Work of Art by Monica Alexander Page B

didn’t complain when someone gave me a check, but it wasn’t the end all, be all of happiness , and I knew that because I’d experienced true happiness at one point.
    “Thank you again, Trisha Spencer,” I said, recalling the name of the woman who’d bought one of my paintings. She’d bought a total of three in the past six months, so I was sort of a big fan of her.
    “Yes, thank you, Trisha Spencer,” Kelly repeated, since apparently she was on a roll now. “In fact, you should track that woman down and give her a big, fat hug.”
    “ Yeah. I’ll get right on that.”
    * * *
    I was agitated when I got home, so I did what I always did when that happened. I cranked up some Linkin Park in my studio and threw paint around. I’d always retreated inside my art when things got too confusing or too much to handle, and I had produced some of my best pieces when I was raging mad, but first I had to get the anger out, and that meant being extremely counterproductive for a while.
    I bought thick white sheets in bulk, so I pulled one from my stash in the hall closet and hung it from the hooks on either corner of one wall in my studio, closed the door, turned the volume way up and started attacking the sheet with a brush and a bucket of cheap red wall paint.
    I painted a big heart, and then I traded my red paint for black and slashed right through the heart. And then I just kept slashing.
    Ryan Fuck ing Carson. Of all the goddamn people from my former life I thought I’d never see again, he was definitely one of them. Especially since I always thought I would be fairly inclined to punch him when I saw him. And I hadn’t. I’d puked, and now I was having all sorts of really unacceptable thoughts about him. I was seriously pissed at myself.
    I paused to take a breath, noticing the black was almost entirely covering the bright red of the heart. And that was exactly how I’d felt when Ryan had ripped my heart out when I was eighteen.
    I leaned back against the opposite wall and slid down to the floor, my eyes locked on the black and red explosion , feeling more confused than ever.
    He was a jerk.
    But before he’d been a jerk, he’d been everything to me, and that was what had me so conflicted.
     
    Thirteen Years Earlier
    I sat outside the dining hall at school, far enough away from anyone who thought it considerate to throw jabs my way. I was tired of it. School should have been a welcome escape for me from what I was dealing with at home, but it wasn’t.
    Everything had come crashing down three weeks earlier. My father, George, had been arrested on multiple counts of grand larceny, embezzlement and fraud for stealing money from his clients – most of who lived in our town and whos e children I went to school with. My mother had flipped out, and then she’d unceremoniously told me in a fit of rage that George actually wasn’t my father. Then, just when I needed them the most, my friends turned on me when they learned what George had done, and they’d cast me out the very next day. I was a social pariah, and school was miserable for me.
    But at home it was ten times worse. My mother was an absolute train wreck. She cried non-stop, and when she wasn’t crying, she was storming around the house throwing things – mostly George’s things – but that only led to more crying. It was a vicious cycle. I was pretty sure she wasn’t eating anything, and she’d completely stopped paying attention to me. She also spent hours on end ranting to her friends about what a sham her marriage was and asking what she was supposed to do now that all of our assets had been frozen. The only reprieve was when she took the maximum amount of sleeping pills she could and passed out at night.
    I’d taken to spending as much time as I could away from home, not that she noticed, but it really was the last place I wanted to be.
    I sighed as I looked down at the sketch I was halfway f inished with. It was just of an old, knotted oak tree on