17
It was the last week of classes. Asta only had the course design presentation left, and then she could focus on the big race tomorrow morning that would determine the final standings of the year.
Asta could feel the eyes of her classmates boring into her as she stood at the front of the room.
Her palms felt sweaty, and her mouth felt dry.
Beside her on the table was the model of her course design, the final project for Mx.
Parsons’s class. The presentation before hers had been constructed from all-white resin components, tricked out with real illusions that sparkled as Kyle and Tassos explained how they had implemented the various theories Parsons had drilled into them that semester: challenge, entertainment, momentum, proportion, and safety.
Asta didn’t know where a person would even buy the model parts the other groups had used, but it hardly mattered.
She wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway.
She had decided to make her model out of the kinds of toys she’d used to build racecourses in her room when she was a kid.
It had seemed like a cute idea at the time.
She’d spent the past week awash in nostalgia, gluing together plastic bricks and placing dragon figurines, purchased from a thrift store in town, into her little scene.
Now, seeing what the other students had done, Asta fought the urge to throw her tacky little racecourse out the window and take the failing grade. She could feel herself blushing from the crown of her head down to her toes.
‘Tell us about your design, Asta,’ Mx. Parsons said. They got up from their desk and bent over Asta’s miniature racecourse. ‘I love how colorful it is.’
This was meant sincerely – Ulli Parsons was the kind of teacher who saw the good in every effort and praised their students with earnest appreciation.
Pikki, who was sitting in the second row, made an incredulous face at the teacher’s compliment and leaned over to whisper something into the ear of her friend.
They both smirked at Asta’s model, then, running their eyes over her frumpy T-shirt and jeans, at Asta herself.
As if Pikki was one to judge. She dressed like a mom with a job at the yarn store.
‘Why don’t you start with the narrative?’ Parsons prompted, retaking their seat at the desk and picking up a clipboard with a blank rubric on it. They crossed their legs and rearranged the fabric of their wide-legged pants so that it did not bunch between their knees.
‘So, the narrative I thought of for this course is “Lost and Found”,’ Asta said.
Pikki scrunched her face at that. ‘What does that even mean?’ Her whisper was not so quiet this time.
‘Pikki, don’t do that,’ Parsons said. ‘Asta listened respectfully to your presentation. You will do the same for her.’
Pikki gave her pastel floral vest a disdainful tug. ‘I thought we were supposed to be critiquing.’
‘It’s not critique if you pan the idea before Asta has had a chance to explain it.’
Asta appreciated Mx. Parsons’s appeal to reason, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Pikki was a jealous, petty asshole who wanted to see Asta fail. That alone restored Asta’s will to nail the presentation. She straightened her shoulders.
‘The Lost and Found narrative begins with an illusion. Just before the flag drops, a woman appears wearing a diamond necklace. She is greeted by a doe, who bows before her.’
Asta placed a small figurine of a milkmaid, along with a toy horse with a somewhat matted mane of plastic hair, near the start.
‘The woman places the necklace around the doe’s neck, and it takes off running, and that’s when the race starts.’
With one hand, Asta moved the toy horse around the first turn, into the terrain, and on to the mountain scramble. With the other, she chased the horse with a plastic dragon figurine.
‘At the peak of the mountain, the deer fragments into twelve doves, which go flying to their positions.’
Asta removed the horse and pointed, one by one, to the twelve positions where she had already glued the little hot pink birds to the model.
‘That’s where the race beacons are, obviously.’
Several of the other students leaned forward to see where Asta had placed them, genuinely interested. Pikki looked as if someone was describing to her the consequences of untreated toenail fungus.
‘The momentum coming off the scramble is utilized through three back-to-back jumps: a three-bar fence, a two-bar fence, and then a fire hedge.’
She ran her toy dragon along the course. There were a few giggles about the fire hedge, the flames of which were represented by the neon orange hair of two beheaded fashion dolls teased upward with hairspray.
‘This is so badass,’ someone said.
‘Is that beacon at the bottom of the trench?’ someone else asked, pointing to a bird under blue cellophane.
‘Yeah,’ Asta said.
The class groaned and exclaimed. Everyone hated dives.
Asta kept going, pointing out the ladders and plateaus, each with their unique challenges.
‘At the top of this scramble, the race goes airborne,’ Asta said.
‘But there’s a twist.’ More groans, a few fascinated murmurs.
‘As soon as the first team passes this beacon, the illusion dove self-replicates, and each team has to chase their own, specific dove through the buoys in a randomized pattern.’
‘Wait, what are the doves again?’ someone at the back of the class asked.
‘Right, so up until this point in the race, doves have just been illusions that mark the stationary beacons on the course, but when the dove replicates here,’ she pointed to the beacon atop the scramble, ‘the copies of the dove illusions get superimposed onto drones that are carrying mobile beacons. That’s what the teams are chasing.
’ Asta spoke fast, excited to reveal what she had learned in her research.
‘Apparently, there is no rule that says a beacon has to remain stationary. So these beacons are flying around. Once a team catches their dove and triggers the beacon, they can move on to the next—’
‘Asta, I’m going to interrupt you for a second,’ the teacher said.
‘Finally!’ Pikki huffed. Parsons shot her a warning look.
‘What you have here is . . .’ Parsons began, a dazed smile on their face, ‘the most imaginative design I think I’ve ever seen.’
Some of the other students voiced their warm agreement. A tightness in Asta’s chest loosened.
‘But,’ Parsons continued, ‘I’m concerned about practicality.’
The tightness was back, along with a wave of nausea. Asta glanced at Pikki’s face. It was radiant.
Parsons stood from their desk and came over to the model. ‘This randomized pattern for the buoys, each team chasing a different dove – it sounds, shall we say, a little chaotic. It might pose some safety challenges.’
Pikki laughed out loud at this.
‘Ms. Lowell, do you have something to add?’ This was meant as censure, but Pikki’s eyes flashed. Parsons realized their mistake too late.
‘It’s just so confusing,’ Pikki sneered. ‘It seems like the whole point of this racecourse is to make sure no one finishes.’ Pikki looked at her friend, who dutifully laughed and nodded. ‘It looks like someone ate the textbook for this class and puked it back up again.’
‘Pikki, that’s enough.’ Parsons smiled sympathetically at Asta.
‘I look forward to reading your report, Asta. What you have here is – well, I don’t even know what to say.
I’m quite intrigued. It does provide a segue into the things we’ll be talking about in Design 201 – in particular, the role that tradition plays in design. ’
Asta took her seat again as Mx. Parsons launched into their lecture, but she didn’t hear a word. Her face was burning, and she could feel her whole body starting to shake. She knew her design didn’t look like a cookie-cutter copy of all the other racecourses out there. She hadn’t wanted it to.
There was one right way to do things here: the Pillar way.The students at Pillar were obsessed with perfecting the skills that Mr. Carle drilled them in, day after day.
Asta missed those afternoons on the Seraphin Estate when she and Felix and Essie and Carmine would go out into the fields and make up challenges for themselves.
They were way harder than anything taught at Pillar.
Some of their more daring moves even had them making contact in the air.
In the Double Decker, as they called it, they flew their dragons in parallel, one right on top of the other, letting the upper dragon actually fold its wings and ride the back haunches of the lower dragon for a second.
Then they would separate and land with the dragons running side by side, sometimes throwing in a synchronized Running Corkscrew for good measure.
Then there was the Ricochet. The Dead Drop. The Escalator. Always something new.
It wasn’t like that here. How many times had she sung along to the school anthem about ‘courage, honor, and integrity’? It was all crap. All they wanted was conformity.
The moment class was over, Asta grabbed her model and wrestled it through the classroom door.
‘Asta,’ a voice called to her. It was Pikki. Two of her cronies lingered behind her like hungry carrion birds following a lion.
Asta debated walking away and pretending she didn’t hear.
‘Sorry if I came off a little strong in there,’ Pikki said, smiling sweetly and shifting her chestnut hair over her shoulder.
Asta could feel her hackles rising. She hated how Pikki could turn her niceness on and off. It was so fake.
‘I just think it’s important that we’re honest with ourselves.’ Pikki waved with her fingers at one of her friends coming out of Dr. Hu’s classroom down the hallway. ‘This place isn’t for everyone, you know what I mean?’
And there went the niceness, right out the window. Two could play at that game.