“I was nervous. Nerves kill my appetite. You know that.”
“Well, you’re not nervous anymore, right? I bet everyone here loves your piece.”
Yeah, if they’re obsessed with the color red, like I clearly am.
She loops her arm through mine again. “Come on. Let’s do one more lap, and then I’m taking you to dinner. That new ramen place on Maple finally opened, and I refuse to try it alone.”
I let her lead me through the gallery. We pass Dorien’s sculpture, and I deliberately don’t look at it. I can feel its presence everywhere, that burnt umber grief reaching out. Reaching toward my painting, which is directly opposite on the other end of the gallery.
Why do they compliment each other so well? I’d rather lose my painting hand than have that be true.
CHAPTER TWO
DORIEN
The studio is mine at six in the morning.
Not technically. Alaria’s sculpture wing belongs to whoever has the keycard and the willingness to show up before the overhead lights have fully warmed. But at this hour, with the corridor dark and the building still preparing itself for the day, the space feels carved out just for me. Fifty feet of poured concrete floor. Industrial shelving against the north wall, cluttered with plaster molds and half-finished armatures. A row of wedging tables along the south wall, their surfaces scarred from years of students slamming clay into submission. The kilns sit in the back corner, dormant, the thick walls holding yesterday’s heat the way old buildings hold sound long after the voices have gone.
I pass the kilns on my way in and the residual warmth rolls over my skin. For half a second, the warmth gets interpreted wrong by my brain and I think of a summer day. The kind of day when you’re too young to know what evil is about to happen. My hands clench inside my gloves, but I keep walking. By the time I reach my table, the feeling has dissolved into the cool studio air and I can pretend it was never there.
I settle into a creaky wood chair and take a moment to myself to just appreciate this space. I’ve been coming in early since the semester started, five days now. I like this new rhythm, because it’s slowly replacing the summer’s silence.
Over the break, I worked in the spare room at my parents’ house. It’s been my “studio” since I was a teen, but calling it that is generous. It’s a third-floor room my mother once agreed to let me use on the condition I cover the hardwood. She’d said it so casually, not even looking up from her phone. “Just throw a tarp down, sweetheart, before you start one of your little projects.”
Yeah,little projects, like I’m a kid doing crafts.
At fifteen, I’d thrown the tarp down and have never picked it back up. I worked there all summer with the windows open and the sound of nothing coming from every other room in the house. My father was in Dubai for most of May, then London, then somewhere he didn’t bother specifying in his texts. My mother followed her own circuit: charity luncheons, spa weekends, a three-week trip to Provence with a woman named Colette that she described as “restorative.” I didn’t ask what was being restored. I already knew the answer had nothing to do with me.
Our family home is four thousand square feet of Italian marble and recessed lighting, every surface polished, every pillow arranged.
I hate that house. There’s a word for it that I learned in an art history lecture sophomore year: a folly. A grand structure built for appearance rather than function. My parents have constructed their entire life that way. They travel because wealthy people travel. They had a son because wealthy people have sons. They hired the best nannies, sent me to good schools, and bought the right clothes, never once understanding that I never wanted material things.
I wanted parents. Bonus points if those parents gave a shit about anything I do, including my art.
My eyes trail along the shelves of student works-in-progress, most clay, some stone and wooden pieces. I’m so happy I’m finally out of that damn house. Moving to the dorms this fall felt like peeling off a layer of something stiff and ill-fitting. Freshman and sophomore year, I’d commuted from that house, arriving on campus each morning carrying the residue of all that quiet. I’d filled the silence the only way I knew how: with confidence and the half-smile I’d perfected from years of practice.
My dorm room is small, with cinder-block walls, a twin mattress, and a desk that wobbles unless you shove a thin book under one leg. The ceiling has a water stain shaped vaguely like a dog. I love it. I love the sounds of other people bleeding through the walls: someone’s music, someone’s argument, the microwave humming at two in the morning.
I stand and move to my own work-in-progress I left on a shelf. I don’t know what it’ll be yet, but the clay is already cut and wrapped in damp cheesecloth from the night before. I pull off my gloves and stuff them in my jeans pocket. Everyone calls them my signature “look” but the purpose has never been style; my hands are always cold. The leather gloves help when I’m not working, but you can’t sculpt in gloves. The whole point is contact. Fingertips reading the grain of the material, finding where it’s dense, where it’s giving, where it wants to go if you’d just stop fighting it and listen.
I unwrap the block and move it to the wedging table. Fold, press, turn. Fold, press, turn. The rhythm grounds me. The clay resists at first, stiff from sitting overnight, but it softens as I work it, warming under my palms until I can feel it yield. There’s a moment in wedging where the material stops resisting and letsme in, and I’ve learned to wait for it instead of forcing past it. I live for that moment.
Once the clay is ready, I move to the smaller table I’ve claimed as mine and get to work. I don’t know what I’m building, just letting my hands work without conscious thought. This piece isn’t for a class assignment or show, just for the pure act of creating.
An hour passes and I’m still alone in the studio.
I take a second to step away and observe. The form is rough, just a base and the start of a torso, the suggestion of shoulders. But I can feel where it’s heading. The angle. The tilt.
Returning to it, I work the neck, drawing the clay upward between my thumb and forefinger, shaping the column of it, and stop.
I stop because I know this shape.
Guess that’s what happens when I let my hands take over.
I’ve been building this form since I started taking sculpting seriously in high school art class. Building it in different scales, from different angles, always halting at the same point: the moment the figure becomes someone. The moment the lifted chin and the slope of the collarbone stop being abstract and start belonging to a specific girl with paint on her jaw and a walk that dares you to be in her way.
I pull my hands back and wipe them on my jeans, not caring about the mess. I stare at the piece on the table. It looks back at me with no face, which is the only mercy.