Forever in Blue by Ann Brashares Page A

about the artist during a long-ago summer she’d spent in Alabama with him and Greta. She remembered him saying how Michelangelo looked for the body inside the block. He saw it and sensed it in there, and with his chisel he freed it.
    Well, Bridget thought, a floor was a more prosaic thing, granted, but she was going to free it.
    Her fingers were so sensitized she almost shouted when they ran into something hard and quite purposeful, but not the floor. Carefully she shook it off and held it in the patch of sunlight.
    “Look at this,” she called.
    Peter hopped down into the room, followed by Carolyn and another guy. “Wow. That’s great. That’s most of a lamp. Look, you can see some of the painting on it.”
    She felt the moist terra-cotta against her fingers and followed the smooth, molded shape.
    “That’s where they would pour the oil. Probably olive oil.” Peter pointed to a little well at the top. “They’d float the wick right there.” He nodded at her approvingly. “I bet you can’t find the missing piece.”
    She was such a sucker for a dare. He could obviously tell that.
    “I found it,” she said less than a minute later.
    He hopped back down again, mirth spread over his features. She was glad to provide so much entertainment.
    “Well done, Bee.” He raised a hand to whack her on the shoulder, but put it down again without making contact. “Do your recording and bring it to Maxine. She’ll be happy to have a whole one.”
    “Love’s Labour’s Lost is such a great play,” Carmen declared. “You were awesome reading the speech of Lady What’s-Her-Name.”
    “Rosaline,” Julia said flatly.
    Carmen was trying to cheer Julia up about the fact that she’d gotten called back for the community production, the least desirable in her mind, and not the other two. But Julia wasn’t having it.
    “Rosaline. Right. You have to admit the play’s a whole lot funnier than Richard the Third.”
    Richard III was the production on the Second Stage. Carmen could already perceive a hierarchy developing between the kids who’d gotten called back for Second Stage and the larger number who’d gotten called back for the Community Stage.
    “Yeah. But they don’t even sell tickets. It’s, like, free. It’s outdoors. It’s not even real.”
    “How can you say that? Of course it’s real. Andrew said it’s the best attended of all of them, by far.”
    “That’s because it’s free,” Julia said. “Anyone can go.”
    “That’s a good thing. Anyway, at least you got called back,” Carmen said. She wasn’t even sure why she said this. She had made up her mind not to tell Julia about her ludicrous tryout, but here she was eager to debase herself to make Julia feel better.
    “Everyone got called back,” Julia said.
    “That’s not true.”
    “What are you talking about? Melanie Peer said that everyone who tried out got called back for something.”
    “No, they didn’t.”
    “How do you know?” Julia was sitting up straighter now.
    “I didn’t get called back,” Carmen said, with a perverse note of triumph.
    Julia looked at her in outright astonishment. “You tried out?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “It was kind of a joke, but no. I really tried out.”
    “Really? Why?”
    “I have no idea. It was kind of a mistake, actually.”
    “Who did you read?”
    “Perdita.”
    “No.”
    “Yeah.”
    Julia looked like she might laugh, but she made a wince of sympathy. “You didn’t get called back.”
    “No way.”
    “Oh, well. It was brave of you to try.”
    “That and stupid.”
    Julia patted Carmen on the arm and laughed. It looked like this method of cheering her up really was working.
    Lena wasn’t sure how much of it was attributable to Leo, but she knew that every hour she wasn’t in her painting class she wished she were.
    “Hi, Lena,” he said to her on Thursday as she was leaving painting class, girding herself for three long, bleak days of not painting and not