Just painting

The canvas doesn't want to stay on the ground. I'm sitting on one corner and watching the paint can on the other corner warily. I'm sure the wind will pick up again and send it's contents flying up and all over the work we've already done. Somehow I don't think Helena and Lysander should be traipsing around in a forest of hot pink trees. So I watch the can while Rebecca paints the leaves and I don't hear the beginning of her thought.

"Sometimes I think I'm too smart." She's finishing up the shading with a bright yellow. Who would think to use a toxic yellow to paint a green tree? She did and it looks amazing.

"Too smart for what?" I say, wiggling over to the center of my edge so she can paint that corner.

"Too smart to, I dunno, grow-up maybe. Or to succeed."

"Like too many thoughts?"

"No, it's more I can't do all the things I think I should as a teenager, because I know I shouldn't."

"You are mature." I agree.

"So are you."

"It is sorta like missing out."

"Like when I started throwing up my food...I knew it was a bad idea. So I told my mom. And the psychiatrist just told me it was a bad idea, and I agreed, so that was the end of that."

"Well it kinda is a bad idea." We counter each other again, I move the can with pink paint and weight down the next corner. The wind is picking up, Rebecca's hair keeps blowing around and getting caught in the green and yellow paint. She looks like a fairy queen.

"I know it is, but at the same time, it would have been nice if I had kept it up just until I lost a little weight."

"But you knew that was unhealthy."

"Right. I analyze too much."

"I kinda get that. Everyone else has all this stuff they're going through and I know it's dumb, so I don't go through it."

"Exactly." Rebecca sits down on the other side of the canvas. I get out the white paint and we both take small brushes, highlighting the trunks and the branches. You could almost see Puck sitting in them, giggling at the bumbling lovers. "I just think that I'll never get to do anything, because I know how it will turn out."

"But you do stuff that's good. You've been all over."

"Not things other people do. You either. You're too smart. We won't ever get to be like others."

By other people, we mean teenagers. I look around. While Rebecca and I have finished twelve canvases of trees that are now peppering the lawn of our "quad" our co-crew members have managed to climb a real tree and are currently drawing on the concrete table "Melissa is a fat pig" and "Joseph is a fag." The girls are lying on the benches, their head in some boys lap. They're cute, skinny, their clothes are tight and ride up on the top and down on the bottom. I think this is no tragedy since none of them have breasts or hips and look more like boys than the boys do.

David is trying to wave me over to watch him try and skateboard down a flight of stairs. He does this every afternoon. Ever since we broke up he keeps wanting me to come watch him play. We don't know it but soon, after we've gotten back together, he'll fall down the staircase railing and get a crack in his skull. His step-mother will then proceed to beat him after their trip to the ER. Eventually he will run away to Alaska without telling his Father. Only a handful of us will know about it and we will be threatened with beatings ourselves for letting him go.

I will only hear from him twice after that. Once to let me know he got there safe and once to let me know he has become a manager for Subway. There will be rumors he has gotten married to a girl he got pregnant. But I will never know for sure.

I turn back to Rebecca. She's not skinny, but she is very developed and curves beautifully.

"You should do a painting of yourself. You're so beautiful."

"I was thinking maybe I'd do a body study of myself. But I need photos."

"I can take them for you." We finish the painting in silence and go to clean the brushes together.

"Maybe," I say "you are just too advanced for right now...but eventually you'll find something challenging later."

"I don't know if I've ever been challenged."

"Me either."

"It's the analysis. I'm too detached."

"Right, life would be easier if I didn't know so much about it."

"Exactly, you're smart, and so you can see what will work and won't and why. All these rumors and myths, they're so easy to see through."

"It's like understanding something you're not supposed to explain." I nod.

Again I look around. Peggy and Mark are in the parking lot making out. Mark is spindly and tall, Peggy is pure skeleton. She had a mother who was a dancer and wanted Peggy to be too. She's a good one. But she's been anorexic since she was 12. She's extremely protective of the other girls and forces us all to eat whenever we can. Lately she's been gaining some weight and looks really good, all of us are unsure if we should congratulate her on how fabulous she looks or if we should keep quiet for fear she may think she's gaining weight again and spiral back to 85 lbs. Once again, we don't know that in a few years she will have become a model in New York and be raped by one of her agents. She looks weak, but she's strong and soon after she will move to California and run her own business.

Mark will go to school, break more hearts, and disappear. Mark never was more than tall and spindly, and desperate to be strange. He never really made it.

"We think too much, but we're not too smart." I tell Rebecca. She nods.

In a few years Rebecca will have joined an art commune and be forbidden to speak with any of her friends. She has disappeared somewhere in the hills of North Carolina. I met someone from her commune at a concert in Louisiana a few years ago. There were no women around and I didn't ask about her. I don't know if her name is still her name. I don't even know if she still paints. I hope she does.

Soon after I graduate I will remember her saying "Maybe I'm too smart." and take it too heart. I'll spend so much of my time pretending to not be smart, pretending to be the girls who giggle over boys skating down stairs that I'll lose focus and forget I ever was intelligent.

I know where I got that idea, but I don't know where she got hers. I guess we did do something teenage and stupid. But it affected us far later than it should have.