Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [17]
She jumped when the timer rang out for the long break. A shiver radiated from her shoulders. She hated coming up to the surface like this. She didn’t want to hear Phyllis’s newspaper rustling and Charlie’s heels slapping around in his sandals. She didn’t want Andrew pulling on his robe. Not for the reasons you might think. No, really. (Though the truth was, she did regain the awkward mindfulness of Andrew’s bare skin in that second when he’d pull on the green kimono and again in that second when he’d take it off.) She just wanted to draw. She just wanted to stay in that place where she understood things without thinking about them.
As Lena stared wistfully at her empty coffee cup, she recognized—almost abstractly—her happiness. Leave it to her to detect happiness rather than actually feel it. Maybe it wasn’t happiness, precisely. Maybe it was more like…peace. At the end of the previous summer her peace had been sliced up like roast beef. The tumult had brought with it a certain strange exuberance, a feeling of living more extravagantly than ever before. But it had also sucked.
She thought back to the end of that summer, when she had first met Paul Rodman, Carmen’s stepbrother. Her response to him had taken her by surprise. She had never experienced such an instant physical attraction to anybody—not even Kostos. In Paul’s presence, that first time, she had spun these out-of-character fantasies about what she could mean to him, and he to her. But after he left, she retreated, as was her wont. Her romantic side went back into hiding, and after some time, her timid side took over, timidly, again.
Now when she thought about him she felt ashamed. He was one of the many things she’d been hiding from this year. He was one of the people she’d been avoiding.
In February, she had first heard from Carmen that Paul’s father was sick. She felt awful about it. She had thought about Paul. She had worried for him. But she hadn’t called him, or written, as she’d meant to. She had learned since, from Carmen, that Paul’s father was sicker and would likely not be getting better. She didn’t know what to say to Paul.
She was afraid of his sadness. She was afraid to elicit his feelings. She was also afraid not to. She was afraid she would bring it up, and there would fall that most inept failure between them: total silence.
It wasn’t until this class, this feeling, that she had regained a sense of balance. The time she spent with her charcoal and her fingers and her broad pads of paper and Andrew and Annik and these deep, stabilizing stretches of meditation—it all felt like too big a gift to be received. She would have to work to receive it.
Her heart soared at the sound of the timer indicating the break was over. Back to work. It was amazing how much she could hate and love the very same sound.
And so began the fateful pose.
For starters, it was unfortunate that the door opened in the middle of the pose, when Lena was least able to process what was happening. It was unfortunate that the person who walked through the door was Lena’s father. It was also unfortunate that the door was located near the model stand and that Andrew was oriented in such a way that the first thing you saw, upon bursting through the door in the middle of a pose (which you really weren’t supposed to do), was a very up-close look between Andrew’s legs. It was particularly unfortunate that Lena didn’t recognize all of these unfortunate things in time to soften her father’s experience, but instead unwittingly treated her father to a long stretch of her unabashed fixation upon the glories of Andrew.
When her father started talking, overloud, she came to. He was looming over her. It was a rude transition. It took her a moment to find any words.