How to Be Luminous Read online

  That’s how I know it’s not an eyesight problem, but a Minnie one.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Color of Paper Cutouts

  The moment I step inside the wide-windowed art space of Poets Corner High on Monday, the back-to-school clamor in the room fades. Even in this behemoth London school, silence and stares have followed me all day: Everyone knows.

  I shift uneasily in the doorway, feeling the weight of my classmates’ whispers. For the first time in my humdrum life, I’m hot gossip. Half the room gives me sympathetic smiles; the other half won’t meet my eye. Including a new boy, huddled in a corner seat, beanie-clad head bent over his sketch pad. He alone is immune to the hubbub that greets my arrival.

  I’m starting to sweat from the stares and mutterings when finally Ritika Okonedo takes pity. She breaks free from a clump of friends and jogs across the room, looking like she’s going to scoop me into a hug. At the last minute, she skitters to a halt, bops me awkwardly in the shoulder.

  “Hey, Minnie. Good summer?” she asks. Then promptly slaps her forehead, shaking her box braids. “Damn. Not, obviously. Sorry about…” Ritika twists her earring, fidgeting. “You know. Your mum.”

  I nod and she smiles, already retreating, as though what’s happened to me is contagious. And I go back to lurking alone. Here’s where a best friend would come in handy. I’m friendly with everyone but don’t have a group to belong to—I’ve always preferred the company of Sloe sisters. At lunch and breaks, Emmy-Kate would hold court with her swimming friends, while Niko would shake off the communication support worker who accompanied her to lessons and hang out with her BSL-speaking, save-the-world girl gang. And I drifted between the two groups.

  I can’t sit with Emmy-Kate this year, not when I know the truth about Mum and she doesn’t. I’m making a mental note to hide behind the bike sheds at lunchtime, when a piercing taxi whistle rings out. Ms. Goldenblatt—the closest a teacher can get to Wonder Woman—strides into the classroom, cowboy boots clicking. Everyone scurries to sit.

  Ms. Goldenblatt takes attendance, then jangles her bracelets, gazing round the room. Her eyes linger on me for a full minute before moving on. “Welcome back, people,” she bellows. “One year left. Shall we make it count? We’ll start the curriculum next lesson—zhoozhing portfolios, prepping for exams. Today, I want to go back to basics. Your tool kit.” This is how she starts every term. With the toooooool kit. “I want a perfectly toned color wheel from everyone.”

  As per tradition, there are boos at this basic assignment—and a paper airplane from Ritika. Ms. Goldenblatt bats it away as it whizzes past her dark waves, adding, “Think about it. A musician practices scales. You need the building blocks. Oh, and we have a newbie among us. Everybody! Please welcome Felix Waters. Now get to it.”

  The room erupts as chairs are scraped back and people jostle for paintbrushes and palettes, jars of water, and rags. With the spotlight finally off me, I can breathe again. I inhale the whole room: paint and fresh turpentine, familiarity.

  “Minnie.” Ms. Goldenblatt clunks over, dropping into a squat next to my stool. “Got a minute?”

  She flicks her enormous earrings out of the way and clasps her hands underneath her chin, looking up with the same wide-eyed pity as the social workers and the police family liaison and the Missing People charity worker and the journalists who tracked down our address and rang the doorbell for days. This is what happens when someone you love disappears: They’re replaced by hundreds of strangers.

  “Oh, Minnie,” says Ms. Goldenblatt in her throaty way. “I was so hugely sorry to hear about your mother. You poor girls.”

  My eyeballs swim. This is how it’s been all morning, in homeroom and every class. Teachers determined to have their sympathy moment. I know Ms. Goldenblatt means it, though, so I give her a meek “Thank you.”

  We’re following the script for a bereavement, but it’s not right. Missing is a new planet. One where the trees are hollow and there are no oceans, a place without a sky. Suicide is in another effing galaxy.

  Ms. Goldenblatt’s hands, fingers laden with plastic rings, move from her chin to her chest, where she presses them against her heart. “Let me know if there’s anything at all you need?”

  I nod and she stands up, half sitting against the table, as if we’re at the bus stop. “And on another topic entirely—let’s talk portfolios…” She beams encouragingly. Ms. Goldenblatt has cheeseball tendencies. She attends all the school plays, standing up and dancing during musical numbers. “Let me guess, all pottery, all the time? I couldn’t tear you away from clay last year.”

  Oh, yeah. Soon after Mum returned to professional art, she invited me—and only me—to come to her studio. The first time she taught me how to throw, she stood at my shoulder at the wheel, her hands over mine, her hair tickling my neck. Afterward we stood side by side at the sink, washing the dried-up clay from our fingers.

  “Want to know a secret?” she asked, bumping me with her hip. “Dry your hands and hold them out.”

  I looked up, meeting her eye in the mirror. She winked, squeezing a tiny dab of something from a tube into my palm. I lifted my hand to my face, and took a deep breath. Glycerin.

  “Um … So what’s the secret?”

  “Neutrogena Concentrated Norwegian Formula,” she replied.

  “You sound like a commercial.” I sniffed again, then rubbed the cream between my palms. “Mum, I’m not sure a hand cream you can buy everywhere counts as a secret.”

  “No, the secret is that ceramicists have the best skin. See?” She vogued her hands around her face in the mirror, posing, her nails painted a lurid neon yellow. When I went to bed that night, I was wrapped in a haze of her smell, only now I knew the secret ingredient, and my sisters didn’t. I hugged the knowledge to myself.

  “Earth to Minnie.” Ms. Goldenblatt clicks her fingers in front of my face. “Clay, yes?”

  I know exactly what my teacher is talking about. Where Mum threw her clay into enormous bubbles with fat, round curves, I got into the idea of clean lines. In fact, I got obsessed. Last year I made tiles, hundreds of them. The plan was to spend this summer glazing them, then splice them into a kind of ceramic patchwork quilt. Not that I’ve ever completed a finished piece of art—it’s the ideas I’m into, the potential. And I haven’t touched clay—or paint, paper, pens, ink, anything—since the last day of junior year. Since visiting Mum’s studio after school and finding the letter. There’s no way I can finish the project.

  “Actually,” I improvise wildly, “I thought I’d try a few other things out. Experiment.”

  Ms. Goldenblatt’s eyebrows fly up so fast I think they’re going to shoot right through her hair. “Amazing,” she enthuses, though I think she feels so sorry for me, she’d pretend anything I suggested was brilliant. “Whatever you finish,” she adds, stressing the word lightly, “SCAD is going to love it, I’m sure.”

  She clasps my shoulder, apparently the go-to sympathy spot, and moves on to hassle Ritika, bellowing as she strides across the room: “Paper airplanes, huh?”

  I blob a set of paints onto my palette, then pull out my sketch pad. The vast blankness of the white paper pulsates in front of me, seasickness-style. For three months, Emmy-Kate has done little else but paint, and Niko spends all her time with SCAD friends, or sequestered in her room. The house is filling up with abstract paintings and trails of tiny paper scraps. How can I possibly keep up, when I can’t see in color?

  I grab a Sharpie and write down:

  I CAN’T BEAR THIS

  Minutes inch by. Ms. Goldenblatt circles the room, handing out fact sheets for the art-school application process. It’s different from university: the aforementioned portfolio. You don’t need to write a novel to study English, but you’re not allowed to learn art until you’ve already made it. The Wonder Woman bracelets jangle again as she calls out, “Forty minutes, artistes.”

  Eff. I shove the fact sheet aside and stare at the blobs of gray paint on my palet
te. Art is going to be impossible. Everything comes down to color. I pick up the Sharpie again and start making a list:

  1. Tickled pink

  2. Green with envy

  3. Paint the town red

  4. Out of the blue …

  OED. Definition of out of the blue in English:

  out of the blue (also out of a clear blue sky)

  PHRASE

  informal Without warning; unexpectedly.

  I’d say my mother walking off the top of a cliff meets the definition. Except it doesn’t. Not my spontaneous, seesawing mother. It sounds exactly like something she’d do. That’s sort of the problem. I believe it, and I don’t want to.

  My heart is starting to speed up; my palms are sweating. I close my eyes and take a couple of deep breaths. It doesn’t help, because out of nowhere I can smell Neutrogena Concentrated Norwegian Formula. Glycerin. It’s so distinct, Mum could be here in the room with me. The spasm of misery catches me so quickly, I fold in half. I’m origami Minnie.

  I tear the top sheet from my sketch pad and crumple it in my fist, then stand up, knocking over my stool with a bang that draws every eye in the room.

  “Minnie?” Ms. Goldenblatt asks, her voice coming at me from a distance.

  But I’m already stumbling from the door, rushing down the stairs, bursting out into the open air and trying to quench my empty lungs. And as I run, my list of questions grows:

  What about time heals?

  What about this too shall pass?

  What about all the things people say that are turning out not to be true?

  How can you even start to heal when your mother chose to leave you?

  Clay

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Halfway between brown and gray, it fades and fades and fades to biscuit beige as the water evaporates. It can take hours to throw a piece. Weeks for it to dry. Days to heat the kiln and fire it once, days to cool it before glazing and firing it again. You have to be patient. You have to wait for her to come home.

  CHAPTER 5

  Not Fade Away

  I spend the rest of the day hiding out with the Rainbow Series I, ignoring the parade of sad-eyed art pilgrims who periodically turn up with flowers and take photographs, as if this is another London tourist destination alongside Big Ben and St. Paul’s Cathedral. And once school lets out, I ignore Niko’s annoyed where-are-you? texts, only going home when it starts to rain. Even then, I linger in the back garden with Salvador Dalí, trying to subdue my pinwheel heart.

  When I finally slip inside, the kitchen is empty and smells fusty, like an abandoned building. Which it technically is. Upstairs, both my sisters’ doors are closed. From behind Emmy-Kate’s comes thumping music, a squeal of her laughter—then a boy’s low chuckle. She’s bringing boys home now? For some reason this seems like the loneliest thing on the planet. Not to mention, she’s fifteen!

  I skitter around, not wanting to be the one to fix this, give her the birds-and-the-bees conversation. Where’s Niko? She should be playing chaperone. I examine her door, biting my lip. Bedrooms are sacrosanct. It’s a lifelong pact between us—one of many, actually. Not that there’s ever anything to see in Niko’s room. She’s neat as a pin: books shelved, bed made, art materials organized in plastic storage boxes. It couldn’t be more different from the explosion of stuff that populates the rest of the house.

  I shrug off the pact, peep through her keyhole.

  My older sister is at her desk. But she’s not cutting up paper: She’s writing frantically in a notebook—with her eyes closed. Kind of like she’s in a trance. Surrounding her are hundreds of huge lit candles. The tall pillar kind you find on the altar in cathedrals. The flames flicker, sending occult shadows across her face.

  Whoa. Oh … kay. I back away from the door. Emmy-Kate is sequestering herself with boys, and Niko is holding a séance. We’re all losing it. And it’s Mum’s fault. At this, a fireball of rage swells in my chest. Instantaneous, red-hot. I want to take London apart with my bare hands until we find her. I want to hurl myself down the stairs.

  Instead I text Ash to come over, lurking by the front door until he arrives and, hand in hand, we go upstairs to my attic bedroom. Aka the Chaos Cave.

  The floor is layered with eight million floral frocks, dog-eared art books, rolled-up magazines, makeup, discarded shoes, empty chocolate wrappers, unfinished art projects, tufts of rabbit fur, old sketch pads, and boxes and boxes of broken pastels and half-used squares of watercolor.

  My desk is as messy as the rest of the room, my portfolio right where I left it last summer. Next to it is a shoebox filled with dozens of unglazed tiles, yet to be fired. I swallow hard, and look away.

  “As usual, I love what you’ve done with the place, Min,” says Ash, turning toward me with a smile. Like yesterday, it’s a subdued, toned-down version of his usual off-the-charts grin. “Busy summer, was it?”

  We both freeze in place, realizing what he said. His eyes widen, and the half-smile wipes out.

  “Crap. Sorry.” Ash knocks on his forehead, sending his damp flop of hair wayward. He’s brought the smell of the rain inside with him. “I’m an idiot. I meant … It was a joke, about the mess. No time to tidy, and all that. I…”

  I take a deep breath and interrupt his stuttering: “It’s fine. I know.”

  The three of us sit on the bed: me, Ash, and his guitar. Sometimes it feels as though I’m in a love triangle with my boyfriend and music. Today, I’m happy to let the music win out. It’s not like I’m a barrel of conversation. While Ash plays, I gaze at the Chaos Cave: It’s a cocoon, rain-dark, the view of the garden blanked out by the murky weather.

  I point to the misty nothingness of the garden and say, “I feel like I’m in a plane.”

  “Yeah?” Ash beats on his guitar and starts playing a sixties song called “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

  I lie back on the duvet and stare at the cobwebs on the ceiling, listening as he goes through his human jukebox routine, song snippet after song snippet. Eventually he runs out of plane songs, moves on to flying. Then birds.

  “What’s this one?” I ask as he sings something about broken wings and learning to fly.

  “This?” Ash repeats the refrain. “‘Blackbird,’ by the Beatles. Wait, fuck. Sorry. Again. I’ll play something else…”

  I put my hand on his arm, say, “No, it’s okay. I like it.”

  The Beatles are Mum’s favorite band. Her only band. She listens to them all the time, won’t allow any other music in the house, even though she was a teenager in the nineties, not the sixties. She says they’re the ultimate boy band.

  I’m thinking of her in the present tense. Is, not was. But what’s wrong with that? People don’t stop being themselves when they die or disappear. Death and disappearance don’t undo heart-shaped pancakes for birthdays or the way she wore sequin party dresses to Emmy-Kate’s swimming competitions.

  Her perfume is Noix de Tubéreuse by Miller Harris; she is addicted to black coffee and hard peppermints and Italian cigarettes. I think of her breaking off halfway through conversations, clicking her fingers, before sprinting to the studio to succumb to some random notion.

  She suffers from sinkholes.

  That’s what we call the days and weeks when her electricity blinks out. When she turns into a broken clock instead of a mother. The times her white-blond hair grows dirty with grease, she lies in bed all day, eats nothing—or nothing but toast, whole loaves of bread at a time, even though she looks like she’s made of bones. But there hasn’t been a sinkhole in five years.

  Except … suicide is the ultimate sinkhole.

  I’m desperate to stop thinking about this, so I say to Ash, my voice coming out in a too-loud clang: “Remind me which album this song is from?”

  “The White Album.” He changes songs yet again, starts crooning along to “Hey Jude.” Only, as usual, he sings “Hey Minnie” instead.

  The words The White Album are snagging on my brain fo
r some reason, ringing a distant bell, the world’s faintest déjà vu. Didn’t Mum have a piece called The White Album? It sounds vaguely familiar—not that I know her work off by heart. She was prolific. The stuff she made when we were little was mostly sold to private collectors; the Rainbow Series I is the only piece on permanent public display. I’ve probably only ever seen about half of her output.

  Ash’s song comes to an end and he places the guitar on the floor, then lies down next to me. We’re face-to-face, body-to-body, ankles intertwined. “Hey Minnie,” he sings again softly, cupping my cheek with his hand. Tentatively, he pushes back my mountains of hair and strokes his thumb along my earlobe. He kisses my forehead. I close my eyes and he kisses my eyelids, then my jawline, then my cheek. We’re like a dance. Calm washes over me, the way it did yesterday in the garden.

  This time, though, I try to ease into it, instead of jumping like a scalded cat. This is a good thing. Despite being apart for a summer, and my whole life turning upside down, he and I are slotting right back into how we were before. Picking up right where we left off. Which was … well, there was a lot of kissing. No sex, yet. But the way things had been going between us, it seemed inevitable, sooner or later. It was a hair beyond our fingertips, on the horizon.

  Ash is smiling, eyes half-closed as his hand slides inside my cardigan, resting on the same spot on my rib cage it always does. The room turns quiet. Even the rain is silenced. All I can hear is our breathing, in sync, and the slow, uneasy panic of my heart.

  Ash moves his mouth toward mine. “You okay?” he asks. I’m not, quite, but I give a tiny nod. Because perhaps this is how I can turn the clock backward. Restore things to how they were.