7 years ago
I didn’t know how long I’d be able to afford the overpriced classes I was taking at Les Beaux Arts.
I was juggling between jobs, one at some fancy, rich-ass restaurant, serving men just like my dad, and the other at the reception of a night hotel where married men were accompanied by escorts for the night. I was saving every penny by living in an apartment with a weird dude named Isaac—he was everything I wasn’t, slightly annoying and extroverted, sleeping until noon and partying all night long, but he was better than Léon. Without him, I’d probably still be sleeping in that train station.
The reason why I came to Bernard’s expensive class wasn’t because he marked each of my finished paintings with a red cross, nor was it for his motivational talk about how I’d never become a true artist because I didn’t have that eccentric genius fever. It wasn’t for the way his golden students treated me like a street rat and how I’d stooped to picking through the trash cans and storage room for their leftover materials. I was a couple of years older than most of them—despite that old dude living his teenage dream and a woman who thought she was a real-life renaissance painting.
The reason why I came to his class was something that’d make corpses laugh from beneath their graves.
Models came, all of them inspiring me with a deep constant void. My paintings were soulless underneath those technically perfected traits. I was reproducing everything I saw without a soul, without a detail worth exploring. I had no story to tell, no feelings to put into the light, no matter how hard I tried. And I tried to fit in so fucking hard. It didn’t work.
Until there was her.
The girl who always arrived with a dress fit for a runaway bride. She had that smile. A smile so proportionate that the mere curl of her lips made her cheeks lift and her eyes squint. With a simple smile, her whole face expressed itself. And she had those eyes—feline eyes that could set the sun ablaze.
It’d been a couple of weeks since she’d been employed to pose at Les Beaux Arts, and I was making sure to never miss her. She invoked a peek at some unknown human emotions I couldn’t classify—like the tingling in my fingers, my heart beating like an old record that blares, the temperature of the room changing abruptly. She created symptoms in me. But since then, my art had come to life.
Bernard was making it even harder on me until he’d purposely humiliated me in front of the students, asking them to correct my painting by adding a word that described the horror I had made. The words freak, homeless, dead, filth, and incapable came to engulf my canvas in the shape of dripping blood. And even then, I had felt a simple twinge but nothing more, and I walked past it every day; Bernard had hung it above his desk like some trophy.
I had talked to that mystery girl. Once. It was in the storage room, but it was in vain. I saw my reflection in the mirror. I knew what people were saying about me. Despite everything, she had written me a letter and given me a four-leaf clover. I was not used to receiving gifts nor people being interested in me. She called me a ghost, and since then, I’d been looking for a similar artist name.
In my usual place at the back of the class, I leaned against the wall and scribbled similar words.
Ghost. Spirit. Phantom. Spectre.
Spectre. I stopped at this word. It meant a ghost or a spectrum—a band of colors like in a rainbow. I erased what I had written. I wasn’t Ajax Clemonte, rich heir. I was almost without a penny Ajax, whose fortune stopped at one luggage full of painting materials I hadn’t even paid for myself and a pocket watch I stole from my father. From what I gathered, she had a preppy boyfriend in the architecture department. I wasn’t enough to vie with.
I took out the pocket watch. She was late. All the students were waiting for her. Even Bernard tapped his foot. The sounds of shoes echoed in the alley, as if someone was running. I glanced next to my canvas. It was her. She seemed exhausted, crossing the main door with messy hair around her face and some makeup drifting down her eyes.
“I’m so sorry. I had an appointment that went on for so long, and I—”
“I don’t have time to hear your pitiful excuses,” Bernard cut her off. “Get on with it.”
She nodded politely and threw her bag in a corner to step into the center, taking in a pose, her gaze lost on the horizon. This was my favorite moment of the day. I could admire every centimeter of her—from the mix of colors in her eyes, from burnt sienna to mars brown, like a work of art on their own, to her snub nose and the way the light hit her face like small crystals and reddened her cheeks. I could admire every corner of her while remaining invisible in the shadows.
My body had a brain and a will of its own. My pencil lines rushed, my eyes were going back and forth quickly, and my brain switched off. My hand clenched to the point that I could cut off the flow of my blood. I was in this phase where I forgot reality; I deformed it. My eyes roamed the material of her dress. The skirts were like a hidden identity, a mystery to be discovered.
A phone rang across the classroom, and I snapped away from that phase.
“Which phone is it?” Bernard complained.
“I’m sorry, it’s mine. I—” She excused herself and left her place to the biggest sighs from the students to kneel down toward her bag. “I’m sorry.”
“What a mess. This day is a complete mess!” Bernard whispered, bringing a hand to his forehead.
I turned my neck to the side to see her as she picked up her call. “Mom, I can’t talk right now. What’s—”
Her face went ghostly white, and she parted her lips, but no sound came out from them, as if she was disconnected from the world. My brows knitted together. She didn’t even reply to Bernard’s complaints and the other students’ stupid laughs.
“I—” She turned around to meet Bernard, but her chin shook. “I’m sorry, I need to—”
A tear welled up in the corner of her eyes, and she rushed out of the room. It stirred something in me. I wanted to follow after her.
“What’s wrong with this girl! That’s it, she’s fired. I’m done with all of this!” Bernard yelled.
“Maybe something happened to her,” I dropped, loud enough apparently for everyone to hear.
“Like I care! Her job should come first!” Bernard tried to call someone in the hallway. “Look, I need a replacement for—”
His voice became more and more imperceptible as he moved away from the classroom.
“That girl is so weird, dude,” Bernard’s favorite student whispered.
“At least she’s kinda hot, if we omit her killer eyes,” another one continued.
A nerve in my jaw twitched at the comments. I wanted to be the only one to paint her, the one to see her, and not them. They were unworthy.
“At her first class, she brought cookies as if we were in a fucking old country movie. Did you know she’s dating Augustus, apparently? But he’s just in it for fucking. We all know he’s crushing on someone else.”
My fist balled as I listened to more of their gossip. I bent down to search my bag for my headphones. I didn’t want to hear them.
“Guys, I bet you there is a unicorn or something inside her bag.” The same favorite asshole spoke as if he was some jokester making everyone laugh.
Some girl bounced her way back from her chair to peer at the mystery girl’s opened bag. “There is a manuscript there. Something called Romance at Sunshine Lake.”
“Let’s hide it from her.”
My grip had tightened on my headphones, and I put them down on the floor. Bunch of morons.
“Do that and I’ll brand the wall with the shape of your ugly-ass face.” I gunned my eyes at the bully and former favorite teacher’s pet.
“Relax, freak.” He looked down on me as if I was that sociopathic man no one dared to approach. “I preferred you when you were mute. Didn’t you understand the lesson we gave you last time? Looks like the freak has a crush on that bitch.”
Last time. He was referring to the time they had already rummaged through her bag and I had gone to retrieve the mystery girl’s notebook after meeting her in the storage room. This jerk and his group of friends had pushed me so that I was tripping on the ground. I hadn’t said anything because if I had acted, I would have been expelled, and all hope of achieving a career in art and seeing her would vanish. I had to be patient to take my revenge on all of them. But patience wasn’t something I had in my disposition today.
I displayed a deadly scowl. “Bitch?”
“What, you’re offended? I’m sure you’re going to the bathroom to give yourself a handjob like a freak.” People laughed. “Why don’t you just quit, loser? Go buy yourself some clothes. You smell like trash.”
“I won’t quit because I’m better than you,” I said, crossing my arms.
“Oh yeah?” He tapped his pencil like some cheap-ass gangster. “How about I go after your whore and fuck her like the cheap one she is in a corner, huh?”
An infernal tide consumed me whole.
It burnt like acid.
My breathing quickened.
My muscles tensed.
Bernard entered the room again as that bully showed me a sexual image on his phone of what he intended to do with her. “They are all incompetent, so we’ll work on—”
I snapped.
I rose up from my chair and headed straight for the bully. I knocked down his easel and threw him against the wall in a murderous impulse.
“Ajax!” Bernard screamed like a five-year-old kid seeing a mouse.
I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I was possessed. My fist clenched at his polo shirt. I took a breath. And another. Clenching my jaw, I pushed that piece of shit away from me. He wasn’t worth it. “Show some respect.”
The student made a look of disgust. “You should tell that to Augustus, but maybe he’s willing to share with a rat.”
He tried to hit me back, but I intercepted him and knocked him down, landing a blow on his jaw. Blood dripped down his mouth, and when he spat to breathe through his bleeding mouth, he sent his blood flying, hitting my shirt. Great, now I have to buy new clothes.
“You incompetent fool. What did you do?” Bernard came to the side of his protégé, pushing me away. “You’re worthless. Get out of my class before I call the police!”
“Gladly.” I didn’t even bother to take my stuff.
“I should never have taken pity on you and taken you into my class.”
Pity. If only the school knew the learning methods that Bernard had inflicted on me; he would be automatically fired. I rushed away from the class, never looking back. I would never enter those doors again.
I rolled up my sleeves and paced through the corridors in the hopes of finding her. I went outside, and scanning the night, I distinguished a woman underneath the light from the lampposts on the Alexandre III bridge. She was leaning into it, alone, as if the world had fallen silent to give her the stage.
I got closer. Mystery girl was throwing pieces of paper away in the river, but her body wasn’t racking with an onslaught of sobs and tears. No, her eyes were filled to the brim with tears that gushed down her ashen cheeks. Her bottom lip quivered, but her chin was high and proud, no other parts of her moving. The void seemed to call her in an invitation to jump, but she didn’t. Even the breeze was silent.
I was hypnotized and fascinated. Her emotions were so powerful they stirred something in me. My stomach twitched. My heart threatened to flee away with maddening beats. My throat dried. The blood coursed through my cells. I memorized the scenery with one promise.
I have to reinvent myself.
I’ll show them.
I was tired of wanting to fit in. I’d create a new identity that no one knew. I’d be a Spectre. And I’d take my revenge, making her a legend. I’d paint her and immortalize her emotions to share them with the whole world. I’d show them that a nobody could rise above.
She’d be my masterpiece.
I stepped forward to her, but what would I even say? I had never been good with words, let alone emotions. I didn’t even know her name.
But one day… One day, I’d have everything.
And that day, I’d be enough.
