Page 30 of Dead of Summer

ORLA

They were of course supposed to go to New York together, Alice and Orla.

But it was only Orla who went in the end.

Her parents came on the ferry to the mainland, where they put her on a bus that would take her to the city all by herself.

It was a blustery day and she had vomited twice in the ferry’s miniature bathroom as they chugged across the sound.

“I’m sorry this isn’t happening the way you wanted, Orla,” her mom had said, but she failed to hide the relief on her face that Orla was finally leaving.

Orla’s father had said nothing but hugged her to his thick chest. She couldn’t blame them.

Orla couldn’t have been easy to be around; she had spent the last two years of high school in a state of total depression.

With Alice and David both gone, the color drained out of her life.

She stumbled between classes, disengaged.

She knew it was a miracle that they let her graduate at all.

When the letter arrived from the New School, she almost didn’t open it. Her parents, however, insisted.

“Why not try it out, Orla?” her dad had said while her mom nodded encouragingly next to him. “Will be good for you to have a change of scenery.”

From the bus window Orla had watched as they turned back to board the ferry home.

She had to grip the seat below her legs to keep herself from leaping up and running after them.

She didn’t know if she could do it. New York alone was almost unthinkable.

Without Alice. Without David. Orla no longer even knew who she was.

At art school she was quiet and cautious.

She felt disassociated from the others who were excited to be mingling and socializing completely free from the confines of their families for the first time.

But Orla didn’t know how to do any of it without Alice, wasn’t sure how to be the kind of person who went to parties or made new friends.

She had always relied on Alice for that.

So instead of developing friendships or dating, Orla studied.

She took the core art classes she needed and tried to work on her craft the best she could.

She painted hundreds of still lifes and nude models, learned the basics of every major medium, gouache to clay.

At the end of each day, she would hole up in her dorm room with a sandwich from the deli and draw.

Aside from the paths she took through Washington Square Park every day, she barely even looked at the city.

Despite all her hard work, nothing she was making had any spark of inspiration.

Somehow, though, Orla managed to pass her classes.

She was focused in a way she hadn’t been before.

After all her effort, she was technically proficient.

Art school is like that, she came to realize by the beginning of her senior year.

If you can pay your way, and you do the work, they are bound to give you a degree whether you are any good or not.

Instead of finding it depressing, this became a comfort to Orla.

She knew by then that art the way that Alice had imagined it, the capital “A” art of paintings and sculptures housed in museums and galleries, wasn’t going to be part of her life.

She would have to pivot after graduation, to find a job in graphic design or maybe even advertising.

It felt good in a way, knowing she was near the end.

She only had her senior project to complete and then she would be released from it all.

She had started to feel lighter, to spend more time out in the world.

Soon she would be able to stop living out the childhood dreams of a dead girl.

And maybe then, she hoped, she would be free from the stomach-turning memories that haunted her whenever she was alone at night, flashing against the backs of her eyelids just as she drifted off to sleep.

Two sets of legs. One young and thin with slightly knobby knees that suggest they aren’t quite yet done growing.

The other is older, covered in a map of veins and leg hair.

The feet clad in some sort of ugly expensive-looking sneaker.

The hand on her knee. The horrible scream. The wet hair curling below the water.

Orla had moved into an on-campus studio apartment by then, an upgrade, as it was somewhere she could spend her time completely alone.

But she was packing to leave. She was going through all her art, getting ready to toss it, when she found the tube, still taped shut.

She had forgotten all about Alice’s drawings.

She’d brought them to New York for sentimental reasons.

But maybe there was something else she could do.

Orla unrolled the drawings onto the floor.

They were a series of portraits, all of people they knew on Hadley.

There was a picture of Jean, with her jagged lines.

And then of course, Henry Wright with his bare feet and his hooded eyes.

The angular lines halting around the corners of his mouth, the large worker’s fingers.

They were ordinary, but in the careful details Alice had made them beautiful.

And Orla had the idea suddenly that Alice would be her project.

She mounted the fragile drawings on thick stock and cut the frayed edges off. The way she smoothed them out, coating them with a thick layer of varnish, gave them a professional quality they hadn’t had before. A sort of polish that made them glow from within their frames.

It was something she could still give her, Orla rationalized, as she prepared each piece for display.

It would be her final farewell to the idea of being an artist, and a send-off to Alice, whose work would be shown in New York just like she’d dreamed of all those times, feet propped on the wall next to Orla’s bed.

Orla even felt a sense of misguided pride when she took them into the gallery at school and lined them up to be hung.

She was bringing Alice’s art to New York.

The way Alice had always wanted. She was doing her a favor.

Or maybe it was all a lie Orla told herself.

That it wasn’t going to harm anyone, and that Alice’s genius could be a gift to her best friend who was left behind. That she could get away with it.

Orla’s thesis adviser, Ruth, a thirtysomething woman with tattoos and hair razor-cut to her chin, someone who had dismissed Orla as boring, stopped to stare.

It was only when Ruth leaned in to look more closely, appreciating the thin lines of charcoal that some chord of apprehension plucked inside of Orla.

“Wow, Orla. These are so raw, so powerful. The lines are so controlled. I always knew you were technically very good, but these almost remind me of K?the Kollwitz’s charcoals. More modern, though, and even more lively.”

The anxiety Orla felt in that moment began to dissipate as they got closer to the show. She was nearly on the other side of college, ready to pivot to whatever real-world drudgery awaited her. She was almost looking forward to finally becoming a normal person. And then everything went wrong.

A famous gallerist showed up to the senior exhibit. Ruth found Orla in the corner of the gallery, quietly sipping from a plastic cup of oaky white wine. “Dom Castro is here.” Her voice was singsongy and her eyes shiny like she’d just been standing in the wind.

“Who?” Orla said, feeling cornered.

“He runs Vestments,” she said, waiting for Orla to respond appropriately. When she didn’t, Ruth got impatient. “Orla. Come on. It’s the most influential gallery in the city right now, aside from, like, the Gagosian .” That one Orla had heard of. Her chest constricted.

“He wants to meet you. He says he wants to show your work.” She grabbed Orla by the wrist. She knew as Ruth dragged her across the room that she had made a major error in judgment.

Orla wanted to tell her then that the drawings weren’t even hers.

But as a man with slicked-back hair reached out to shake her hand, Orla found it was already too late to say anything.

So, Alice’s drawings were not just a success, they were a triumph.

A rare fluke of time and space rarely afforded to any artist at any point in their career let alone one in her early twenties.

The gallery show had sold out before it even opened.

But the opening was still spectacular. Orla doubts that Alice herself would have been able to dream up what came next.

How she went from reclusive nobody to the art world’s darling in a matter of months.

The invitations to show her work, the write-up in Vogue complete with a photo of Orla wearing a Balenciaga gown with a pair of Nikes, her head tilted arrogantly to one side.

Orla had known it was wrong. But she couldn’t say that the drawings weren’t hers, not then.

She would have been publicly shamed and, worse, after all that she went through, she would have her degree revoked.

She needed to live in this new reality, to make it her own.

So instead, she studied Alice’s drawings and followed as best she could the same techniques, creating several more shows from the work she produced.

They were not the blowout successes that the first had been, but they were passable enough to keep collectors salivating. It almost didn’t matter if they were as good as the first set, which Orla knew they weren’t. By then everyone wanted an “Orla OC,” as she had begun to go by.

Plus, Orla was finally starting to enjoy her new life, the one where her phone was lighting up with texts and she suddenly had places to be. The new people in her life filled up the empty place where Alice had been. They helped her forget.

As the delusion really settled in, she had begun to gain confidence. Orla liked the new version of herself with the fashion industry friends and cool bangs.

She even began to convince herself that Alice’s genius and her own were actually intertwined.

Orla could show some of her own paintings, she decided.

She started a series of monochromatic boxes, their tops opened to reveal their empty insides.

She painted them late into the night in a fervor.

It was that last desperate attempt that did her in.

First the bad reviews poured in and then after the show, everything slowed to a pathetic trickle.

Her astronomical success, like most, had been a quick hot flame. And then it was over.

Orla looks down at the kitchen table at the drawing she’s started of Alice’s house.

The branches twist like they are moving.

The dark windows appear through them as sunken eyes.

Maybe there is something there. A flutter of hope builds in her chest. If there were just more contrast to it perhaps.

Orla is suddenly desperate to prove that she has talent.

David is wrong about her. She just needs to finish this drawing and she can take it back to New York and ask her agent to find her a new gallery.

She can turn her career around. And maybe then her life will follow.

Remembering a box in the closet marked Art Supplies, Orla leaves the drawing sitting next to her nearly empty tequila glass and goes upstairs. She makes a beeline for the closet door, swinging it open, and steps inside reaching for the flimsy string to turn on the single bulb.

The shelves in the back remain dark as she puts her hand up and feels for the box.

She finally finds the edge and pulls down an old green plastic pencil box.

She undoes the latch and holds it under the light bulb as she paws through it, an invisible film of ancient eraser dust and pencil shavings making her fingers slippery.

At the bottom of the box Orla finds what she is looking for, a narrow packet of vine charcoal still in its plastic wrapper.

It’s been there since high school art class.

That will work. She tucks the box under her arm and turns back to the door quickly, eager to leave the closet.

As she reaches back up for the light switch, she is confronted with the hand-drawn mural on the back of the closet wall.

Her heart jerks violently up into her chest. Before she can fully comprehend what she is looking at, she starts screaming.

The box of art supplies falls to the floor with an angry clatter, sending pens and pencils rolling loudly across the hardwood into the dark corners of the closet.

It isn’t Alice and Orla’s drawing. Not anymore.

It’s been changed. Orla’s knees buckle. The faces of the two of them so carefully rendered by Alice have been scribbled over with coarse black Sharpie, looped into furious scribbles over the eyes so that only their mouths remain.

And David, the entirety of him is blacked out.

Then there is the Rock. The house’s windows have been filled in crudely with black paint.

It drips all the way down the side of the wall, pooling in a sticky puddle on the floor of the closet.