by Anna Birch
I sigh and slide into the driver’s side instead.
Translation: I’m exhausted from my morning with the esthetician, and I’d like to sleep off the Bloody Mary that’s still in my system before we get back to your dad.
“I’m not doing the Capstone,” I say.
My position has only galvanized between Dusk’s office and Mom’s car: I would be selling my soul to the devil. I’m not ready to count it as my only option just yet.
“We all agreed that the Capstone Award was a part of your outcome goals.” Mom shoves a pair of oversize designer shades onto the bridge of her nose and then cringes. She fans her face with an old church bulletin off the floorboard. “I’ve got the document on my phone—”
“You can’t just stick your kid in therapy because she’s not doing what you want her to do.” I jam the keys into the ignition and start the engine. “That’s literally not even how therapy works.”
Merely surviving versus fully thriving … But only when it’s convenient to the adults in the room.
Mom reclines her seat as far back as it can go and fastens her seat belt.
I throw the car into drive and descend the hill through the fog, stopping to merge onto the frontage road. The traffic doesn’t relent—the fog is thick, and one car after the next flies up with their brights screaming through my rear window.
I have no option: I have to go forward. There’s no escaping, no turning right and finding a back road onto the interstate.
I’m stuck here, with no fewer than twenty cars behind me, and now they’re all starting to blare their horns, waiting for me to merge. Stuck. Always effing stuck.
“Mom—”
“I’m just saying, you did wonderfully in the Ocoee Youth Arts Awards last year. It’s so good for your résumé, and this is your year for the Capstone Award—”
“No.” I breathe through the tightness in my chest. I’m going to pull out in front of one of these wild Atlanta drivers, and then we’re both going to die. “I need you to tell me what to do—”
“Just send something they haven’t seen yet. Surely you have something—” She pulls her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose to peer up at me. “Send them drawing homework. They love you.”
All of the cars are honking now. All of them.
Thirty cars blaring their horns. To my left, the interstate is hemorrhaging midsize sedans. “No, I mean, I need help pulling onto the road—”
“Ugh, Rhodes honey, just wait for a break and then gun it.”
“There are no breaks—”
“Sure there are. Just go.”
Around me, cars all cut each other off. They jump in front of each other, and honk at each other, and fly around each other with middle fingers waving out their driver’s-side windows.
With a deep breath, I throw us into traffic.
Behind me, a car swerves onto the shoulder. The car behind them slams on their brakes, and I hear a telltale metallic crunch three cars back—nothing life-altering, by the sound of it. A second later, the drivers are out of their cars and arguing.
They’re fine by the looks of it, thank God.
“Go!” Mom says.
I rocket off toward the Alabama state line.
I won’t stop shaking until long after I step out of the car.
“Just think about it,” Mom says, oblivious. “Win the Capstone, and the world is your oyster.”
* * *
I-Kissed-Alice 9:55p: Holy crap, update 48 is EXPLODING. Has your phone stopped buzzing at all?
Curious-in-Cheshire 9:59p: My phone’s died three times. I don’t think we’ve ever actually had this kind of a response before.
I-Kissed-Alice 9:59p: The comments are the best part: “It was so authentic.” “I really felt their connection.” “I ship it.”
Curious-in-Cheshire 9:59p: Of course it felt authentic …
I-Kissed-Alice 10:00p: I mean I’m still surprised you used our sexts from the other night
Curious-in-Cheshire 10:00p: Was I not supposed to? I always thought that was kind of the idea
I-Kissed-Alice 10:00p: Oh I mean yeah. Of course.
I-Kissed-Alice 10:00p: It’s the first time you’ve actually used a scene we workshopped like that. It feels a little, like … voyeuristic.
Curious-in-Cheshire 10:07p::(Should I take it down?
I-Kissed-Alice 10:07p:… I like it.
Curious-in-Cheshire 10:08p: I do too
I-Kissed-Alice 10:09p: check your email for the #49 rough draft Curious-in-Cheshire 10:09p:!!
* * *
Comment 1: I-Kissed-Alice 10:44p: what do you think
Comment 2: Curious-in-Cheshire 10:44p: soooo how is therapy going
Comment 3: I-Kissed-Alice 10:44p: that obvious, huh?
SEVEN WEEKS UNTIL THE CAPSTONE AWARD
CHAPTER 5
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire
Last online: 3h ago
The rest of October flew by as fast as the wind could carry it.
In that Alabama way, it was still sort-of-summer until it wasn’t—green, eighty degrees, and sunny one day, blustery and brown the next.
Sarah and I figured things out in that careful, uneasy way we always do.
She doesn’t apologize, and I don’t expect it anymore.
I apologized two weeks ago.
I suppose Rhodes and Sarah made nice as well, but who ever really knows what’s going on with them? Sarah knows better than to bring Rhodes up with me at all anymore, but the fact that they’re tagging each other in memes on social media again seems to be a decent indicator that they’re back to getting along.
Hungover students wander the halls like zombies, armed with oversize sunglasses and nursing neon-blue sports drinks because people say it’s the next-best thing to the proverbial “hair of the dog that bit you.” I didn’t go out for Halloween this year—I didn’t have time. We might have seven weeks left until the Capstone finals, but the project proposal is in five. Our declaration of intent essays are due by “close of business” today, which Mr. Randall says means six p.m.
Close of business can mean a lot of different things when your parents fit pipes for a living. Mom and Dad didn’t know what it meant, either. And for that matter, I had no idea what a declaration of intent essay even was, so while everyone else got drunk and toilet-papered houses in Mountain Brook, I worked my ass off.
We have three weeks until Thanksgiving break, and then a month until Christmas.
Five weeks until the Capstone Award project proposal, if we’re so lucky to be invited, and practically zero hours until our declaration of intent essays are due. Maybe more like eight-hours-and-something, but it feels like zero. I still have no idea if this thing I cobbled together is what the Capstone board is going for, but I don’t have time to start over.
I feel like I’m going to die.
Suffice to say, the energy in the visual arts wing is peculiar.
“No, not midnight tonight,” Mr. Randall is telling Sarah—and probably fifteen others—at the front of the room. “Close of business means six p.m.”
Randall is all tweed and elbow patches because it’s November, even though it’s sixty-two degrees outside because this is Alabama. Somehow, inexplicably, he loves what he does.
A blessing, I guess, because I’ve never been impressed by any of his work.
I lay sprawled on the polished concrete floor of the makerspace—a fancy word for what someone might have just called a studio five years ago—with a large crimson-red sheet of paper just under my nose. A long, narrow L-square—an L-shaped ruler used to draw right angles—lies under my chin, and notches have been scratched into the paper with a white colored pencil in regular intervals. A forest of legs stands around me, students draped over the tables, and standing at the printmaking equipment, and stretched out on the floors wherever they know they won’t get trampled.
I don’t think about the tight quarters when I’m working with the X-Acto knife until I jab
myself in the thumb for the fifty-leventh time. I’m too tired to stand and drag myself across the studio to grab a bandage from my work locker, so I suck on the throbbing, swollen wound instead.
Sketchbooks, large and small, are strewn everywhere.
My own sketchbook is full, but I’d never let anyone else see what’s inside: Rhodes at an angle, with her prominent nose in a stark, almost caricatured contrast to the softness of her mouth. Cubist Rhodes, with her features distorted as if she’d appear in Picasso’s sketchbooks instead of my own. Rhodes slaying Holofernes, anguished and dragging a double-edged sword through Benjamin Randall’s windpipe.
(Randall was not amused by my brief foray into the stylings of Artemisia Gentileschi).
It’s locked away, with the couple pages filled with concept sketches for what’s under my hands ripped from the spiral binding and cast just to my left.
It’s an opportunity to catch up on my DMs from Alice rather than work, and I regret nothing.
I-Kissed-Alice 9:31a: headed to go talk to my advisor next period.
Curious-in-Cheshire 9:31a: fucking yikes
Curious-in-Cheshire 9:32a: did you ask to meet or did he
I-Kissed-Alice 9:33a: he emailed me. Copied mom on it. She has to be there
Curious-in-Cheshire 9:33a: that’s ominous
I have no idea how to tell her how bad this really sounds.
It’s one thing to have scheduled meetings with your advisors. It’s something else entirely when they bring your parents in for it—and it’s rarely anything positive. Not that I’d know from personal experience—my grades have always kept me out of hot water with both the school and my parents.
We’ve purposely never actually discussed where we go to school—internet safety and all that—but I imagine our schools are pretty similar.
She goes to studio art classes like I do and deals with the same kind of asshole faculty advisors. I might have thought she attends the Conservatory, too, except there is no one here remotely like her.
There’s only one Alice, and I’d know her anywhere.
I-Kissed-Alice 9:33a: nah. It’s fine.
I-Kissed-Alice 9:34a: We have these all the time.
“Who are you texting?” Sarah is nothing but a pair of Christmas elf socks peeking out from scuffed Doc Martens when she appears to my left. She drops a bandage onto the screen of my smartphone.
“Where did you find this?” I yank the bandage free from its packaging and wrap it tight enough that the tip of my thumb turns purple.
“I grabbed it from your locker,” she says.
I forgot she knew my locker combination. It isn’t worth the stink to ask her why she was poking around my stuff. Or how she knew I even cut my finger, she’s been on the other side of the room since class started.
It’s easier to tell myself she was just trying to be helpful.
I know Sarah’s hovering over me, but worry brings me back to Alice instead.
Curious-in-Cheshire 9:35a: but your mom was copied on email this time, right? She’s going to be there
I-Kissed-Alice 9:36a: why are you so convinced this is something bad
I-Kissed-Alice 9:36a: quit being negative for christ’s sake
This is bad.
Nervous-craps bad.
Gonna-barf bad.
Sarah nudges the phone from my hands with the toe of her boot. One of the elves on her socks winks at me. “Hello?”
“It’s nobody important.” I stuff my phone under my arm, but my cheeks tell Sarah otherwise. “We have an entire holiday before Christmas. Your socks are literally killing me.”
She gives me a look. “Did you get your essay in for the Capstone Award?”
I’ve been working diligently on the essay every night since the Capstone Award presentation. The topic came to me, clear as a bell: Tarot imagery as archetype. The way such archetypes can be utilized in a creative process, and how each arcana carries its own arc, like a story. I’d been waiting for this all summer, more than I’ve waited for anything else. Not only for the opportunities it would give, but for the message it would send. If I won—when I won—Rhodes would have to see me as a Real Artist. She’d have to acknowledge that I deserve to be at the Conservatory, that I deserve the Capstone, and that art doesn’t have to be soulless intellectual snobbery to mean something to people.
Most important? She owes me this.
I roll over onto my back and peer up into Sarah’s face. My curls scrawl and skitter across the paper. I haven’t sent in my Capstone declaration of intent yet or pitched the proposal—the next step, if my declaration of intent is accepted—but I’m already working on my project for the finals round. I have no idea if the other potential participants have started working on theirs as well, but the idea is apparently entirely foreign to Sarah.
No one worthy of winning is going to wait until two weeks before the finals round to begin working on their final project. Even if I don’t make it in, at least I’ll have created something that isn’t Composition III homework.
“I sent it in yesterday,” I say. This is a lie.
It sits unfinished on my laptop right now, two tables over. The thought of it sends my stomach into uneasy somersaults. I wanted it to be finished three days ago.
How the hell do I know if I’m even doing this thing right?
Why is it so hard to explain this to Sarah, who only ever seems to understand things after they’ve been hand-fed to her like she’s some kind of defenseless baby animal?
I’ll hit send as soon as open studio is over, when I get the chance to finish moving commas around without her looking over my shoulder.
But if I tell her the truth, it will be the same variation of the arguments she’s already made a thousand times:
Let me see what you wrote for your essay. I need ideas.
And
You’re the one that begged me to transfer here with you, so you need to help me keep my grades up.
And
Rhodes believes that formal education only prepares us for fitting comfortably in society’s boring, square pegs, and she lets me use whatever I need because we’re doing the only work that matters in the studio—
And so on and so forth, followed by an entire calendar week of Sarah climbing up Rhodes’s ass and refusing to speak to me until I apologize for hurting her feelings by refusing to let her poach my work. But our eyes meet, with her hovering over me, and there’s nothing nefarious in her features: They’re held open wide and framed by brows arched in question.
“Oh. Okay.” She frowns for a moment, processes, and drops down onto the floor next to me, criss-cross applesauce. “Want to hear a secret?”
“Sure.” I stick my pencil behind my ear and wait.
“Rhodes didn’t send in an essay at all.” Her face is all expectation: She ducks her chin, and crosses her arms, and sort of looks like one of the elves on her socks.
I need to process.
I had heard rumors that Rhodes wasn’t planning on doing the Ocoee Arts Festival at all this year, much less go out for the Capstone Award—she didn’t participate in the informational meeting, even though she’s juried into the Ocoee Arts Festival and has medaled three years in a row. Her silence was super obvious, even to the Ocoee Arts Festival chairwomen who came to give the presentation. Rhodes was meant to be an example for all of us, and she merely watched the whole thing unfold from the balcony.
It sent a message, loud and clear: Rhodes Ingram is too good for the Capstone.
“So, Rhodes isn’t going for the Capstone after all.” Disappointment rings in my voice. I fight the urge to clap a graphite-stained hand over my mouth. “What, are her parents flying her to France for college or something?”
Sarah shrugs.
Her face is still contorted into something sour, but it’s quickly losing its heightened coloring.
“She didn’t say anything to me about France.” She’s oblivious to sarcasm. It sounds like she’s admitting to a crime. “She doesn’t tel
l me anything.”
“So, that’s what this really is,” I say. “You guys are fighting again.”
This back-and-forth with them is exhausting. I thought they were fine.
“Is it fighting if you haven’t really been talking?” Sarah fidgets, picking at the hem of her denim skirt and flicking the hole in her tights with a thumbnail.
“I don’t know. Is it?” I ask.
Rhodes really doesn’t seem to understand what the Silent TreatmentTM does to Sarah. I want so, so badly to tell her I have zero desire to hear any of this.
It’s sixty-two degrees outside, twenty degrees too warm for Sarah’s “winter aesthetic” wardrobe choices. Her hairline is damp around her ears, and her DIY finger-knit scarf lay cast aside across the back of the chair where she sat typing into a computer only moments before.
She hikes her sweater sleeves over her elbows and turns her eyes to the wide, single-pane window past my shoulder.
“Look, about Sylvia’s”—Sarah pulls her bottom lip through her teeth—“just … I don’t know. I’m not sorry for what I said, but I’m sorry for how it made you feel? I don’t know.”
“Wow, some apology,” I say.
Truthfully, our argument hurt more than I would have ever told her.
There’s so much I never say to her. In spite of how used I feel, I’m not saying anything about this, either.
I need her, too. Aside from Alice, she’s all I have.
Personal responsibility is not something Sarah has ever attempted to figure out for herself, though, and it would just become something she put back on me: I’m jealous of her relationship with Rhodes. I’m jealous of Rhodes’s talent. I’m jealous of Rhodes’s opportunities and Sarah’s opportunities because she’s in Rhodes’s orbit.
Still, I need something from her so I can put it all to bed once and for all.
