Ugh. I need more gelato.

With my mouth half full, I ask without thinking, “So do you like Elena? Like more than a friend?”

He considers this. “I mean, she’s sweet and all but I’ve never really thought of her that way.”

“Oh, okay,” I say out loud, but on the inside I’m like, Oh, thank God!

But my relief doesn’t last long. My grand plan to show Milo how I feel hinged a lot on going to the dance together. I had everything plotted so carefully, but what am I supposed to do now? If Thea were here, she’d tell me that there’s an easy fix for my dilemma, but I shut her voice out of my head.

Milo glances at his phone. “I have to head home in an hour. Want to walk around a bit?”

I say yes because of course I do, and we wander into the West Building of the gallery, where we enter a special exhibition about post-Picasso cubism. I drift a step behind Milo, thinking hard about how I might use our upcoming class trip to Kings Dominion to my advantage. The bus ride will take over an hour, so I could claim a seat next to him. Then I could grab his hand on the Flight of Fear coaster—only for a second or two but long enough to get him thinking. That might actually work, but it does little to chase away the sinking feeling in my stomach. What if Elena grabs a seat by Milo on the bus ride over or on the roller coasters?

Suddenly Milo turns around and dips his head toward mine. “What’s with all the cats?” he whispers.

Oh, right. I’m supposed to be looking at art. I squint at the paintings in front of us, nine of them in total and arranged in a neat square, three in a row. Sure enough, each one depicts a deranged-looking cubist cat. There’s a green one in the middle and another with big, googly eyes and yet another painted in shades of gray. It’s like peering into a pet store if you were on LSD, not that I have firsthand experience with recreational drugs.

Milo has already moved on to the next painting, but his question has made me curious, so I read the little placard next to the kitties.

Joseph Preston

Canadian, 1902–1961

Street Cats: A Study

1926

Oil on canvas

Born in Vancouver, Preston settled in Barcelona to attend art school. He specialized in depicting common life, in particular stray dogs, birds, and—in this series—stray cats. Instead of signing these paintings with his initials, he used the letters “LJC,” whom scholars believe to be a young woman that Preston wished to marry and for whom he painted this study. His personal letters reveal, however, that the woman became engaged to one of Preston’s colleagues before he could gift her with this work.