Page 29 of The Big Easy & Other Lies
I kept going, straight to the kitchen where I dumped the mess into a big black trash bag, shaking the box until the last clinger inside it fluttered down.
It didn’t feel like much of a victory.
I pounded up the stairs hard enough to make the house shake, almost daring Delphine to yell again, but she didn’t. Maybe our fight had worn her out too.
The heat in my room roiled like invisible smoke, curling around me and smothering my last bit of fight. My hands weren’t shaking, but I didn’t feel better. I flopped on my bed and pulled out my cell phone, one of Bran’s hand-me-downs after he upgraded to an iPhone. I FREAKING HATE DELPHINE, I texted Livvie.
We all do,she texted right back.The woman is made of crazy. I don’t even want to bless her heart. Can I do something for you?
I sighed.No. Just venting. I better go study. And crank up my music loud enough to tick her off.
Livvie sent me a smile and I set the phone aside, tuning my radio to the modern rock station and turning up the volume far louder than normal. After a moment, I could barely hear Delphine’s muffled yell to keep it down, but I ignored her. Instead of reaching for my French book, I picked upTrista and the Prince.
I leafed through the pages where Nimue tells Trista she’s leaving for a few days to seek a rare weed for her potions, skipping to my second favorite painting. It was a color explosion compared to the browns and grays of the first two pages. Crisp jewel-green dabs of paint formed trees ringing a woodland pond, their limbs blossoming with brightly plumed birds. Flowers burst from marsh grass in the wildest shades on my mom’s palette, as if the sun perched on a delicate stalk and shy buds had suddenly erupted into fistfuls of garnets.
It was funny how time changed your perspective. Before my mom passed, when she used to tell me to find the beauty in the bleak, I thought she was giving me sage advice. Extra-strength last words from the lips of a dying woman. But maybe it wasn’t that. She knew what Delphine was like. Maybe she had meant it as a prayer for me, something to get me through because she knew I would need it.
I stared down at the painting for another moment, not even seeing the words from Nimue warning Trista not to leave the swamp or she’d destroy everything in it that Trista loved, and then I put the book away.
There was nothing beautiful in dead cats and years of newspaper stacked against walls. I missed my mom, but some things were too ugly to save. I couldn’t listen to her try to tell me differently anymore tonight.
* * *
I had Instagram. Maybe that was weird for a hermit, but Mrs. Broussard made an account for Applied Design, so I broke down and signed up. I even had over a hundred followers, but I was a stalker. I accepted the follow requests that came in sometimes from LaSalle kids, and I watched what they posted, but I never, ever posted anything myself. I still even had the generic avatar for my profile picture. Most people forgot about me as soon as they added me because I was as quiet on Instragram as I was everywhere else.
Tonight, I had twenty-seven follow requests waiting from LaSalle kids.
I could only guess that they were all hoping to get a front row seat for any updates, like couple-ish pictures of me and Rhett. Otherwise, I didn’t know how else to explain the sudden interest in me. But there were twenty-seven people now doomed to disappointment because my profile and posts would continue to say the same thing they always did: nothing.
I went through the requests one by one and accepted them. Ignoring them would only draw more attention. Halfway through the batch, Rhett Hawker’s name popped up.
Rhett Hawker wanted to follow me on Instagram.
I pressed “accept” and then bounced to his profile where I wasted the next thirty minutes instead of studying physics. He posted album covers from more bands than I had ever seen on anyone’s feed before. I liked his movie choices, too. Most boys at my school put stuff that involved explosions and fistfights.
I clicked through a couple of dozen photos that didn’t tell me much. Mostly it was Rhett hanging out in crowds. I found one picture that must have been his family. He had the same sharp planes and angles in his face as the man in the picture, and the light eyes and dark hair of the woman. Rhett’s arm was around a girl who looked slightly older, but also a lot like him. Probably his sister. Where was she? College, maybe?
I was halfway through my photostalking when Livvie texted me.You still working the garden party tomorrow?
Yeah,I typed back.Unfortunately.
It’s cash money, girl. Hate on them all you want, but make sure you get paid. See you tomorrow.
Her text broke the Rhett spell, and I pushed my laptop, a hand-me-down from Livvie, aside to make room for my sketchbook. I knew Mrs. Broussard was right about abandoning my Color Splash capstone project. It was good enough for LaSalle, but not for guest judge Aidan Helm.
An idea had been itching to get out since Delphine threatened me with school in the Lower Ninth Ward. Hurricane Katrina had devastated the district, and fifteen years later, some parts were still wrecked. The national press had been crawling all over the place three weeks ago before the most recent Katrina anniversary, poking around for stories of hope and renewal to air on the news magazines.
I imagined a collection that used the aftermath of Katrina as a metaphor, a phoenix kind of thing about a city rising from destruction. I could easily tie it in with my sophomore ecology class and use some architectural details to reference my current History of Western Civ class. That took care of my capstone requirements.
The trick would be fusing avant-garde with ready-to-wear. They lived on opposite sides of the fashion scale. But I’d have to win over Aidan Helm if I wanted admission to SoHoandthe Heart of LaSalle ladies for a scholarship to pay for it. I flipped to my latest dress design and grabbed a color pencil, curious to see if changing the lines would transform it to fit my new design concept. After a few minutes, I smiled.
Yes, this was going somewhere. Somewhere amazing.
Chapter 12
Getting dressed in the mornings wasn’t usually a problem. I generally grabbed a fitted T-shirt, a pair of jeans, a vintage necklace or pair of shoes and called it good. So the problem this morning wasn’t which frilly or funky thing to pull out. The problem was the lagniappe.
Rhett would be looking for it, and it gave me that funny under-the-microscope feeling like I’d had at Boudreau’s during lunch on Tuesday. I slipped on a white cotton V-neck, skinny jeans, and red ballet flats. Then I grabbed my favorite pair of hoop earrings. They weren’t large, maybe silver dollar-sized, but they were wide enough to have a design etched into them. Unless someone looked closely, the pattern looked random. Up close, tiny letters spelled out a Lady Gaga quote. “Artifice is the new reality.”
