He wandered down the hall one morning after his own class and happened to glance into another classroom. The session was taught by one of the older women, a local teacher who gave her time freely. Today, she was having the children draw and paint. The creations were pictures to be sent to parents, even though they might never be heard from in return. Julien opened the door and gestured to the teacher that he would like to join them. She nodded as she continued instructing the children in her class, most of whom were between five and ten.

“You can show your parents what you are doing now, and what you hope to be doing in the future,” the teacher suggested.

Julien stood behind Teddy, his best math student. The boy was coloring a drawing of himself, his mother, and his father. The three were in a rocket ship, all waving. Julien sat down at the table and took a piece of paper for himself.

“Will you send yours to your parents?” Teddy asked.

Julien drew the outlines of a face. “If I could, I would send it to my girlfriend.”

Teddy wrinkled his nose with distaste. “You have a girlfriend?”

Julien laughed as he sketched. She was not yet a girlfriend, not truly, and yet she was more. In a few instants Lea’s image surfaced as if he’d conjured her.

“She’s pretty,” the boy granted.

“Actually she’s much prettier than this.” Julien folded up the paper and slipped it into his pocket.

That evening he went to the garden and gathered onions to bring to the kitchen to boil so he could use the residue as a wash of color over his sketch. When he painted the wash on the portrait, Lea seemed alive, as if the white paper had turned to flesh. From then on he joined the class every day, greeting the teacher, Madame Rey, then slipping into the room. He always sat beside Teddy, who grinned whenever he saw his new friend. In time, the teacher had managed to get some watercolors. It was a pleasure and a joy to have real paints, rather than washes and inks made of berries or grass or onion skin. Julien created his memory of the garden of his parents’ house, before his mother removed the roses and the peonies so she could replace the ornamental plants with vegetables for their meals. There was the tree he and Lea had climbed so they could be alone, and the gate she had walked through when Ava had rightly insisted they must leave, and the sky that was so bright on the day the police came for his family.

Madame Rey came to watch, standing behind him. She made him nervous, so he put down the brush. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Julien said, feeling a fool.

“No, you’re very good at this,” the teacher encouraged him. “You’re an artist.”