Chameleon ✔️

3 flowers

When I trudge into art on Friday afternoon, the most horrifying sight plagues me. I almost want to turn around and walk right back out.

Flowers.

But not just any flowers. Sunflowers.

Those were Mom's flowers.

Get a grip, I tell myself. You'll draw attention to yourself.

I take a step backward into the hallway. I back right into a girl in my class whom I think to be named Emma. She looks at me like I'm a fool and her aura is a muddy brown disgust. "Sorry," I mutter as she walks past me.

I walk to the nearest unoccupied locker and my hands find the lock. I bow my head and begin spinning it aimlessly. Outward, I feign normalcy. But inward, I am screaming. I close my eyes. I take a deep breath. It's just a flower. She may have decorated my childhood home in it. She may have grown them in the backyard during the summer. We may have decorated her grave with it. I may have kissed one and tossed it atop her coffin just as the machine was lowering it into the ground. But it's just a flower.

I feel a calming aura, the lightest of blues, and I know from whom it came. "Thank you," I whisper to my mother. Then I stand up straight, adjust my bookbag atop my shoulders, and walk into the classroom.

Whereas the sight of Eli's toothy smile usually unnerves me, today I am grateful for it and find the oddest comfort in it. I look only at him — not at the flowers in vases atop the tables, three in each glass, three on each table — only at Eli, and I make my way toward him as swiftly as can still be considered casual.

"Hey. I think we're painting still-lifes today," he tells me excitedly as I sit.

"Cool," I reply.

I set my bag on the floor and lean over it, pretending to be digging for something. Soon Mrs. Berthelot's voice rises above the tumultuous thoughts of death in my head. I keep my eyes fixated solely on her as she explains the assignment. We are to create a portrait of a sunflower using oil pastels and showcasing the use of contour lines that we'd learned about yesterday.

I finally place my gaze atop the scene at the table before me. The flowers are mostly dried up and browning now after being aggravated by teenaged fingers for six hours. The initial pointed stabbing at my chest I'd felt upon first sight of them now fades into a dull throbbing due to the help of a certain aura. A case of oil pastels that look like crayons sits atop the table between Eli and me.

I take a few moments to stare down at the blank white sheet of paper, clean and pristine, and consider how I don't want to scuff it up and ruin it with the crude strokes of my wrists. Eli, however, seems to suffer no guilt as he chooses the yellow pastel and begins to fill the center of the paper with color. I select the green pastel and carefully draw the crooked line of the flower's stem.

"You know, I don't really know that much about you."

This is so not what I need right now.

"You should tell me about yourself," he prods.

"There's really not much to tell," I lie, and now I think I'd actually rather draw the sunflower.

"There's always something to tell," he insists. "Sometimes the characteristics of ourselves that we've come to find uninteresting could be fascinating to someone else."

"I'm just the mysterious new girl," I say dryly. "That's, like, my thing."

"I'm gonna ask you some basic questions," he says, ignoring my remark, "and you're gonna answer them. Na'óⁿ?"