my creation sits before me. Knowing that I'll likely wake up and that it'll all be wiped away again actually gives me courage. I need not fear mistakes. There is nothing I can do to this canvas that would be wrong, that could ruin it.

“Oh, Karma,” Jane says, her praise as rare as her smiles. Don't get me wrong, she's always encouraged my sisters and me to push harder, further, to be better, but true praise, like I hear in her voice now, is not a common commodity. “This is incredible.”

We stand there together, staring at the freshly painted stars in the sky, each one a different color, the butterflies dancing in the moonlight, the coffee cup smashed to pieces on the ground. There's a little yellow Bug in the distance, the bumper crumpled up and streaked with black paint. Masks hang from the limbs of the tree: a black leather devil's mask, two red ones, an orange and black butterfly mask, a goblin.

“As soon as this dries, I'm tackling another layer,” I say, sweeping my purple hair back from my forehead and smearing my skin with paint. It doesn't occur to me in that moment that the images I've just created will disappear before they get a chance to dry. “For now, dinner's on me.”

I head inside, grabbing