Read Online Summer in the Invisible City by Juliana Romano - Free Book Online Page A

I had wanted to do the RISD precollege summer so badly, but it was seven thousand dollars and my mom said no way. We had one of our biggest fights ever over it.
    â€œOh you should have done it! It would have been so fun to be together,” Izzy chirps.
    A hot wind curls down the street and the first thick drops of rain splatter on the pavement.
    â€œYay!” Izzy cries. And then she throws her arms around my neck, hurtling herself onto me in an almost football-player tackle and I laugh.
    â€”
    Izzy and I duck into a deli to buy umbrellas. Izzy grabs one of those super energy drinks out of the fridge and places it in front of the cashier.
    â€œThis is very bad for you. This poison,” the old man behind the counter says, in a thick, foreign accent.
    â€œI know, it’s horrible,” she says, batting her dark lashes at him.
    He smiles. He likes her. After he gives her change, he tells her she looks like his sister who still lives in his home country. She asks him where he’s from and he says, “Turkey. Where are you from?” and she says, “Nowhere. Just here.” And he says, “New York. Best city in the world.” And she says, “Yeah yeah yeah whatever.” And he laughs.
    â€”
    Even with our umbrellas, Izzy and I are sopping wet when we stumble into the New Museum lobby twenty minutes later. Inside the museum is dry, quiet, and antiseptic white. The exact opposite of the storm that churns outdoors.
    The show we came to see is a painting exhibition on Level 3. As we wander up through the galleries, we pass strange sculptures and text pieces, and a silent film projected in a big darkroom. I don’t understand what I’m seeing, but I like how each object in the museum is meant to be meaningful. In the real world, things that are important and things that are unimportant are all shuffled together, but here, everything is worth looking at and considering and the rest is erased.
    Izzy sets the pace, deciding when we move from one room to the next. She looks like she belongs here, the way she doesn’t second-guess how much time she spends in front of any one artwork before moving on.
    Finally, we reach the painting exhibition that we camehere to see. The paintings are much smaller in person than they looked on the Internet. Each one is a still life of flowers. They are painted really simply; a child could have made them. Still, the combination of pinks and lavenders is mesmerizing. No matter how bright their colors are, all the flowers look sort of sad.
    There is one that shows a single red rose in front of a bright blue background, and the rose’s shadow looks kind of like a lollipop. It reminds me of a birthday card I made for my mom when I was little that she had framed. I wonder what happened to it. It hung on the wall at our old apartment, but I haven’t seen it since we moved. It’s probably in one of the boxes we put in storage in a warehouse somewhere deep in Queens. It’s strange, how just looking at a painting of a rose can make me think about my old apartment, and things I’ve lost, and dark rooms in large faraway buildings.
    â€œWhat’s your dad ’s art like?” Izzy asks as we ride the wide elevator back down to the first floor after we’re done seeing the show.
    â€œIt’s . . . hard to explain,” I say. “He’s having an exhibit in New York this summer. You can come with me to the opening if you want.”
    â€œOmigod, really? Yeah, I’ ll come ,” she says. She leans against the wall and inspects me from across the elevator, smiling. I wish I knew what she was seeing.
    â€”
    In the bathroom before we leave, Izzy refreshes the makeup that the rain washed off, putting on sky-blue eye shadow.
    â€œPretty color,” I say to Izzy. “It’s so blue.”
    â€œYou like?” she asks. “I’ve been really into it lately. It’s so out it’s in, you know? I