We Could Be Enough - Lams

XVI.

"Wait!" I cry, running after him. "Alex, please!"

He ignores me, facing in the opposite direction. I start wildly waving my arms, trying to get his attention, and he still acts like he can't hear me.

"Alex, I'm sorry!"

He whips around, tears in his eyes. "Sorry doesn't bring back my gummy bears, John! You should know by now not to eat my food!"

"I only ate, like, a third of the bag!"

"You two are such drama queens," Lafayette says, walking past us to get to his chair, with his hand halfway into Alex's bag of Haribo gummy bears. I swear to god, Alex's jaw dropped all the way to the floor.

After having to restrain Alex from straight up murdering Laf, I try and get back to drawing my stupid fish.

I just sit here in the Arts & Crafts room, thinking about how I'm mediocre at drawing, but fish are just so goddamn difficult to draw. Like, why does the flippy flappy part gotta be so wibbly and wobbly? I will never know the answer to that very important, life-threatening question.

I throw my pencil down. My hand just, like, won't work. Like, I know what I want to draw, and I can visualize where the lines need to go, but my hand won't follow what I want it to do and it's just frustrating as hell.

Lafayette's just tossing glitter everywhere, and Eliza is glaring at her paper, so I doubt anyone else's work is turning out relatively good. Herc isn't even doing it; He's just on his phone. Like dude, come suffer with us, it's not fair that you're not suffering too.

Angelica keeps drawing and erasing and re-drawing the same face several times. I take a peek at it while she's up sharpening her pencil, and it seems literally perfect. I would totally be satisfied if my drawing turned out half as good as hers. Why in the world does she not like it? Maybe I could ask her. No, that'd be awkward. I could just not say anything, then maybe lead the next conversation I have with her into talking about our art, and then I'd say the perfect thing that would make her tell me about her art. That is definitely the only thing that would work.

But I digress.

Other than that, the arts and crafts seem to be going well... I guess.

I don't feel like doing my fish anymore.

You know that thing you do when you're bored out of your skull, but no one's talking, so you feel like you can't talk to someone or else it'd be disrupting everyone's concentration? So you just look around at what everyone else is doing, but then quickly run out of things to look at, so then you start to look at everything around the room. You look at the cart full of bags of clay for making ceramics, the jugs of paint on the window sill in the paint center, or the stack of unfinished art that is yet to be claimed by anyone. But then, you realize, you've run out of things to look at again. So what do you do next? You stare off into space until someone pulls you back to reality. You know that thing? Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now.

I'm only pulled back to reality when James walks through the door. I didn't choose to be pulled back, but the door was near where I was staring and my eyes focused on the only movement in the environment.

Holy heck, how did I not notice Thomas sitting at that table in the corner? He's almost entirely obscured by a rack of drying watercolor paintings, but Madison immediately approaches him.

I shouldn't bother thinking about them. Them being here brings me back to that conversation I had with Alex earlier in the day.

"... I just wanted you to be in the loop."