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know, right?” She sighs. “At least I know everyone else can’t either. So we’re all in the same boat.”
    “These are really, really cool. How’d you get the idea?” I ask, walking from table to table to see them all. There are some that are just lines, some that are swirls upon swirls of every color in the rainbow. And some that just have simple bursts of color.
    “I don’t know,” she says, following me around. “I was working on a painting of a horse. Lame, I know, but that was an assignment for class. I was so frustrated because I can’t draw normal things, like horse’s faces, so I threw paint on the canvas out of anger.”
    I nod, not really picturing her frustrated.
    “I liked the way the paint fell, so I got a fresh canvas and did it again. Then added some lines in different colors, and, I don’t know, I just went from there.”
    “This could be a stupid question, but what do they mean?”
    “Not a stupid question,” she says. “They’re chaos, I guess. I mean, art is usually so precise and perfect, I wanted to show the other side of it. The frustration when things aren’t going your way. The dreams you have when you can’t draw. Or the daydreams that come when you’re planning your next piece. They’re just abstract images, really.”
    “I really like them,” I say again, at the last painting.
    “I’ll make you one!” she says eagerly, and I smile at her.
    “That would be awesome. I’ll hang it in my dorm room.”
    She grins proudly, then starts piling them up. I help her, grabbing a few. “Kat already has a bunch. I give her my screw-ups. She loves them for some reason.”
    “I’m sure even the screw-ups are awesome,” I reassure her.
    “They’re not, but Kat thinks so.” She pauses. “I kind of love that about her.” She pauses again. “Did we ever tell you how we met?”
    “No,” I say, shaking my head.
    “We had class together, but didn’t know the other was, you know, so we pretty much ignored each other. Okay, actually, she ignored me . . . I thought she hated me.”
    “That sounds like her,” I say.
    “Right? So the class ended—like, the school year ended—and I was over her. I passed her in the hallway and said some crazy thing like, ‘I’m not a mean person, you know’ or something, and she just started laughing. And then I started laughing. Because I liked her, you know? Ithought she was super cute, and it was so frustrating that she ignored me. So then we started talking and, well, yeah. Anyway, she could have made fun of me about that for years , and she never has. She’s just cool like that.”
    I smile, feeling kind of awkward, then pile up the rest of the paintings in silence. There’s a piece of paper on the floor, so I lean down to grab it. It’s nothing much, just a sketch someone made of a flower blooming out of two tangled hands. I guess it was inspiration for one of their drawings.
    “Picking up one of your found-object things?” Cindy asks from the other side of the room. I told them about it a few days earlier, when they saw me picking up a scrap of paper at the bookstore. It was a receipt for a coffee and the book The Giver .
    “Uh, yeah,” I say, putting it in my pocket, feeling kind of self-conscious about my habit. It was okay with Ella—I wanted her to know, to see that part of me. But with them, I just kind of told them factually, like telling them about my shoe size. There was nothing much to it. Maybe because I don’t feel like it’s that much a part of me anymore, after making some amazing real memories of my own.
    “You know, in a way, what you’re doing is art.”
    “How so?” I ask, hopping up onto the table.
    “You’re curating a collection,” she says, sitting on the one opposite me, legs flailing under the table.
    “But it’s not my own work. I didn’t make any of these, like you made your paintings.”
    “True, but think of poem anthologies. The editor didn’t write all of them, just picked his