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“You here over break?” I ask.
“Yeah. We’re doing a January-term independent thing with Rikki.”
“What on?”
“Frit casting.” He wiggles his fingers like a magician.
It’s because of Rikki that Laurie is working in glass. He used to be satisfied making giant sculptures out of metal, but now he’s got to have giant glass hammers, too, even though he wasn’t kidding when he said the logistics are a fucking pain in the ass. A one-to-one casting of a glass hammer is a tough object to make, but not impossible. Multiply the scale by a thousand? Enormous fucking headache, because where are you going to get that much glass? How the fuck do you make the mold, and more to the point, where’s the kiln to fire a glass hammer the size of a car?
This is the kind of stuff he pays me to try to figure out. Which, actually, I fucking love it. Best job I’ve ever had.
“Did you need something?” Rikki asks.
I come back to myself, realize I’m standing there staring at the molds piled with frit and daydreaming about work. “Yeah. No. I mean, it can wait. I just wanted to talk to you about something, but you’re busy.”
“I can make some time if it’s important. Is it Frankie?”
“Nah, just class stuff,” I lie.
“Are you going to be in Laurie’s 3D Design in the spring?” Raffe asks.
“No, I didn’t sign up.”
“How come?”
I shrug. “Just didn’t.”
Rikki gives me a look. “What did you register for?”
“A bio class, organic chemistry, an econ seminar, and an advanced statistics thing.”
“Those are all sciences.”
“Econ is a social science.”
“Why do you need so much science?”
“It’s practical.”
She sniffs. “Practical. You do not need more practical. You need more art.”
This is Rikki’s shtick. I need more art. I need to learn to play. I need to let myself take up more space in the world.
I’ve heard it enough times now that I keep thinking it’ll stop digging into me, but it hasn’t. Every time, I feel like she’s scraping over something soft inside me. It makes me irritable. I think she knows it, too.
I think that’s why she does it.
The thing is, I liked her class. It frustrated the hell out of me, but I liked it.
I like working with Laurie.
I even liked Russian history and Music in African-American Lit and Spanish, but when it came time to register for the spring semester, I went with bio, chem, econ, and math because the scholarship I’m on is worth more than fifty thousand dollars a year, and I don’t know what I could do with art.
Nothing, probably.
I can’t waste all that money on nothing.
