My hands are flat on the table, mirror shards scattered between my fingers, and I can feel the tendons in my forearms tensing too much.
“You rearranged the piece without asking me,” I continue. “That’s the issue. Not whether the wires were good or bad. You made a decision about our collaboration without collaborating. You saw a difference in vision and you overrode mine withoutasking.”
My chest fills with ice because… she asked that day, didn’t she? When we were kids. She asked what we should do. She listened to me. She followed me instead of?—
I grip the edge of the table with bare hands and realize the classroom is quieter than it was a few minutes ago. The pair at the table to our left has stopped working. I catch the girl’s eyes shifting between us, then away when I look at her. Two tables down, someone whispers behind their hand.
June notices too, and color rises in her cheeks, but she doesn’t lower her voice. “God, you always do this. What is it you really want to say to me, huh? You hold back, you don’t commit, and then when someone steps in, you act like they stole something from you.”
“And you always dothis.” I gesture at the canvas, keeping my voice low. “You rearrange everything around you until it matches what’s in your head, and anyone who has a different idea can just deal with it. You’re a control freak.”
“That’s not fair,” she says.
“It’s accurate.”
I know I’ve gone too far when June’s eye twitches and she jerks back like I just slapped her.
Professor Whitman’s voice cuts through the room. “Belrose. Kael.” She doesn’t raise her volume but her tone is authoritative enough. “If your creative differences require that much passion, I’d suggest channeling it into the piece rather than the performance. You have forty minutes left.”
A few students turn back to their work with poorly hidden grins. June’s face is flushed, and she’s gripping the edge of the worktable like she might flip it.
I slip my gloves back on and slouch back in my chair, picking up a piece of mirror. Neither me nor June speak. I feel like shit.
For ten minutes, the only sounds between us are my pliers bending wire and the soft clink of mirror fragments. I attach three shards to the upper wires, angling them so they reflect different sections of the painted surface. The mirrors catch thecolors and throw them back as fractured versions of June’s brushwork.
It’s beautiful, but I’m sure she doesn’t see it that way.
She’s no longer fighting the piece and has stopped caring about it entirely. She’s now drawing with markers in her sketchbook. With less conflict surrounding it, the piece is starting to do what I envisioned: show the viewer the painting, then show them the painting seeing itself, then make them wonder which version is real.
Hell, maybe it is pretentious.
When I glance up, June is watching from her side of the table. Her arms are folded, her body angled away from me, but her eyes watch my hands.
I open my mouth to apologize because—even though she was completely wrong about taking matters into her own hands without collaborating first—I can see now that, maybe, my vision was taking over the piece.
But I don’t manage to get any words out before her phone buzzes loudly on the worktable.
It’s face-up, so she glances down at the screen. I’m not looking directly at her, but I see in my periphery the way her whole posture changes. Her spine becomes steel and her hands, which were resting on her crossed arms, drop down and press flat against her thighs. The color that was in her cheeks from our argument drains out, and what’s left is a bloodless expression.
She stares at the screen for three seconds, four, five. Then she turns the phone face-down on the table.
I lower my pliers. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“June.”
“I said I’m fine. Asshole.”
Her words are harsh, but there’s still no color in her cheeks, her eyes still fixed on the canvas. But she’s not seeing it. She’s somewhere else.
“What was the—” I start to ask, but she stands so fast her chair almost topples backward.
“I need the bathroom.” She’s gone, weaving between worktables toward the door, before I can say anything else.
The classroom door creaks shut behind her.
I look at her phone.
