I hooked my arm in Cooper’s and we headed to the exit.

“That was torture,” he said.

“It wasn’t that bad.” It was something new. Something I’d never tried before, and it had pushed me outside my comfort zone to feel nerves I hadn’t felt in a while.

“You have a good singing voice,” he said to me.

“Thanks.”

“I don’t think I realized that before.”

“Abby!” Lacey ran down the aisle toward us. Cooper and I turned to face her. “Hey,” she said, when she stopped in front of us. “I wanted to tell you about a small barbecue I’m having at my house for the Fourth. You should come. Both of you.”

I’d actually heard about Lacey’s parties. There was nothing small about them. She lived in a huge house and threw even bigger parties. We’d never been invited, though. Cooper looked at me. We always watched the fireworks on the pier for the Fourth of July, and I wondered what he thought about this change of itinerary.

“Um,” I said, hesitating. Cooper didn’t say a word, obviously leaving this decision up to me.

“There will be people and food and fireworks. It’ll be fun,” she added.

Maybe I could count it as something from my list. The one about strangers or trying something new. I had to think of five of those, after all. “Okay.”

“Really?” Cooper said under his breath, and I elbowed him.

Lacey took the paper I held about callback information and wrote her name and number on it. “Text me and I’ll give you my address and stuff.”

“Okay.”

Cooper held his tongue until we’d waved good-bye and were outside. “Are you and Lacey friends now?”

“No, I hardly know her.” We hadn’t had a new friend join our group since it originally formed. We all got along too well and were too comfortable with one another to try and force an expansion.

“So no pier this year?” he asked.

“Rachel and Justin aren’t here, so it will already be different. We don’t have to stay at her party long if you don’t want to.”

He shrugged. “Maybe we should. Maybe I’ll bring a date.”

I tried to keep my voice casual when I said, “You might want to ask Lacey first.”

“If she’s just going around inviting random people, I’m sure she’d be fine with it.”

“Random people?”

“No offense.”

I laughed. “Well, too late, offense already taken.”

“You know what I meant.” He paused for a moment. “I wonder if she got a lifetime supply of zit cream from that commercial.”

I pushed him. “You’re a dork.”

With late afternoon light shining through the windows of my art room later that day, I started a perspective piece—the view from the stage. Again, I tried to go just from my memory and how I had felt. It had been so hot up there on stage. And bright. The light shining in my eyes basically blinded me. I squeezed a large amount of yellow and white onto my palette. I mixed a bit of each color and blotted it onto the middle of the canvas, making a quarter-size spotlight. I squeezed out some red and cream, some black and brown for the chairs and people and stage that would surround that spotlight, and got to work.

The window in the room had grown dark, and now only my lamp lit the painting. I moved to the switch and turned on more overhead lights to assess my progress. It was wrong. There was something wrong with it. Too many chairs. Too many eyes from too many people looking forward. That’s not how I had felt on the stage. I had seen hardly any chairs and almost no eyes. I swiped a clean brush through more yellow and white. I pulled out the light from the spotlight wider and wider. I streaked it across the chairs. The not-dry red mixed with the white and yellow and made orange swirls on the outside. The side of me that had obviously always loved my paintings to reflect reality almost painted more yellow over it, but I stopped myself. It was interesting movement. The spotlight in the center now made it almost impossible to see the surrounding chairs or people watching or edge of the stage. It took over the painting.

My eyes were tired. They had been straining too long. I resisted the urge to rub them with my paint-covered hands. I wasn’t quite done with the painting, but it was time to call it a night. I stepped back but then stopped when I noticed a face in the few that remained just outside the spotlight. I leaned closer and squinted. It was my mother. I’d painted my mother into my painting without even realizing it. My mother—the least likely person to be in that auditorium today.

TWELVE

“What about her?” I asked Grandpa as we pushed a cart through the produce section.

Grandpa was squeezing nectarines and placing only a select few into the clear bag he held. “That woman? You want to know her story?”

“Why not?”

“I’m just wondering why all the people you are pointing out are women in their sixties.” He tied the top of the bag in a knot and added it to the cart.

Grandpa always tried to set me up, and I always tried to set him up. And we both never actually agreed to the setup. It was our thing. “No reason,” I hummed.

He pushed the cart forward. “That’s what I thought. Your list isn’t a matchmaking opportunity for me. It’s a growth opportunity for you.”

“I don’t see why it can’t be one and the same.”

Grandpa bonked me on the head with a red pepper and added it to the cart. “Let’s not mess up the dynamics of our already precariously balanced home.”

“Precariously balanced? We have a perfectly balanced home.”

“Exactly.”

“No.” I huffed. “That’s not what I meant. I meant that we are lovely people and can add another lovely person to our mix.”

Grandpa stopped the cart near a bin of apples and turned toward me. “Now that you’re thirteen, we need to have a serious conversation.”

I knew he was throwing an age joke at me to counterbalance the ones I always threw at him, so I chose not to react. “You want to have a serious conversation in the middle of the produce section?”

“What better place?”

“I don’t know, maybe a more private aisle. Like the cleaning products. That aisle is always empty. Nobody buys their cleaning products at a grocery store.”

Grandpa didn’t give a sarcastic rebuttal, only folded and unfolded the grocery list he had brought. That’s when I realized this wasn’t a joke. He really wanted to have a serious conversation with me in the middle of the produce section. I looked around. There were only a few people picking through a vegetable bin. I lowered my voice. “What is it?”

“Your mother was supposed to go to the store today. It was her turn.”

Oh. I’d thought he was going to talk about meeting someone, but this was about my mom. “I know.”

“She hasn’t left the house for more than a walk to the park in weeks.”

“I know. I think she needs to find a friend or two. It always used to help.” I hadn’t thought of it before recently, because she seemed fine. But now that she was headed in the wrong direction, I knew she needed something.