Seafoam //Completed//

Chapter 41

The gallery was completely transformed. Lulu hadn't realized it was going to be a full blown affair when she and Zac walked in through the glass doors. There were people everywhere, the men dressed in suits or tuxedos like Zac, the women in long and expensive dresses. Waiters in white walked around offering glasses of champagne to the guests who stood around admiring the art.

"Do you want to take a look around, first?" Zac asked her.

"Oh, I don't mind if we just go to your display," she reassured.

"Actually, I kind of wanna look around."

Lulu frowned but didn't say more as they weaved their way through the crowd.

"Stop when something catches your eye," Zac told her.

There were portraits everywhere. Naked men who made Lulu blush, angelic faces of women who stood beneath a sunny sky, and even abstract faces of demonic children. Nothing really made her stop until they reached the other side of the gallery. It was the all-white painting she'd seen earlier. Upon closer inspection, she could see that the canvas and the paint were just a shade different. It looked as if the paint had been splattered onto the canvas but in a very precise and calculated way. At the center, there was an almost perfect circle of only canvas, and radiating from it, was the white paint, like a colorless sun.

"What is it?" Zac asked.

She described it to him as best she could and he nodded, listening intently. "It looks so metered," she said.

"It is. The way to get those splatters, is you place the canvas on a spinning table and turn it as fast as you can, and the painting almost creates itself."

"Oh, I can see that now. It was too perfect for someone's hand I guess."

"You sound a little disappointed," he said.

"I guess I expected someone to care enough to carefully construct it this way by hand."

He smiled at that. "Is it perfect though? Isn't there something to say for the chaos of it. When the artist started this painting, he or she—"

"She."

"—she, didn't know what was going to happen. What if the table wasn't secured right and the paint didn't land where she wanted it to? There was risk involved, in this calculation."

"Huh." Lulu bit her lip as she thought. It was a strange feeling, to see through the eyes of a blind boy, but had it not been for him, she would never have realized it. It took both their eyes to glean the beauty of what would have been nothing to someone else.

They stopped at a few more pieces, each one looking different after Zac explained a technique Lulu didn't know, each one evoking a different emotion in Lulu she never thought she could feel for a piece of art. It was electric the way she could see what he could. And he looked more handsome than ever in his element as he stood up straighter and smiles more easily.

After about half an hour of looking around and meeting with Claudia again and having her introduce Zac to fellow artists, they made their way to his display. Yet again, Lulu felt completely invisible, but this time she welcomed it. As long as nobody noticed her, they'd never notice she was the inspiration for "Portrait of a Mermaid." It was the name Zac had called his portrait of her. The other one was simply called "Mermaid," which he admitted wasn't too imaginative.

"I'm terrible at coming up with names," he confessed while they stood next to his display.

"So, the girl in the portrait," Lulu began, "why'd you call her a mermaid?" Curiosity burned within her, so she braved the consequences of the question.