New Girl - By Paige Harbison Page 0,19
felt Max’s eyes shift to me. I glanced at him, and saw the smallest trace of a smile. I quickly looked away.
“So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pair you guys up, and you’re just going to start painting, see what comes out. This is your Gamsol.” He held up a glass pot with a lid. “You rinse your brushes in here. It’s like turpentine, except I’m not allergic to it.”
Another titter from the girls.
“You’ve got your brushes, your oil paints, your palette, your palette knife and a rag. Make sure you rinse your brushes thoroughly or all of your colors will go muddy. Squeeze out only the smallest amount of paint. I assure you, this stuff goes far.”
He paired us off. In this kind of situation I usually ended up partnerless and had to work with the teacher. But not this time.
“All right, so go ahead and grab a canvas and an easel and then stop off with me to get your box of supplies.
Once we were set up and sitting across from each other, I gave the boy in front of me an awkward and probably very unpretty smile.
“Max,” he said, holding out a hand. “We met by the boathouse.”
Oh, did we? I hadn’t recalled…
“Yes, I remember, I nearly fell to my death on those stairs.”
With a sickening lurch, I realized what poor taste that had been in. I wanted to say something to make up for it, but before I got the chance, he just nodded as he squeezed out some blue paint and said, “But here you are.”
“Here I am.”
I squeezed out a couple of colors and blended them until it resembled Max’s tanned skin tone.
“So are you any good?” he asked.
“Good?”
He nodded at my canvas. “At painting.”
“Oh.” I laughed nervously. “I doubt it, I’ve never really done it before. I helped paint a mural back at my old school, but it was basically like painting in between the lines. Like a huge coloring book.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“St. Augustine. In Florida.”
“Did you grow up there?”
“Yeah.”
He gave a small smile. “You’re in for a hell of a winter, then.”
I took a deep breath and said, “Oh, I’ve heard.”
“Ever seen snow?”
I shook my head.
“You’re gonna see a lot of it here.” He furrowed his brow at his canvas and looked at me.
“Are you any good?” I asked, indicating his canvas.
“Not at all. Don’t be insulted by my portrait of you. I just took this class because I needed an elective and Crawley is awesome.”
“He seems cool, yeah.”
We settled into a silence I struggled not to fill with stupid rambling. I mixed up some more color to match his dark hair. I laid the brush on the canvas with the blackish color I’d mixed up. But it wasn’t quite right. There was a small tinge of another color in there somewhere. I sifted through the paint tubes and found Alizarin Crimson. I added a tiny bit. Yes, that was a lot better.
“Look at me for a sec,” he said.
I looked up. “What?”
He squinted and leaned toward me. “Green, okay. But…” He stood and came over to me. He put his hand under my chin and lifted up my face. My heart skipped.
“Trust me,” he said with a smile. “I’m an artist.”
“Paint me like one of your French girls.”
Oh, the words spilled from my mouth before I could stop them. I was too used to my group of friends. My cheeks turned hot.
He dropped his hand and looked at me. “Did you just make a Titanic reference?”
“Maybe.”
He smiled and raised an eyebrow. “My older cousin Sarah watched that for the entirety of a family trip at the Outer Banks once. And if I remember correctly, in that scene, he wasn’t just painting her face.”
“Well, we probably won’t be asked to do that in here.”
“Probably not.” He smiled. “Now look at me, I need to look at your eyes.”
He tilted my head so that my eyes caught the light.
“They’re not just green. They have some brown in them, too. Right in the middle.” I looked at him as he studied my eyes.
“Really?” I said, even though I fully knew it.
“There’s also…” He narrowed his own eyes. “Also some blue. They’re like the color of…a pond or something.”
I laughed, and it echoed in the otherwise silent room. Everyone looked at us. I bit my lip and looked around apologetically.
Max smiled. “What?”
“A pond? So, like, the brown is mud and the green is pond scum?”
He laughed, too, sitting back