April’s mouth fell open, and she looked up at Daphne with those dark eyes full of mysteries. A million stories and ideas and dreams, unknown to everyone but her. She inhaled as though she was going to protest again.
“Don’t,” Daphne said, then pressed her forefinger to her lips, her other hand still reaching for April.
April’s eyes narrowed a little, but her mouth lifted in a subtle smile. She slid her palm against Daphne’s, let Daphne pull her up from the bed. She let Daphne lead her out of the cabin and back down the cobbled path to the lodge, and she let Daphne keep hold of her hand all the way to the art studio.
Daphne only released her when they got inside and she flipped on the light, then went straight to the supply cabinet. April stood there silently as Daphne pulled out a drop cloth, two hunter-green painter aprons, and two large blank canvases. She spread the cloth onto the floor near the front of the room, then set the canvases up on their instructor easels before handing April an apron and then tying on her own. After that, she collected bottles of nontoxic acrylic paints, squirting them onto the largest palette she could find. Finally, she handed April a thick paintbrush.
April took it, the apron nearly swallowing her small frame, butthen stood there holding the tool like a sword she wasn’t sure how to wield.
“I’m not a painter,” she said.
Daphne ignored this. “When I was a teenager and I was feeling particularly shitty—”
“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you swear,” April said.
Daphne laughed. “You’re a bad influence.”
“You’re welcome.”
They smiled at each other for a second, the air thick between them. Daphne cleared her throat. “Anyway, when I was feeling particularly shitty about my family or the fact that I had no friends, my art teacher, Ms.Hale, would throw down a drop cloth in the art room and put a canvas on the easel and tell me to paint it.”
“Paint it. What’sit?”
Daphne shrugged and dipped her own brush through a blob of rich paint. “Whatever you need it to be. Usually? I just made a mess, but the product wasn’t the point.”
She turned to face the canvas, then slapped the brush over the surface, marring the clean white with a slash of deep purple. She didn’t rinse the brush before slicing it through some red paint and throwing it at the canvas. Crimson dotted the white like blood on snow, splattering onto the drop cloth and her apron as well, speckling her bare arms and legs. The effect on the canvas was pleasing. Unformed and messy, and that was exactly what it was supposed to be.
After a few moments, April stepped up to her own canvas. She dipped her brush through a blob of green on the palette between them. She stood there for a second, frowning at all that white as though it were a window into another world. Then she started slow, a spread of green in a wobbly arc over the white. But soon she added more color, more textures, creating a riot of swirls andstripes. Daphne went back to focus on her own mess, loving the effect of the multi-hued splatters and drops.
They worked like that for a while, and Daphne lost herself in the random patterns, months and years of pain and anger and fear kaleidoscoping over the canvas.
At some point, she heard April laugh.
She paused, glancing over at April’s work, the canvas covered, not in blasts of paint but in slashes. Harsh in some places, but smooth and lyrical in others, layers of color Daphne wouldn’t expect from April—lavender and mint and turquoise and cotton-candy pink.
But then, subtly, shades of gray and black.
The dark started gradually in the right bottom corner but then burgeoned and spread into darker, elegant swirls snaking through the pastel.
The effect was striking.
Beautiful and terrifying.
Just like April.
Daphne smiled and watched April laughing quietly at what she’d created, a single tear escaping her eye and rolling down her paint-splattered cheek. Daphne had the sudden urge to wipe it away, but that wasn’t what this was.
This was tears set loose.
This was tearsfelt.
April glanced at her, a smile on her face despite the tears, and Daphne smiled back. And soon, the smile turned into more laughter, more tears, an amalgam of emotions mirroring the paint on their canvases.
By the time Daphne slowed down, her canvas a thick explosion of color—speckles and slashes, all done in mostly jewel tones of deep greens and purples and navy, a bit of shocking red here and there—she was breathing hard, her lungs burning for more oxygen.
“Well,” April said, her breathing just as labored.
“Well, indeed,” Daphne said, her eyes locking with April’s.
