"Hello," said Jenny, coming up the bank and finding David sprawled across the grass, sketching.
He looked up. "Hello."
She flung herself down beside him and watched his fingers move the pencil across the page, deftly outlining the trees at the end of the meadow.
He moved. "Could you not, please? You're throwing a shadow on me."
She got up and walked away. If that was how he wanted to be, then she'd find someone else who wanted her company.
"No, Jenny!" He rolled over, sketch forgotten. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it."
"Aren't you going to finish your sketch?" she asked with a trace of bitterness in her voice.
He shrugged and said, "It's finished, for now anyway. Come on, sit down. I want to sketch you."
She plopped down in the grass where she stood, some ten feet from him, and brushed her hair out of her face. She hoped she'd get to keep the sketch he made of her. She had about a dozen of his sketches, but none of her yet. Although if he wanted to keep it, might that mean that he cared for her as she did for him?
Her face was unusually pensive as she sat in the grass, longing to pluck a grass stem and whistle along it but not daring for fear that the sketch would be spoiled.
"Done," said David finally, standing up. "It isn't anything like you, but you may have it, if you like." He tore it out of the sketchpad and held it out to her.
She took it and glanced over it, seeing in a moment what he meant: there was a strange lack of life to it, contrasting vividly with her own abundance of the quality.
"I can never capture you," he was saying. "You're too alive to be trapped on a page. I've tried and tried, but I can't do it."
She found herself replying, "I kept wanting to whistle on a grass stem, but I thought it would ruin the sketch."
His eyes lit up. "That's it! I must sketch you in motion, only those ones are all movement lines and blurs, and I can't seem to make them look like anything." He sat down again.
She sat next to him. After a few minutes she said, "David?"
"Yes?"
"Meg Lawson's party is next Saturday, did you know?"
"Yes, I've been invited." His tone was carefully casual, as if to warn her against saying anything else about it, but she plunged on.
"Oh, so have I! That's splendid, we can go together!" He didn't answer, and the silence began to stretch on and bear down on them until she wanted to choke.
"Can't we?" she asked, timidly, a little plaintively.
When he spoke, his voice had lost all of its former gaiety and laughter. "I'm going with Amy Brook, and if you must know, I wouldn't have gone with you anyway. I don't want people getting ideas."
"What ideas?" she asked, knowing what he would say and dreading it and wishing it were all over.
"That you and I -- that we -- that we like each other," he stammered. "Because it just isn't like that with us, Jenny. We're friends, and that's all we ever need to be. Why must we grow up and spoil our friendship?"
She nodded, feeling the tears come, and said, "That's all right, then. I suppose I'll just go by myself." And before he could say anything else to wound her, she ran down the bank, back the way she'd come.
He sat in the grass, staring at his sketchpad in deep thought. A few minutes later, his pencil was running across a fresh page as if possessed, and at the end of the afternoon he had a picture, rough but full of life, of Jenny in tears, running away, but with her head turned back, as it had done just before she had vanished from his sight.
