Edgar the cat is eyeing the paintbrushes.

He's the only boy in a basement filled with arty girls.

It's Monday again, which means Lauren Eastman is here, sitting at the big Formica-topped table using her left hand as a palette.

And Natalie Dermann is beside her searching for inspiration in the pages of a picture book.

Across the table, Emma Morin is fleshing out the faces of her family with shades of gray paint, studying a photograph her dad took when her mom was still alive.

Tessa Dobrusky, the newest and youngest Monday  art girl, sits at one corner drawing. And Abbey Bettinger — the chattiest of the art girls — is catty-corner, smashing clay and chatting away about the look of the new Pepsi cans.

It's what they do here, says  their teacher.

They talk about small things, like the look of pop cans. And big things, like relationships and life.

"We hang out, do art, eat cookies, talk," Barb Mattley says.

She's been teaching art for more than 20 years. She sees how it changes people, reaches down into their souls.

Lauren is 17 now, a junior at Lincoln High.

She's been coming to Miss Mattley's basement art studio for six years at least,  maybe seven. It's been five years for Natalie, an eighth grader at Lefler Middle School. And almost five years for Emma, a 16-year-old sophomore at Pius. Tessa goes to Irving. Abbey is at Lincoln High with Lauren, who gives her a ride to class.

They are girls who might not be friends otherwise.

But the art brings them together in a way nothing else could.

It's like home down here, the girls say.  Walls covered with paintings. Counters crammed with paints and pencils and paper.  Music playing on the radio. White lights and candles glowing.  Miss Mattley encouraging them.

When they have to miss class, they miss it.

“I need to do it," Emma says.

“I get irritable if I can’t come," says Lauren.

A few weeks ago she finished a graphite drawing of Natalie's mom and grandfather. Natalie sat beside her as she worked on it each Monday, trying out different mediums, trying to capture the faces.

“Do I have her eyes right? Lauren would ask.

"What about her mouth?"

Natalie's mom, Kara, committed suicide last year.  Lauren's dad killed himself when she was a pre-schooler. It hurts the same, no matter how old you are, she says.

For such young women, they know a lot about loss, but they don't sit in class and cry.

“We keep the focus on the art,” Lauren says. “If someone wants to talk  — or not talk — we respect that."

And sometimes they talk through their art. Like the weeks Emma has spent drawing her older brothers and sisters with her mom in the midst of them all.

The day Emma found out her mom had cancer was a Monday. She wanted to go to class, she remembers, and the first person she told was her art teacher.

“Ever since then I've felt really close to her."

The time after her mom died was a blur.  “Art, I think is what got me through it."

And, then, when Natalie's mom died, Miss Mattley came to her house. Natalie had been taking a break from art because she'd been busy with other things after school.

“I asked her if I could come back.”

And coming back helped, says the girl with a smile matching the one on her mother's face in the portrait Lauren drew.

“Everyone knows each other so well. It’s easy to talk to each other about everything. And if we don’t want to talk, it’s comfortable, too.”

There’s something about creating art, Lauren says, that makes it easy to open up about other things.

“It’s almost to the point where it’s a therapeutic little community. It’s a good place to kind of forget about everything.”

Monday they paint and draw while Edgar the cat watches.

Natalie pencils in trees and a road that disappears into the distance, no end in sight.

Lauren mixes yellow into the palette of white and black on her left hand, dabs it on the canvas.

They talk about llamas and Abbey’s lavender hair and the way Emma’s portrait of her family is shaping up.

“That’s gorgeous, Sweetie,” Miss Mattley tells her.

One day Emma turned to her teacher after class.

“Wouldn't it be great if we all just grew up together?" she said.

Miss Mattley answered.

“Oh, honey. You are.”

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com