“I know, it’s the worst kind of feedback. They’re all just lacking any sort of—and I hate this phrase, I really do—but they’re lacking any kind of feeling. They’re … flat.” He says the last word like it came to him in a dream and he’s finally put the word to what he’s been thinking for ages.

Flat.

“So…” I’m waiting for him to tell me how to fix it.

“So maybe you haven’t found your thing yet,” he says.

I found my thing when I was eight. My thing was baseball. This is supposed to be my new thing. I can feel the heat rising up in my chest as frustration starts to take over.

“Keep working on these, but I also think you should check out ArtPrize and get some new ideas.”

I nod, because I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure I end up in this program and have something to look forward to my senior year.

Including finding a way to get to ArtPrize, a huge city-wide art contest ninety minutes north of us. I haven’t been in years, not since I got busier in the summer with baseball and my parents couldn’t drag me around with them. My mom loves arts and crafts shows. I remember it being a lot of paintings in hotels, and weird stuff like giant yarn murals. And as much as I’m enjoying the bicycle lifestyle, a hundred-mile ride isn’t exactly practical. Not unless I want to leave on day one of the event and arrive on day four. Which I don’t. No excuses. “I’ll definitely check it out,” I say.

I’ll figure it out. I always do.

OLIVIA

I never realized how many things you could make with cherries. There is a sea of round, red cherry faces staring out at me from bottles of salad dressing, bags of dried fruit, barbeque sauce, jars of jam, and an entire shelf of glass-bottled sodas. There’s a rack of stuffed cherry faces next to me, their shiny black eyes staring down from a gigantic display. I tear my eyes away when I hear Emma’s voice.

“Lunchtime,” she sing-songs, as she unties her white apron and deposits it on a hook outside of the double doors I assume lead to the kitchen. She has a foil-wrapped something in each hand.

“Are we not eating here?”

“Outside,” she says quietly—almost eerily quiet for Emma—as I follow her through the glass doors and into the parking lot. “It’s old-people dinner time.”