What was I thinking at that exhibition opening? I’d stood next to her longer than I’d allowed myself to in years. She’d been looking at my sculpture, her weight shifting slightly forward, the way people lean toward things that consume them, and she hadn’t known it was mine. I’d watched the side of her face as she studied it: the small crease between her brows, the way herlips parted, the almost imperceptible softening in her shoulders. She’d felt something. My piece had made herfeelsomething, and I’d stood there like an idiot, letting that fact make me happy.
And then began the “chatty” part, even if it felt more like verbal warfare. The whole time my hands had ached with the need to touch the angle of her jaw just to see if the real thing matched what I’d been sculpting from memory. Just to know how wrong I’d been getting it.
I’d been getting it wrong. I was always getting it wrong. The real thing was better than anything I could ever sculpt.
Last year, I’d managed to avoid her completely. Her freshman year, my sophomore year, and I’d engineered an entire calendar around her absence, thanks to Carter’s tips about her schedule. I’d eaten in the dining hall she didn’t use. I’d taken the long route to the sculpture wing because the short one passed by her painting classes. Twelve months of avoidance, as it must be.
Then the empty summer and that empty house wore me down. I worked on a piece to submit to the exhibition, but on the side I also sculpted the same girl over and over and over.
When I was alone as a child, June was there. Despite being on different ends of wealth, our mothers were friends. June was there when I was five and my mother forgot to pick me up from school. Melia had brought me home and made me a sandwich, letting me draw at the kitchen island while June talked to me about a caterpillar she’d found. She was there when I was seven and the world was still good. She was there when I was nine and the world stopped being good and never started again.
As a kid, I clung to her the way you cling to the one warm thing in a cold room, and when the worst happened, I’d learned the only lesson my nine-year-old mind could shape from the wreckage: being close to her costs something.
Actually, it was my fault. I don’t make good decisions around her because her presence clouds my mind.
We must always maintain our distance.
I notice the familiar shape my hands are working again in the clay, so I smash it flat with my fist.Start again. Somehow, I’ll train myself to stop thinking of her.
“So Aeron said something interesting last night,” Carter says, and I feel the tension in my shoulders drop. Safer ground. June’s younger brother. A kid I’ve seen around the Belrose house a hundred times.
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“Well, I overheard him talking to June. He signed up for a sculpting class this semester.” Carter tilts his head. “Advanced Sculpture. Isn’t that the same one you’re in?”
I pause, my hands still in the clay. “Advanced Sculpture is a junior-level elective. He’s a freshman.”
“Apparently he talked to the professor and demonstrated he already knew the foundational techniques. Cheng let him in.” Carter shrugs, the movement loose and unbothered. “He’s just taking it as an elective. Not like he’s committing to sculpture as his thing.”
I lean back in my chair with a resigned sigh because things just aren’t flowing right today and my hands are getting too cold. I grab a cleaning tool and start picking clay from underneath my fingernails. “Didn’t you say he was doing sound art over the summer? Seemed like he was finally picking a niche.”
Carter huffs a small laugh. “Aeron sticking with something? That’s optimistic.” He says it with warmth, not cruelty. Carter doesn’t have cruelty in him, or if he does, he’s buried it so deep under kindness that it suffocated years ago. “The kid dabbles. You know that. Last semester it was video installation. Before that, textiles. Before that, he was building something with reclaimed wood in the garage and Melia almost called the fire department because he’d doused it in fuel and lit it.”
I laugh. “Oh, yeah. Kinda wish I’d seen that.”
“There are still black spots on the garage ceiling.”
I wipe my hands with a cloth, ready to pack it in for the day. I have a class starting soon anyway. “He’s all over the place,” I say.
Carter starts making a lace for his small football-shaped clay piece. “Yeah, but he’s talented. You’ve seen his sketches.”
I have. Not up close, because Aeron guards his sketchbook the way some people guard their phones. But I’ve glimpsed enough over the years, passing through the Belrose living room, catching a page left open on the kitchen counter whenever I go there to hang out in the basement with Carter. The kid has an eye that’s raw, instinctive, and the kind of natural ability that makes me jealous in a quiet, complicated way. I’ve had to work for every ounce of skill I possess and people like Aeron just wake up seeing the world in lines and shadows.
I hope he’s able to figure out what he wants to do with that talent.
But I don’t know how I feel about him being in my class. Aeron is June’s brother. He has her collarbone structure, the same stubborn jawline, the same way of holding his body like he’s bracing for impact. Being around him is a lesser, stranger version of being around her. Close enough to the source to feel the warmth but not close enough to burn.
Or maybe that’s the problem. Maybe any proximity to her world is too close.
I walk to the sink to wash my hands and wet a square of cheesecloth. I return to the table and Carter holds up his football. I smirk. “Nice.”
“What do I do with it?”
“Put it in the kiln if you want to keep it.”
“Nah,” he says as he smashes it into my heap of clay.
As I wrap the damp cheesecloth over the mound, I say, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about what classes Aeron takes. Chengis a tough critic but he approved him. If he’s good enough to be there, he’s good enough to be there.”
