4
October
Senior year
“Who can solve this equation? Nobody? Come now, we’ve just spent twenty minutes factoring cubic functions. Miss Taylor and Mr. McKay, would you kindly stop flirting long enough to…”
I glanced up as my math teacher, Mr. Hopper trailed off.
Lauren, who sat two seats ahead of me, had been leaning back over the empty desk between us going on about a party I'd missed. Sometimes I swear high school girls get paid by the word.
It was her giggling that had attracted the attention of our teacher.
At least until we’d been saved by the girl in the doorway.
She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a backpack dangling from one arm. Her skin was warm like caramel and her hair was dark, almost black, and longer than any of the other girls’ in our year. Her head came halfway up the doorframe, and for a second I wondered if she was a junior.
“Miss Martinez.” Hopper read from the sheet of yellow legal paper she handed him. “Would you like to introduce yourself to the class?”
“Pretty sure you just did.” Her voice was deep, and she said it like a fact, not like a burn.
“There’s a seat for you.” He pointed and the girl, with a gaze that slid over the entire classroom in one long, wary pass, wound her way back to the desk between me and Lauren.
I tuned out of math—I could’ve solved the equation the second he’d put it on the board—and studied the girl in front of me.
She was physically tiny. One of my arms would probably go around her entire body.
But she didn't seem small. Maybe it was the way her eyes had flashed when she’d taken her seat. Like there was something giant inside her, waiting to get out.
When the teacher assigned the class to do some work and ducked out into the hall, I shifted out of my chair to peek over her shoulder.
“What’re you working on?”
Well damn. New girl had an edge.
“That’s Frank Miller.”
She covered the drawing with both hands in a black belt defensive move. “It’s none of your business.”
“This is high school. Everything’s everyone’s business.” I took her raised brow as an invitation. “That’s Sin City. Gail. And Dwight.” Surprise flashed across her face. “The comic was incredible and the movie was underrated. They could’ve done more with it, but…” I shrugged. “I’m Riley. This is Max.”
My friend lifted his chin in hello from the next desk over.
After a moment’s hesitation, she replied, “Sam.”
“Sam like Samantha.”
“Sam like Sam.”
Now that I saw her up close, she was the kind of pretty my sisters would spend hours in front of the mirror to achieve. But instead of playing it up, she played it down.
She couldn't erase them entirely. Her eyes, which couldn't decide if they were green or brown, were framed with dark lashes. In their depths was curiosity, intelligence, plus something I couldn’t read but wanted to.
“Hey. You have lunch plans?” I asked on impulse.
Max muttered something inaudible next to me.
Sam looked between us. “Eating. Was the plan.”
“Good. You’re showing me those.” I nodded toward the drawings.
“I'm not showing you anything.”
“What?” It was her turn to surprise me.
“I said no. Have you heard the word before?” Something in the way she said it made me wonder if she'd caught Lauren's display of literal back-bending to get my attention.
“Mr. McKay.”
I straightened in my chair, looking around Sam as she turned to face the front. “Mr. Hopper.” I met the teacher’s narrowed gaze. The rest of the room had fallen silent.
“How are those proofs coming along?
“They’re as good as self-evident.”
I thought I saw Sam’s shoulders shake, and pleasure rushed through me.
Oh, yeah. This girl was different.
I wanted to know who she was. Where she came from.
I wanted to know everything.
“Epic sent some concept art. Assuming you’re awake enough to take a look,” I told Max the next day in his office.
I opened the attachment on my phone. Max scanned through the half dozen images of the title character, the Phoenix, and her band of misfits.
“It’s crap.”
“You get that when a studio options your work, it gives them exactly that. Options.”
“Remind me why we did that?”
I scribbled a number on a Post-It. Underlined it. “Tristan’s college tuition. Grad school in his field of choice. A down payment on his first house, depending on whether he opts for two years of grad studies or four, and the neighborhood…”
Max shot me a look.
“Payton thinks I’m funny,” I insisted.
“Payton cares about the feelings of all living things. She found a spider in the stairwell last week and carried it outside to the garden so it wouldn’t get stepped on.”
With a few keystrokes, Max pulled the images David had sent up on his monitor. “Still shit,” he declared. “Would you go see this movie?”
I studied the first image on the screen. A composite of the full cast, in comic-rendered glory.
Except that Max was right. It wasn’t glorious.
I clicked through to the next image, a wide pan of a battlefield. It didn’t look like some surreal world.
In fact…
It looked like my uncle’s hundred acre spread in Kansas.
“What if we send them something better? In the spirit of collaboration.” I recalled what David had told me about them being open to our input. “Can Katie do this?” One of our artists in Cape Town was responsible for much of the original work on Phoenix.
Max shook his head. “She’s at capacity on Omega.”
“What about Sam.” The idea popped out of nowhere.
“Sam who.”
I blinked at him. “What do you mean Sam who. Sam Martinez.”
“She paints landscapes.” He glanced toward a wrapped white rectangle leaning against the wall.
I retrieved it, unwrapping the canvas and carrying it to Max’s desk.
This was one of the smaller paintings from the gallery; I could hold it in my arms.
In contrast to the art on the monitor, Sam’s work took on moody, surreal shapes. Even the trees looked alive.
“She didn’t always.” Without waiting for a response, I set the painting down and jogged downstairs. No one at their desks looked up as I crossed to my office, where I dug in the closet for a file box in the back, then returned upstairs.
I dropped the box on Max’s desk a few minutes later, shuffling through photos and yearbooks to get to the bottom.
“Shouldn’t this shit be at your house?”
“Doesn’t match my décor.” I found what I wanted, then flipped open the cover of the binder, revealing sketches that were tucked carefully into plastic protectors.
The first was Sin City characters.
The second X-Men.
The third was a world we’d made up in our own minds, talking and dreaming like kids with their whole lives ahead of them.
Max pulled the last image out of the binder, holding it up next to his screen.
The characters were different, the quality was different, but Sam’s looked larger than life.
“I’m going to ask her,” I decided.
Max’s skeptical look as he replaced the sheet of paper had me folding my arms. “What?”
“You expect me to believe this is about helping Titan?”
“What else would it be about.” My voice had a warning edge.
“You haven’t had a girlfriend in a while. Now you run into Sam, the living breathing one that got away.”
“I'm still waiting for your point.”
“You miss having someone to… woo,” he said finally.
I raised my brows. “You think I’m looking for someone to ‘woo’? This isn’t Elizabethan England, Max.”
He passed the drawings back to me without another look. “If you was anyone else I’d say you miss having someone to fuck. But you don’t operate that way with women. It’s more—”
“Civilized? First, sue me if I’d rather date than get hammered and grope some girl at a bar I won’t even recognize the next day. And second…I’m not trying to make Sam either of those.”
“You sure about that.”
“Yes.”
I strode back down the stairs with my box, feeling renewed energy.
The Pit, made up of desks, beanbag chairs, arcade games and other stuff befitting a game company was filled with coders. Again, no one looked up as I dropped into a chair in the empty glass conference room, staring out at the team.
Right now they might as well have been dollar signs as people. I thought about the cash flow statement I’d been reviewing before the call from LA came in.
Which brought me to Sam.
Sam could help us out. If I could buy a slice of her time, her talent, it would pay off big time.
Epic would take her ability to transform raw materials into energy and emotion and turn that into money. For them, and for us.
That was all this was. Business.
Max was sleep deprived and delusional if he thought otherwise.
I hadn’t seen the woman in ten years. This wasn’t about finding out what she’d meant when she said she expected more from me.
Nor was it about closure, though seeing her again made me wonder if I’d ever gotten any.
I crossed to the kitchen, jerking out my phone and the business card I’d picked up on my way out of the gallery.
On impulse, I copied a picture I’d taken of Max, Payton and Tristan at the hospital, smirking at my friend’s buzz cut and the baby’s dark fuzz.
Riley: Thought you might like to see this. Tristan’s the dude with the hair.
I went to the fridge which held rows of neatly lined up energy drinks. I popped the tab on one as I waited for her to respond.
Nothing.
I set my phone down and took a swig of the drink, leaning a hip against the counter as one of the coders walked by to grab a granola bar from the cupboard.
I went back to my office and started going through some overdue paperwork.
It was almost two hours later when my phone buzzed.
Sam: Cute
I looked up from my work.
Riley: There’s more where that came from. I could show you in person
This time, the response came almost immediately.
Sam: If you’re trying to hold me hostage by my ovaries, it’s not working. I have zero maternal instincts
I barked out a laugh, the only sound in my office besides the dull buzz of conversation from the Pit outside my open door.
I started writing, then erased it.
Riley: Max and I want to ask you something.
I should’ve felt guilty for not telling her Max wouldn’t be there. But they don’t let you into law school without a little moral ambiguity.
Sam: Okay
Riley: How’s tomorrow. Got lunch plans?
The text sent and my screen stayed motionless. I frowned, clicking the power button to make sure it wasn’t frozen.
Finally, dots appeared.
Sam: Twelve-thirty. I’m coming from the gallery