For Blackpearleyes

Summer Day

The sky above was a clear, pristine blue, with only a few feathery clouds high up in the sky to block the sun a little every now and then. A cool breeze swept past his cheek, bringing with it the scent of green things growing and the sound of children laughing, and underneath that, the distant honking of car horns.

Benjamin – or Ben, as he was most often called – could not have been happier, more so since it was the first weekend since school ended for summer vacation. There was always a sense of infinite potential on weekends like this, the feeling that they could stretch out, going on and on into eternity.

Or at least until fall came, of course.

“I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”

Ben smirked at his current companion. “Hey, you lost the toss. I even let you call it.”

Clive rolled his eyes as he tucked his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

The decision to go to Central Park wasn’t too much of a contest. Clive, Ben, and their friends Cody and Sarah had already decided that they would go to Central Park on their first weekend out of school, since there were lots of things to do and see in the Park during the summer. What had been most hotly contested, though, was what they were going to do, and as usual, Ben and Clive had stood as polar opposites to each other. Clive wanted to see a freestyle skateboard and inline skating demonstration, while Ben was determined to see an art exhibition centering on chalk art. Since they couldn’t come to a decision that didn’t involve flying fists, Sarah decided that since the two boys, being such – well, boys – were better off tossing a coin to make the choice for them. So Ben had pulled out a quarter from his pocket, and let Clive call it. Clive called tails, and when Ben tossed it, the coin landed heads on the floor of the Pryce homestead’s foyer.

And so here they were, waiting for Cody and Sarah to pay for the pink lemonade they were buying to combat dehydration, with Ben excited to see the exhibit, and Clive looking as if he wished he were somewhere else.

“So what’s this whole exhibition about, huh?”

Ben grinned, recognizing the resigned tone in Clive’s voice. Score one in that department. “It’s a charity show to raise money for a freedom wall and courtyard here in Central Park, kinda like what the people in Sydney did, only they gave over a whole tunnel, not just a wall,” he explained as he pulled out a folded piece of paper for his front pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to Clive. “It’s so graffiti artists will have a place to do their work without getting arrested.”

Clive raised an eyebrow at that. Was Ben serious? Clive was something of an expert on graffiti, having learned to read them in order to determine which gang claimed which part of the city as its “turf.” But what Ben was talking about was like making graffiti out to be “art,” which, as far he was concerned, it wasn’t.

But now he was a bit interested – if only to see what these artists were doing that they thought it important enough to raise money for a whole wall and courtyard just for graffiti.

“…art to the streets,” Ben explained, speaking more rapidly as he warmed up to his subject. “And I heard Kurt Wenner and Julian Beever would be there, along with other amateur artists from practically everywhere in America.”

Sarah Chase smiled teasingly as she approached the two boys, handing them their tall plastic cups of icy-cold pink lemonade. “This must be a really huge deal then, if you’re that excited about it,” she remarked as Cody ended up walking alongside her, and all four of them started on the path towards the place where the exhibit, called “Gallery: Central Park,” was being held.

“I don’t get it though,” Cody murmured thoughtfully, causing all three to look at him. “Why’d they call it ‘Gallery: Central Park’?”

The grin on Ben’s face was wide and enthusiastic. “I could tell you, but that’ll just spoil the surprise.”

Sarah blinked. She wasn’t quite certain what sort of surprise there was going to be – after all, it was an art show, wasn’t it? – but she held her peace and instead contented herself with listening to Clive and Ben argue about this and that, while she and Cody just looked at each other and sighed to themselves over the fact that, though they considered themselves "friends," Clive and Ben were just as likely to punch each other as they were to side with each other.

Cody hadn’t even gotten through half of his pink lemonade when a large group of people up ahead caught his attention. What made them really odd, though, was that practically everyone beyond the little booth that asked for an entrance fee was looking at the ground.

“There it is!” Already Ben was charging ahead of them towards the booth, using the money that Merrick Roswell had given them to spend on the exhibit. As Cody well knew, Merrick was a great believer in the educational value of art, and so had been happy to give them enough money to pay the entrance fee.

What they saw beyond the entrance booth made Cody’s eyes widen. The people were looking at the ground, because there, on the pavement, were drawn… Cody frowned. That looked rather weird.

“What the hell is that?” Clive drawled as he tilted his head sideways, looking at what appeared to be a huge, distorted drawing of…he wasn’t sure what it was. “Don’t tell me this is one of those crazy-ass modern art things.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “That’s ‘cause you’re not looking at it right.” He gestured to what looked like a telescope that was positioned not too far away from the drawing. “Take a look over here.”

Sarah was the first to move, and she leaned over, her hair spilling over one shoulder as she leaned forward. When she peeked through, she gasped. “Oh wow! It’s the Grand Canyon!” She grinned up at him and Clive. “C’mere, you gotta see this!”

Ben watched as Clive walked over, apparently skeptical at Sarah’s excitement. He probably thought it was just a huge blob of color on the ground. What could be so special about it? Still, Clive took Sarah’s place leaned in, squeezed one eye shut, and peered in.

“Holy Jesus!”

The exclamation that was obviously just shy of a swear word made Ben smile in satisfaction. He knew what they were seeing: a three-dimensional rendering of the Grand Canyon, made to look as if someone had dug through the pavement and found it there. The little card taped to the viewer’s stand indicated whose work it was: an artist unknown to Ben, though it was obvious that the artist had drawn inspiration from Kurt Wenner’s work.

“How do they do that?” Cody asked, straightening up a bit to look at the art piece without the telescope, and through the scope again.

“It’s called anamorphosis. A really neat trick with perspective.”

Ben turned around, and blinked when he saw a girl standing a few feet away from them. She didn’t look much older than he did.

She smiled when they all started looking at her, and she walked over, seemingly heedless of the fact that they were perfect strangers, and that she hadn’t even introduced herself yet. “This is a really nice one. The one who made it – I met her earlier today – is Native American, and she says she chose the Grand Canyon as a subject because it was sacred to her people.”

She frowned slightly, thoughtfully then, and Ben thought she must have been a bit younger than he initially thought. “Or at least, that’s how I remember it.”

And then she turned around to face them, her smile bright as the summer sun overhead. “My name’s Caitlin Delaney, but everyone calls me Caty. What’s yours?”

Introductions went around fairly quickly, to which Caitlin replied with a smile and a little tilt of the head. As soon as those were out of the way, though, Sarah asked: “So, what’s ana…mor…what was it?”

“Anamorphosis,” Caitlin replied, the word coming off her tongue easily. “It’s when you play with perspective so that when you paint or draw something on a flat surface, when you look at it the right way, it looks 3-D. Here, take a look at this one.” She stopped and gestured to a rather long smudge of green, and then moved to sit on the ground just in front of it. She nodded to the Polaroid camera that was standing in place of the usual viewer. “Take a look through there.”

Ben did as she was told, and peered through. The green smudge turned out to be a rendering of the Statue of Liberty, and from the way that Caitlin was seated, it almost looked as if she was sitting at the foot of the statue, like a child. He grinned as he stepped aside to let Sarah take a look. “Now that’s cool.”

Caitlin grinned, waiting for the others to finish looking before she stood up. “There’s more, actually. There’s one of the moon, and there’s another one where, if you pose just right, it can look as if you’re about to go over Niagara Falls in a canoe.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon in Caitlin’s company, who was more than happy to show them around – Sarah, especially, since the two seemed to click in the way that all girls seemed capable of doing. She seemed to know the place very well, and Clive figured she was a guide of some sort, someone who could show people around and answer their questions.

She was, all in all, a really great kid to hang out with, though he thought there was something just a little off-kilter about her. Maybe it was because she was so cheerful…but Clive really couldn’t find fault in that. God only knew how much people needed that sort of optimism, given the state the world was in.

They were walking down another path, and they came upon two sketches. One was of two cars and a pickup truck, all three tricked-out with gorgeous paintjobs, racing through the desert. The other one was a bit more complicated: it was made so that it looked as if the viewer was peering over the shoulder of a fighter pilot, who was, in turn, looking out of his cockpit at a house far below, waving at a mother-daughter pair who were both looking up at the pilot and waving right back.

“Who did these?” Sarah asked, her curiosity piqued as she looked again and again at the one that featured the fighter pilot waving to the family below. What was even more curious was that the little girl looked a lot like-

“Oh, I did these.”

Sarah turned to look at Caitlin, pleasantly surprised the revelation. “Really? You did? Wow! I didn’t know you were an artist, Caty!”

Caitlin smiled. “It’s what I like to do. I study at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.”

Sarah stared. “So you came here all the way from Pasadena?”

“Uh-huh. My friends decided to come down here with me.” Caitlin nodded at the drawing of the cars and truck in the desert. “I made that for them. See? That’s Doozy’s truck over there, and that’s Jin’s Mazda, with the dragons; I painted them myself. That’s Mona’s Honda, but I didn’t do the Quetzalcoatl painting on that one. It’s still pretty though.”

Cody looked up at her then, curious. “What about the other one, the one with the fighter pilot?”

Caitlin’s smile seemed to lose a bit of its brightness then, like the sun slipping behind a cloud, and Cody regretted asking the question. “It’s supposed to be my dad, waving to me and my mom from his plane. He was a fighter pilot, but he died when I was little.”

The little cloud of elation that had wrapped around all three of them seemed to evaporate at that moment, and for a while, they stood together in silence. In some way, shape, or form, knew what grief was like, what loss was like, and knew what it was to be touched by violence and death at a young age.

And though they had known Caitlin for only a day, the knowledge that they were linked in this manner brought them closer than any amount of hanging out together could have possibly done.

+---+---+

“Something wrong, chica?”

Mona voiced the question that had been nagging at her since they came and picked Caitlin up from the exhibit at Central Park. They were currently seated in a pizza shop down in Little Italy, which Bella had recommended to them as a place that served “the best calzone you’ll ever find in the United States.” And though both Jin and Doozy were in a very happy mood – even Bella was cracking jokes every now and then – Caitlin was altogether too somber for Mona’s liking.

Caitlin looked up at her then, smiled, and shrugged. “Nothing. I was just thinking about those kids I met earlier.”

“You mean the ones you were hanging out with?”

“Yeah.” Caitlin took a bite out of her calzone, chewed thoughtfully, and then replied: “I’ll miss them.”

Mona chuckled softly as she reached over to pat Caitlin lightly on the head. “You’ll see them again chica. I’m sure you will.”