Gemini Read Online Free Page B

animal natures.
    I heartily despise it.
    â€œYou know why you hate art?” Hailey asked me as we walked into the art room.
    â€œCut that out,” I said. “I hate it when I’m thinking about something and then you just start talking about it, like you can read my mind. Try to remember that we’re not telepathic, okay?”
    â€œI’ll tell you why,” she said as she led me over to the cabinet where she always stashed her favorite paints and brushes. “It’s because you suck at it.”
    â€œWell, obviously I suck at it,” I said. “That’s a given. But also, art itself sucks.” Okay, I don’t always soften my opinions when it’s Hailey that I’m talking to.
    She shook her bright pink head. “You just don’t get it.”
    â€œOr,” I suggested, “maybe there is nothing to get.”
    I helped her carry her paints and brushes over to her easel, where she had already sketched out and begun to paint a portrait in the medieval style.
    This was something she’d been doing since the end of junior year. She’d copy the painting techniques from the Middle Ages, back when nobody had figured out things like perspective to give dimension to things, so it all looked flat and depthless. Back then the one thing that everybody wanted to paint was the Madonna and child. So Haileyadapted that format to paint things like a curvaceous pop star holding a tiny photographer on her hip, or in this case, a woman in a burka cuddling a naked baby girl.
    If it were anybody else, I would have guessed she was just pretending to have a point, but Hailey is always sincere. Still, when it comes to her art, she keeps her words to herself. Whatever she’s trying to say, she says it only with paint.
    Hailey took her time setting up her equipment. There were maybe fifteen kids in the art class, and lately Hailey had been grabbing a spot near the window each day. She said it was for the light. She never said it had anything to do with being near Alek Drivakis, who just happened to always work nearby.
    Alek had been doing this thing where it would be like a Thomas Kinkade painting, one of those cute English-cottage-and-flowery-garden scenes, except there would be a corpse rotting in the yard, or half the cottage would be burned to the ground. Two months into the school year, he had nearly finished the third painting in the series.
    When he arrived that day, Hailey was swirling a brown oil together with a cream on her little palette. It seemed to me that she glanced up at Alek, then too quickly away, as he stowed his black messenger bag and got out his supplies. But I might have been making this up, because I can’t ever see Hailey’s face that well. It’s hard to say how much my reading of her is sisterly instinct and how much is pure invention.
    Alek is always dressed head-to-toe in black, and his hairand eyes are dark, dark brown. He’s only a hair taller than we are (and we’re average-size for girls), but I have to admit that when you look him right in the eyes, he turns out to be surprisingly good-looking.
    It’s funny how a face like that can slip through the cracks, going unnoticed by most of the girls, maybe because he’s short and doesn’t play any sports, or maybe because people still remember when he first came to town, moving in with his grandparents back in seventh grade. He would sit in class drawing pictures of people being killed in a startling variety of different ways, and he kept his head down, his face obscured by his hair falling across it, and never spoke to anyone if he could help it. There were rumors that he had murdered his parents, or alternatively, that he had witnessed them committing murders and that they were now in prison. Those rumors had long since faded, but I supposed they had left their mark.
    Today he brought his paints and his brushes, canvas, and palette over to the easel where he liked to work,