Page 47 of Brushed and Buried
Golden State University was the crown jewel, the program we’d been building toward since I was fourteen. Their football program was legendary, producing more NFL talent than almost any other school in the country. Coach Morrison, their head coach, had personally called my father twice that season. They were interested. Very interested.
My daily schedule left little room for anything else. I would be up at five for weight training, downing protein shakes in the locker room before class, film review during lunch, and practice until dark. It was a tight unit of sweat, silence, and pressure. That’s the world I lived in.
And then came Room 3B. Visual Arts, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at 10 a.m.
It didn’t belong in my schedule and in my life. The old wing of Santa Ynez Valley High School’s auditorium always smelled like turpentine and damp paper, and the desks were scratched with years of boredom. At first, I kept my head down, told myself I’d do just enough to pass and stay on track for graduation.
But after a few weeks, I’d already lost that battle.
Because that was the room where I noticed him.
Adrian.
He always arrived a few minutes late, sliding into his seat like he’d been born there, not in a rush, not ashamed of the disruption. He carried energy with him, warm and groundedwith something a little wild around the edges. His skin was sun-warmed and golden, his hands stained with ink or graphite, and his hair looked like it had been through a storm, never combed but somehow perfect.
He didn’t walk like the rest of us, shoulders square and prepared. He moved like someone who didn’t even realize the world might be watching, until it did, and then he made a show of ignoring it.
I sat in front of him for four weeks before either of us said a word. When he finally did, it wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even a real conversation.
He leaned forward from behind, tapped my shoulder, and slipped a page across my desk.
I blinked at him, confused. “What’s this?”
“You,” he said, like it was no big deal. “Keep it.”
It was me. He’d drawn me, my arms folded across my chest, back straight, jaw clenched like I was ready to fight someone. He’d captured something I didn’t even know I showed.
I stared at it too long and didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.
He just smiled like that was enough and turned around, his fingers smudged with charcoal and still twitching, already halfway into the next thing.
I stuffed the sketch into a textbook. But after that day, I couldn’t stop watching him.
It was not because I liked him, not in that way. At least, not then.
It was because Adrian was the only person in that school who didn’t seem weighed down by anything, and it made me wonder if there was a world outside mine. Maybe a place where you didn’t have to fight for everything, where someone might see you before you even looked up.
Two weeks later, I joined the theater crew part-time out of necessity. My GPA was fine, but college applications needed more than stats and highlight reels. One of the recruiters from GSU told my coach that well-roundedness mattered, especially for scholarship interviews. I already had leadership credits from being team captain, but I needed one more extracurricular to round out my recommendations.
My coach told me to pick something that wouldn’t mess with game prep. No debate team, no mock trial. Something easy and quiet. Background.
The set design sounded harmless enough. I would paint a flat, move a few platforms, and hammer a couple nails. There were no lines to memorize, no spotlight to face, just enough work to tick a box on a form.
But that’s where Adrian was, and nothing about it ended up being simple.
Adrian painted storms with quick, confident strokes, swirls of blue and violet that felt like real weather, like movement frozen mid-breath. I measured plywood and cut boards instraight lines, doing my best not to stare too long when he’d stretch to reach the top corner of a backdrop or tuck a pencil behind his ear.
It didn’t happen all at once. At first, we worked in comfortable silence. Adrian hummed while he painted, off-key, low, like he didn’t even notice he was doing it. One day it was “Take Me to Church” by Hozier, the next it was something a bit older, like “Don’t Know Why”by Norah Jones. It was always soulful and aching, the kind of songs that stuck to your ribs.
After a while, we started swapping tools without asking, him sliding a ruler across the worktable, me handing him a staple gun just as he reached for it. We started having small talks. He would tell me about his plans to go to a prestigious art school after graduation, how he planned to change the world with his art. I could tell he talked like this to convince himself he could actually do something like that.
By the third week, we were talking like we’d always known each other. He’d sit beside me during breaks, our knees bumping, him handing me one of his protein bars even though I never asked. I told him about the time I ran the wrong route during practice and crashed straight into the water cooler. He told me about the gallery his mom loved in Santa Barbara and how he’d once spent a whole weekend painting the ocean just to make her smile. He asked me if I ever got tired of being that guy, the one everyone expected to win. I didn’t know how to answer that. No one had ever asked me that before.
It wasn’t romantic, not then. It was just easy, comfortable in a way nothing else in my life was. And I didn’t question it, because why would I? We were friends. Friends could laugh, could lean close while mixing paint, could spend half an hour adjusting lights until one of them said, “It’s still too hot, man,” and the other grinned anyway.
I didn’t think I was getting confused. I didn’t think I was changing. I just knew I liked being around him, more than I liked most things. And at the time, I told myself that was enough.
One afternoon, we were tucked behind the heavy curtain backstage, just the two of us, trying to rig a pulley system. The rest of the crew had gone to grab lunch, and the auditorium had that strange, echoing silence. Dust hung in the shafts of light, the air thick with paint fumes and old velvet.
