COMPLEMENTARY [GxG]

Chapter 22 | The Princess Pleads

Eris tells me she has something after school, so she'll pick me up after the sun goes down. We decide that we'll spend a few hours making sketches for our next painting, which justifies our meeting up. Even though all I can think about is her forgery.

Twenty minutes late, her car pulls up in my driveway. I've been waiting at the door, my stomach doing nervous flips. Eris has interior lights in her car, casting a neon blue glow. I get in, and it feels nothing like all the other times I've reluctantly stepped in her car. At first, I think it's because it's night and we're lit in blue.

But the way she's looking at me is different. She's not glaring at me now, for one. But even that isn't enough to explain it. While I've grown used to her laid back, aloof demeanor in the rides to her house, today she has her full attention on me.

We haven't talked in person since the announcement about making it to the finals last week. A.k.a. since she hugged me. Since I offered for her to move in with me in Canada, planting the possibility of an Eris and Persephone that don't fade out of each other's life after graduation.

I'm self-conscious all of a sudden. Hyper-aware of the silence, her slight movements, her breaths, the way I'm sitting, my hands folded in my lap.

"Your hair looks different," she says.

Cue even more self-consciousness. Last night, I took out each and every one of my pink-tipped braids, gave my hair a long wash and an elaborate conditioning treatment. I don't have the type of curls that sit nicely by themselves. My hair is dark brown, tightly coiled, and the only way I like to wear it natural is in two French braids.

"I need to get it re-done," I mutter.

"It looks nice."

"Don't lie to me."

She scoffs. "I have no reason to flatter you. I'm serious."

My inhale is sharp and stilted for no reason. "Okay."

She drives. At her house, her mom offers me a steaming plate of food. The Lugo clan is having dinner, though Iker and Axel are absent today. I sit at the table and finish as fast as I can without it seeming impolite—I can't sit still until I see Eris' forgery.

Finally, we get to her art studio. She's organized the place, with canvases now arranged neatly against the wall, streaks of paint cleaned off the floor. She's smiling, but she's trying not to show it, her lips pursed even as the single dimple on her right cheek reveals her excitement.

"You ready?" she asks me. "It took a long ass time. Interesting exercise, though. Getting into your head."

Her glances at me are long and lingering. My skin warms, again for no reason. In the same way I have her full attention, my mind no longer trails off into my elaborate systems of categorization and sums, instead completely anchored to her.

She leads me to an easel, where my painting, Spring in Ottawa, second place at the California Youth Painters Fair, is propped up.

"So?" I ask. "Where's the fake?"

"This is the fake, Ef." She takes a few steps and pulls up an identical painting. "This is the original."

My world stops. The Earth's responsibility to spin on its axis has now been relegated to me. How fast is it meant to go anyway? A thousand, two thousand kilometres an hour, but my mind is faster like a spinning top toy out of control until it runs out of momentum and collapses on its side.

I literally fall to my knees.

I am going to throw up. I am going to explode.

Because it's a perfect forgery. Down to the angles, the thickness of the lines, and the time-lapse effect as Ottawa shifts through different times of day, a clash of dawn and noon and sunset.