10. Aeron
CHAPTER TEN
AERON
Visual Studies is on the second floor of one of the older buildings.
To reach the classroom, you have to walk through arched doorways and navigate corridors that swallow your footsteps.
The lecture hall seats about fifty but it’s never full.
There’s a projector screen at the front, and dimmable lights Professor Morrison keeps low enough so the screen is the brightest thing in the room.
Most of the light in here is secondhand, borrowed from the projector and the glow of laptop screens.
But the far right side, where the light doesn’t quite reach, is darker than the rest.
Guess which side I pick.
I’m in the back row, far right, where the dark is deepest and the professor’s eyes are least likely to find me.
My sketchbook is open on the desk. The lecture is about…
I glance at the board. Visual semiotics.
The relationship between signifier and signified.
Professor Morrison is at the front, clicking through slides.
She’s tall and angular, and her dark hair is cut close to her jawline.
She’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses she never pushes up and a black turtleneck tucked into high-waisted trousers.
She dresses like she’s curating herself.
I sigh and focus on my sketchbook. I should probably be paying attention to the lecture, but I’m not. I hate lectures, especially ones I get from my sister.
I turned in a short assignment late—Morrison didn’t even care—and June thought it was a good idea to lecture me about it last night during dinner.
I rarely venture out of my room to eat with everyone at the dinner table, because that’s what happens when I do: my sister nags me.
She acts like I’m too stupid to keep my grades up.
I passed High School with a 2.7 GPA, which was good enough for Alaria. Not everyone has to care about getting perfect scores, but to my sister that’s like a cardinal sin.
June and Cinna are sitting together near the middle of the room because my sister sits where she can see the front clearly and take notes like a person who believes notes will save her life.
Cinna sits beside her because Cinna sits beside June in every class, every room, everywhere.
They’re leaning toward each other, whispering, and Cinna covers her mouth with her hand when she laughs so Morrison won’t hear.
I smile, feeling better from just seeing her so happy.
The projector light catches Cinna’s hair and turns it into this pale gold that’s almost white at the edges.
She’s wearing a light blue sweater, and the color makes her skin look warm even from the back row.
Her profile is half-lit by the screen, half in the dimness of the room, and I can see the curve of her smile behind her fingers.
My pencil is moving before I make the decision to draw her.
Maybe I should be worried about how often this happens, but I don’t care.
My hand just creates her face on the page the way my eyes find her in every room.
I start with the profile: the line of her forehead down to her nose, the soft angle of her chin, the way her hair falls forward when she leans in to whisper.
I sketch the hand over her mouth, the fingers slightly curled.
Then I add the light. The screen glow on the left side of her face, the shadow on the right, the way the bright half seems to be laughing, and the dark half seems to be keeping a secret.
I’d love to know all her secrets. All her thoughts.
Like, what does she think of me?
I remember being twelve when I first wondered that. June had Cinna over on a Saturday, which was normal. They were on the couch watching TV and I’d been napping in my room because I’d been up late drawing. Mom left a sticky note on my door: Cookies downstairs when you wake up.
I really wanted one, so I dragged my groggy ass to the kitchen. But the cookie container was empty.
Mom was at the island doing work on her laptop. I stood there holding the empty container. She looked up, her face pinched in the way it does when she just realized she forgot about me. Her eyes widened, her nose scrunched, and she bit her lip like she’d been caught lying.
“Oh, shoot. Sorry, sweetie, I didn’t make enough. I’ll bake more later.”
She said it while already looking back down at her laptop. I put the lid back on the empty container and stood there for a second, trying to decide whether “later” meant tonight or next week or that vague, drifting “later” that meant never. Then I went back upstairs.
About five minutes passed before there was a knock on my door. I didn’t even get a chance to say “come in” before it opened.
Cinna was standing in the doorway with two cookies in her palm, wrapped in a paper towel.
“I took too many,” she said, holding them out. “These are extras.”
She hadn’t taken too many. Mom just hadn’t baked enough for three kids because she forgot there were three kids in the house. But Cinna said it like it was her fault, like she was correcting her own mistake instead of my mother’s, and the kindness of that lie made my crush even worse.
I took the cookies. She smiled and I felt warm all over. The hallway light was behind her, outlining her in a soft, amber glow, and her face was in shadow but the smile came through anyway.
Her smile always comes through, no matter the lighting or if I’m having a crappy day. That smile makes the world better.
I’m shading her perfect jawline when Morrison’s voice cuts through my concentration.
“Aeron.”
My pencil stops.
“Aeron Belrose.”
I look up and find most everyone in the room glancing back at me.
Morrison is standing beside the projector with her arms crossed, one eyebrow raised above those wire-rimmed glasses.
On the screen behind her is… some painting of a man with fruit in front of his face.
The slide title is too small to read from the back row and I cannot remember a single word she’s said in the last twenty minutes.
“Would you like to share your thoughts on how Magritte uses visual contradiction to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about representation?”
My throat is dry. So many faces are staring at me. I can feel each one of them like individual lights aimed at my table, and I want to slide under the desk and keep sliding until I’m in another building.
“Um.” I close my sketchbook because if Morrison walks up here and sees what I’ve been drawing instead of taking notes, I will transfer schools. “He, uh. He puts… familiar things in unfamiliar contexts? So the viewer has to… reconsider what they’re looking at?”
It’s a garbage answer and we both know it. Morrison holds my eye for a moment, which lasts approximately nine years, then turns back to the class and continues her lecture as if I’d said nothing. Which, effectively, I hadn’t.
Four rows ahead, June glances back at me.
She tries to make it casual, just a quick glance over her shoulder.
But I know that look. It’s the Are you okay?
look. The I’m worried about you look. The look that says she’s going to ask me about this later, probably in the kitchen, probably in front of Mom so I feel even more stupid, probably with that specific tone that makes me feel like a broken appliance she’s trying to fix.
I stare at my closed sketchbook and think back to last Tuesday.
I was on the porch, late afternoon, working on the updated concept for my sculpture piece.
I’d been at it for a while, the sketch eventually getting somewhere good.
I was figuring out how the fibers might attach to the metal armature, whether they should be knotted or looped, and I was deep in it, lost in it, when June came home.
She dropped her bag inside the door and came straight to where I was sitting. She looked over my shoulder. Didn’t ask what I was working on or what I was thinking. Just looked and started talking.
“The proportions on the torso are a little off. If you brought the shoulders in, like half an inch, it would feel more natural. And I wonder if you might try a tighter weave for the fibers. If it’s too loose, it might read as unfinished to a professor.”
She said it like she was actually helping.
Like her years of experience as a painter (two more than mine, not twenty) qualify her to diagnose my work and prescribe treatment.
She never asks what I’m trying to do. She never asks what the piece is about, or why I chose those proportions, or why the weave is loose.
She just sees something she’d do differently and tells me, like I’m supposed to be some carbon copy of her.
Clearly I’m not or Mom would actually notice I exist.
Dorien, who is a sculpture major (not a painter), asked me what the metal underneath was for. He asked if the breaking was the point. He asked about the fibers and listened while I tried to explain something I was still conceptualizing, and when I fumbled, he said, “Both is good.”
His opinion I trust, and he also treats me like I’m my own artist.
June never asks. June tells.
The heat that’s crept up my neck is unbearable. I know my sister means well and her suggestions come from a place of caring, not cruelty. I just wish she would, I don’t know, trust me.
Not everything has to be her way.
Morrison moves on to a new slide. When I’m sure she won’t look at me again for a while, I open my sketchbook to a fresh page.
I start a loose study of the projector light on the far wall, letting my hand move in long, slow strokes, trying to look like someone taking visual notes instead of someone who just got publicly humiliated and is pretending it didn’t happen.
The class ends. I’m packed up and out the door before June can reach me.
I’m in the kitchen getting water when Mom comes in.