by Daryl Banner
“The Showcase.”
I lift an eyebrow, the coffee sitting in front of me growing cold.
“The Showcase,” Minnie repeats, her curls of blue-and-green-tipped black hair bouncing when she nods at me, as if I’m supposed to know what she’s talking about. “What’s your progress?”
“You’re asking about the progress of the piece I’m submitting?”
“Piece? No, pieces. And yes, they’re still due at the end of next month, just before Halloween. You haven’t submitted a damn thing.”
I frown at her. “How do you know that?”
She rolls her eyes. Minnie is a very frail-looking woman, thin to the point of assumed emaciation, and her face is very pointy and angular. Her mad hairstyle of dark curls tipped in a different color of the rainbow each week is so big, it sits like a second head on top of her own. An enormous pair of white-trimmed sunglasses sit in her hair like a mother bird squatting in her nest.
“You do realize I’m chummy with the head of the art school, plus I curate the Showcase myself with Brian, Yuri, and Esmeralda.”
“Esmeralda?”
“Essie. Lord, you are clueless, Nell. What has happened to you? By now, you’d have six things submitted already and working on six more.”
I’m not about to have a conversation with Minnie about Captain Big Dong who has consumed me for the past however many weeks. I’m not going to blame my lack of artistic progress on a budding relationship. Besides, I have made progress. The problem is …
“There’s really only one piece I want them to consider.”
Minnie gawps at me, speechless.
“Seriously.” I fiddle with my coffee cup, annoyed that she questions everything I do ever since she graduated. She used to admire my choices and ask about my inspirations and desires. Now she scrutinizes everything, like I’m her child who needs constant artistic guidance. “I don’t want anything else in the Showcase. I want just the one piece. It’s the most important thing to me.”
Minnie purses her lips, gives a short shake of her head. “That, my friend, is an incredibly arrogant thing to do.”
“It’s not arrogance. It’s selectivity. How would you feel if you submit five inferior works and a sixth work that is your pride and joy, and then one of the inferior pieces gets selected and shown to the whole world? All you are as an artist, all you amount to, all that represents you … is that inferior piece.”
“Or you could be arrogant, putting only one piece in for consideration, and have that one piece not get selected, and then you’re not in the Showcase at all. And you won’t exist to the world.” Minnie shrugs, irritated at me, then pulls a piece off her blueberry muffin. “I really thought I knew you, Nell.”
“No one does,” I huff under my breath.
I’m not sure if she heard me, but she doesn’t react either way. She lets a deep breath in while chewing, then pushes it all out. “Well. Do you at least have … your one piece … ready for submission?”
“Working on it,” I answer vaguely.
“What is it?” she asks, squinting at me suspiciously. “What’s this one amazing piece that’s gonna blow my vagina off this planet?”
“I doubt anything can blow your vagina off this planet,” I tease.
“Try me.”
If I’m honest, I resent that Minnie acts like her opinion has suddenly elevated to a level where her magic eyes are the ultimate pinnacle of artistic judgment. She must think that I’m so lucky to know her, like she’s Klangburg Art School royalty. She’s becoming worse than Renée Brigand. Bitch, I was the one holding your hair every time you bent over a toilet freshman year. Maybe that should be my submission piece. Me, kneeling by the toilet and holding back the curly locks of a friend after her long-awaited party, a turned-over bottle at the foot of the toilet and mascara smeared down her snot-filled, greasy face. I’ll title it: Happy Birthday.
“You’ll see it when I submit it,” I answer.
Minnie studies me with curiosity, her expression softening. “That look in your eyes …”
I lift an eyebrow quizzically.
“The piece is about your father, isn’t it?”
I feel the weight of a cold, heavy brick in my gut. I often overestimate Millie’s intelligence, then seconds later underestimate her intuition. She may not know everything about me, or the specifics as to why my dad is no longer a part of my life, but she knows me. She has seen all my work, and she can distill the truths beyond just what’s on the canvas.
I shake my head. “No.”
She crosses her arms on the table, leaning forward. “Whatever it is, it better be damn good. I want my Nell in the Showcase. I want my Nell front and center. I want the world to know your name.”
Quite suddenly, a flash of Brant’s face crosses my mind, and I hear him say my name. I love the way he says it, the way it comes off his tongue. Nell. He puts so much tongue into it that every time he says my name, I’m drawn to his mouth and I get wet.
Even now, I’m clenching my thighs together, feeling the pressure of need down there. He has a masterful tongue.
This isn’t the best time for these thoughts. I’m getting horny about something completely unrelated to Minnie and the Showcase and what piece I’m going to submit.
Maybe it’s completely relevant. Maybe my piece will be Brant’s tongue and the many, many ways he uses it. To make words. To softly utter names. To tickle earlobes. To suck my hard, pebbled nipples.
To enter me and blow my vagina off the planet.
An hour later, Minnie decides she’s going to stay and visit with some of the professors while I swing around to the School of Theatre. I still feel the cold kiss she gave either of my cheeks as I enter the theater. In the lobby, I pass four students rehearsing a scene—freshmen, if I had to guess—and make my way to the main auditorium.
I push open the doors and feel the frigid wave of air conditioning wash over me. For a moment, I believe I’ve walked into an actual performance, what with the dramatic lighting and actors performing a scene on stage, until I realize there’s no one in the audience.
Except Brant.
And he’s standing up high, precariously balanced with each of his feet on the back of a seat. He licks his lips, aims, then—
Flash.
He looks into his camera, then gives a thumbs up to the stage where I notice Dessie emerge from a crowd of what appear to be fairies or elves. “Very good. Can we get one with just Oberon and Puck? No fairies.” And following her command, the actors on stage disperse to assume a new scene.
Brant, so confident in his awkward balancing atop the backs of those seats, starts bouncing to some song in his head—the endearing way that he does so often—and then he turns his head, as if sensing me.
When our eyes meet, he grins brightly.
I lean against the wall and cross my arms, smiling mutedly back at him, not wanting to break their process.
“Ready!” calls out an actor who looks like a male fairy with a warped, thorny crown made of bramble.
Brant snaps back into focus, game face on, and he raises his camera, readying the next shot. There is something so sexy about watching him work. I love seeing the focus in his eyes. I love the way his arms flex and move when he raises or lowers the camera. Even just the expert way his fingers manipulate his equipment, pressing buttons, snapping and unsnapping little toggles and switches, rotating and focusing and twisting things into perfection.
It’s the care he takes with everything. It’s the attention he gives.
It’s the fierce blue of his eyes and the way his forehead creases with concentration.
He licks his lips. He aims.
Flash.
That’s precisely the imagery that inspires me to take him to the Westwood Light and show him the other side of my weekly routine for the first time. I’m not sure what kept me from bringing him, other than my incessant need to hide the things I most cherish from the world, like I’m afraid that bringing it into light will ruin
it all or taint it somehow. I should have known better where Brant’s concerned. Who knew he’d be so damn good with kids? The second I introduce him to them, he’s right there among them at the short, circular table making doodles on construction paper with every color in the crayon box while they excitedly watch. I was able to procure them some new paints, which two of the girls use to follow along in painting a car similar to the one Brant is drawing. Two of the kids proceed to drive around the room in imaginary Ferraris, gifting us with a chorus of engine hums and vroom-vrooms.
I can’t stop staring at Brant. How can someone change so much in such a short amount of time? Perhaps he hasn’t changed at all, but rather I was looking at him in all the wrong lights. I never saw myself as a particularly judgmental person, but maybe I am.
Maybe I judged Brant too quickly.
It should be noted that he doesn’t stay over at my loft very often. But it’s one Monday morning when we wake up together in my bed that he asks the unexpected question.
I blink. “A whole weekend?”
“Not just any weekend,” he points out. “Halloween weekend.”
Three half-finished papier-mâché ravens stare down at us from the ceiling where they hang by wire. I study one of them, the closest one, and remember the bird costume I wore the last time I ever bothered with festivities. I was twelve. My dad was sober that Halloween.
“Did you have plans or something?”
I look over at him. “What?”
“You went away for a sec. Your eyes. You went into some kind of thought train or somethin’.”
I shrug. I’m not sure I’m ready to meet Brant’s parents. Or maybe it’s that I’m not ready for them to meet me. I don’t know what kind of home life I expect him to come from, but I can’t imagine it’s anything like mine. I bet he woke up to pancakes every Saturday morning.
“There, you did it again.”
I smirk and chuckle away his whining. “Fine,” I tell him, maybe just to shut him up. “Halloween weekend with your family. Wait. Where is your family?”
“About an hour that way,” he answers with a lazy point toward the window. “I’ll take you. I grew up in a suburb on the edge of town. We can head out after our classes next Friday.”
“Next Friday,” I agree, staring at my ravens again and biting my lip.
“Oooh, now I get it.”
I squint at him. “Huh?”
“It’s the End Of Year thingy. You’re worried about it. You still haven’t submitted, have you?”
I sit up, hugging my knees to my chest. “It’s not quite that.”
He brushes against my side, then rests his chin on my shoulder. “Wanna tell Brant? Brant can make ya feel all better.” He kisses my neck lightly. “I can take it all away, whatever it is.” He kisses just behind my ear, casting goose bumps down my neck and side. “Just tell me whose ass I gotta kick. And I’ll do it, provided he’s not seven feet tall. I mean, I could probably take him, but like, y’know, uh …”
“I don’t need you to kick any ass. I need you to … kiss an ass.”
“Kiss?”
“My ass.” I turn my face, my nose tapping into his, and I smirk smugly at him. “Kiss my ass, Brant.”
He quirks an eyebrow. “You’re into that?”
I pounce on him, inspiring a grunt of surprise that quickly turns into a moan when my lips crush into his.
An hour later, the heavy door has shut after his departure and I’m rinsing out the mugs we drank our coffee from. He takes it black like I do. The faint scent of his cologne—or body spray or soap or hair product or something—still hangs in the air and torments me. My bed smells like him too.
And so do my own clothes, from the hours he snuggled me in the night and snored softly by my ear.
Later when I’m looking at my submission for the Showcase, I realize I’m growing increasingly concerned about how awful it feels whenever he leaves. Even if I know I’m going to see him again on campus in a few hours. Even if I know he’ll be back tonight. Even if I know I’ll be going away with him for a whole weekend.
No matter what, I feel a piece of me collapse inside every time he leaves the room. I feel like I’m missing something after his departure.
I feel wounded.
I’m very alarmed by this emotion and I have nowhere to put it. I can’t even turn it into anything artistic. It just … exists.
I stare at my submission piece. It exists, too. I knew from the start what I wanted to show, and it’s the only piece I can. The enormous canine stares straight at me with his big, well-meaning eyes. His head is beastly big and his teeth shimmer with saliva, bared in a way that could inspire nightmares in children.
But he never inspired them in me. He was my hero. He kept me safe.
He growled and barked when my dad had one too many and raised his voice. He snapped his teeth when my dad punched the wall instead of me or Mom.
It’s so odd, that my dad never laid a finger on either of us, even in his drunken fits. It was always the nearest available object, or wall, or pillow. It’s really difficult to look at that and see the redirected anger as an act of compassion.
“You know I love you, sweetheart,” he’d tell me every morning, even when he couldn’t remember what he’d done or said the night before. “You’re my little Penny.”
It’s so hard to see that as love.
I can still hear Dog growling if I close my eyes tight enough and listen for my dad’s furious shouting.
And here I am, yet again, submitting my childhood canine for judgment. Dog will once more be studied by a bunch of snobby higher-ups in the art department, including some grad students, the joint heads (or should I say Queens?) of the department, and even Minnie. The longer I stare at my work, the more naked I start to feel … more and more naked, until it’s me cuffed to that platform in the gallery instead of Brant—with a gag in my mouth, having become my own Object—and I feel the people staring at me and marveling over what I represent, over what I am, over who I am.
You don’t know what I represent.
You don’t know what I am …
Or who I am.
I hear my dad’s shouting the longer I stare at the dog and his big, bright eyes as he waits for me to rub his ears and throw the ball across the room. Those big, wet, beastly eyes …
And who am I?
The feeling of abandon when Brant leaves eats at me from within. And this submission piece eats at me from the outside.
One of them has got to go.
I swipe the hammer from off my workbench, lift it up high, and club my piece over the head. I do it over and over as my dad’s shouts ring through my ears. I don’t stop swinging until the whole head falls off intact, slamming into the floor with a heavy, resolute thud.
My dad’s shouts have died away.
I breathe slowly until I’m calm again.
Now, my submission piece is ready.
Chapter 19
Nell
One week turns into two, and then Brant is waiting for me outside my complex in his small blue pickup. He leans against the side with his arms crossed, sporting a form-fitting plaid shirt and jeans that are all distressed at the thighs. He looks so clean and dirty at the same time. When he lifts his head, his eyes shimmer and glow in the afternoon sunlight.
“That all you got?” he asks when I approach, opening the door for me as I slip into the cab.
“I pack lightly,” I answer.
He gives me a crooked smile, then shuts the door and comes around to the driver’s side. “You look really pretty,” he tells me before shutting his own door, his eyes going down to my breasts.
I picked a simple black top that hugs me, paired with the only pair of blue jeans I own. I figured if I was going to meet Brant’s parents, I should probably not go with my whole all-black thing I normally do in front of people I’ve never met before. I imagine Brant’s roommate Dmitri and I would have a lot of chromatic overlap amidst our wardrobes, considering how much blac
k and grey he wears.
Brant twists a knob, flipping through the radio stations as he eyes me. “So, like … you still wanna do this, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, you can still back out. My parents can be a bit much, and … well, I guess it should go without sayin’, but—”
“Having second thoughts about introducing me to them?”
“No, no, no. It’s more, uh … I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. Get me?”
I smirk. “Doesn’t seem like I’m the one who’s uncomfortable.”
He bites his lip. “Alright. Fair enough. It’s just that I … never, uh—”
“Never take girls home?”
He lands on a station, then looks up at me with a grave expression. “It’s been … a long time.”
“Like, last year Theatre gala long?”
“More like freshman year of high school Sadie Hawkins dance long.”
“Yikes.”
“They might be a tiny bit overexcited and weird and, like, cook you things and interrogate you and stuff.” His face is already going red and he’s not even pulled the truck into drive yet. “Just try to ignore it and play cool if you can.”
“Ignore your parents’ hospitality? That would be rude of me,” I return with mock offense.
“Hospitality? Alright, babe, if that’s what you call it.”
I eye him for the term of endearment, which he clearly said to annoy me judging from the crooked grin on his face as he pulls out of park and takes off.
We enter the interstate and cross through the dense downtown, dodging buildings that tower over the highway and sandwich us on either side. When the city passes by and becomes another shrinking thing in the rearview, the highway soon grows narrow until we exit and rip down a few streets at a speed I presume to be well over the limit. The cookie-cutter houses line the road now with neatly-trimmed sidewalks on either side shadowed by homely trees.
It’s at 702 Barkley Lane that he draws to a stop by the curb. Brant takes a deep breath in, then lets it out all over the steering wheel, his eyes popped wide open as he stares at his hands.
He is clearly tense and unprepared for this. Maybe he is having second thoughts.
