Breene, K F - Growing Pains 01 (3 page)

Abbey was the other roommate. She
was the touchy one; prone to bursts of anger and anxious about her stuff. She
was also the master tenant, which made ignoring her impossible, since 90% of
the stuff in the house was hers and she could kick them out if she wanted.

A great part of
San
Francisco
was rent-controlled, but even still, it
wasn’t what most young people—or any people, for that matter—called affordable
housing. Often one person would take on the contract, responsible for the rent
and the responsibility of dealing directly with the landlord, then take on roommates
to help pay the rent, ensuring rent control kept everything affordable. It was
how Krista found the place; she’d seen the ad for a third roommate on
Craigslist, interviewed, and been accepted.

Ben had been a great addition to
her life. Abbey, on the other hand, she avoided at all costs.

“This is important,” Ben said, not
to be deterred from his painting. “I know she’ll hound me about it, but I need
to do this. I need to put this on canvas.”

“What on canvas?”

“I had a dream last night that the
two of us—“

“Oh my god, did you have a sex
dream about me, Ben?” Krista interrupted with an evil smirk.

As expected, Ben turned a furious
shade of red. “Krista, gross. That’s—I don’t—“

Krista laughed. “Okay, okay, go
on.”

Ben, still flustered, cleared his
throat and continued, his hands finding his hips. “It was this really strange
dream. One of the strangest I’ve ever had actually. Potent. Extremely potent.
You were present, but not always corporeal. As if the whole episode was coated
in your aura. It was frightening in some places, knowing you needed my help,
but me not able to find you.”

Ben gave her that anxious look
again, checking the edge of the tarp to make sure he couldn’t get a little
closer without dribbling paint on the floor to administer that hug.

“Go on,” Krista prodded, a strange
unease in her stomach.

Ben’s eyes unfocused as he thought
back. “Well, the whole dream landscape was saturated with your emotion. That’s
all it was, really. Strong, turbulent emotion. The emotion came across in
colors. The beginning was pastels mostly. Hope. Yellows and oranges later. It
was bright and flowing. But hope started to fade. Yellows and oranges became
reds and pinks.
Hue
changes.
Pastels became bold reds. Blood reds. Maroon.
Burgundy
.
The colors started to multiply, ‘round and ‘round, swirling.” His hands were
shaping an invisible swirling ball between facing palms. “The color turned
muddy brown. Mud made with red clay, though. Reddish tinged. That’s what
everything became. As if a red filter was placed over the landscaping.”

Ben’s eyes sought her, checking to
make sure she was following. She wasn’t, since she didn’t speak art, but she
nodded anyway.

“Next came pulses. A deep current
ran beneath us. This was when you became afraid. Apprehensive. When you needed
the most help, but were unreachable. A new color now. Blue. Soft blue at first.
Translucent. Then the color got deeper. The current stronger. The red filter
slashed with blues and purples. Anger now. Then sadness. This is when I start
losing the themes.”

He turned back to his painting,
Krista forgotten for the moment, working things out. He scratched his head with
the hand that still held the paint brush. He’d have a job washing his hair.

“This was when you were corporeal.
When you were warning me. It’s when the most enormous waves I have ever seen
emerged. Suddenly we were on a beach and waves were coming in as normal. But
you kept warning me. Telling me not to go too close, because a big one could
come in at any moment. I remember being confused at the warning. Wanting to
play, but you kept holding me back.”

Ben turned to her, painting
forgotten. His eyes were huge and haunted. “Krista, those waves—the fear was
worse than any nightmare I can remember having. They blotted out the sky. We
could see them building. Coming after us. You nearly dragged me, trying to get
me to run. But the undertow was sucking us back. It was—I was terrified. And
then—I remember this very clearly—you turned to me, grabbed me by the arms, and
said, ‘We will be overtaken. When I say, hold your breath, and hope we can
breathe underwater this time.’ That’s when I woke up.”

Krista stared at him in mute
horror.

“You’ve had those wave dreams
before, haven’t you?” Ben asked soberly.

“I think you really are
clairvoyant, Ben. Holy hell.”

“But you’ve had those wave dreams?”

She nodded. “Lately, as a matter of
fact. I don’t usually go under anymore. They started after I found out what Jim
really was. What I’d got myself into.”

Ben’s brow furrowed. “Jim?”

Oh, yeah. She hadn’t told Ben why
she’d left
Seattle
. The real
reason. She’d always just said she needed a change of venue, never hinting that
there was a reason behind it.

And then she was purging.

She told Ben about her job, and
that first week. Then her mug. Also about what happened the last time she lost
a lucky mug. Then, because she had opened the vault, and it was already on the
table, and maybe, too, because Ben was hanging on her every word as if she was
giving directions to a pile of gold, she just went ahead and told him the broad
strokes about why she left
Seattle
.
Miraculously, she didn’t cry once.

When she was done, Ben was nodding
with a furrowed brow. “That makes sense. What about the ocean part, though?
Where does that fit in?”

“I told you—the waves started with
Jim.”

“No, not the waves. The blues. The
deep current under everything. The waves were strong emotion. That makes sense.
But it wasn’t a past…situation. It was present. This was all very present. Very
now. There was ocean.” He was looking at her as if he wanted to unhinge her
head and have a look instead.

“Ben, you are under the impression
this relates to me simply because I was in it.”

He shook his head as he crossed his
arms across his chest. The red on the brush was drying, but still managed to
smear his coveralls. “Oh no, Krista, not only that. I am quite perceptive with
emotional nuances. I am like a woman in that respect. I draw off it for my art.
I hone in on it, you might say. You’ve been … turbulent lately. I’ve paid more
attention than normal. I apologize, but it is great art.”

“That, umm, seems like a violation
of privacy? Maybe? Pirating emotion, perhaps?”

“You never said, how was your day?”

“It was bad.”

“Oh yes, that’s right. You did say.
I’m afraid I just botched that again. I’m sorry.”

Krista shook her head and heaved
herself out of the chair. She approached the canvas, warning Ben with a finger
that terrible things would happen if he hugged her with paint all over him.
They turned toward it together.

It was a large rectangle
half-covered in every shade of red that could be created. The strokes were
broad and bold. Thick layers coated, piling on top of each other. Yellow and
orange—what Ben had called hope—were under that, creating a background layer.
It looked like a kid had found a bunch of finger paints and went wild.

“And that dream, with the waves and
beach and stuff, is what you are drawing?”

Ben nodded, looking at the canvas
with a crease between his eyebrows. “Painting, yes.”

“Huh.”

“I am not quite getting the emotion
of it. I’m missing a very important piece. Your background helps—I’ll
incorporate that—but I’m still missing something.”

She didn’t feel like asking how he
planned to incorporate anything with the expectation that people would know
what it was, so she said, “Hmm.”

“Ocean. Why ocean?” Ben asked himself
thoughtfully, turning to gaze at her in thought.

“Well…we are right next to it.
Maybe because you hear it?”

“I thought of that, but no. That’s
not it.”

“I run by it? I like it?”

Ben turned back to his easel. “I
don’t think that’s it. There is something else taking your concentration.”

“Well…” Strangely perplexed, even
though this was more than just a bit illogical, Krista leaned in to look at the
assortment of reds. “My job is taking its toll.”

Ben shook his head.

“Well… Oh! I just made up with a
guy that originally asked me out and I turned down. I was a bitch about it—I
didn’t mean to be. He kind of sur--”

Ben threw his hands up in
exasperation. “Ben! How could you miss that?” He turned to Krista with an
expression that said he thought himself the stupidest person on the face of the
plant. “A man! I didn’t even think of that! You definitely tend to spend a lot
of your time in sexual overtones.”

“Are you calling me a slut?” Krista
asked with a cackle.

“Not the time for hysterics,” Ben
said, waving away her jest.

Hysterics? She thought sourly.

“Hmmmm.” Ben took on a look of
inward contemplation. He turned back to the easel. Krista followed his gaze and
still saw the same random brush strokes of red.

“Anyway,” Krista started to wander
away. “Not much on the man front, I’m afraid. I do need to start dating again,
though.”

“Uh huh. Hmm. I might have to use
my imagination on that one.”

“Okay, then. Let me know if you
ever figure me out. I’ll pass the code along.”

If Ben heard her, he didn’t show
it.

As she was halfway to the kitchen
she heard the front door open.

Oh shit! Abbey’s home!

Krista ran back to Ben. “Ben,
Abbey’s home! You need to cart this off to your room!”

Ben shook his head, still staring
at the canvas. “Not this time, Krista. I need space for this one. This is
finals material.”

“But Ben—“

“I’ll handle her, Krista. It is a
buyer’s market out there. Past school starting. There is no one to take my
place. She won’t kick me out. Not this time of year. She is insane, but when it
comes to roommates, she’s been in the city too long to be stupid about it.”

“What the f**k has happened to my
living room!”

Krista turned around slowly. Sure
enough, Abbey the Horrible had shown up on scene. She was a Goth girl back in
her distant youth, but hadn’t quite given it up completely. She was
thirty-eight, often wore black clothes, but stopped with the black lipstick and
nail polish when she hit thirty. She always looked like she was sniffing poo,
and that was a thing she probably wouldn’t grow out of.

Ben turned to Abbey, looked her
straight in the face, and said, “Abbey, I appreciate your territorialism, and I
wouldn’t dare upset your balance, but I need all the space and concentration I
can get to work on this piece. It is extremely important to me. If I mess anything
up, I will be happy to pay for it. Now please, go away.”

Ben, who usually bowed his head and
found somewhere else to be, standing up to Abbey, who was definitely a bully
growing up who stole lunch money from kids like Ben, was so foreign, so totally
absurd, that both Krista and Abbey stood speechless.

Ben turned back to his painting.
“Now, if you two will excuse me, I have a masterpiece to put together.”

Krista hightailed it to her room.
If Abbey exploded, she wanted to be somewhere else. If Abbey didn’t, she’d
probably perch at the dining room table and watch Ben, making sure he didn’t
mess anything up. Krista didn’t want to be an ingredient in that mixing bowl.

The next day, Krista got to her
desk at one minute to eight. The stupid Muni had broken down in the tunnel and
she had to nearly run in. As she dropped her handbag in the usual spot she
froze. Her lucky mug sat in the middle of the clean desk, somehow back in one
piece!

Tentatively, not believing her
eyes, she leaned closer. It was then that she saw the cracks, small pock marks
and fissure lines where it’d broken.

Next to the mug was a note. A neat
but lazy hand scrawled,

 
to buy a new one. –Sean.”
à
“It
was the best I could do. Please use this

The arrow was pointing toward a
Starbucks gift card.

“What the—“

She poked her head outside the
cube, saw the usual nothing, and stepped back in.

“—hell?”

It was a really sweet gesture. He
must have gone home and spent time gluing the mug back together. Not many men
would put in the time or effort.

Damn. The guy was good, she’d say
that much. He was on par with the best there was, Krista was sure of it. There
probably wasn’t a woman alive he couldn’t get if he really tried.

Krista picked up the gift card. Too
bad it was Starbucks. She was a
Seattle
girl, born and raised.
Seattle
’s
Best Coffee was the coffee for her, and since Starbucks, the sell-out, had
bought them out, Starbucks was the enemy. She would settle for a local
San
Francisco
company, or free work coffee, but she would
not set foot in a Starbucks. She had to draw the line somewhere, take some kind
of stand in something. Everyone had their thing. Starbucks was hers.

She clutched the card. She couldn’t
throw a gift away, and she couldn’t give it to someone else in the company
because it’d look really bad if Sean found out. She could take it home to Ben,
but he had an anti-Starbucks rule, also, even though his was for other reasons.
He had tried to explain, once, but it had something to do with politics and
rainforests and hippy stuff—she stopped listening when he got passionate.
Everyone had their thing, but a person didn’t need to go spreading the insanity
around. She had plenty of her own.

In the end, Sean did fix her mug.
And she probably owed him an explanation why she couldn’t accept his
peace-keeping offer—if that’s what a womanizer called bribery.