by L. B. Carter
Without preamble, Kayna dropped down cross-legged next to a gangly boy of Asian descent, curled against the wall.
“Hey, Stew. Good summer?” she asked.
He turned a faint shade of red under his thick-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair before nodding. “Not bad, you?” He directed the question at Kayna, but snuck a quick glance up at Rena.
Kayna had confided during a late movie night of Rom-Coms over the summer that she suspected Stew had a crush on Rena. Rena more figured that of the two of them, Stew had more of a thing for Kayna, but Rena was the unattached one. He didn’t get much attention from others, thanks to his nerd status.
“I wish there’d been more beach time, ya’ know? But those job applications don’t write themselves. I’m almost glad I don’t have a chance of getting into a university. Those apps have essays and exams you have to pass, right?”
Stew nodded.
“Didn’t you already get accepted to one?”
Stew nodded again, ducking his chin a bit in embarrassment. “BSTU,” he mumbled.
“Dang. Then again, you and Sirena would probably have to blow raspberries at your interviewers or something to get rejected anywhere.”
Given how many classes she’d passed out of, Rena was considered as nerdy as Stew. However, she hadn’t applied to any universities. That wasn’t something Grandpa or Kayna knew.
For reasons beyond Rena, the remaining universities after the higher-education crash were located along coasts. It was ironic, the smartest in the country sitting right in the path of imminent flooding, even as the cities started growing inland. One of those cities was Rena’s target. That’s as far as her plans had gotten. She didn’t consider herself ‘genius’ quality, anyway—just dedicated to work. That happened when you didn’t have much of a social life.
“If either of you ever decide to go evil warlord and dominate the human race, remember I brought you coffee before our big chem test in May,” Kayna sternly reminded them both. “Sit, girl. Stop towering,” she added, flapping a dainty hand at Rena. “I’ve heard Mr. Sanderson is usually at least ten minutes late for first period.”
Before Rena could even cross her feet to settle on the floor, a hand flew out of nowhere knocking her notebooks with a thwack to the ground at her feet. Conversation in the hallway died.
“Whoops, sorry. Didn’t see you there, Spectre,” the self-righteous nasal voice mocked.
Rena’s stomach almost met her books at her feet.
JT’s face appeared in front of hers, his perfect features twisted in a smirk. “I was kinda hoping you’d have gone into the light during summer break, or whatever it is ghosts do when they have no business being here.” He crossed his arms like he’d just aced some test. The joke was not new. His posse guffawed behind him regardless. “Maybe if you’d disappeared, you wouldn’t have gotten so wet in the rain.”
The reference to his puddle-soaking this morning was not lost on Rena, and the snicker from the lanky basketball star behind him indicated that at least one of the goons had enough brain power to pick up on it.
Goon Two unwrapped his arm from the tiny waist of his Cheerleader Of The Week and stepped up beside JT. “We got you real wet, huh?” Dylan sounded proud of his innuendo.
Gross. Even his girl looked faintly revolted. Though maybe that was because Rena was the subject, rather than the innuendo itself being crass.
“What, not speaking to us?” he added. Again, nothing new.
Rena barely refrained from rolling her eyes. JT’s girl—Shayna, Miss Popular herself—made a ‘tsk’ noise, and cocked a hip in her... dress? It looked like Rena’s sleep shirt, barely reaching her thighs. Definitely against school rules. Apparently they didn’t apply when Daddy Dearest was one of the best lawyers around. Shayna flipped her platinum ponytail. Could she get any more stereotypical? It was like Shayna had studied that movie Kayna liked—Clueless. Well, she was certainly clueless that the guy she was dating spent more time in the bathroom with some of her ‘friends’ than in his classes. That was a somewhat mollifying thought, especially since Shayna was head of the Stick Up the ARse (Laim’s favorite swear word) Squad as Kayna had named them, or SUARS for short.
“I’m not sure she’s even solid enough to hear you, babe.” The cheerleading captain’s red-tipped nails slid under JT’s bulging arm, the same way her cool voice slithered into the conversation. She gently tugged him back a step, as if he could catch something standing too close. In her summery wedge heels—which made no sense in the rain—JT was actually a few inches shorter than his girlfriend. As if she’d noticed, Shayna pushed her hip further out, losing height and licking her red-coated lips before whispering in his ear.
He smirked and allowed himself to be pulled to the classroom door just as a harried looking bald man with a paunch and a leaking briefcase rushed around the corner, keys jangling. The quiet in the hallway was broken as everyone made for the door.
Rena finally breathed out and dropped to hands and knees to pick up her notebooks.
Stew started a pile to her left. “Sorry about Jonathan,” he apologized.
Rena just shook her head. That too was nothing new. Jonathan was the third member of the SUARS’ Boyfriend Brigade. He’d been there, behind JT and Dylan, in his pressed blue shorts, white polo shirt and yacht shoes, with his girlfriend Maddy looking like the complementing women’s half of a Ralph Lauren catalogue. They never actively joined in, but the silence they maintained put them pretty high up on Rena’s Shi– Ship List.
“He’s always really nice at practice,” Stew said.
Of course he was. JT was hockey and Dylan basketball. There was no one on the Golf team for Jonathan to have to impress.
Kayna added a composition notebook to the pile, grumbling unintelligibly, her hands shaking in anger. She didn’t usually confront, but she took every move against her friends personally and seethed for hours after. She’d have more peace when Rena moved away, too.
Rena stretched her hand out to grab the last notebook that had slid just out of reach. A heavy black boot stepped down on her fingers. She gave an involuntary little yip.
“Shit, sorry!” The boot lifted back off her hand.
She flexed her fingers experimentally. Red and achy, a few of the bruised knuckles from her impromptu boxing that weekend flared up again.
“Are you okay?” The culprit crouched in front of her and took her hand between his. They both looked up at the same time and froze.
Speaking of punching…
Nor’s lips quirked. “Not your day, today, is it?”
She wanted to punch him again. He’d said it benignly, but she had residual anger from the SUARS. Rena blew a breath out through her teeth and methodically uncurled her fingers from a fist, one at a time.
Oblivious to the danger his nose was in again, Nor added the last notebook to the pile, picking the stack up as he stood. His face was serious when he offered a hand down to Rena, interrupting her attempt to calm down.
She straightened on her own and snatched her books from him. All but marching into the classroom, Rena left Kayna gaping after her and Stew scurrying to join her at a lab table in the front. When Nor came in a minute later, just as the bell rang, Rena received a stoic expression of… nothing from her new stalker—just blankness and a barely-there glance before he moved past her to sit in the back of the room, where she couldn’t see him.
Mr. Sanderson handed out the horrifyingly long list of dissection labs—frog, pig, cat… yuck—almost distracting Rena from the feeling of eyes on the back of her head. “You will be expected to remove and bisect each animal’s heart, liver, stomach and lungs,” Mr. Sanderson began droning in a voice that was far too unemotional for such a gruesome topic.
Almost distracting.
◆◆◆
By the end of class, Rena was feeling queasy, having watched Mr. Sanderson label a crude sketch of the inside of a helpless little kitten on the board. Trying to block it out with mental recollections of the
last kids’ movie she and Kayna had most recently watched about a lost fish hadn’t been as effective as she’d hoped.
Feeling slightly ill, she grabbed her pile of notebooks—a graffitied old textbook now added to the stack—and escaped out of the door before anyone else had moved. The feeling of being watched was definitely not why Rena all but ran for the art room on the other side of school.
The earthy smell of clay calmed Rena as she entered the pottery room. Having to fill her schedule with random credits until she passed her last requirement wasn’t so bad, even if, as it appeared, she was the only senior in the class. Pottery was pretty therapeutic. It was much preferred over any overbearing therapist They had thrown at her. Rena settled one wheel away from the other students, on the far side of the room.
Paul, who insisted all the students call him by his first name, ambled in and clapped his hands once to get their attention. He gave no introduction to the class. “We’ll start our story with vases today,” he said gruffly, his copious grey beard smearing the words together.
With his short rotund stature, today clothed in a loose brown leather vest and floral harem pants, he looked kind of like an older version of the dwarf from Lord of the Rings dressed up for Halloween as a Hippy.
“Let’s be giraffes today: delicate, tall, graceful.” He shaped something in the air as he spoke. It looked more like the silhouette of a curvy woman than a vase. There were a few snickers. “Have at it.”
Paul might be a little loopy, but he was brilliant at pottery and he liked quiet. The art should do all the talking, he’d told a particularly chatty student the previous spring. Rena had wanted to air-hug him.
However, the lump of brown clay in the middle of the wheel wasn’t speaking to her at the moment.
“Don’t think,” Paul admonished as his moccasins shuffled past. “The clay speaks to the soul, not the mind.”
Vague, but she actually understood what he meant. He was a fan of the hands-on first, let it flow later type of non-plan. It was actually a nice reprieve to turn off her brain sometimes. Dutifully Rena wet her hands in the tray surrounding the wheel and cupped her palms around the mass. Her foot lightly pressed down on the pedal and, with a whirr, the wheel gradually picked up speed.
Ten minutes later she had a taller, thinner column of brown yuck. Lining her thumbs up back to back, she pressed the pads into the flat top of the column, making a dent to start hollowing the inside.
Someone knocked on the frame of the classroom door and a throat cleared. “Sorry?” It came out like a question. “I’m new. Got a bit lost.”
No. Rena jerked her head up in disbelief.
Yep. Nor was hovering in the doorway.
Paul turned from a freshman, who had made some kind of squid vase if the tentacles were any indication, and headed over to Nor. “No worries, no worries. We all get a bit lost sometimes.” Paul seemed to lose focus for a minute and Nor coughed. “Right, well. Do you know how to work a wheel?” Nor nodded. “Then have at it. Vase. Tall. Think skyscraper but made of wind.” Paul wandered back to the frazzled student.
Nor raised a brow after the teacher, then looked around the room. His eyes landed on Rena.
She was staring, again. Super.
The corner of his mouth quirked and he sauntered over. Rena suppressed a sigh and started up her wheel again. He’d have come over anyway. Next to her was the only free wheel, right in the invisible quarantine wall between her leper colony and the unafflicted.
“More water today, huh?” Nor got his hands wet.
Rena ignored him. The dent in her clay deepened.
“I needed an art credit,” he informed her conversationally, eyes on his blob, which was rising rapidly. “It was pottery or chorus.” He shrugged. “I’m good with my hands.”
The last remark had an odd inflection and she peeked out the corner of her eye.
He caught her look and winked.
Her mouth dropped for a brief second until she snapped it shut again. Rena had punched him in the face, ditched him after a kind car ride, ripped her book from his helpful hands, and Nor was sitting next to her flirting? Or at least pretending to be interested.
That gave her pause. Had he been put up to this? Woo her and then dump her publicly? But he’d picked her up this morning before knowing all the gossip, before meeting the SUARS. Unless he knew them before, and he was just a really good actor in the car…
“You okay?”
Rena came back to herself and realized her wheel had slowed. Her thumbs were dangerously close to the bottom of the vase, forearms now covered in a thin film of clay. Rena shook her thoughts free. What did she care his reasoning? He wasn’t going to be wooing her, regardless of his intentions.
She shifted one hand to the outside of the vase and in tandem her other fingers pressed on the other side of the clay, thinning the vase wall. Slowly both hands ascended, little bits of sand in the fine material catching on her fingers. It was becoming less a skinny science fair volcano, more of a vase.
“Clearly you are, too,” Nor commented out of the blue. “Good with your hands,” he elaborated, gesturing at her creation with his own mud-slicked fingers. “Though I already knew you were good with your fists,” he tacked on, nonchalantly.
Rena started. Small bits of clay flung out in all directions, thankfully caught by the tray around her wheel. She wrenched her foot off the pedal and the wheel coasted to a stop.
Her vase sat in the middle, lopsided and sad, looking like an open fish mouth, gasping at her. There was now a gaping hole on one side where her thumb had punched through, like a bullet hole in the fish’s temple. Her vase was dead.
Salty barnacles.
Nor was chuckling.
Anger replaced the guilt he’d dredged up. Oh, he was so getting punched again.
“What happened?” Paul stood in front of the mess, more curious than upset.
Rena just shrugged, wanting for all the world to point a finger at Nor in blame.
“My fault, sir,” Nor jumped in, surprising her. “I startled Sirena.”
If he’d startled her before, it was nothing to the jolt she felt about him knowing her name. How had he gotten that information already, between arriving at school and period 2?
Paul hummed. “Less mouth talking, more hand talking.” And then to Rena he added, “Use it to your advantage. Design into the flaws.” And he was gone again.
Well, how in the Hel– shell was she going to do that? She couldn’t leave it with a hole; something that leaked water defeated the point of being a vase. And sticking the pieces back in the hole would just make it look like Frankenstein’s monster. (They’d read The Modern Prometheus in English in the spring. Rena had found it particularly compelling, commiserating with the monster who just came into existence one day with no background and a lot of confusion). Time for a fresh start. Rena couldn’t wait for one of those herself. Her nails slid under one side to scrape it off the wheel base–
“Don’t!” Nor spoke sharply, though not loud. “Don’t,” he implored again, softer, swinging a leg over his wheel and coming to crouch in front of hers. Without a thought, he grasped her hand and pulled it away, their skin sliding, lubricated by the wet clay. Rena snatched her hand back, glaring, but he missed it, contemplating the corpse that currently could only be called modern art.
“Just because it doesn’t look like a typical vase doesn’t mean it should be scrapped. It’s unique.” ‘Unique’ again. “What you may see as flaws are not imperfections to others, like how a clam feels about a pearl. And lucky for you, clay is malleable. You have the control. Make it how you want, but don’t ever give up on it because it’s not like everything else.” Nor’s voice grew more impassioned throughout his speech, until Rena was sure he wasn’t talking about the vase anymore. He glanced up, blinking away some unknown hardness from his expression.
“Here, like this.” Nor grabbed a piece of spare clay from the dirty puddle in her tray, rolling it between his palms until it look
ed faintly like a short, fat eel. He flattened, scored, and attached each end to either side of the hole, melding the strand to the base. Rena watched, fascinated, as he grabbed another piece and did the same to the opposite side of the column, intentionally adding a hole there with his thumb to match.
He was very good with his hands.
“Handles,” he explained as he worked, “are extremely useful. Now all you need to do is straighten it out.” He reached out for her hands and pulled them to either side of the Leaning Tower of Pisa that would be her new, improved vase.
His palms covered the backs of her hands before she could pull back, pressing them into the clammy clay.
Breathe.
There were calluses on his palms—
Inhale.
—and they were warm…
Slowly.
Rena wanted to pull her hands back. Instead she just sat there, a statue as rigid as the fired pots on the shelves.
Nor ducked his head, blocking her vision of their joined hands, a brow raised expectantly at her, a dark strand of hair flopping across his forehead. When she didn’t move, he shifted his crouch to nudge her foot off the pedal, replacing it with his. His hands gently encouraged hers up the slightly undulating surface, maneuvering the clay back into a vertical position with his added strength.
The wheel slowed to a stop but neither of them moved.
Rena continued to stare at the flesh-on-flesh contact, her heart-rate speeding up in preparation for the inevitable panic attack.
“Perfect,” Nor whispered and Rena darted a glance up to find him staring at her.
Exhale through the nose. Her body didn’t respond.
“Guys.” Paul’s voice rose from a few spots over, interrupting. “Each mind is its own flower. Cross-pollinating contaminates the beauty,” he chastised.
Without another word, Nor pulled his dripping hands away, the cool air conditioning replacing his warmth, and went back to his own flawless piece.
