Free Color Blind by Jonathan Santlofer Page B

he whispers into the dim room. He doesn’t feel it.

    Grrrrrrrrrrrreat!

    “Thanks.”

    It helps having friends like Tony. Someone who knows he is good and smart. Tony has made him feel a lot better, strong enough to pull himself off the couch and get to work.

    He squirts several blobs of oil paint onto his palette, lifts one of the several magnifying glasses he owns and stares at the paint, his eyes blinking. He will not allow himself to be frustrated. Right now, he wants to work. And at the moment he is not hungry. Not yet.

     

    N ola Davis struggled to lift herself out of bed. A relatively simple act a few months back, but now, with her beach-ball eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant belly it was like trying to defy gravity.
    Had she totally blown it, now, of all times, with a year to go in school and all she had been through to get here?

    How stupid was she?

    Nola shook her head, shoulder-length dreadlocks brushing the smooth dark brown skin of her cheeks.

    Well, it was far too late for self-pity. She had made her choice and would just have to live with it. Hell, she’d survived growing up in a concrete jungle—as wise old Bob Marley had sung in his drugged-out Jamaican patois on one of her favorite CDs.

    Nola had a sudden, almost violent urge to pee. If she could run she would have, but a sprightly waddle was about all she could manage.

    She flushed, slowly eased herself up, hands under her belly for support as she padded back into the combination bedroom/living room of the Upper West Side studio apartment that Kate was paying for while she finished up her senior year at Barnard— if she finished her senior year.

    Nola sighed. No way she’d be finishing out the school year, not even the semester, with a baby due in less than a month. She’d just do what she could, take her incompletes, and start up again next fall, which made her feel bad, like an ordinary colored girl who didn’t know any better, which she guessed she was though she’d worked hard not to be—ordinary, that is.

    She stroked her belly and thought of Kate, who had been great, as always, though Nola suspected she was disappointed by her getting knocked up, even if she’d never shown it.

    Nola waddled into the kitchen area and attempted to snare a box of tea bags from a shelf above the sink, though getting onto tiptoes was becoming an effort in her condition. Maybe she should move in with Kate and Richard, she thought, straining to get a grip on the Lipton container.

    No, not Kate and Richard. Just Kate.

    Nola’s eyes filled with tears as she lowered herself into a kitchen chair.

    How was it possible? Richard dead.

    She just didn’t know what to say to Kate, whom she loved so much it hurt sometimes, just babble, anything to keep herself, and Kate, from crying. She had a feeling that if the two of them started, they could cry for a full year straight.

    She’d never seen Kate like this, had to admit it scared her. Kate, her mentor, her champion, the woman who could do anything, alone now, and Nola knew she would never admit she needed to be taken care of.

    But didn’t everyone need taking care of sometimes?

    Matt Brownstein, whom Nola had been sleeping with most of last semester, sure as shit didn’t know how to take care of anyone, not that she wanted him to take care of her, the arrogant asshole, also a senior at Columbia, studying studio art, painting—who hated using condoms, but when Nola became pregnant insisted she get rid of the baby, that no way he was sticking around for that .

    Why had she taken up with him in the first place?

    Was it because he was a tall lanky white guy with curly hair, and because he was Jewish, just like Richard Rothstein?

    Nola tried not to think about it. She stared up at the reproductions of artworks pinned to her wall. Studying art history had been the most amazing thing in her life. And now she’d have to delay her matriculation at the prestigious NYU Art Institute, which Kate had pulled