22
Sometimes I just didn’t get her. I mean, I know that there was a whole lot about Emma that I didn’t know, but it was so weird how she would be happy one day and then the next would be so… so, I don’t know. Sad. Upset. Angry. Distant.I almost told Nick that he was going to have to take a rain check that night so that I could have Emma to myself and hopefully get her to smile, or at least sound a little happier. But then I figured that she wouldn’t have said yes to him hanging out with us if she didn’t mean it. If there was one thing I knew about Emma at that point, it was that she said what was on her mind. If I suggested pizza and she didn’t want it, she told me no. She never did that stupid thing that girls do where they agree with anything you say in order to make you happy. I always hated that when chicks couldn’t make up their minds.
So Emma showed up, still in a noticeable bad mood, and I tried my best to cheer her up without smothering her.
“Have you been to the gift shop here yet?” I asked with a grin.
“Not yet… I need to buy some gum though before we get on the busses again. Someone said we’d be driving through mountains and I don’t want my ears popping like crazy.”
“It’s a nice one actually… lots of crap.”
She smiled at me, “What did you buy?”
I couldn’t help but smile. I pulled a small bag out for her and put it in her lap. “For you, my dear…”
She chuckled and the sound was music to my ears, “You’re crazy…”
“Yeah…” I nodded. “But look at the stuff anyway, it’s cool.”
Looking through the items her smile grew a little brighter and I loved being able to know that something I did made her feel better, even if it meant spending money on her. There were so many people in my life that came in looking for my money, expecting me to spend it on them. With Emma though, I didn’t mind spending money on her. Probably because I knew that when she said thank you for something, she really and truly meant it, and she never flat out expected me to buy her shit, I just did.
That day I’d bought her an assortment of stupid little things aimed at simply making her smile. I bought her pencils with weird designs on them, which I figured would come in handy for that art she so modestly called ‘doodling’, and crayons with a coloring book that just looked fun. I also got her a lot of sugary candy to hype her up when she couldn’t smoke, and even found a few travel toothbrushes that were interesting enough that I thought she needed to add them to her collection.
“Thanks…” she said softly when she’d looked through everything.
“You’re welcome…” I said with a smile.
She leaned forward and picked her sketchbook off of the coffee table and flipped it open to a particular page then handed it to me, “You asked to see these…”
I smiled and looked down at the artwork. She was so much better at drawing than she liked to say. I couldn’t believe what she was able to create just with a pencil. I wondered if she was that good with paints or even colored pencils. “These are great…”
She shrugged and lit a cigarette taking a deep drag before flipping the page for me, “They’re alright… I did that today too… after you called me.”
I looked down and smiled at a very detailed drawing of one of the tattoos that I had on my arm. “Wow…”
“I was studying your tattoos the other day when we were sitting by the pool. They’re really artistic, which is nice to see. Sometimes people have such ugly tattoos. I figure if you’re going to have something put on your body forever, it should mean something to you and at least be well done. All of yours that I’ve seen are nice.”
“Thanks… I don’t let just anyone ink me. The guy who did most of these is kick ass. He did a lot of them with just an idea of what I wanted. I’d go in with a basic idea and we’d have a smoke or two while he sketched something and before I knew it he’d drawn something amazing that he then inked on me.”
“That’s cool…”
I looked at her and raised an eyebrow, “Are you inked?”
She smiled at the look on my face, “Yeah…”
“Whip em out…” I laughed, only half teasing.
She pulled off the tee shirt that she was wearing and revealed a tank top under it then turned so that her left shoulder was facing me. On it were four stars each a different color and outlined in black arched over a misshaped heart, which was also outlined in black. The stars had tails almost like shooting stars and looked like they had burst out of the heart and left it in an odd shape. She looked at me over her shoulder and then turned so that I could see her right shoulder, “Then there’s this one…” On her right shoulder there was another star, but this one was smaller than the others and was solid black unlike the vibrant colors of the stars on her other shoulder.
“They’re nice…” I said quietly and looked at the colorful stars again.
She took her sketchbook and flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. “This is the original. But I didn’t want to put all of this on my body, so I sort of condensed it.”
Talk about being blown away. The drawing that I looked at was one of the only ones I’d seen in her book that had color in it. The same four stars were there across the top of the page and were so vibrant that they looked like they were going to jump off of the page at me. The heart in the drawing had a noticeable distance from the stars whereas in her tattoo the heart was right there with the stars very close and connected, but like I’d seen with the tattoo, the stars had burst out of the heart in the picture. The picture showed with much more detail where each of the stars had broken through the heart and left their scars on it. The black star in the picture was off in its very own section and the area of the page where it was looked like all of the color had been drained from it. I have no idea how she made it look the way that it did, but it was amazing.
I knew looking at the picture that it had some sort of deep meaning to her, but I was afraid to ask her about it. Something in her eyes told me that her showing me the tattoos and the picture was a lot for her and to ask for anything more would be pushing it. Plus, a drawing that powerful had to have a pretty big story behind it, and I wasn’t sure if it was my place to ask about it just yet. So, I didn’t ask.
I shook my head and looked away from the picture smiling at her, “You’ve got a lot of talent. This is really beautiful…”
She nodded through a drag of her cigarette, “Thanks…” She put her tee shirt back on and then took the book back and closed it in her lap. She took a deep breath and let it out before looking at me again, “I’ll tell you about it someday, okay?”
I smiled and nodded then couldn’t resist the urge to run my hand consolingly down her back, “I’d like that…”
