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high school.
    Bethany sat up, suddenly realizing that she had been staring at James’s fingers, with their three silver rings and black fingernail polish, for too long. She returned to the lone, dead tree she had sketched and drew a crow perched on one of the long-fingered branches. Her eyes slipped back to James’s nimble fingers on the brush, seeming to caress the canvas with paint. His fingers reminded her of that time he had played his guitar for her in his basement. They had lit candles, and the air had been thick and fragrant. His silver rings and the guitar strings seemed to catch the light of all the small flames so that with every strum the music sparkled.
    She tried to capture that silver sparkle on a new page in her sketchbook. It came out like crap and she yanked the page out and crumpled it up, threw it toward the trash can but it ended up on the floor. What kind of self-portrait would that have been, she wondered. She hated those girls who defined themselves by their boyfriends, and here she was, doing the same thing. Who was she really? She stared at the blank page in front of her and wondered if that was it.
    James’s canvas was her focus again. Her canvases always looked like some six-year-old’s crude finger paintings next to anything of his. Then James looked up, and saw her looking at his work.
    “What do you think? It might be done,” he said, angling the canvas toward her.
    “It’s beautiful,” Bethany said. Now she could see that the red and black formed a heart inside a chest cavity. Only James could make human organs beautiful. “I thought you’d be working on that till Thanksgiving.”
                  With no reply, James gathered up his brushes and palette and went to the sink to wash them off. Bethany had forgotten about her brushes. She picked at the red acrylic paint now dried to the brush fibers. And looked again at James’s painting. It was so beautiful she wanted to cry.
    When James sat back at his seat, he listened to his Walkman, drumming on the desk. “Aren’t you going to start the next assignment?” Bethany asked, feeling like a dork the second the words came out of her mouth.
    “There’s only fifteen minutes left in class,” James pointed out. “I already have an idea.”
    “Don’t you need to sketch it out?” Bethany asked.
    James shook his head and refocused on his music. He never needed to make sketches before he painted, like she did. He painted without planning, and somehow his paintings always came out beautiful. Bethany wondered what it would be like to spontaneously paint how she felt.
    James always did his own thing, didn’t care what anyone else thought. Neither did Genn. Bethany tried to pretend she didn’t care, but she did. She had to think about everything, and she wasn’t free with anything. When James broke up with her, he told her, “You need to be more free with your feelings. You keep all your emotions bottled up.” Since he said that, Bethany had become increasingly self-conscious about how much emotion she showed. Sometimes she tried to force herself to feel something, but it always felt fake. Like her art. That painting she’d done of hate was a good example. Who really believed she felt that much anger inside? She couldn’t say anything if she got mad. She swallowed it down, tried to ignore or avoid it. She thought about the gun in her bag.
    Bethany flipped through the pages of her sketchbook. Fake, fake, fake. She wanted to rip all those fake pages out and rip them up and hurl them at the trash can, but she didn’t feel like dealing with the consequence of all those staring faces.
    When the bell rang, Bethany lingered. “What are you doing after school?” she asked James, tracing her fingers over a carving on the desktop. M.H.S. sucks .
    “Nothing much, hanging out with Genn I guess,” James said.
    “Oh,” Bethany said. She started drifting toward the door.
    “You could come, I guess,” James said. “I mean,