Ruin Me

20. Paint me

"Where were you on Friday night I was looking for you?" Mina swung into her chair next to me in art on Monday.

"Sorry I had to leave early I was feeling kind of sick," I lied easily. Too easily.

I hated all those lies building up around me, like tiny bricks in a huge wall that any minute someone would pull a brick out of causing the entire thing to collapse in on me.

"Feeling better now?"

"Uh huh," I nodded and put my concentration into my painting, this week we'd been set a task to paint the person who meant the most to us. I was painting my mom, of course, and Mina was painting her older sister.

I wish I had chosen someone simpler though, I should've just made a face up and claimed it was a distant Aunt who I aspired to be like. Painting mom was just too difficult. I couldn't capture her, something was always off. I couldn't bottle her charisma and liveliness to splatter onto the page in abundance. I couldn't make her eyes glow with the mischievous and daring glint that had once lit them up. When I painted her she didn't leap straight out from the page like I wanted, instead the face remained flat and impassive. The woman I painted wasn't my mom.

I lost count of the number of times I crumpled up my paper and threw it into the bin in frustration. The first few times I did it Mina asked what the problem was but by the end of our third lesson painting she gave up on acknowledging the wads of paper flying past her head towards the bin.

If only I could see moms face again, maybe then I could paint her properly.

At least I had dad though, he was now insisting on eating dinner with me every night in his apartment on the ground floor of the dormitories with the freshmen. He had his own kitchen/dining/living room that consisted of an oven, sink, microwave, table, sofa and TV.

I found myself slipping into a new routine. I started each day eating breakfast with the Silent Boys who then drove me to school. I spent my break and lunch with Mina and her friends who I was slowly becoming more friendly with. I got the bus home which unfortunately Jenny now took so I had to pretend to listen to her whine about how boys never noticed her until I got home. Then I would usually find Ben in his room doing homework and watching YouTube videos, he welcomed me to the world of comedy sketches and each afternoon we would find ourselves clutching our sides in laughter as tears of mirth dripped down our faces.

Spending time with Ben was so effortless, maybe because I felt that there weren't any expectations with him like there were with so many others. Instead things were simpler when we lay on the floor and watched chickens skateboarding on his computer. There were no questions left unanswered or old grudges held or tensions lingering in the air. Only laughter.

Until I was yanked back to real life, so far from the world of talking emus. I was pulled to my dads kitchen to eat pasta, as it was the one of one thing he could cook, and talking about mindless matters as we danced around the things we really wanted to say.

And finally I would close each evening with the Silent Boys in my bedroom, of course with the door open, and play card games (that I always won), computer games (that Nico always won) or we would just talk and listen to music.

I wasn't sure how I felt about this new routine, part of me was scared by it, I was worried I'd become too attached to it. I was just anticipating the moment it would inevitably be yanked out right from under my feet. If something became too familiar and too ingrained the more I would miss it when it was gone.