11. Dorien
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DORIEN
She pulled out my wires.
We’re back in Mixed Media for our last workday before critique, and June pulled out the wires I had in place last class.
She took the piece home to work on it and wasn’t supposed to fuck with the wires.
Each one has been pulled free and rewrapped in tight, controlled loops that hug the canvas like a fist closing around it.
The crayon work is done, I’ll give her that. She melted color through the back the way we discussed, and it bled beautifully into the front, staining the acrylic in these uneven blooms of orange and red. The color work is excellent.
But the wires. My wires.
As we’re sitting at our table and she continues to mess with it, I rub my temples.
I’d left space between the wires on purpose.
The gaps mattered. They let you see through the structure to the painting beneath, and they let the canvas breathe between the copper lines, so the viewer’s eye could move freely from flat surface to three-dimensional form and back.
The openness was the whole point. That was where the conversation between our two pieces lived, in the space between them.
And she just… what a nightmare.
It now looks like a painting wearing a cage, which was not the vision I thought we’d agreed on.
“You changed the wires,” I say, trying not to sound immediately defensive.
She pulls a sketchbook from her bag and doesn’t look up. “I adjusted them.”
“You pulled them completely out and rewrapped them.”
“They were loose.”
I yank off my gloves and rub my temples harder. I can’t remove the bite in my tone. “They were supposed to be loose.”
She finally looks at me and sighs. Her jaw is set the way it gets when she’s already decided she’s right and the conversation is a formality. “They looked unfinished, Dorien. Like you forgot to tighten them.”
“I didn’t forget anything. The spacing was deliberate.”
“Well, it didn’t read as deliberate. It read as sloppy.”
I press my tongue against the back of my teeth and count to three.
Around us, our classmates are getting to work, taking advantage of this time to finalize their projects for next week.
The tall windows let in gray September light that flattens everything it touches.
Professor Whitman is at the front, sorting through a stack of papers, probably enjoying that she doesn’t have much to do this class.
“We talked about this,” I say, fighting to keep my voice level. “We sketched the layout together. You took the canvas home to do the crayon, and that was the plan. Crayon on the back. That’s it. Were you, I don’t know, drunk?”
She crosses her arms and gives me an edgy frown. “I did the crayon, obviously. And it looks amazing. I also fixed the wires because they needed fixing.”
“They didn’t need fixing. You just decided they did and you didn’t even talk to your collaborator first, which is me. Did you happen to forget this is a joint project?”
She gives me a slow, uninterested, stubborn-as-hell blink. Cadmium yellow is dried on her right index fingernail. “I’m not going to leave a piece looking half-done just because you’re clingy about the negative space.”
“I’m a sculptor. The negative space is the piece.”
“And I’m a painter. The surface matters.”
We stare at each other across the worktable. The canvas sits between us with its tightened wires and its bled-through crayon; apparently a battleground we’re both going to die on.
I could keep arguing. I want to keep arguing, because she’s so very wrong and she knows it, and the fact she won’t admit it makes me the most irritated. But I also know how this goes with her. She’ll dig in harder the more I push, and the piece will suffer for it.
She always has to do things her way.
I exhale through my nose and pull my bag onto the table. “I’m adding mirrors today.”
“Mirrors?”
“Yeah. My original piece had mirrors, remember? They need to be added.” I take out a paper bag and shake out the shards I took off the piece last class.
They catch the overhead fluorescents and throw small squares of light across the ceiling.
“They’ll angle away from the canvas. When someone looks at the piece, they see the landscape reflected back in fragments.
The piece interrogates itself, almost questioning what it’s now become. Two separate halves becoming whole.”
June stares at the mirror shards for a long moment, then at me. Her lips part in disbelief. “That’s pretentious, which is the only art you do, isn’t it?”
Okay, this is getting too personal. Last class, she’d said “pretentious” with a half-smile and we seemed to actually be getting along for once. This time her mouth is flat and her voice is serious. She means it. Or she’s using it as a wall.
This is how it goes: neither of us can coexist peacefully.
Guess it’s our subconscious reminding us we shouldn’t even try.
I grab the adhesive. “It’s conceptual,” I say.
“It’s you making the piece about yourself. About how clever you are.”
“I’m making the piece about perception. Which is what it’s been about from the start, if you’d been paying attention to anything.”
Her eyes narrow. The powder-blue goes cold. “Don’t talk to me like that. I took the piece home and finished it and made it better.”
“You made it worse.”
Her voice is climbing. Mine is dropping, which is worse, because when I get quiet people mistake it for calm and it is not calm.
Quel borde.
My hands are flat on the table, mirror shards scattered between my fingers, and I can feel the tendons in my forearms tensing too much.
“You rearranged the piece without asking me,” I continue. “That’s the issue. Not whether the wires were good or bad. You made a decision about our collaboration without collaborating. You saw a difference in vision and you overrode mine without asking.”
My chest fills with ice because… she asked that day, didn’t she? When we were kids. She asked what we should do. She listened to me. She followed me instead of—
I grip the edge of the table with bare hands and realize the classroom is quieter than it was a few minutes ago. The pair at the table to our left has stopped working. I catch the girl’s eyes shifting between us, then away when I look at her. Two tables down, someone whispers behind their hand.
June notices too, and color rises in her cheeks, but she doesn’t lower her voice. “God, you always do this. What is it you really want to say to me, huh? You hold back, you don’t commit, and then when someone steps in, you act like they stole something from you.”
“And you always do this.” I gesture at the canvas, keeping my voice low. “You rearrange everything around you until it matches what’s in your head, and anyone who has a different idea can just deal with it. You’re a control freak.”
“That’s not fair,” she says.
“It’s accurate.”
I know I’ve gone too far when June’s eye twitches and she jerks back like I just slapped her.
Professor Whitman’s voice cuts through the room. “Belrose. Kael.” She doesn’t raise her volume but her tone is authoritative enough. “If your creative differences require that much passion, I’d suggest channeling it into the piece rather than the performance. You have forty minutes left.”
A few students turn back to their work with poorly hidden grins. June’s face is flushed, and she’s gripping the edge of the worktable like she might flip it.
I slip my gloves back on and slouch back in my chair, picking up a piece of mirror. Neither me nor June speak. I feel like shit.
For ten minutes, the only sounds between us are my pliers bending wire and the soft clink of mirror fragments.
I attach three shards to the upper wires, angling them so they reflect different sections of the painted surface.
The mirrors catch the colors and throw them back as fractured versions of June’s brushwork.
It’s beautiful, but I’m sure she doesn’t see it that way.
She’s no longer fighting the piece and has stopped caring about it entirely.
She’s now drawing with markers in her sketchbook.
With less conflict surrounding it, the piece is starting to do what I envisioned: show the viewer the painting, then show them the painting seeing itself, then make them wonder which version is real.
Hell, maybe it is pretentious.
When I glance up, June is watching from her side of the table. Her arms are folded, her body angled away from me, but her eyes watch my hands.
I open my mouth to apologize because—even though she was completely wrong about taking matters into her own hands without collaborating first—I can see now that, maybe, my vision was taking over the piece.
But I don’t manage to get any words out before her phone buzzes loudly on the worktable.
It’s face-up, so she glances down at the screen.
I’m not looking directly at her, but I see in my periphery the way her whole posture changes.
Her spine becomes steel and her hands, which were resting on her crossed arms, drop down and press flat against her thighs.
The color that was in her cheeks from our argument drains out, and what’s left is a bloodless expression.
She stares at the screen for three seconds, four, five. Then she turns the phone face-down on the table.
I lower my pliers. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“June.”
“I said I’m fine. Asshole.”
Her words are harsh, but there’s still no color in her cheeks, her eyes still fixed on the canvas. But she’s not seeing it. She’s somewhere else.
“What was the—” I start to ask, but she stands so fast her chair almost topples backward.
“I need the bathroom.” She’s gone, weaving between worktables toward the door, before I can say anything else.
The classroom door creaks shut behind her.
I look at her phone.
It’s face-down, the case scuffed at the corners from being dropped too many times. A sticker of a small cat in sunglasses is peeling at one edge.