Paint the Town

public transportation (i)

Even though she had refrained from weeping herself to sleep that night, Lizzie's eyes still felt sore the day after, like maybe she had sobbed in her sleep without noticing.

In hindsight, she couldn't remember the last time she cried. Scratch that, she thought, remembering the first time she watched My Girl two weeks ago.

Correction, she couldn't remember her last real cry; the kind that stung your eyes for hours after, and clogged your sinuses so intensely that you found it hard to breathe. Or tears that came from heartache and devastation for herself rather than characters in a film or a novel. "Don't cry, Lizzie-bear," her dad would always say, "salty tears don't water the garden."

As she got older, she came to appreciate her own resilience. She could not afford to add, "sensitive," to the already long list of reasons why she was the least intimidating person on the planet. In some warped way, she considered herself lucky.

When Sunday afternoon arrived, however, she felt her luck had forsaken her when her feet began to throb in her boots. Walking to the park itself wasn't a bad idea. As a matter of fact, she walked almost anywhere that she could; work, the corner store, even Christina's place. The bad idea was testing out her newly thrifted brown boots on the 20-minute walk. That was the killer.

The snow on the side of the streets was finally melting as Lizzie neared the park, and the trees were beginning to grow back their leaves. A gentle breeze blew by, swirling fallen foliage on the ground and sending Lizzie's baby hairs into her eyes and mouth. She swatted them away as the sound of laughing children grew louder and louder.

It did not take her long to find Antonio, who was sitting on a bench on the opposite side of the playground, with his legs crossed and bulky laptop open in front of him. He was seemingly unbothered by the cold, not shivering or bracing himself in the slightest.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Alvarez," Lizzie said with a cheeky grin. She was standing directly in front of him when his eyes flickered up, then down, then up again, like he was surprised to see her and her sunny yellow tights. She sat down next to him on the wooden bench. "So, how was your weekend?" she said. Even then, a few seconds passed before he looked away from his screen, putting the clacking of his fingers on the keyboard to an end.

"Quite well, thank you, Miss Mars," he said. Lizzie beamed at his response, ignoring the purposeful mispronunciation. He shut his grey computer and placed it in his bag to substitute it for his leather-bound sketchbook. "I went over what we compiled, and I think that it's a good place to start."

"That's great!" Lizzie said, clasping her hands together in her lap. Antonio's attention was still fixed on the strings of his sketchbook. "That is great, right?"

"Yes, but we still have a lot to do," he said, letting go of a deep breath and flipping the book open. As he turned the pages, Lizzie caught glimpses of drawings on the inside. They went as fast as they came, whizzing past before she could identify them, but piquing her interest all the same. Before her brain could process any of the illustrations, the book was opened to a clean page.

"So, what are we doing today?" she said, swinging her legs over the bench and watching Antonio lean down to reach into his bag, and pull out a sleek black pencil. He tapped it on the edge of the sketchbook three times before putting the tip of the graphite to the paper.

Rather than making any pencil strokes, he snapped his head towards Lizzie's dangling feet, alternating back and forth, up and down. "Stop that," he said, freezing her legs mid-swing.

She pulled her feet under the bench and crossed them at the ankles. "Geez," she muttered.

Antonio put his pencil under his thumb and looked up at the playground, then back down at the sketchbook. "I've found that one of the best ways to get art to resonate with people is to allow it to be a reflection of them," he said, his hand beginning to form shapes on the paper.