Quoted By:
>Join the art club.
The bell rings. Classes are over.
Alice drags her feet as she shuffles slowly to the clubroom. It really wasn’t that bad, she told herself. Sitting around for an hour was basically nothing. Sometimes she got to chat with Sophie, too.
When she arrives, her friend is already there, surrounded by a circle of her newest buddies.
“Whoa, how did you do the colors on that painting, Sophie?!”
“The sunset looks so vibrant!”
“The shading looks so natural, and frames the subject perfectly!”
“Haha, thanks everyone… I just really had this image in my head I wanted to get down, so I took my canvas home yesterday and worked on it all night…” Sophie sheepishly scratches her head, nearly overwhelmed with praise. When she notices a certain girl entering the room, she perks up and waves at her. “Hey, Alice!!!”
Alice gives a half-hearted wave in reply. “Hi, Sophie.”
The art-lover is quickly swept back up into another conversation, and Alice simply makes her way to the back of the clubroom quietly, sitting by her usual corner easel. Eventually, after agonizing minutes of trying to tune out the excited chatter next to her, the art teacher makes it into the room. The other club members finally quiet down.
“Sorry I’m late, everyone! I was busy getting together some examples of impressionist landscapes, like Lily requested. I was thinking we could do our usual discussion and analysis of these pieces to start the meeting off, then try to do some rough sketches of our own in the last fifteen minutes!”
The lights are dimmed, and the first piece is projected onto the wall. The teacher begins to give some background history on the artwork. Alice yawns and leans back against the warm window, staring up at the ceiling blankly.
At first, she tried, she really did. She tried to force herself to like art. She tried to force herself to see all the random intricacies and details her clubmates pointed out, tried to appreciate them as much as they did. But, eventually, she found out it was pointless. The vase of daisies was just a vase of daisies. The flowers being wobbly meant nothing to her.
The teacher stopped calling on her for comments after the fifth time she said she didn’t know.
