Page 43 of The Starfish Sisters

I hate my life. I hate my dad. I hate that I’m stuck here in this house for five more years until I’m 18. I wish I could run away likeGO ASK ALICE, but I don’t know where I’d find some older guy to let me live with him.

I wanted to be in the play so bad, and now I can’t do it. I wanted to BE WITH YOU during Thanksgiving and now you’re back home and that makes my heart hurt SO BAD. I miss you. I wish you lived here.

[PAGE TORN OUT]

December 1, 19—

Dear Phoebe,

I am fine. Don’t worry. I’m glad you and Joel had fun. He told me he kissed you, which you might have said. I don’t know about this diary right now. I’ll try to call you, but I don’t know when.

Love,

Suze

CURRENT DAY

Chapter Eleven

Phoebe

After we drop Suze off at her house, Jasmine and I have rest time. Not that she likes it that much, but I’m attached to my naps. When I’m refreshed, we head down to the studio. I can tell she’s restless. Art is great for a couple of hours, but she and Maui are bouncing off the walls. Looking through the windows, I see that the rain has stopped. “Why don’t you go play outside?” I suggest, swishing a paintbrush in water.

“Finally!” She pulls on her hoodie and Maui jumps up, grabbing a stick he dragged inside earlier. Jasmine takes it. “Let’s play fetch,” she says and leans in. “That means I throw it, you bring it back, okay?”

I chuckle. “Don’t go too far.”

When they leave, I think about those words. If I yelled for her and she didn’t arrive within a minute or two, I’d be in a panic. So unlike the days when Suze and I tumbled through the forests and beaches all day without anyone worrying. We had bikes and rode them for miles on trails and beaches, around town and to explore places we would surely have been forbidden to visit, like the junkyard and a strip club down on the county road. A hole in one of the walls let us peek inside to the tired, dark interior, where women gyrated in a bored way. Still, it gave us a thrill to see naked breasts.

We also collected everything from shells to pine cones to snakeskins, and took them to the studio to paint and draw. Suze loved feathers, loved trying to capture the iridescence of the vanes, and she liked collecting rocks, too. My tastes ran to flowers, dandelions and roses, the dahlias in my grandmother’s farm fields—such a glory when they bloomed in July and August!—anything with petals.

It took me literally a decade to recognize that my love of flowers and the sea has always been the direction I wanted to take with my art. This direction, illustration and flowers. Color. Bold, bright color.

All the things they looked down on in art school.

The plan had always been for Suze and me to go to New York City after high school, and room together in a garret we imagined would be romantic. Instead, when it came time to apply to schools in the city, I was afraid. Afraid to be rejected, afraid I would never measure up, afraid to be so far away from my father and my grandmother and all the things I understood in Oregon. I did want to go to art school, but in the end, I only applied to schools in the Northwest. I got in to both Seattle and Portland, and chose Seattle only because my grandmother told me I needed to at least get that far away from home.

Embarrassed at my small ambition, I lied to Suze and told her I didn’t get into anything in New York. I asked her to come to Seattle with me, but she was dead focused on making a name for herself on Broadway. Like millions of girls before her, she headed for the bright lights.

I headed up I-5 and dived into art school. It was fantastic from the start. I loved my classes and made friends. My teachers encouraged me and pushed me. It was the most I’d ever liked school.

Sometimes it scared me. I didn’t always want to push the envelope, or make ugly paintings to get oohs and aahs. Not that everyone did that, and it’s not that fine art is all strange or ugly. It’s not. But when I was in art school, the things I loved were beautiful paintings of giantflowers and pensive women looking out windows. They were very much not in fashion.

I met Derek my second year. He was in my studio class, and was generally acknowledged to be the most promising artist in our year. His work was bold and harsh, with lots of nudity rendered in thick lines, and he had a confidence that was rare for a nineteen-year-old.

The first time I saw him in class, I was absolutely smitten. His hair, so thick and black and shiny, falling around a face as beautiful as a dark angel’s. He was the kind of guy who should have been with the pretty girl from Omaha in figure drawing, but for some reason, he liked me back. He liked my paintings, the size of them, the colors I used. He loved my breasts and painted them—both painted on them and painted renditions of them on canvas. It was embarrassing to have him show that work in class, and I always blushed when I saw someone look at me, measuring.

It was a hot, hot love affair. We had sex everywhere, in a thousand ways, as horny as only nineteen-year-olds can be. My passion for art was subsumed by my lust for Derek, and he used that to his advantage. He often dropped comments that only one artist could be primary in a relationship. It terrified me. Would he leave me for a non-artist?

God, the things we do for sex and love! I want to go back in time and shake that smitten child. Suze tried. My grandmother mounted an entire campaign that included a trip to Paris on my winter break junior year.

They failed.

For two reasons, really. The first was that I landed with an instructor that fall who loathed my work. Loathed. He loathed women, but I didn’t get that then. I just thought there was something wrong with me, with my grasp of the finer ideas of art. Derek landed a modest show, and the instructor loved him.

And only two years after she arrived in New York, Suze was invited to come to Hollywood for a screen test. For the lead role in a book we’dboth adored, a historical about a beleaguered and fierce woman who makes her way triumphantly through the world.

When she landed it, so easily, I was both desperately proud and wildly jealous. She was always going to be the star in the world, and I was always going to be the mouse.