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“Ay, sweetie! You’re awake.” Mother comes pummeling through the door and into the kitchen. She gives me a quick kiss on the head and glances over at the plates of food I’ve prepared.

“Why did you let me sleep so long?” I grunt, getting us napkins and sitting down.

“You looked tired. I wanted to let you rest,” she says as she joins me at the table. “I just went out and signed us up as members of the Holy Trinity.”

“What?” My face drops, and I can tell she notices.

“Because, hija, it’s time we start going. As soon as possible,preferably. I liked that one most, and they were very welcoming to us after the service.”

“Mother, all churches are welcoming. They’re always trying to recruit more people. Why are you in a rush all of a sudden?”

“That man, in the mountains…” Her voice becomes shaky. “He strayed from the path of God just like your father. We need to start on our paths as soon as possible.”

“I know how you’re feeling. I was just as scared of that man as you were, but is this really necessary? You know we’re not like Father. We’re stronger than him, we can resist temptation. Besides, Georgia has exponentially fewer avenues for easy drugs than California. Wasn’t that the whole point of moving here?”

“Sí, yes hija, but we also moved because we were better off here. When we lived in Georgia, we were poor, but we were happy. California ruined our family. Besides, it’s just better to get involved with the church sooner rather than later. Just to be safe.” She puts a hand over mine on the table. “I also found an amazing catholic school affiliated with the church. I put the deposit in for you to attend next semester.”

My heart stops, and for a moment, the room is spinning. Going to church before we’ve settled in is one thing, but Catholic school? She can’t just uproot my life when I’ve finally settled here. California didn’t ruin my father; the drugs did.

I stare blankly at the wall, then stand up abruptly, storming out of the kitchen and back to my room. Mother calls back to me, but I need to be alone. First, she moves us all the way out to Georgia after not living here for ten years, and now that I’ve finally readjusted, she moves me to another school? Unbelievable.

I grab my phone from where I left it on my bedside table and pull up Drew’s contact. My finger hovers over the call button, but it stays there. She’s the first person I want to call, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not after how we left things at the cabin. I’m not even sure she’d want to talk to me after how mucky I left things.

The encounter with the drugged-out man in the mountains shook me so bad that I shut Drew out, and now I’m stuck in limbo, afraid that I may call and say the wrong thing, but also afraid that if I don’t call, I may never talk to her again.

I need to clear my head, to think about anything but this, so I pull out the one thing that always distracts me: my art. Art has always been my escape.

Back when we were struggling financially, I would doodle in the margins of my school notebooks given to me by various charity organizations to take my mind off the hunger boiling in my stomach or the thoughts of worrying when my next meal would be.

Once my father got a job with that rubber company, working long hours and coming home for only about two to three dinners a week, I would draw in my fancy new sketchpad bought with the money that was exchanged for his absence.

When that fancy new job eventually moved us to California, I would carry around a pocket pad of paper and a golf pencil to distract myself during long meetings with real estate agents as they discussed California school zones and all the other ways they were uprooting my life in Georgia.

With everything that happened with my father recently, I started this personal project because I felt like I needed something bigger. Bigger than notebook margins and fancy sketch pads and pocket paper.

I needed something more than a doodle or a drawing to distract me. Something that could make me forget entirely, just for those few hours. Something I could sit down and pour myself into and pretend that a smudged mess up was the worst inconvenience of my life.

I lay the sketch paper out on my desk and flatten it.

It’s time to put this on canvas.

For the next four hours, I meticulously transfer the sketch ontothe canvas. It’s rewarding to see my drawing blown up on a bigger scale, and just as I intended, it takes my mind off the news at breakfast.

My stomach rumbles halfway through, begging for sustenance after I abandoned breakfast so quickly this morning, but I keep working through it. Unfortunately, I did inherit my father’s stubbornness when it comes to holding grudges, and going upstairs just to run into my mother was not something I was willingly going to do.

I finish the sketch and start on the oil paints. As my brush drifts across the canvas and down to the hips on the outline, I’m reminded of whose hips those are. I try to shake the thoughts out because I’m not supposed tothinkwhen I do art. But I can’t. No matter how hard I try to forget, the thought of Drew stays firmly planted in my mind.

What makes it even worse is that when I glance down at my half-finished painting, lines that were supposed to be objective, abstract, supposed to mean nothing, suddenly resemble her figure. Like the shape of her hips and the deep-sunken dimensions of them are permanently ingrained in my brain from when I drew her at the cabin.

I hate how much of her became familiar with me, deeper than surface level. I hate that I can’t even make basic art without it winding up looking like her. I hate that I’ve let someone in so intimately that I can’t push them out, no matter how hard I try.

I hate that even the eyes on the painting reflect the moon, the medium I saw—really saw—her eyes through. I hate how perfectly the color matched the woman in the painting’s hair compared to Drew’s and how it reflected that cute little birthmark right under her hairline.

I hate that Drew ruined the one thing that was only mine—my escape. But most of all, I hate that despite hating all of these things she’s made me feel, I could never hateher.

In a moment of impulsive weakness, I pick up my phone and pull up our texts. The last messages exchanged were from when I first gave her my number in AP Environmental class, and we talked about that night at the playground.

I want to text her. To tell her that I need her. That I need to cry on her shoulder again, and I need her to hold me silently and play with my hair and tell me everything will be okay. But there are no words that can be typed to explain everything I feel, so instead, I click out of our messages and press the call button.