A Thousand Pieces of You (Firebird #1) - Claudia Gray Page 0,14

grad student: tall, broad-shouldered, and extremely muscular—from the rock climbing, I guess. Paul’s frame seemed to fill the entire door. Although I kept working, rarely looking away from my brush and canvas, it was as if I could sense him behind me. It was like feeling the warmth of a fire even when you’re not looking directly at the flame.

“Okay, maybe portraits don’t rule the art world anymore,” I said. Other students at art shows did collages and mobiles with “found objects,” Photoshopped 1960s ads to make postmodern comments on today’s society, stuff like that. Sometimes I felt out of step, because all I had to offer were my oil paintings of people’s faces. “But plenty of artists earn good money painting portraits. Ten thousand bucks apiece, sometimes, once you have a reputation. I could do that.”

“No,” Paul said. “I don’t think you could.”

I turned to him then. My parents might worship the guy, but that didn’t mean he could wander into my room and be insulting. “Excuse me?”

“I meant—” He hesitated. Obviously he knew he’d said the wrong thing; just as obviously, he didn’t understand why. “The people who get their portraits painted—rich people—they want to look good.”

“If you’re trying to dig yourself out of a hole, you’re doing a crappy job of it. Just FYI.”

Paul jammed his hands into the pockets of his threadbare jeans, but his gray eyes met mine evenly. “They want to look perfect. They only want their best side to show. They think a portrait should be—like plastic surgery, but on their image instead of their face. Too beautiful to be real. Your paintings—sometimes they’re beautiful, but they’re always real.”

I couldn’t look him in the face any longer. Instead I turned my head toward the gallery of paintings currently hung on my bedroom walls, where my friends and family looked back at me.

“Like your mother,” Paul said. His voice was softer. I stared at her portrait as he spoke. I’d tried to make Mom look her best, because I love her, but I didn’t only re-create her dark, almond-shaped eyes or her broad smile; I also showed the way her hair always frizzes out wildly in a hundred directions, and how sharply her cheekbones stand out from her thin face. If I hadn’t put those things in the painting too, it wouldn’t have been her. “When I look at that, I see her as she is late at night, when we’ve been working for ten, fourteen hours. I see her genius. I see her impatience. Her exhaustion. Her kindness. And I’d see all that even if I didn’t know her.”

“Really?” I glanced back at Paul then, and he nodded, obviously relieved I understood.

“Look at them all. Josie’s impatient for her next adventure. Your father is distracted, off on one of his tangents, and there’s no telling whether he’s wasting time or about to be brilliant. Theo—” He paused as I took in the portrait I was finishing of Theo, complete with black hair gelled into spikiness, brown eyes beneath arched eyebrows, and full lips that would have suited a Renaissance cupid. “Theo’s up to no good, as usual.”

I started laughing. Paul grinned.

“And then there’s your self-portrait.”

Although I’ve participated in various art shows, even had an exhibition of my own in a very small gallery, I’ve never displayed my self-portrait anywhere besides my bedroom. It’s personal in a way that no other painting can ever be.

“Your hair . . .” he said, and his voice trailed off, because even Paul possessed enough tact to know that calling a girl’s hair a “disaster zone” was probably unwise. But it is—curlier and thicker and more uncontrollable even than Mom’s—and that’s how I painted it. “I can see all the ways you’re like your mother.”

Sure, I thought. Bony, too tall, too pale.

“And all the ways you’re not like her.”

I tried to turn it into a joke. “You mean, you don’t see the same incredible genius?”

“No.”

It hurt. I wonder if I winced.

Quickly Paul added, “There are perhaps five people born in a century with minds like your mother’s. No, you’re not as smart as she is. Neither am I. Neither is anyone else either of us is likely to meet in our lifetimes.”

That was true. It helped, but my cheeks were still flushed with heat. How could I feel him standing near me?

He has a softer voice than you’d think, from the big frame and the hard eyes. “I see . . . the way you’re always searching. How