Suddenly, the little girl pulled her pad of paper out of her bag and said, “I came in here because my pencil broke.”
And so she had. The pencil the girl had been trying to draw with was already short and measly, the kind of thing that needed to be thrown away. But Jasmine didn’t have any pencils on sale.She guessed the girl didn’t have any money to buy supplies, anyway.
“I might have something,” Jasmine said, heading to the back office.
Previously, she’d seen the owner’s daughter bring a package of colored pencils into the office. She was pretty sure they’d been abandoned, left to gather dust as his daughter developed other habits and interests. Jasmine’s fingers had itched to take them out of the package and watch the colors flow across the page.
The colored pencils were just where the other girl had left them. Jasmine took them out to the girl in the yellow bikini and handed them over. The girl draped her black hair behind her shoulders and said, “How much?”
“What do you have?” Jasmine asked.
The girl glanced back at her sleeping parents. “Two hundred?” she said, presumably because she was from the city and prices like that were standard.
“Tell you what,” Jasmine said. “You can have them as long as you draw me a picture.”
The girl narrowed her eyes, as though wary that Jasmine was tricking her into something. “Can it be anything I want it to be?”
“Anything you want in the world,” Jasmine agreed.
The girl set to work immediately. She drew a camel next to a massive bonfire. On the camel, she placed a snake wearing a top hat and a dialogue box that read: “Give me the password.” But she’d misspelled “password” like “paswurt.” It was legible and understandable. Jasmine gushed that it was super creative.
“My mom said I can be an artist one day,” the little girl explained, handing over the paper.
“It looks like you’re already an artist,” Jasmine said.
“Do you know any artists?” the girl asked.
Jasmine thought for a moment. She guessed that the little girl’s parents knew plenty of Manhattan-based artists, that theysurrounded her. It was likely that those people knew about Larry Calvin Johannes’s paintings. It was likely they’d seen them either in person at an exhibition, in their friends’ houses, or on television. Jasmine’s heart leaped into her throat.
“I’ve known artists,” Jasmine said.
“But that means you aren’t an artist?”
Jasmine thought for a moment. “I think almost anyone is an artist, as long as they open themselves up to their creativity. Do you know what I mean?”
The little girl shook her head. “Are you saying that you could draw if you tried?”
Jasmine laughed. “I don’t know about that.”
But the girl seemed curious. “Draw me,” she ordered, maybe because she’d done this very thing with her Manhattan-based artists. She shoved a colored pencil into Jasmine’s hand and posed like a model, with her hips jutted out.
Jasmine laughed. “You won’t want to hold that pose for very long. It’s not comfortable.”
The girl loosened her posture and gazed out the window. “I don’t have all day,” she said to Jasmine, again echoing what she’d heard her parents say.
Jasmine worked quickly and dutifully. It had been a long time since she’d attempted a portrait like this, but it felt fluid, joyful. She did only the girl’s face, as there was so much to work with, so much to the girl’s expressive eyes. When she handed the paper back, the girl looked at it for a long time, then tilted her head. “This is pretty good,” she admitted. It felt like a rare compliment coming from her.
“Thank you,” Jasmine said.
Right as she prepared to tell the girl she could keep it, a woman of about thirty-five entered the convenience store, rubbing sleep and sand from her eyes. “Gigi,” she said. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”
Gigi turned to scowl at her mother. She handed the paper over. “You were sleeping,” she accused before scampering past her mother and back toward her father on the beach.
Gigi’s mother glanced down at the drawing, then yawned, as though the image was really so dull. “I’m sorry about her,” she said. “I hope she wasn’t too much trouble?”
“She’s lovely,” Jasmine assured.
“I think the word is ‘precocious,’” the woman said. She wagged the paper for a moment, then said, “You aren’t that bad. Are there art classes around here or something?” She put the paper on the counter and twisted to grab a bottle of ice-cold water from the fridge.
