I pause in the middle of grabbing my bag off the floor and just stare up at him.Tell me.Like he’d do something about it…? Is he offering to stand between me and whatever’s coming?
I feel it in my whole body—a flush of warmth that starts in my chest and spreads outward. It’s the idea of Dorien protecting me, of having someone in my corner who isn’t family or Cinna, someone who’d step up because they wanted to, not because they had to.
It’s exactly the kind of feeling I can’t afford to have about him.
“I don’t need you to fight my battles,” I say as I grab my backpack and head for the exit. “I can handle it on my own.”
“As you wish,” Dorien says behind me.
I hurry into the hallway. I try not to think about the fact that for one brief moment, I wanted to say yes.
Yes, I’ll tell you.
Yes, take my hand.
CHAPTER TEN
AERON
Visual Studies is on the second floor of one of the older buildings. To reach the classroom, you have to walk through arched doorways and navigate corridors that swallow your footsteps. The lecture hall seats about fifty but it’s never full. There’s a projector screen at the front, and dimmable lights Professor Morrison keeps low enough so the screen is the brightest thing in the room. Most of the light in here is secondhand, borrowed from the projector and the glow of laptop screens. But the far right side, where the light doesn’t quite reach, is darker than the rest.
Guess which side I pick.
I’m in the back row, far right, where the dark is deepest and the professor’s eyes are least likely to find me. My sketchbook is open on the desk. The lecture is about… I glance at the board. Visual semiotics. The relationship between signifier and signified. Professor Morrison is at the front, clicking through slides. She’s tall and angular, and her dark hair is cut close to her jawline. She’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses she never pushes up and a black turtleneck tucked into high-waisted trousers. She dresses like she’s curating herself.
I sigh and focus on my sketchbook. I should probably be paying attention to the lecture, but I’m not. I hate lectures, especially ones I get from my sister.
I turned in a short assignment late—Morrison didn’t even care—and June thought it was a good idea to lecture me about it last night during dinner. I rarely venture out of my room to eat with everyone at the dinner table, because that’s what happens when I do: my sister nags me. She acts like I’m too stupid to keep my grades up.
I passed High School with a 2.7 GPA, which was good enough for Alaria. Not everyonehasto care about getting perfect scores, but to my sister that’s like a cardinal sin.
June and Cinna are sitting together near the middle of the room because my sister sits where she can see the front clearly and take notes like a person who believes notes will save her life. Cinna sits beside her because Cinna sits beside June in every class, every room, everywhere. They’re leaning toward each other, whispering, and Cinna covers her mouth with her hand when she laughs so Morrison won’t hear.
I smile, feeling better from just seeing her so happy.
The projector light catches Cinna’s hair and turns it into this pale gold that’s almost white at the edges. She’s wearing a light blue sweater, and the color makes her skin look warm even from the back row. Her profile is half-lit by the screen, half in the dimness of the room, and I can see the curve of her smile behind her fingers.
My pencil is moving before I make the decision to draw her.
Maybe I should be worried about how often this happens, but I don’t care. My hand just creates her face on the page the way my eyes find her in every room. I start with the profile: the line of her forehead down to her nose, the soft angle of her chin, the way her hair falls forward when she leans in to whisper. I sketch the hand over her mouth, the fingers slightly curled. Then I addthe light. The screen glow on the left side of her face, the shadow on the right, the way the bright half seems to be laughing, and the dark half seems to be keeping a secret.
I’d love to know all her secrets. All her thoughts.
Like, what does she think of me?
I remember being twelve when I first wondered that. June had Cinna over on a Saturday, which was normal. They were on the couch watching TV and I’d been napping in my room because I’d been up late drawing. Mom left a sticky note on my door:Cookies downstairs when you wake up.
I really wanted one, so I dragged my groggy ass to the kitchen. But the cookie container was empty.
Mom was at the island doing work on her laptop. I stood there holding the empty container. She looked up, her face pinched in the way it does when she just realized she forgot about me. Her eyes widened, her nose scrunched, and she bit her lip like she’d been caught lying.
“Oh, shoot. Sorry, sweetie, I didn’t make enough. I’ll bake more later.”
She said it while already looking back down at her laptop. I put the lid back on the empty container and stood there for a second, trying to decide whether “later” meant tonight or next week or that vague, drifting “later” that meant never. Then I went back upstairs.
About five minutes passed before there was a knock on my door. I didn’t even get a chance to say “come in” before it opened.
Cinna was standing in the doorway with two cookies in her palm, wrapped in a paper towel.
