Keeping the Moon(40)
Author: Sarah Dessen

“I figured you weren’t interested.”

“I am,” I said. “I was stupid. I forgot.”

Now he did look up. “You don’t have to feel obligated,” he said. “I mean, I’m not desperate or anything.’

“I know,” I said. “I wanted—I want—to do it.”

He bent over to rearrange the canvases, shoulder blades moving beneath his shirt. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m pretty busy these days.”

“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t about to beg; I felt bad enough as it was. “Okay.” I stood up and started inside.

I was about to open the back door when he called after me. “I didn’t really think about that when I asked you.”

I just stood there half in, half out.

“I mean, a portrait is a big commitment,” he went on. “It’s not just a one-day kind of thing.”

“I’ve got time,” I said.

He turned back to the car. I didn’t know why this was so important to me, but winning Norman back was suddenly all I wanted. So I stood there, wishing he would turn around.

He didn’t. I started back inside, but just as I did I heard him say, very quietly, “Well, okay.” I had to strain to hear him. “I mean,” he said, sounding resigned, “I guess there’s still time.”

I felt my shoulders relax and I let out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. “Good,” I said. “Thanks, Norman.”

“But,” he told me in a firm voice, “you missed out on the hot chocolate. No second chances on that.”

“Okay,” I said. “I can take that. When do we start?”

“You still have those sunglasses?” he asked. “The ones I gave you?”

“Yeah.”

“Bring them down to my place tonight, around eight, so I can do a sketch. After that we’ll work on it there in the evenings, and here, during the day,” he said, going around and shutting the tailgate with a bang.

“Here?” I said. “You can do it here?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Right here, actually. Under that.” And he pointed over my head. “I’ll see you tonight.”

I turned and saw a sign I’d never noticed before. It was white, painted with red letters. DELIVERIES, it said. And then, underneath, LAST CHANCE ONLY.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

The first time I’d been in Norman’s room I’d thought it was a mess. What I discovered that night was that it was, actually, a carefully ordered universe.

Norman’s universe. And in it, everything had a place, from the huge collection of plastic cartoon and action figures on a bookshelf—arranged according to height, like a class picture—to the mannequins he’d had with him the first day we met, which were seated neatly against the walls as if waiting for appointments. There was a workbench lined with baby food jars, each full of something: washers, bolts, brightly colored thumb-tacks, rusty nails, marbles, seashells, tiny plastic doll heads. It looked like he could take anything and make it worthwhile.

The walls were painted white and covered with canvases—some I’d seen before, like the one of Morgan and Isabel, and some I hadn’t. Only one other, however, featured the sunglasses theme.

It was a portrait of a man who looked to be in his early twenties, leaning against an old-model car. He had a crewcut and wore a white shirt and a tie, black pants and sunglasses, with his arms folded across his chest. Behind him the sky was blue and broad and his head was thrown back with laughter, as if someone had just cracked the funniest joke in the world. I wondered who he was.

Norman sat me down in an old blue wing-back chair. It smelled like faded perfume, like roses, and I thought it must be strangely comforting for everything around you to have its own history.

“Okay,” he said. “Look right here.”

Behind my sunglasses, I wondered how he could tell where I was looking at all. He was sitting across the room on a milk crate, a sketchbook balanced on his lap. Next to him was a coffee can filled with pencils of various colors and sizes that he kept rummaging through, as if he couldn’t find exactly what he wanted.

I realized that I was the only thing he was going to be focused on. I was grateful to have something to hide behind.

“Hold your chin up,” he said, picking out a pencil and squinting at me. “Not that far. Okay, there. That’s good. Stay just like that.”

Already my neck was aching. But I didn’t budge. Instead, I looked at Norman, almost as if for the first time.

I couldn’t say exactly when it happened. Maybe when he bent over, looking up only occasionally, his dark brown eyes moving over and past me, taking me in glance by glance. Or when I watched his hands—which I’d seen flip burgers, capture cats, and cradle eggs, and even held, once—and how they seemed so different now, moving in slow, careful strokes, creating me. The sound of the pencil against paper was the only thing I could hear except for my own breathing. And I felt strange sitting there in front of him. As if he wasn’t just Norman Norman, another lazy hippie, but a boy with deep brown eyes, watching me and maybe, if Isabel had been right, thinking—

“Don’t mess with your lip ring,” he said quietly, his eyes still on the sketch pad, his thumb smudging a thick black line.

“I wasn’t,” I said automatically, embarrassed, as if he could read my mind.

It’s just Norman, for God’s sake.

He glanced up at me and for one panicked moment I thought I’d said it aloud. This time he didn’t look back down at the sketch.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, still watching me.

“What?” I said, too quickly. “What is it?”

He stood up, putting the sketch pad aside, and crossed the short bit of carpet between us. I felt my stomach jump.

“Hold still,” he said, leaning in, and then reached with one hand to tuck a piece of hair behind my ear, his thumb brushing my cheek.

It was just one motion, one movement: it was, really, nothing. But as he went back to his sketch pad, I felt something rush in me, and, behind my sunglasses, closed my eyes. I could see him again in my head, leaning forward, eyes on me, one hand reaching out to touch my face.

“Chin up,” he said. “Look right here, Colie.”

I took a deep breath, settling myself. This was ridiculous. Mira would have said it was astrological, some crazy moon thing, the kind of celestial pull that drives women into labor and sets werewolves loose on the streets.