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out of the public eye.
    “And you look like crap,” Grace commented, her eyes giving my disheveled appearance a once over.
    “You can ignore her,” Avery chimed in. “She’s a bit bent by a stupid rumor floating around.”
    “It’s not stupid.”
    “It is stupid,” Avery retorted in her usual black and white tone.
    “What’s the rumor?” I looked up as they neared. They both looked crisp against the fuzziness of my mind. Bold and put together, swimming through my world of gray.
    “Sean’s interest has been caught by a little, you know,” Avery said as she leaned in and whispered, “T and A.”
    “Well, which is it?” Glad to have someone else’s problems to focus on. “A ‘T’ or an ‘A’?”
    “She’s got both,” Grace grumbled. “Big boobs and a nice curvy ass.”
    Avery giggled. “Chelsey.”
    Their approaching critique set a flutter of nerves loose in my stomach. “She hardly compares to your curves.”
    “I know I got it in the trunk,” Grace replied, her hips swinging wider, “but her perky double-D’s are a visual stimuli even I can’t compete with.”
    Avery and I did a simultaneou s eye roll as I moved to the sink, distancing myself from the canvas and their reactions.
    They both took it in at the same time and went silent, the ticking wall clock suddenly the loudest mechanism in the room. My palms turned damp. I plunged them under the spray of cold water, along with the brushes. Of all the art lessons I took in San Francisco, the one I never mastered was putting my art on display for public opinion.
    It was Grace who finally broke the silence. “Couldn’t you have at least distorted my boobs bigger?” she said of my version of Picasso’s cubism using the two of them as models.
    “I could have.” The cold water bit at my hands as I cleaned the brushes. “But you both knew portraits weren’t my thing before I asked you to model.”
    “It was a stupid class assignment,” Grace spit out.
    Done with her 30-second scrutiny, she snagged a magazine off the art table and flopped herself down on the old couch along the wall. “But, as usual, yours turned out much better then my interpretation of the Seattle skyline.”
    Avery continued her thoughtful study of the canvas. “I don’t get it.”
    “That’s because it doesn’t involve numbers or symbols,” Grace quipped back to our math genius, whose interest in art ran just deep enough to put up with Grace and me.
    My cell phone beeped as I dropped my brushes on the drying rack. I dried my hands and walked back to the art table, pushing around the clutter to find it. “So who’s your source about Chelsey?”
    “Jenni,” Grace pouted.
    “Unreliable,” I said and moved up behind Avery who was still studying the canvas. “You don’t have to look at it any longer,” I whispered over her shoulder. “You’ve fulfilled your friendship viewing quotient.”
    “It’s fascinating.” She cocked her head left, than right. “I can see hints of me the longer I look at it, even though it looks nothing like me.”
    My phone beeped again.
    “Girls. Focus. We’re discussing me. What makes her unreliable?” Grace asked, stretching her legs out and flipping through the magazine. I knew she was trying to act disinterested, but she wasn’t fooling anyone.
    “She’s one of Chelsey’s closest friends. She’s just stirring the pot to see if anything floats to the top.” I grabbed my phone and looked down at the screen. A text. From a number I didn’t recognize.
    “I agree,” I heard Avery say as I stared at the number.
    Finished with her analytical scrutiny, she moved over to the arm of the couch and added, “If you want an answer, you need to flush out a direct contender. Ask Chelsey.”
    “Or better yet,” I said pulling up the text message, “you could ask . . .”
     
    R U free Thursday night?
    -Quentin
     
    “I could ask who?” Grace’s voice drifted into my scrambled confusion.
    I reread the text, my heart