Mara's part of the third day was the most practical and the most tender at once. She carried buckets of clean water up from the art room, emptied the rinse jars when they grew cloudy, and kept the floor clear so no one would trip over a cord or a tray. She brought Tess a warm roll from the cafeteria at mid-morning and reminded her to eat it before it cooled, standing guard over the paints while Tess ate with paint on her cheek. She held the ladder steady again and again, for the high seaweed fronds and the upper edge of the rocks, and she learned to anticipate when Tess would need a different brush without being asked. She did not paint. That was the agreement between them, spoken once and then simply kept: this was Tess's mural, and Mara's job was to make the making of it easier, not to make it herself. Once, when a student passing by suggested Mara could just fill in the large blue area faster, Mara shook her head and said, "She's got it." Tess heard her, and the words stayed with her through the rest of the morning like a small, warm weight in her pocket.
Painting the rocks came next, and Tess mixed the umber and grey Ms. Alvarez had suggested, adding touches of brown where the rock would be wet and darker where it would be in shadow. She worked with a broad brush for the large shapes and a smaller one for the cracks and crevices where small creatures might hide. She thought of the real rocks at the marine centre, how they were never one colour, how barnacles and algae made patterns on them that changed with the light. She tried to give her painted rocks that same variety, dabbing rather than stroking in places, letting colours sit side by side instead of blending them into a flat wash. Ms. Alvarez stopped by between her own classes, looked at the rocks from the middle of the hallway, and nodded. "You are letting the wall breathe," she said. "Good. Do not overwork it." Tess, who had a tendency to keep touching a passage until it lost its freshness, took the advice seriously and moved on to the next shape before the rocks could become too polished.
At lunchtime, the hallway filled with students, and the mural, half-painted, drew a small crowd. Tess felt exposed, standing on a ladder with a brush in her hand while people watched, but the feeling was different from the exposure she had felt when her sketchbook pages were posted online. Then, she had been looked at without her permission, and her private drawings had been turned into a joke. Now, she was choosing to show her work as she made it, in progress, imperfect and unfinished, and the watching felt less like judgment and more like curiosity. June Park asked about the colour of the water. A younger student asked if the starfish would be orange. Tess answered, and her voice did not shake as much as she had feared it would. Mara stood nearby, not blocking the view or answering for her, just present, with a cloth over her shoulder and a bucket at her feet, ready to help if Tess needed her and content to wait if she did not.
In the afternoon, Tess painted the starfish. She had saved it for a time when she felt steady, because the starfish was the heart of the low-tide panel for her — the creature she had drawn first in her sketchbook, the one she had watched most closely in the tide pools. She mixed a warm orange, not too bright, with a touch of pink and a little ochre to keep it from looking like a cartoon. She painted the five arms slowly, one at a time, letting each arm taper naturally, adding the small bumps along the centre with the tip of a fine brush. Her hand was steadier now, warmed by the day's work, and the starfish took shape on the rock with a quiet rightness that made her pause. She stepped back, as Ms. Alvarez had taught her, and saw it from the hallway: a starfish resting in shallow water, neither perfect nor apologetic, simply there. Mara, who had been washing brushes, came to stand beside her and said nothing for a moment, and then said, "That's the one from the back pool, isn't it?" Tess nodded, because it was, and because Mara had remembered the afternoon they had spent together at the shore, before any of the trouble, when Tess had pointed out a starfish and Mara had crouched beside her to look.