They both crack up and the weed makes a laugh flow out of me easily.
“Yeah, fine,” I say. “I was drawing boobs.”
We spend way too long laughing, like we all just turned twelve. Then the conversation shifts and Dorien asks me how the sculpture idea is coming along. Carter starts sharing another crazy story from Hargrove. And I just vibe. I feel like their equal here.
For a little while, I belong.
Then Carter’s phone buzzes on the coffee table. He picks it up, glances at the screen, and I see the name before he tilts the phone away and answers the call.
June.
“Hey,” he says, pressing it to his ear. A pause. “Yeah, he’s here. He’s fine.” Another pause, longer this time. Carter’s eyes flick to me, then away. “Yeah. He’s fine. We’re just hanging out.” He listens for another few seconds, then says, “Yeah, okay. I will. Bye.”
He sets the phone down and doesn’t look at me.
“June?” Dorien asks.
Carter nods.
Nobody says anything for a second. The room is the same. The bulb is the same. The shadows haven’t moved. But something is different.
“And what’s she freaking out about this time?” I finally ask.
Carter shrugs. “Oh, just wanted to see when you’d be done down here. She wanted to talk about your assignments.”
And to lecture me about Morrison’s class.
“Guess I’m sleeping down here tonight,” I say and Carter smirks.
Dorien lets out another puff. “Not a bad idea. Are we having a slumber party?”
The three of us crack up again. Then, when we’re settled, Carter grabs snacks from upstairs. We do have a slumber party (whatever a grownup guy’s version of that is).
My sister will be annoyed with me in the morning, but tonight, I get to exist without judgement.
Feels fucking great.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DORIEN
She pulled out my wires.
We’re back in Mixed Media for our last workday before critique, and June pulled out the wires I had in place last class. She took the piece home to work on it and wasn’t supposed to fuck with the wires. Each one has been pulled free and rewrapped in tight, controlled loops that hug the canvas like a fist closing around it.
The crayon work is done, I’ll give her that. She melted color through the back the way we discussed, and it bled beautifully into the front, staining the acrylic in these uneven blooms of orange and red. The color work is excellent.
But the wires.Mywires.
As we’re sitting at our table and she continues to mess with it, I rub my temples. I’d left space between the wires on purpose. The gaps mattered. They let you see through the structure to the painting beneath, and they let the canvas breathe between the copper lines, so the viewer’s eye could move freely from flat surface to three-dimensional form and back. The openness was the whole point. That was where the conversation between our two pieces lived, in the space between them.
And she just… what a nightmare.
It now looks like a painting wearing a cage, which was not the vision I thought we’d agreed on.
“You changed the wires,” I say, trying not to sound immediately defensive.
She pulls a sketchbook from her bag and doesn’t look up. “I adjusted them.”
