Everything Between Us by Mila Ferrera Read Free Book Online

hands were shaking. I was sure I was going to throw up. My stomach was tied in crazy knots. My heart squeezed up so tight that I knew it was about to explode. I started sobbing. Taylor veered out of traffic to a chorus of horns and got pulled over by a cop for blocking the shoulder. By the time he was done giving her a citation, I was feeling a little better. Instead of being glad, she seemed mad that I wasn’t dying.
    I paid for the ticket, but she was done. So was I. My world became the size of my dorm room. My dad had to fly out and travel with me just so I could get home for the holidays.
    I blink down at my cheerful email to Taylor, all my exclamation points screaming I’m fine! I’m happy! I’m trying too hard!
    She doesn’t want to hear from me. She’s glad I’m gone. I delete her email and logout.
    This is my life now. I sit in this room by myself. I read classic novels. I bake cookies and cupcakes and send them home with the housekeeper. I have art lessons with my mom’s mister. Daniel, not Danny or Dan or Danielle. I don’t even know his last name, but now I’m thinking about him again. My mom said he was an artist from the co-op downtown, and that he teaches there. I open my browser and do a search for the co-op’s website, where I tap the Artists tab. It’s a simple site, nothing fancy, but they do have pictures of each artist and a brief description of their work. Markus Brower, a sculptor who looks a little like he belongs in a biker gang. Lyle Dykstra, a portrait painter with a graying comb-over. Daisy Bakalar, who does still lifes and landscapes in oil pastels, and has a pretty, round face and long hair. Sasha Miller, a potter with shoulder-length black hair and eyes that are beautiful but somehow sad at the same time. Caleb McCallum, a painter with dark brown hair and a face that could land him on a runway at fashion week.
    And Daniel Van Vliet, his mischievous blue eyes staring out at me, with a face that’s probably landed him in plenty of women’s beds. His profile says his style resembles what would happen if Willem De Kooning had one too many drinks and played seventeen straight hours of Final Fantasy before sitting down to draw the portrait of a hyperactive lizard.
    I read it again, certain that I skipped some key word or sentence that renders that statement understandable. It’s not there. I look up Willem De Kooning and peruse a few of his paintings, then slide my way back to the co-op website and click on Daniel’s portfolio. There are several pics here, taken of pieces he’s completed in the last two years—none of which resemble De Kooning’s style in any way. Many of them are listed as being part of private collections, but some are for sale in local galleries.
    I flip through each picture, enlarging them so they take up my whole screen. Daniel’s style is … well, I don’t know anything about art, but it seems ballsy, I guess. And playful. There’s nothing dark about his paintings. He seems to gravitate toward bright colors, and sometimes he uses newspaper clippings cut into odd shapes and positioned to emphasize certain words or phrases. One has six words right down its center, cut from newspaper headlines:
    Do
    Not
    Glue
    Your
    Faces
    To
    All around the words, tucked and overlapping, are stills from reality television shows, movies, news programs, photographs from the war, and, in the bottom corner, there’s a large magazine photo of a possum with its mouth wide open, its sharp little teeth gleaming. Daniel’s painted over parts of the images in ways that completely change the mood, enhanced them, layered them on top of each other, and left a few blank spaces where it looks like clippings have been pasted and torn off. All of it looks intentional, though, because even in those blank spaces, there’s texture, as if he’s challenging the viewer to guess what was there. The whole thing is silly and irreverent, like he knows he’s part of this culture and he’s laughing