The Rules of You and Me by Shana Norris

below.
    But I couldn’t go up there. Even the idea of being so high made a cold sweat break out along my neck.
    I shifted in my seat, tugging at the belt to relieve some of the pressure in my chest.
    “ So,” I said, searching for a change of subject, “what’s with your truck anyway?”
    Jude glanced at me. “What do you mean?”
    “ Why is it unpainted?”
    “ Oh.” Jude ran his teeth over his upper lip and adjusted the cracked rearview mirror. “It’s a work in progress. I haven’t gotten around to painting it yet.”
    “ How long have you been working on it?”
    “ A year,” he said.
    I raised my eyebrows. “And somewhere in that year, you never found the time to paint your truck?”
    Jude shrugged, but didn’t say anything else. His expression turned blank, like he had shut down. I shifted in my seat as the silence deepened. The tension had become thick within the small cab of the unpainted truck. We rode the rest of the way back to Aunt Lydia’s house without speaking a word.

 
     
     

CHAPTER TEN
     
    I squished the wet clay between my fingers as I examined the lump on the table in front of me. To my left, Ashton expertly added sloping curves into her vase. Even Kate’s bowl actually looked like a bowl. Mine still looked like a lump of gray clay.
    “ How do you do that?” I asked, leaning toward Ashton to whisper the question. At the front of the room, the instructor was helping an older woman with her vase. All around me, people worked hard at their pottery, barely using any effort to manipulate the clay. I didn’t want to attract attention to myself, but nothing seemed to be working as easily as the instructor had led me to believe.
    “ Hold your hands like this,” Ashton said, showing me the correct posture again.
    I tried, and this time the clay rose up in a column. But then it collapsed, bending over in the middle so that it looked sad and pathetic.
    “ Tell me again why we’re doing this?” I said.
    “ It’s fun,” Kate answered.
    “ It’s torture for the art challenged,” I said.
    “ Everyone has an artist in them,” Ashton said. “Didn’t you ever draw when you were a kid?”
    “ Sure, but at some point, I realized that I sucked and so I gave it up and focused on things I was actually good at.” I sighed as I looked at my clay-caked hands. “I’m going to go wash up and wait for you guys to finish.”
    Another thing I can check off the list, I thought as I scrubbed at my hands over the stained sink in the corner of the room. Mark would be happy when we resumed our sessions in the fall. Attempting to be artistic in the little pottery studio at Blue Ridge Crafts was certainly stepping far outside my comfort zone.
    Ashton and Kate were still putting the finishing touches on their works, so I wandered around the hall outside the room and studied the artwork on the walls. I had never really been into art or paid much attention to it. I used to visit Aunt Lydia’s gallery and pretend to be interested in the newest paintings she had acquired, but really, it all looked the same to me. I could look at pictures of the Mona Lisa or Starry Night in a book and understand that someone had deemed them masterpieces, but nothing really called to me in the paintings. I didn’t know what made them anymore special than any other painting by another artist.
    I stopped in front of one painting, feeling something familiar about it. It featured a small town rising out of the trees that surrounded it. The buildings weren’t very tall and there was nothing remarkable about it. But something held me there in front of it for a long time as I studied the colors and the shapes within the painting.
    I looked at the brass tag underneath the painting. “WILLOWBROOK” BY LYDIA MONTGOMERY, ASHEVILLE, NC.
    This was one of Aunt Lydia’s paintings. And not just any painting, but one of my home. Our home.
    I was still standing in front of the painting when Ashton and Kate finally found me.
    “ How