“I took too many,” she said, holding them out. “These are extras.”
She hadn’t taken too many. Mom just hadn’t baked enough for three kids because she forgot there were three kids in thehouse. But Cinna said it like it was her fault, like she was correcting her own mistake instead of my mother’s, and the kindness of that lie made my crush even worse.
I took the cookies. She smiled and I felt warm all over. The hallway light was behind her, outlining her in a soft, amber glow, and her face was in shadow but the smile came through anyway.
Her smile always comes through, no matter the lighting or if I’m having a crappy day. That smile makes the world better.
I’m shading her perfect jawline when Morrison’s voice cuts through my concentration.
“Aeron.”
My pencil stops.
“Aeron Belrose.”
I look up and find most everyone in the room glancing back at me. Morrison is standing beside the projector with her arms crossed, one eyebrow raised above those wire-rimmed glasses. On the screen behind her is… some painting of a man with fruit in front of his face. The slide title is too small to read from the back row and I cannot remember a single word she’s said in the last twenty minutes.
“Would you like to share your thoughts on how Magritte uses visual contradiction to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about representation?”
My throat is dry. So many faces are staring at me. I can feel each one of them like individual lights aimed at my table, and I want to slide under the desk and keep sliding until I’m in another building.
“Um.” I close my sketchbook because if Morrison walks up here and sees what I’ve been drawing instead of taking notes, I will transfer schools. “He, uh. He puts… familiar things in unfamiliar contexts? So the viewer has to… reconsider what they’re looking at?”
It’s a garbage answer and we both know it. Morrison holds my eye for a moment, which lasts approximately nine years, then turns back to the class and continues her lecture as if I’d said nothing. Which, effectively, I hadn’t.
Four rows ahead, June glances back at me.
She tries to make it casual, just a quick glance over her shoulder. But I know that look. It’s theAre you okay?look. TheI’m worried about youlook. The look that says she’s going to ask me about this later, probably in the kitchen, probably in front of Mom so I feel even more stupid, probably with that specific tone that makes me feel like a broken appliance she’s trying to fix.
I stare at my closed sketchbook and think back to last Tuesday.
I was on the porch, late afternoon, working on the updated concept for my sculpture piece. I’d been at it for a while, the sketch eventually getting somewhere good. I was figuring out how the fibers might attach to the metal armature, whether they should be knotted or looped, and I was deep in it, lost in it, when June came home.
She dropped her bag inside the door and came straight to where I was sitting. She looked over my shoulder. Didn’t ask what I was working on or what I was thinking. Just looked and started talking.
“The proportions on the torso are a little off. If you brought the shoulders in, like half an inch, it would feel more natural. And I wonder if you might try a tighter weave for the fibers. If it’s too loose, it might read as unfinished to a professor.”
She said it like she was actually helping. Like her years of experience as a painter (two more than mine, not twenty) qualify her to diagnose my work and prescribe treatment. She never asks what I’mtryingto do. She never asks what the piece is about, or why I chose those proportions, or why the weave isloose. She just sees something she’d do differently and tells me, like I’m supposed to be some carbon copy of her.
Clearly I’m not or Mom would actually notice I exist.
Dorien, who is a sculpture major (not a painter), asked me what the metal underneath was for. He asked if the breaking was the point. He asked about the fibers and listened while I tried to explain something I was still conceptualizing, and when I fumbled, he said, “Both is good.”
His opinion I trust, and he also treats me like I’m my own artist.
June never asks. June tells.
The heat that’s crept up my neck is unbearable. I know my sister means well and her suggestions come from a place of caring, not cruelty. I just wish she would, I don’t know, trust me.
Not everything has to be her way.
Morrison moves on to a new slide. When I’m sure she won’t look at me again for a while, I open my sketchbook to a fresh page. I start a loose study of the projector light on the far wall, letting my hand move in long, slow strokes, trying to look like someone taking visual notes instead of someone who just got publicly humiliated and is pretending it didn’t happen.
The class ends. I’m packed up and out the door before June can reach me.
I’m in the kitchen getting water when Mom comes in.
She’s coming from her study with a stack of student files tucked under one arm and her reading glasses pushed up into her curls (she’s such a caring counselor that she’s alwaysworking late). The kitchen is between her study and the stairs, which means I’m an obstacle in her path, not a destination.
