The Bad Boy with a Heart of Gold

✖ Chapter 4 ✖

Like a junkie, I made it home afterwards with my fingertips itching for a fix. My hands trembled all through the ride back home with mama and Toni. The car was a tomb, but once we made it home they exploded with charged words and cries that I just couldn't handle. I ran upstairs and locked myself in my room. I rested my forehead against the cool door, cringing at the fact that I probably should do something for Toni. But I was still too mad by our conversation.

She was crazy if she thought something wild and disruptive would bring me some form of release. From what? My life was on track, just like hers had been before this whole mess. Sadly for her, I was on mama and papa's side. This was a terrible thing and she couldn't convince me otherwise. On that, she was on her own. On everything else that was going to follow, I'd be there for her, of course.

I knew I wasn't being very nice right now, but like, I wasn't going to fail her either.

It was like with flight instructions, though. First you had to take care of your own oxygen mask before you could help anybody else with theirs. I locked my door and dropped my bag on the floor. The text books I'd been studying with at the car shop flopped out onto the floor. I stepped around them and opened my closet. All the way from the back I pulled out my secret box. I paper mached the heck out of it in middle grade so that it would look like a Florida scene, all colorful sunset and palm tree silhouettes. I sat on the floor with it and lifted the lid. The smells hit me like they always did, as though I was coming back to my church and it welcomed all my senses. I reached inside for the largest bloc I kept at the bottom and shook it out gently.

Art.

This was something I could only do in the dark, locked up from the outside world. I'd always liked to draw and paint, and my parents had been proud when my drawing won a county fair award in middle school. But before I got too excited about it, papa had said words that had stuck to me more than any prayer at Sunday church.

"Art is something to look at, not something to eat with."

He was right. I didn't want to be a starving artist. They didn't leave Venezuela to escape poverty and crime, only for me to die with a brush in my mouth instead of bread.

So art, drawing, painting or anything that I could do with my hands had become a secret hobby. A way to decompress with something that I was good at. I wasn't good enough to share with anybody and I didn't want to, anyway. This was my thing and my thing alone. I was already on edge every time the girls caught me doodling and started talking about it. I didn't want this to come out for people to ruin it with questions or criticism. And I didn't want papa and mama to know I'd kept at it for years, even though they had discouraged it. I didn't want them to think I disobeyed.

I was not going to become what Toni had become.

I opened the bloc and grabbed a piece of charcoal. My hand finally stopped shaking. The sunset filtering through the window cast shadows that I traced over the paper, with no rhyme or reason at first. The thing I loved the most about drawing was that the thoughts in my head always vanished, giving way to things that lurked under the surface. Things I otherwise couldn't tap. There were whole worlds and swathes of color and light in my mind that didn't exist in reality, that couldn't, unless I let them out. I escaped in them while my hand tried to replicate them. I stopped being Aurora Maria, she who had to get into a top local college and became Rory, she of the mighty pen. It gave me a thrill that life otherwise didn't have.

There was a knock on the door that made me jump half my height. The motion made me run the charcoal over the page, ruining what otherwise had turned out to be a cool depiction of a stormy sky.

I shoved the bloc and the box under my bed and jumped up. With my foot I scooted the bag and text books closer, to really make sure everything was hidden. Then as I was going to open the door I saw my blackened hands.