“China? Wow. I’ve never been out of California.”
“Dad was working on a hydroelectric plant, and I got to tag along.”
The October sun is brilliant, but Kevin shields the screen so I can see the video. In a huge atrium, copper-colored raindrops the size of my hand slowly descend from the ceiling. I watch as they rise and fall, perfectly synchronized, moving as a wave, then a waterfall, then curve into a wing, and twist into a helix before they retreat into the ceiling. “How do they do that?” I murmur. “There must be a thousand of them.”
“Twelve hundred actually.”
Kevin plays the video again, pointing out the grid in the ceiling and the thin cables that raise and lower the raindrops. “A motor operates each drop, and all the motors operate off a computer program.”
We move forward with the line.
“So this is why you came to CALINVA: to create kinetic sculpture?”
“Yep.”
“But you must need to know a lot about motors and programming. How will you learn that when they don’t teach it at CALINVA?”
“That’s why I’m at Caltech.”
I peer at him. “I’ve obviously missed something.”
“I wrangled a special deal. Engineering major at Caltech, art minor at CALINVA.”
“No wonder you’re so normal.”
“Normal. Ow. That hurts.”
“No. It’s a compliment! You don’t get caught up in all the drama. Krell calls your work pedestrian and you don’t—”
“Wait. Do you mean Krell doesn’t like my painting?”
His face is so earnest that for a moment, I’m thrown, but then he bursts out laughing.
We’ve inched our way to the front of the line, and Kevin nods at the menu board. “I’ll have two fish and three beef.”
“Five? You’re having five tacos? The bet was for one.”
“Have you seen how small they are? They’re like two bites.”
“Yeah, okay, you’re right.” I reach for my wallet, but he stops me.
“I’m paying.”
“But I lost the bet.”
“Yeah, but you admitted you were wrong and that was what I really wanted.”
“Well, thank you, Mr. Walker.”
“My pleasure, Ms. Reyes.”
We put in our order and I grab a handful of napkins, then we move to the pickup window.
“You know, dealing with the whole Krell-CALINVA thing is not as hard for me, because I’m not talented the way you and Bryian are,” Kevin says, very matter-of-fact.
His cutting himself down shocks me. “You’re talented!”
“No, I’m inventive. That’s different. And the art world doesn’t see kinetic sculpture the way they do other art. Chances are, my work will never be installed in a top gallery or museum. At best, it’ll be in a science museum or a corporate headquarters or a shopping mall in Dubai. So it doesn’t matter if Krell doesn’t like my stuff, because I expect him to dislike it.”
There’s so much to process here, I don’t really know where to start. “I think you’re wrong about the art world not valuing kinetic sculpture.”
“Did you see any at the Broad?”
“No, but—”
“What about at MOCA?” and he points to the Museum of Contemporary Art down the street.
“No,” I admit. “But there’s that sculpture at the LA County Museum of Art—the one with the racetracks and tiny cars.”
“One sculpture out of three museums. What does that tell you?”
I frown.
“It’s okay,” he says. “The shopping malls in Dubai are incredible.”
“You’ve been to Dubai?”
“Spring break two years ago.”
I can’t resist teasing him. “How was the food?”
“Unbelievable. The ghuzi—they roast lamb with pistachios and rice—” He looks at me barely holding it in. “What? I like good food.”
The man at the window calls out our number and Kevin grabs our order. The paper plate he hands me sags under the weight of my tacos. The tortillas are laid out like yellow flower petals piled with meat and beans. Bright white slices of radish and green limes dot the plate. “I’m glad you insisted we wait,” I tell him.
Most of the benches are taken in the little plaza next to the Broad, so we perch on a concrete planter and balance our plates on our laps. We dig into our food, not talking except with our eyes.
Sauce drips down my chin. I wish I could feel the way Kevin does about Krell. I wish I could be immune to his attacks and just paint. But Kevin’s not on a scholarship, so he can afford to relax.
He grins as he swipes slivers of lettuce off his cheek.
I’d hoped the trip to the Broad would inspire me, but when I get back to the house, I face off with a blank canvas. The more I stare at it, the bigger and whiter and emptier it looks, so I shove it in the closet and pull out a smaller canvas board.
I’ve avoided painting since Krell reamed me the other day, but tomorrow he expects us to show up to class with a painting that doesn’t have to be finished, but it has to be started.
I flip through my latest sketchbook, looking for ideas, but nothing grabs me. Then I dig one from high school out of the closet and sigh when I see CALINVA doodled all over the back.
I leaf through my drawings from last fall, shaking my head at how juvenile most of them look. A few pages later, I’m into sketches from last spring and can barely stand to look at them. Mom’s fragile hand curled on her blanket. Mom floating in a cloud of dreams. The beach where I waded in and scattered her ashes.
I can’t paint any of these. I might as well strip naked in front of the class.
The rest of the pages are throwaways from last summer when my hands were almost too cramped from cleaning to hold a pencil. Frayed scraps remain of pages I tore out: pen-and-ink drawings I did at the hipster dog park in Silverlake and sold for twenty dollars apiece to overly proud rescue-dog owners.
By eight o’clock, panic’s a monkey biting my shoulders. What am I going to do? I can’t show up empty-handed to Krell’s class and score another black mark for the girl who should never have gotten the Zoich in the first place.
The walls feel like they’re pressing in, and I have to escape. I step onto the porch and the cool night air lures me down the steps. The broken sidewalks here trip me up even in daylight, so I walk down the middle of the street. Dead leaves crunch under my feet, but the sycamores are still thick overhead.
The houses are mostly bungalows with dried cornstalks lashed to their porches and peeling picket fences. Lights are on in most of the windows, and I slow when I glimpse a family moving behind the shades. They might be happy or they might be sad, but tonight those kids have a mom or a dad or maybe they’re extra lucky and have both.
I’m almost to the corner of Mission Street when a Metro train clatters past the ice-cream place. Inside the store, people are lined up at the counter, bright as Popsicles, while outside on the unlit patio, a woman sits at a café table. Light from the window falls on the front half of her body, carving it out of the darkness. It could be a scene painted by Caravaggio if she wasn’t sharing her cone with a tame white rat.