Chapter 7
seven
GRANT
Locke is confronting Liliana.
Well, he might be. Confronting, ordering a drink—they could be the same thing. He could be interrogating her about our non-existent project in between requests to froth his almond milk.
Tonight is one of the few times I decided not to sit at my window seat, choosing a two-person table instead. It doesn’t have the Boston scenery, but this angle is even better to glance at Liliana during the last moments of her shift.
Her hair is pulled into a ponytail, tied with a pastel yellow ribbon in the same shade of the daffodils littering her dress.
She taps something into the tablet and smiles up at Locke, passing his card back.
It’s polite, but unlike the smiles and throw-her-head-back laughs I distinctly remember from our undergrad days.
The grin she gives Locke is all customer service.
A tiny part of me grinds at the scene of him getting one of those smiles, though.
I can’t say I’m totally upset he’s here.
I guessed he would spy on me. Running into him again makes my lie look more believable, and it means I have proof he’ll come back.
Reasons to see Liliana next week to maintain my story.
I’d want to see here outside of this context, too, where we’re not tethered to schoolwork and cafés.
From the passenger seat of my car again. Under the Boston streetlights. Standing in the middle of an art museum, where she’s surrounded by pieces as beautiful as her.
I occupy myself with my sketchbook to get out of those thoughts. They’re frequent daydreams, and have been since the day we met, but I can’t expect them to become reality if I don’t earn her trust back.
I focus on tracing out the stems across the page instead and ignore the café doorbell ringing.
“I’ll take it he’s not a friend of yours?” Liliana pulls me out of focus a few minutes later.
“Not necessarily.”
She delicately places her bag on the table and takes the seat across from me. “Are you going to tell me who that is, and why we need to be seen together like this?”
My nose turns up. Locke isn’t many things to me. A distant relative, if I had to classify him as anything at all, but not important by any means.
He’s also the last topic I want to be discussing with Liliana, who I’ve decided to make my main priority. This started with deceiving Locke, but it’s more than that now. Memories of everything gone wrong between us flooded back once she mentioned our final.
The emotions that took over me that week. The way I locked myself into my room. Results that followed, with failed grades and lonely drinking nights in the quiet of my apartment.
The fact that I left her hanging there with no explanation and no back-up plan.
Our positive memories are what I’ve clung to. I selfishly pushed our one negative experience out of my mind.
I’m glad she brought it up. I deserve it. After spending so much time together, getting as close as we did, she should feel angry towards me. And I’ll take full responsibility.
I’ll take responsibility for earning my way back into her life, too. I intend to get back into Liliana’s good graces and prove I’m worth her time. I want to explain myself to her. I need Liliana to know I could never forget a girl like her.
“If I tell you who he is, will you let me explain what happened the day of the final?”
Her face falls instantly. When she walked over, it felt casual, like we were friends. But her back straightens at my words, and we’re back to being two acquaintances, if that.
“No.” She waves her hand, light purple nails flailing around. “I told you. The assignment is too important. We need to focus on that.”
My lips press into a thin line. It’s her I think is important, not the assignment.
But if that’s what she cares about, I’ll commit myself to it, and work my way to a point where she’ll want to hear what I have to say.
“Okay.”
The textbook I’ve rarely paid attention to until last week ends up on the table between us. I hadn’t gotten anywhere past page ten prior to a few days ago, but since reading through it, neon flags and sticky notes scatter the pages. “I did some reading-”
She laughs, small and quiet, but I catch it immediately. “You can read?”
It’s sudden. I’m not sure if she realizes the lighthearted nature of it, but I chuckle. This, and the impromptu vocabulary lesson from our library meeting, are the closest it’s felt to how we used to be. Poking fun at one another because we’re comfortable, and we can.
“Yes, I can read. And what I read was pretty interesting stuff. Kinda happy I had an excuse to open the book.”
“Your assigned reading wasn’t enough of an excuse?”
“Not really. I kind of just get a vibe of what goes together after a while.” I shrug. “Trying to shove it into my brain doesn’t work for me.”
She snickers, lowering her voice to barely audible mumble. “Must be nice.”’
My lips tug into a frown. The shock from her revelation on Friday still hasn’t fully worn off.
I’ve met a lot of people throughout college.
Pretentious art students who care more about analyzing the pain of a dead artist are some of the most unbearable.
They have one personality trait, and that’s proving themselves right at every turn.
Liliana is beyond them and everyone else I’ve met. No one comes close to matching her wit or ability to problem-solve. She was the smartest student in class and is probably the most intelligent person I’ve ever met.
More importantly, despite being on a different level than everyone else, she never seemed to center her attention on making others feel small. She uplifted herself and her skills without belittling others. Watching her shine never knocked me down a peg. It only made me admire her more.
To find out she’s failing a class—a writing class, at that—was almost too shocking to believe.
“That’s what we’re here to work on, isn’t it?” I spin the book to face her. “There’s a lot of stuff in here I think you could use. Depending on what you need to work on.”
She pauses, then sighs. “Everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everything.” She focuses on the chapter I opened to, one about finding inspiration in nature. Her voice is flat and defeated. “I have to figure out everything.”
It’s another shock through my system. The Liliana I knew had every detail of our work planned out in advance, with colored stickers and gel pen marks organizing every thought.
Planning a story and wringing out the details sound like the part she would be best at, and yet, she claims to have nothing.
“You don’t have a rough idea? Details, at least?”
Papers are pulled out of her bag, lining up next to her agenda and pencil pouch.
“We started off by creating an outline. This is mine, but I need to start over.”
I can’t read the words from this angle, but I see the maroon ink in the margins that must be peer comments. Liliana would never use a color that dark.
“Alright, so you have something.”
“Not really. I wrote an outline… Or a few. And I didn’t get great feedback.” The nail polish on her fingers start to get chipped at. “Everything came back negative.”
“So, you did start.”
I go to reach for the paper, but her hand quickly slams onto the pages. “Well, yeah. But it’s not good.”
“Says who?”
I wait for her to pull her hand off. She doesn’t move.
“Other students in my cohort.”
“Fuck them.”
Her shoulders loosen for a second while she laughs, and the moment becomes my favorite part of today. “My classmates know what they’re talking about, Grant. And my work is bad.”
I roll my eyes. “And if they’re such good writers, what did they come up with, then?”
Liliana tenses again, her palm pressing down into the paper. “One of them is writing a story about two star-crossed lovers from the 1600s being reborn, with one love interest having all their memories intact and the other being oblivious to their past. My stuff isn’t even half as good.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.”
“I’m serious.” She sits back into her chair, letting the red stained paper free. “The best outline I came up with was about two people who meet at a party. I got a comment saying I should be more serious if I want to be in the writing program.”
Anger for her rises in my chest and I scoff. “That’s not even feedback. It’s just mean. I didn’t realize writers had snobs in their classes, too.”
It’s as if she doesn’t hear a word I’m saying. She waves her hand dismissively.
“They majored in literature. They know better. The outline was horrible.”
“It’s not so black and white. If I listened to everything people have said about my art, I wouldn’t be pursuing it.”
Liliana opens her mouth but quickly closes it without saying anything.
My high school art teacher told me children’s illustration was a career for artists who aren’t good enough to make it in other spaces. She didn't teach me much about actual technique, but from her I learned that labelling yourself as an artist doesn’t mean you have the heart of one.
From how Liliana’s entranced by her own work, carefully scanning over what she’s written and how it’s perceived, I know she has heart. Fine arts aren’t for the weak. You don’t go into a master’s program you don’t care for.
Everything I’ve gathered about Liliana, in the context of our classes and project, comes to mind. She’s holding herself so close to structure that she’s distancing herself from her creativity.
“There is no right or wrong way to create art. Just because they tell you something is bad, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Use whatever outline you want.” I motion towards the papers she glances at like they’re about to jump at her.
“And rely on your own creativity to take you to the end. Throw out the rules.”
“That’s the whole point of a rubric.”
“Rubrics were made to evaluate someone’s ability to listen, not to create. Do you think Beatrix Potter followed a rubric when she created Peter Rabbit?”
“What- I’m sorry, who?”