Through the Break in Her Hair

Chapter 14

Van rejoined us after the first quarter, stating that he "got lost," and accidentally sat on the opposing side's bleachers until he spotted us. God, what a loser, and he thought I was pathetic! Lindsey, sweet as always told him that it was easy for her to get turned around in big crowds too, but I think it was more for his sake than it was true.

Mention her artwork...came his voice in my head.

"You like to draw, don't you?" I asked obediently, even though the delivery was all in shambles.

Lindsey's eyebrows pricked curiously. "You noticed?"

"I'd be blind if I didn't." It was as if I plucked those words right out of a movie! They sounded so perfect, eons older and smoother then I had ever been in my entire life. God, that was cool. I wished I could talk like that more often. Maybe Van figured out how to control my tongue now and was the one speaking through me. Nah,I thought, shaking the notion from my brain. He'd be gloating if it were him.

Van side swiped his foot, crashing it into mine with more force than I thought was deserved. Focus, John...What have you noticed about her artistry?...

What hadn't I noticed? When she wasn't eating or working on homework, she was sketching. Her hand couldn't be stilled, nor could it be parted from some kind of art medium. Her tiny fingers were always smudged with what looked like soot, or deep blue ink that could have easily been mistaken for black-- to the ignorant that is.

Just watching her manipulate ink and charcoal, creating shadows in the light, making every image pop off the paper-- it was remarkable. At this age, she should have been entering art contests, or displaying her work in museums of modern art. She was what my dad called a prodigy—a mastermind and a wonder.

Tell her that...

"Your artwork is amazing."

I could see Van shaking his head out of the corner of my eye as he whispered, Try again...

Why was it that my thoughts sounded like poetry in my head but gibberish when it came out of my mouth? I gulped at the lump in my throat, sweat beading on my forehead, and continued. "I think your art is so cool, like..." I struggled to come up with his name and finally just gave up. "That guy who painted that church ceiling in Rome." God, I hoped that resembled a compliment. Van's weighty sigh told me that it did not.

"Michelangelo?" she asked. It's a good thing I quit while I was ahead, I was going to say Leonardo da Vinci.

"That's the one!" I shouted excitedly, making Lindsey jump back a couple inches.

The apples of her cheeks turned pink and she smiled. "I'm not that great, but thanks," she said passing off my compliment. "That's what I want to do, um, not the Sistine chapel of course, that's already done. I mean I want to an artist one day." Her eyes scrunched disappointedly and she turned her face away from me.

She hates stumbling through her own thoughts...It makes her self-conscious...

Yeah, me too, I thought back at Van.

I felt a small poke inside my brain, like he was nudging me with the end of a pencil. Van and I hadn't worked out all the bugs, the kinks, in our non-verbal communication yet, so I was basically just guessing what he meant by every cough, poke and prod.

Another poke to my temporal lobe must have meant, "yes" or "hurry up, stupid." Like I said, it was all guesswork on my part. Van was the evil mastermind; I was just his puppet.

I leaned back, propping up my elbows of the bleacher behind me. "I hate when I trip over my own words, makes me look like an idiot, like I never learnt how to speak."