by Anna Birch
“Well, darn.” Kiersten pushes the cart to stop only inches away from where Griffin, Rhodes, and I sit on the floor. “I figured we’d be the only ones to think of getting here early like this.”
“You overestimate your own basic intelligence, Kiersten,” I say.
Sarah flusters, but Kiersten only feigns injury.
“I’m surprised y’all are even here,” Sarah says. Kiersten shoots her a warning look, but Sarah keeps going. “The board sent out an email. Everyone knows about you, Rhodes. I’d think you’d be embarrassed.”
“You make no sense, Sarah.” Rhodes twists her hands into the hem of her sweater. “Why are you acting like I did something to you?”
Kiersten shoots Sarah another careful look.
“Well, girls, let us know if we can help y’all with anything.” Kiersten’s eyes drift to me, for just a moment, and she remembers to smile. “Let’s grab dinner later, yeah?”
Rhodes doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything.
Kiersten and Sarah push past us without another word, through the double doors behind us, and out onto the terrace. When Sarah turns back to glance at us over her shoulder, her expression isn’t haughty anymore. She looks small, and tired, and sad, and it occurs to me that maybe Rhodes is right to believe in the goodness of people.
I’m glad I never told Rhodes my theory about Sarah, because everything in her now tells me that I would have been wrong. She’s been angry with me hundreds of times before, but never in her life has she done anything to try to actually hurt me.
“I think we know who screwed us over,” Rhodes says.
“Kiersten,” I say.
Griffin stows his phone in his back pocket, stands, and picks up a box. I push my fingers through my hair and stuff my tarot cards back into my bag.
Our saboteur could have never been anyone else.
* * *
The second phase of Rhodes’s plan is, of course, brilliant.
“They’re still your tarot cards,” she whispers from the base of a nine-foot ladder. “They can’t disqualify you for not displaying what you pitched. They might be wrinkled up and covered in ink, but they’re still beautiful.”
“I can’t believe you thought of this,” I say. I’m at the other end of the ladder, straining as high as I can go to hook humble paper clips into the metal framework over our heads, a part of the wide tent pitched in Frist’s sprawling courtyard. We’ve laced thin metal wire through the clips as if we’ve laced a pair of shoes, and from here the tarot cards will hang to move with the breeze.
My corner of the tent is small, and placed unceremoniously between sweeping, technically difficult paintings of the Tennessee Valley, but it’s perfect. A corner was exactly what I needed for this to work.
“I got the idea after the ink on the paper-cut cards had finally dried. They were scattered across the studio table like autumn leaves, all crunchy-looking and fragile. It wasn’t hard to imagine them falling in showers from the trees.”
I climb down from the ladder, one rung at a time. Rhodes is there when I finally reach the bottom, with her hand pressed against the small of my back to steady my balance. I can still feel the warmth there, even after her touch falls away.
“It’s genius,” I say. “If I somehow win this because of your idea—”
“I’m not just doing this for you—this is for me, too.” Rhodes glares across the tent, where Kiersten unpacks a series of canvas frames mounted in hand-dyed oranges and pinks. “She did this—I know it. You have to beat her, for the both of us.”
“I’m going to do everything I can,” I whisper. “It’s all I have left, too.”
CHAPTER 27
RHODES
Username: n/a
One of these days, it won’t take my life to be dumped over like a basket to figure out what it is I want. Every change in my life has come with so much upheaval, it’s almost like I’ve only ever had to take myself apart and put myself back together because I was broken, not because of anything I ever wanted to achieve.
Everything I had six months ago is gone now: my relationship with the Ocoee Arts Festival.
My relationship with Cheshire.
My friendship with Sarah.
The fallout doesn’t stop there, though: I haven’t known how to even speak to my mother since June was let go from the arts festival and I was disqualified. Her meddling is what has brought me here, and her meddling is what took it away from me. It feels abusive, to have something forced into your hands and then have it snatched from you.
The condo is quiet. Griffin is asleep, and Iliana is—I don’t know—taking a shower, or texting her friends, or reading her tarot cards.
I step outside onto the balcony and find where Iliana has been all along.
I’ve always associated her with motion—if her curls aren’t vibrating with frenetic energy, she’s pacing. She’s moving and talking and bitching and stretching, and she never sits still, ever.
But tonight, she’s curled up tight into the corner of a wicker couch.
She’s perfectly still, and awe glows warm in some kind of aura around her.
The Gulch stretches below our balcony, wild with activity: Christmas is only a few days away, and thousands of people mill around the sidewalks like a colony of ants.
The air is dense with ideas, the thoughts of thousands of people blooming up like steam from the streets below.
This feels closer to where I’m meant to be than I’ve been in months.
Maybe Griffin was right: Sweet, simple, and socially acceptable isn’t where I am anymore.
“This place is wild,” Iliana says. She’s bundled under coats and sweatshirts and jeans over leggings, but she’s still shivering with cold. “Is this, like, your parents’ vacation place?”
“Mom works in Nashville during the week.” Iliana holds out the seven-layer blanket situation across her lap, and I take a seat next to her on the couch. “It was cheaper—and safer—for Mom and Dad to get a second place than for Mom to commute from Birmingham every day.”
“Is your mom, like, a businessperson?”
“Investment banking,” I say.
The barely functional drinking is only the tip of the iceberg with Mom. There’s also a rich boyfriend that Dad doesn’t know about, and a cover side-hustle writing code, to explain where the money for the condo the boyfriend’s funding is coming from, and more than likely more debt than Satan himself.
Even if it’s beginning to feel like Iliana and I have been friends for years, I don’t know if I’m ready to say any of this out loud.
I told Cheshire once. Ultimately, I couldn’t trust her, either.
“Ah.” She says nothing else.
I have no idea what she thinks about me.
Iliana’s hair is an unholy mess, and she isn’t wearing any makeup. She watches the world fly by with the same kind of quiet awe that I only felt moments before.
Everything about her demeanor is a version of Iliana I only knew existed because Sarah swore it did: Her body language is casual, if a little nervy-twitchy, and her shoulders are relaxed back into the couch cushions. It never occurred to me that nervy-twitchy might be baseline for her, that she might worry about anything.
Maybe this—the lights and the sounds and the hustle—is what Iliana wants too.
“I don’t want to be a fine artist anymore. I want to be an illustrator,” I whisper. “I want to be a comic artist.”
Never in a hundred million years would I have thought Iliana would be the first person with whom I’d tell that piece of truth.
That’s its own kind of coming out, admitting something big and scary to myself out loud.
I’m relieved.
I ache with the honesty of it, and I fear for what it will mean for my future.
Iliana has no poker face. She brightens, for a moment, eyes wide and shining, and then she pulls it all back in again. The expression she seems to be going for is “blank but interested,” but with the way her brows
are furrowed together, she only looks confused.
“That would be a … departure,” she finally says.
“Yeah.” I stare out into the night. It’s not hard to picture the street like I would illustrate it, lines and angles and splashes of neon against indigo.
This could be one of the worlds Cheshire and I never explored in the Hearts & Spades universe, an entire planet overrun with steel and concrete.
“A lot would change, actually,” I say. “I’d need to change a few things with Randall on my schedule—I’d need to take another illustration technology class and drop Drawing III. I’ve gotta figure out how to get my grades back up.”
“You can do it, though.” Iliana shifts a little closer. “My brother bombed his last year of high school, then went to junior college for a year before he transferred to University of Alabama. It took a little longer, but he’s a lawyer now.”
“I know. It’ll be harder, though—Mom hates the idea of me doing something like graphic design or illustration.”
“What? Why?”
“She says if I’m going to be poor, I might as well do something that people will celebrate after I die.” I shrug. “If I’m doing apprenticeships in Paris and Italy, and fellowships at galleries here, maybe I will make a name for myself and the money won’t matter.”
“Wow…” Iliana balks for a moment. “There’s so much wrong with that. She only cares if you’re poor as long as she can be proud of you.”
“I think she just wants to make sure I can take care of myself,” I say. “I think she thinks I don’t understand how the world works, or that living costs money.”
“Says the woman who’s paid hand over fist to break every rule in the way of you doing what she wants.” Iliana frowns. “My family is broke. Like, flat broke. My brother was the first person in our family to go to college, then the first person to go to grad school, now the first person to work in an office for a living. People who are born poor are more likely to die poor. So much of having money or being poor is about who your parents are, and their parents, and their parents, all the way back as far as it can go.”
It’s like a lightbulb clicks on over my head, and guilt tugs at the smallest corner of my heart.
I’ve misunderstood so much about Iliana—and Sarah, too.
Sarah grew up three houses down from Iliana, and I’ve always been acutely aware of how much less was available to her, compared to Iliana’s family. I’ve never tried to understand, only judged.
I’ve been so unfair.
“I want to show you something,” I say. My hands are shaking.
I’ve never shown anyone this, other than Griffin. It feels right, though.
If anyone will understand, I’m realizing that it will be Iliana Vrionides.
I lean forward to grab my tablet from the glass coffee table in front of us, and arctic cold hits my back. I don’t have my Slash/Spot account anymore, but I archived the original files for my Hearts & Spades panels in my cloud storage. I tap open the most recent panel, my best work.
Iliana’s eyes soften. She shakes her head a little, pinching and dragging the screen with her fingers to study the image more closely.
“You should be a comic artist,” she says. “I can’t believe you learned how to do all of this yourself.”
“When you’re passionate about something, all of that research and practice doesn’t matter.”
Iliana looks up from the screen in her hands. She leans back against the couch and rests her elbow between our heads. For a moment, I think she’s going to reach between us to caress my cheek.
I’ve never considered what it would feel like for Iliana to touch me like this.
“Ever since the argument”—she pauses to swallow—“I’ve regretted everything.”
She’s right there, close enough to touch.
I could touch her.
I could kiss her.
It never occurred to me before now, but Iliana has controlled every interaction we’ve ever had up to this point: She has initiated, and I’ve reacted, over and over again. She could have touched me just now. She was thinking about it. For whatever reason, she chose to do otherwise.
I reach between us the way Iliana did only moments before, but I don’t hesitate. I run the tips of my fingers along the constellation of freckles that sweep over the bridge of her nose and along her cheeks, then thumb one pierced earlobe
Iliana’s lashes flutter. Her mouth forms a perfect O, and she goes deathly still, as if I am some kind of rare butterfly landing on her shoulder.
If she doesn’t move, I won’t fly away.
Her skin is softer than I imagined, if a little blemished. There are scars, and pockmarks, and freckles, and a hundred other things I’ve never noticed before tonight, because I’ve never just looked at her.
“It felt good arguing with you like that,” I whisper. “I mean, it was always going to come to that, right? From the first day we met, I knew it would come to that one day.”
I expect indignation when I meet her eyes. The expression I find doesn’t have a name.
“It didn’t have to.” Iliana’s eyes redden. She doesn’t cry, but she looks like she could. “Sarah was completely infatuated with you. From the first time y’all met, I didn’t know if she wanted to be you, or sleep with you, or follow you to the ends of the Earth.”
“You’re her best friend.” Was her best friend? Past tense? I don’t even know anymore. “You were little girls together. What makes you think I’d ever hold a candle to that?”
“Because you’re everything.” She pulls her bottom lip through her teeth. “When she met you, she looked at me and said, ‘You wouldn’t believe her. She’s, like, a real artist,’ and that sounds so absurd but, like—what am I? You have everything in the world at the tips of your fingers. You have access to things that I’d never be able to give her.”
I can’t believe what I’m about to say.
I believe it with every fiber of my being, and maybe I always have.
The night is weird. The lights are dim.
I push a gingery-blond lock of hair out of Iliana’s face.
“You were enough,” I say. “You are enough.”
Iliana’s small, round palm cups my throat. Her fingers splay into my hair, and her thumb grazes the curve of my ear.
My pulse is a fractious thing, and now Iliana knows it. It’s like the world has gone from black and white to color all of a sudden, like the inside of my brain is nothing but prisms and refracted light. When I touch her again, I know it’s the wave of a white flag.
“Rhodes, I, uh, wanted to tell you—”
I fumble forward. It’s awkward, but somehow I don’t think to be embarrassed.
We bump foreheads; our noses brush. I laugh a little. We inhale.
I pull her closer by the cheeks, by fistfuls of hair, and I finally find out what it takes to make Iliana Vrionides stop talking.
She kisses just like she speaks, honestly and earnestly. But if this is the case—if she kisses the way she does everything else—then there are parts of Iliana I’ve never even seen before. I’ve found a part of her who knows how to be slow, careful around the parts of me that are still sore and broken. A part of her that might be shy about getting what she wants.
I want her to know me, too.
I pull her close under the blanket. I’m the one to deepen our kisses, to let my hands wander, to pull her bun loose and let her hair fall wild around her shoulders. She pushes me backward until my head pops against wicker. Iliana’s laugh is soft and deep, and she runs a hand through my hair to cradle my head against the hard side of the couch.
I thought I would be afraid.
I’m not afraid.
Around us, the entire world breaks into a million pieces and comes back together into something entirely different.
Grif.ingram 12:17a: well
i.vrionides 12:17a: well what
Grif.ingram 12:17a: did you tell her
i.vrionides 12:
18a: what do you mean ‘did I tell her’
Grif.ingram 12:18a: did. you. tell. her.
i.vrionides 12:18a: I didn’t really have the chance.
Grif.ingram 12:19a: are you kidding me? I’ve been hiding in my room all night to give y’all ~space~. Why the eff do you think I disappeared?
i.vrionides 12:19a: I tried.
Grif.ingram 12:19a: How do you just ‘try’? literally it’s maybe three sentences strung together.
i.vrionides 12:19a: I’m going to tell her
Grif.ingram 12:19a: You can’t keep going like this. I think she’s really starting to like you.
Grif.ingram 12:20a: how could you start something with someone with that kind of secret hanging between you? Jesus
i.vrionides 12:20a: wow condescending much
Grif.ingram 12:21a: this is serious, ok? I didn’t want to be like this, but she’s my sister so I’m more worried about her than I am you.
Grif.ingram 12:21a: you need to tell her tomorrow, or I will.
Grif.ingram 12:21a: if she finds out I knew and she didn’t, she’ll never speak to me again
Grif.ingram 12:21a: neither of us want this, ok?
THREE HOURS UNTIL THE CAPSTONE AWARD
CHAPTER 28
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire
Last online: 4d ago
Almost three years ago, as a freshman, I handed an Alabama Conservatory for the Arts and Sciences pamphlet to my parents across the dinner table. It was an invitation to the graduating art track’s senior show, carefully scheduled two weeks before the school’s portfolio deadlines to audition for the visual arts program the following school year.
They humored me, because they knew that saying no would boil down to the kind of obsession I’d never shake for the rest of my life. I’d never forgive them, and it wasn’t worth the drama.
We went, a week later. I didn’t know a soul, and I’d never met the teachers that would eventually become inimitable figureheads in the growth of my craft as an artist. I wandered the cavernous second-floor gallery with my dad trailing behind me, but I wasn’t there to see the art—not really.
