Spray Paint

Sunny knocked on my door the next morning before I'd even had breakfast. I opened it and she was standing there in paint-stained jeans, holding two cans of spray paint, one in each hand, like they were normal things to hold at nine in the morning on a Sunday. "You draw," she said. Not a question. "How do you—" "Yesterday. You had a sketchbook. You were holding the pencil the way people hold a pencil when they actually use it, not the way people hold a pencil to look like they use it." She tilted her head. "I'm Sunny. We moved in across the street, which you know, because you watched the whole thing." She said it without any meanness, just like a fact, and somehow that made me less embarrassed instead of more. "Come outside. I want to show you something." I should explain that I am not a person who goes outside when a stranger tells me to. My abuela raised me with a healthy fear of basically everything. But I went. I think I already knew, even then, that Sunny was the kind of person you said yes to, and that saying yes to her was going to lead me places I would never have gone on my own. Some of those places were going to be amazing. A couple of them were going to be trouble. I didn't know which was which yet. I just put on my shoes. She walked me down to the end of Alder Street, to the wall. Everybody in Pruitt knew the wall. It was the side of the old feed store, which had closed before I was born, and it was just this huge blank concrete wall facing the empty lot. Gray. Cracked. The most boring surface in a town made of boring surfaces. I'd walked past it ten thousand times and never once thought a single thought about it. Sunny stood in front of it and looked at it the way she'd looked at the whole street the day before. Like a present. "Tell me what you see," she said. "It's a wall." "That's what it is. I asked what you see." She held one of the spray cans out to me. "When you draw in that sketchbook. You're not drawing what's there, right? Nobody draws what's there, that's just copying. You're drawing what you wish was there. The wall's the same. It's not a wall. It's the biggest empty page in this whole town and nobody's even looked at it." I held the spray can. It was heavier than I expected. My heart was doing something fast and stupid. "This is illegal," I said. "Probably. This is somebody's wall." "The feed store's been closed sixteen years. I asked the diner lady. She said the owner moved to Arizona and nobody's heard from him since." Sunny shook her own can, and it made that rattling sound, that sound I would come to love, the sound of something about to start. "Río. I'm not asking you to wreck it. I'm asking you to make it better than gray. There's a difference, and the difference is the whole point." She'd remembered my name. I'd told it to her once, yesterday, across a street, and she'd kept it. I looked at the wall. The big gray boring wall I'd walked past my whole life. And for one second I didn't see a wall. I saw what Sunny had been trying to make me see — I saw all that empty space, and I felt my fingers itch the way they itch when a sketchbook is open, and I thought about how I'd spent sixteen years drawing the same small things on the same small pages because I had agreed with Pruitt that small was all there was. I shook the can. It made the rattling sound. "Just so we're clear," I said, and my voice came out braver than I felt, "if we get in trouble, I'm telling my abuela it was entirely your idea." Sunny laughed, this bright surprised laugh, and the sound of it bounced off the big gray wall, and I lifted the can, and I made the first mark — a curve, blue, the start of something — and the town did not end, and the sky did not fall, and Pruitt, for the first time in my whole life, started to change color right in front of me.