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“What? Oh. Um. What did you say?” Rian muttered.
“I was asking what you said,” I told him, smiling a little at his slightly unfocused eyes, like he’d just awoken from a dream. “What did you say just then?”
Rian shook his head. I realised I was asking quite a lot of him. I wasn’t sure Rian often remembered the day before. He lived from psychedelic moment to psychedelic moment. Usually in his head.
I blushed slightly as I cleared my throat and whispered with a tucked chin, “Um, you said something about Conor.”
“Right!” Rian said, snapping his fingers. “Right, Conor. Right. Conor. Conor. Conor.”
I almost shushed him. I would have died of embarrassment if Conor knew that I was asking one of his friends about him. I mean, I wanted to know everything about him, but I couldn’t just pry around for information. I had to be sneakier than that. My cheeks grew hotter and I whispered, “Yeah, what was it you said?”
Rian drummed his fingers against my photo. Conor thankfully didn’t turn around. Not to say he hadn’t heard. But at least he was pretending that he hadn’t.
“Ah,” Rian said at last, “I said this reminds me of Conor’s earlier work.”
I glanced again toward Conor, toward his broad back, strong and well-defined. For the first time in days, I hoped it would stay facing me, that he wouldn’t turn with his angry, fuming eyes. I did my best to keep my voice low so he couldn’t hear me, but casual, non-committal if he somehow could.
“Like when he was just starting out?” I asked.
Rian was studying the crying girl, his head tilting this way and that. Almost distractedly, he said, “Yeah. Well, I mean. I guess I don’t really know when exactly Conor started working on his art. Or who got him started or whatever. But this reminds me of his style when we were in school together.”
As Rian shifted my notebook, turning it at different angles, his focus completely consumed by my art, I realised that he probably wasn’t all too aware of what he was saying.
After shooting a look toward Conor’s back, I said, “I didn’t know that you two went to school together.”
Rian was somewhere else and said dreamily, almost as if he was sleepwalking, “Limerick Art School. I needed a cheap place when I enrolled and I kind of got distracted with some things and waited till the very first day of school and I just lucked out that I found Conor who was renting out his one-bedroom. He must have been more strapped for cash than I was because he took the couch in the living room.”
“For a whole semester?”
Rian flipped the page of my portfolio and gave a little shrug.
“It wasn’t like he was the most dedicated student in the world,” he said. “He didn’t have this perfect record that was in jeopardy from a few sleepless nights. The guy ditched class all the time. We didn’t have many classes together, but I don’t remember a time when I saw him there.”
I didn’t put too much weight into this part of story given that Rian would often come into the parlour, work for several hours, and then ask where I had been all day like I hadn’t been literally scooting aside his foot to get to his wastebasket five minutes earlier.
“But he was gone from the apartment all the time,” Rian continued, “so he must have been doing something at the school. He showed up to classes at some point, because I would find his art in the dumpster out back when I snooped around for old sneakers or such a time or two. You know, the whole starving artist schtick.”
I looked toward Conor for a moment, frowning slightly. “He tossed his classwork?”
“Wouldn’t really surprise me all that much if he never even turned it in,” Rian said, drumming his chin as he looked at one of my first piece of street art, a messy, hastily done sun. “I like this one.”
I don’t know why I put that one in at all. I flipped the page for him and pointed at a lady’s face morphing into the wind. “This one’s better,” I said. “Why wouldn’t it have surprised you?”
Rian tried to go back to the sun and I stopped him. It was easy enough in the distracted, distant state he was in.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Because Conor was like that. It was like he was there, but he wasn’t there. He never made any friends besides me and honestly, I don’t think even that would have happened if we hadn’t been roommates. He never socialised with the other art students. Never met up at the coffee shops or the bars after class. He never talked about his professors or his assignments. He’d stay up painting or drawing, but in the morning he’d be gone and the finished work would just be sitting there on the easel or on his desk. Like he’d gone to class and just…I don’t know, forgotten it. I mean, the alternative is that he left it behind on purpose. But that doesn’t really make sense to me.”
Without me realising it Rian had gone back to the sun drawing I hated. I regretted putting it in. I promised to rip it out the moment I got my portfolio back.
Rian was studying it as he said, “Like this. Conor could have done something like this back then.”
“And then thrown it away?” I asked.
Rian nodded. “Kind of beautiful if you ask me,” he muttered.
I stared at Conor’s back. I felt that something was missing from Rian’s story. Pieces that didn’t add up. To someone like Rian that was how life was; I don’t think he particularly liked when things just “fit”. But I could sense something more…something darker…
I was trying to figure it out as Rian continued with his critique of my portfolio when Mason came down, obviously ready for a night on the town. He glanced over Rian’s shoulder and gave an approving nod before saying to me, “Hey, you can get out of here, you know? Just because these two losers don’t have a life on a Friday night doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”
I glanced at Rian, but he was absorbed in my art. A glance in Conor’s direction revealed no change at all.
“Oh, um, yeah,” I said, forcing a smile. “Right. Cool.”
I gathered up my jacket and my backpack, checking the whole time whether Conor would look over at me, whether he would invite me to stay where it was warm and safe, whether he would fake the excuse of organising a stupid spice rack or wiping down the tools for the second time that day. But when I said a hesitant goodnight at the door no one answered.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Conor didn’t hate me. Maybe Conor just didn’t care.
