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say. Her voice sounded childish. “We can be depressed together.”
    James looked at her quickly, then stared at his painting. “Yeah,” he said.
    The words disconnected him from her. She wanted him to look at her, to care about how she felt. The distance of the past few months still spanned between them.
    She turned to her canvas. Suddenly she wanted to paint a slash of red across the whole thing. Genn kept him distant from her. Of course. Just then Genn poked her head into the doorway again and James went over to give her one last kiss good-bye.
    In his absence, Bethany returned to the paint table and poured a glob of bright red onto the plastic palette. She went back in her seat, slapping the palette down on the desk.
    The music suddenly stopped. Bethany looked up to see one of the nerdy girls, Jody Skinner, standing by the radio like a squirrel watching a truck racing toward her. “Sorry, it was really loud,” Jody said in practically a whisper, then scurried off to her seat.
    “What the hell,” Paul said, glaring at Jody as she hurried past.
    Bethany had gone to school with Jody since kindergarten, had even sort been friends with her in fifth grade. Bethany stared at her canvas, wondering why high school had fucked everything up. Sometimes she looked at middle school life and marveled at how normal she had been, and how abnormal at the same time. And how incredibly abnormal she was now. Even people who had known her for ten years now looked at her like a complete freak of nature.
    She dipped her brush in the red paint and eased it across the horizon line of the painting. The red line jagged over sharp, protruding mountains, then circled down to bisect the landscape’s foreground. The paint filled in that angry streak she felt. The brush became her sole focus, each stroke intensifying the color. Dark, dark red, like a river of blood. When she finally couldn’t find an area of red she needed to reinforce, she stared at the painting until she realized she was finished. She painted her initials in the lower right-hand corner. B.C.
    The red line had taken such concentration and deliberation that Bethany hadn’t noticed Mr. Beck and James watching her. “Cool,” James said from beside her. She hadn’t noticed when he had returned from making out with Genn, and congratulated herself.
    “Nice use of complimentary colors,” said Mr. Beck. “Are you ready for the next assignment?”
    Mr. Beck put Bethany’s painting on the drying rack and handed Bethany a photocopied packet. “A non-literal self-portrait,” she read. There were some blurry photocopied artworks to illustrate. Bethany took out her sketchbook and began working on some designs.
    Mostly her mind was blank. Then negative thoughts began creeping in, about how she wasn’t good enough to be in this class, how she wasn’t a real artist at all. It was pretty rare for sophomores to be in the advanced painting class. Only Bethany, Jon Whitaker, and Jody Skinner were sophomores. Bethany could see Jody’s painting from where she sat, and it was good enough to be a gallery. She was beginning to think her acceptance into the class wasn’t based on talent at all. Maybe there really weren’t that many sophomores who even wanted to take advanced painting.
    Bethany’s eyes drifted toward James’s painting.
    James was a junior, but he was taking the class for a second time. He had failed the first time because he hadn’t gotten all of his assignments in before the end of the year. Bethany remembered at the end of last year trying to encourage James to get his projects done.
    “Inspiration cannot be hurried,” he had told her, lying on his bed with a joint between his fingers. It was one of those moments where Bethany felt as she had all through middle school, like a dork because she actually cared about a grade. It was really important to her that her only A come from art class, so maybe her parents would see that she should go to art school at the end of