My Secret Family

The Escape Artist

Sophie

61 kg and falling

I wanted to be thinner. Trapped in the expectation of an almost impossible ideal I knew I would get told by the people who judged me for being too fat that I was now too thin, that there was something wrong with me. They would lecture me that I needed to watch my weight for health reasons and not be vain but also care about my looks. And smile, always smile, because beauty comes from within.

I put on an extra layer of make-up to cover each pockmark on my dry skin, sculpted my eyes with illusion and my cheekbones with treachery. I was the femme-fatale, running through a twenty minute ritual every day just to summon the person trapped behind the mask.

Art had always been my escape, escape from the endless trial of college, from endless and pointless tests.

Today I wanted to escape from my own reflection.

As students we joked about how school never tested our ability, just our memory, because memory was something a teacher could measure, something they could strike through with a red pen. For me, Alameda College was a daily grind of vapid souls pulled by some invisible string to each class, run by the type of people you knew were going to be your boss one day.

I signed up for an evening art class, not because I had any dream of becoming an artist, but because l needed something creative to do to stop myself going crazy. I signed up without telling my parents because they would give me a different kind of lecture, tell me how it wasn't appropriate for a young lady to associate with those types, or how it wasn't a commercially viable prospect and would interfere with my studies.

Both my parents worked as financial attorneys, their lives revolved around business meetings, paperwork, things that didn't really matter to me. They couldn't look at a painting without discussing how much return on their investment it would get them; they never spoke about the color in a Jackson Pollock or the texture in a Renoir, or how it made them feel. They were dry of life and if I turned out like them I would kill myself.

That's not a euphemism.

I had to pay a deposit for the evening art classes, all my savings from odd jobs and stock taking at Kohl's, so now I just had to figure out how to pay for the rest of term. I was confident that something would come up

- as my friend Sue always said, I was born under a lucky star.

The other students and I stood nervously behind our easels in our first class, waiting for instructions. How To Be An Artist 101.

I counted twenty people, mostly students from the college but some as old as forty. An equally nervous teacher, with a mess of curly hair that bounced when she walked, introduced herself as Olive. At the front of the concrete-floored room a tatty old armchair sat alone on a raised wooden dais.

Olive shifted her large frame uneasily from side to side when she talked, swishing her patterned sarong and scuffing her sandals while she told us we would be drawing a beautiful goddess today. "No, not me," she said, laughing nervously and avoiding eye contact with us, "but first you must cover your page in lines. To create a work of art we must first destroy something perfect."

The person standing next to me tried to cover her laugh with her hand, dropping her pencil in the process.

As she straightened up she looked up into my eyes.

"Hello," I said involuntarily, shocked by the blueness and the whiteness of her gaze.

"Hello. Who are you?" The pretty, blonde girl held out her hand in greeting as if I should kiss it. I shook her hand lightly, feeling her thin fingers immediately pull away from mine.