Voice Like a Hyacinth: A Novel

5 WE LIT ALL THE CANDLES

5

W E L IT A LL THE C ANDLES

Saz loved The Craft , so we usually watched it at least twice every fall, when Finch’s list of gory horror hits was too much for the group to sit through. She kept it taped beside the TV with a fat red marker crossing off everything we’d already watched and marked a few of our favorites with a smiling star sticker: It Follows , The House of the Devil , Suspiria , The Descent . Saz adored them, could never watch enough, but sometimes Amrita got scared—she’d always been weird about sleeping in total darkness. When we were freshmen, there were nights I’d return late from the library and find her already in bed with the lamp on her desk aglow.

“You can turn it off. I was just waiting for you to come home,” she’d admit, comforter pulled up to her chin and exposing only her eyes, muffling her voice and making her so little that I wanted to crawl into bed beside her. I often did. I’d kick my shoes off by the door and change into my pajamas. She’d lift the comforter and I’d curl up beside her, her hair tickling my throat and fingertips circling my wrist like she needed something grounding to hold on to.

Now the September breeze made everything smell like wet leaves past the living room’s cracked window. Our first week back at Rotham had passed in a long drag of forming habits—arriving at the studio early and staying late, manifesting answers to Moody’s questions that might make me appear like I knew what I was doing, trying to take Kolesnik’s words and burn them into my own perception of my work.

Saturday morning held the promise of first freedom. I could hear distant laughter, a smattering of footsteps, wind in the trees, the TV playing Siouxsie and the Banshees. Saz and I lay across the sofa with her head at one end and mine at the other. The blanket over our legs was too warm, but I was unwilling to disrupt the comfortable cradle we had created.

“You guys look like the grandparents from Willy Wonka ,” Amrita said, dropping her bag in the doorway and plopping down next to Finch on the rug, shuffling until her head was pillowed on Finch’s shoulder. Finch threw an arm around her and stoked a tiny, jealous flame in me.

I had brought the box of books home from the library and showed them to Saz. Now she had ANTHROPOMANCY open across her lap. Daylight made slats through the blinds across the pages and blanket over her knees as lightning flashed on the screen with an echoing scream. She pushed her feet into my ribs and I jumped.

“That makes you Grandpa Jo,” she declared, and while they laughed, I snared her ankle and tugged, sliding her down the cushions and closer to me. Saz writhed, giggling, until she abandoned the book and launched herself up on top of me, fingers digging down into my sides until I pleaded for her to let me go. We wrestled like that, movie nearly forgotten, until she hushed me with her fingers over my mouth. “Wait! This is one of my favorite parts.”

We watched dutifully. Sometimes I thought I enjoyed these movies because I loved what they taught me about my friends, unfiltered access to their adoration. I could feel Saz’s heartbeat thumping in her fingertips against my lips. When I was sure she wouldn’t catch me, I flicked my eyes back to her face, to take in the entrancement there.

Saz and I had always bonded over movies. It was how we’d met. The two of us sitting side by side in a sophomore Philosophy of Film class, one I’d taken to fulfill a liberal arts credit after every other interesting class filled up for the semester. I spent a lot of classes trying to sketch her without getting caught—she was always wearing something bright and improbable and dyeing strips of bleached hair in an array of colors. Sophomore year had been her blue period. The ends of her bob curled neat and ultramarine just above her shoulders, legs crossed and terminating in platformed black boots beneath a calf-length periwinkle dress. Her knuckles were laden with rings. She flicked a pen between each finger as she kept her eyes on Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight beaming from the projector, her every movement clicking metallically. I tried to copy the outline of her profile in the corner of my notebook.

She surprised me by turning to face me near the end of the movie, her eyes silver with tears, ringed hands pressing a tissue to her nose as she sucked in a deep, trembling breath. I immediately slid a hand over my sketch and tried to pretend I hadn’t been staring.

But she just spoke as if we’d known each other all our lives, too-loudly declaring, “Why the fuck would they make us watch this in class? Don’t get me wrong, it’s incredible, but I would have worn waterproof mascara if I’d known this was on the syllabus.”

I blinked back at her, stunned, and my hand slipped away from the drawing. Her eyes glazed over it, and her frown quirked up at the corners. “Hey, that’s pretty good,” she sniffled, prodding my arm with the end of her pen. “Aren’t you a painter, too?”

It had been ridiculously easy to pull Saz into our budding group. She brought a light to our dim corner.

Now Saz was a soothing weight atop me as she called “What’s taking so long?” down the hall, where Caroline killed the screeching kettle and poured water into a French press. She yelled back something scathing about being ungrateful. Amrita guiltily hopped up to help her carry mugs, and then we were all in the room again. Something about it was nearly right enough to lull me to sleep.

But weekends were no longer a comfort. We’d spent half our Saturday like this, and it left me full of impenetrable anxiety, the lizard part of my brain insisting that we should be in the studio. Every moment I wasn’t working felt like a waste, and every moment I was working felt like some other girl’s life taking the place of my own. Sometimes I wondered if I would have the same drive without them at my side. If Rotham fed me only isolation, would I still find it worth it to work as hard as we did? I thought I wanted to be good—a good artist, a good friend. But I was a little afraid that I just wanted to be good enough to impress them, and no one else.

“That’s the kind of spell I’m talking about,” Saz said vaguely, her eyes trained on the film as she sat back and pulled ANTHROPOMANCY into her lap again.

“What do you mean?” Finch asked. She plucked at the frayed edges of her shorts. Her hair was pulled back sloppily, and the strands that grazed her cheek made me soft. I wanted to twist one around my finger.

Saz gestured to the screen. “They knew the importance of power. And like, sacrifice to a higher being. That’s what I want. Something momentous and earth-shattering and delicious. Something that could give us all a chance to reach our highest potential.”

“Don’t tell me you’re on this spell idea again,” Caroline said from the doorway. Her fingers spidered around the rim of her mug, eyes downcast. “You should accept the inevitable now, Saz—it’s called Solo for a reason. The sooner you realize we’re all going to duke it out, the better chance you have of not getting knocked on your ass.”

We fell quiet. I wanted to blame my anxiety on an empty stomach. There was a part of me that found it easier to resign myself to likelihoods—that Finch and Caroline were some of the most talented students in our year, that they would end up at the top of Moody’s list, that the rest of us would cheer them on from the Grainer Gallery. But beside that lived a deliriously fatuous hope, one that felt capable of killing. The idea—the dream —that I could have a chance of Soloing. What would I do for that kind of power?

I couldn’t think about the end. I was already terrified of all the ways it might tear us apart.

We ended up in Grainer by late afternoon. If one of us went to work, the rest of us followed—it was a forced accountability that I adored and resented all at once. Saturday turned into Sunday before we gave up and returned home to sleep, Finch splitting away to go to her apartment in Tuck House. Later in the morning, we repeated the process. Fucking around and watching something brain-meltingly insipid on the TV, cooking each other breakfast, prolonging our laziness until finally one of us got dressed and made the rest of us feel guilty. Then it was back to Grainer to spend the rest of our evening.

A life could pass like this, I thought. A life could walk right by me.

We weren’t the only ones there. I passed Mars at the sinks scrubbing spray paint from beneath their nails, and Cameron crouched on the floor shooting staples into a canvas. Quiet music poured from the direction of Studio 1, where Veda must have been hard at work.

In my studio I put on headphones and started a playlist Caroline made me consisting mostly of sad folk songs, offensively titled JO’S TORTURED LESBIAN TUNES, and tried to focus on the project at hand. Moody sparked fresh anxiety in me—I wanted to prove her wrong and show her I could make us interesting. I’d taken the sketches of the four of them at our dining table and transferred the same image onto a canvas. Right now, they were still an underpainting—a technique we’d learned in our sophomore year where the artist laid all the shapes and tones out in a burnt-umber oil paint that would later be layered over with full color. It gave the rest of the painting a lively heat. But in its current state, my women were ghoulish apparitions illustrated in terracotta hues.

Darkness fell across campus without my realization. By the time Caroline poked her head into my cubicle, I had sketched out the first shadows of the painting with a wide brush—sweeping greens so dark they were nearly black surrounded our group, illuminated by the orange glow of the table lamp. Their hands were blocky shapes atop the table, each overlapping where I planned to add a linked pinky or an interlocked elbow.

Caroline’s mouth mimed out a silent proposal as she rapped on the wall beside my painting.

I slid my headphones off. “What was that?”

“I said, let’s get pizza tonight. I’d rather swallow my own tongue than cook something. Wait, this is looking good!”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” I answered as she leaned closer to the painting.

“You made me so sexy,” she continued. “I look like an ancient depiction of Lilith.”

“Come on, it’s just the first layer.”

“I’m serious, it’s a compliment!”

Caroline turned to me, smiling. There was yellow paint on one side of her nose where she must have scratched it. I thumbed it off for her, and her eyes shut in content.

I met Caroline in a Chemistry of Pigments class our sophomore year. It was the type of course that my dad had laughed at when I first registered for Rotham, saying that it was funny none of us had the chops to take a real science class. But that was part of what made Rotham so alluring to me. It was the kind of place that made our curiosities corporeal.

Caroline’s first words to me, “I want to crush them between my teeth,” were a perfect example. She had been talking about the fine granules of mustardy pigment sifted into a small container on the table in front of us. Professor Bervoets paired us up for the first in-class trial. We ground color down with a glass muller that was made for turning the powder into smooth paint when combined with oil. We spun the muller into the mixture for what felt like hours. Caroline had swiped a finger through it, turned to me, and pretended to lick her skin clean. I’d been too surprised to laugh. Instead, my eyes traced the spiraling motion of her tongue, the little curl it made in its playacting.

“Does it look delicious to you, or is that fucked up to say?” Caroline asked. “It’s like what I imagine would come out if you pressed a thumb into an overripe apricot. Like you were separating the color from the object.”

“It’s not fucked up,” I said quickly, taken aback that she would ask me, that she would want to hear what I had to say. The curse sounded wrong in my mouth, overly formal. “It looks divine.”

She laughed and pointed the ochre-covered finger at me. “Divine, that’s right. What a perfect word.”

She was our final missing piece.

Was there a term for learning you hadn’t been as complete as you might have once imagined? For discovering shards of yourself? For seeing these people and knowing it at once, like the slow acknowledgment of a finger falling asleep. For learning the things that constructed their desires and their personalities and all the ways they fit with you, like interlocking fragments of a machine.

Now I wanted to tell Caroline the truth—that even after three years at Rotham, I felt entirely aimless. That I didn’t think there was a point to anything I was painting, that I was foolish for trying to depict the ways we were special to one another as if it might mean anything to anyone outside of our five. But Caroline hated it when I was self-pitying, and I was trying to become the kind of person that didn’t expect my friends to carry my insecurities on their backs. So I just slid off my stool and scrubbed my brush in a jar full of solvent. Color swirled into chemical as I kept my question casual. “Did you already ask the others?”

“Yeah, I thought we should drive into town, but Amrita wants to save money, so I think we’re just going to eat some of the nasty Bane pizza. We’re supposed to meet by the sinks in fifteen. Clean up so we can go find them.”

By the time we gathered at our usual table in Banemast, the dining hall was overcrowded and overwarm.

“We should have just taken our food home,” Amrita said, cutting her eyes at the table next to us as someone tossed a rolled-up napkin through the air. We watched it fly. “This place is a zoo.”

Saz leaned back in her seat. “I don’t know. We could probably benefit from friendships outside of the ones at this table. Maybe we should join like, a kickball league or something. Get some camaraderie going.”

Finch rolled her eyes. “Do you have to be such a dyke all the time?”

Saz gasped. “That’s rich coming from you, varsity softball player. You eat carabiners for breakfast.”

That shut Finch up, until their prodding dissolved into a unanimous roast of the new photo the admins displayed on the wall in Banemast. It was a portrait of Rotham’s deans lined up with the rest of the administration, alongside a fair chunk of the full-time professors on campus.

Finch squinted at Kolesnik’s grim smile. “When are they going to put that guy down and give us someone new? It’s sad. He’s like a rheumatic dog.”

Caroline snorted.

“You’re going to hell. You’re probably first in line,” Saz said. “Isn’t he only like, sixty or something?”

“Sixty-eight,” Amrita corrected.

“Exactly,” Finch clarified. “Geriatric. Let’s get someone in here who’s less of a ghoulish bastard. That first class was a slog.”

That got a round of thoughtful nods and the conversation devolved into commiseration about our progress. Finch was cagey about the painting she was working on, and Caroline kept checking her phone. Amrita picked at her margherita piece, leaving slices of pale tomato behind on the plate, and bemoaned the advice Moody had given her on how to limit the color palettes in her folkloric watercolors. She didn’t want to limit anything, Amrita told us, tearing her crust into hunks. If anything, she wanted to expand until the paintings were rich with hues and contrast. It was so funny to hear her talk about color while exclusively wearing black, her sweater sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Saz thoughtfully chewed on her salad as she listened. The greens had seen better days.

“Okay,” Saz said, interrupting the end of Amrita’s rant. “I have a proposal, but you have to promise to hear me out before you argue.”

“I already hate where this is going,” Amrita sighed.

Saz ignored that. “We’re all struggling to figure out where we want to go with our theses, correct? Am I wrong to say that?”

She waited. We shook our heads. No, she wasn’t wrong. Over the past three years, I had built a recognizable style for myself: earthy, muted rooms and landscapes with poses from family photos transferred within them. But the portraits always ended up a little soulless. They needed something more —and I hoped that painting the five of us might bring that necessary sentience to each piece. I felt like a freshman all over again; completely insecure in everything that I created, self-deprecating, resentful, uninspired.

Saz drummed her fingers on the table beside the copy of ANTHROPOMANCY . It went back and forth between Grainer and the Manor with her often, and she had brought it into my room the other night. Her knee had nearly whacked me in the stomach as she threw herself down beside me and splayed the book open to a saved page. It revealed a gruesome print of an old Greek painting, a man splayed across a stone slab and surrounded by figures digging around in his exposed entrails. “Look,” she’d whispered, awestruck. “It’s a kind of divination with intestines of a dying body. How fucked is that?”

Gore never bothered me much. But I had found that illustration unbearable to look at. I nudged the book shut with the back of my hand and told her it was cool, but it was about to make me spew my dinner.

Now her voice was firm as her eyes darted around the table. “We all want a shot at Solo, don’t we? If it can’t be all of us, then it’s one of us or bust, that’s what we agreed on?”

I didn’t like to think about it. Those five spots at the top of Moody’s list were my worst fear. In the pit of my heart, I prayed it would be our group who would advance, and that the Solo spot would belong to Finch or Caroline. If the rest of them could move forward, I could still be proud.

But also—I wanted it. And the thought was annihilating.

“Get on with it,” Caroline coaxed. “What’s your big idea?”

Saz stabbed her fork into the salad until it stood up straight. Her smile was wickedly pleased. “There’s this ... ritual that I found. To amplify creativity. It’s supposed to unlock your deepest inner path and allow you to create to your fullest extent.”

Finch laughed. “Sounds like someone’s fucked-up ayahuasca trip.”

But Caroline’s eyes were bright. She flipped her phone face down to where she couldn’t see the screen as Saz scoffed at Finch. “Not at all. Everyone who tried it said that it led to their making the best work they’ve ever created, and their career really took off afterward. Gallery representation, whole retrospectives, sales on their crafts and artwork that earned them enough cash to quit their full-time jobs. Awards and grants, postgrad travel around Europe and Asia, adjunct professor positions in some of the New York schools. This is the real deal.”

Caroline swallowed a mouthful before she spoke. “What do we have to do?”

Saz prodded at her wilting lettuce again. Amrita leaned back in her chair as Finch crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, we have to like, sacrifice someone.”

My reflex was to laugh. It was a high, nervous sound, a weak attempt at easing over an argument that hadn’t yet begun. I darted a glance around Bane, searching for an eavesdropper, but the dull roar of conversations seemed to block out our voices.

“Come on,” Amrita said. “I thought you were being serious.”

“You never let me explain before you get mad! We’re not killing anyone. We’re basically ... cursing them, or hexing them, or like, fixing the evil eye on them. We pick someone that really deserves it, and we toss them the misfortune that would have stuck to us instead. We’re left with all the good stuff.”

“How?” Caroline pushed.

Saz shrugged. “I don’t know how it works; it’s the fucking universe or something. It’s intuition or karmic retribution or the High Priestess or all three at once.”

“No,” Caroline said, “I mean how the hell do we do it?”

Now Saz smiled again. The shape of it lit up her eyes. She had Caroline snared, and we all knew it.

“Like I said, we have to make a sacrifice. It’s not enough to give up something physical of our own. It’s more like ... we need to be able to live with giving that misfortune to someone else. You gotta be willing to steal someone else’s joy.”

“Easy. I only have two settings,” Finch said around a full mouth. “Bitch and cunt.”

Amrita nodded solemnly. “Truest thing you’ve ever said.”

“You have someone in mind,” I said to Saz. It wasn’t a question. I could tell by the cagey way Saz was presenting herself—she knew more than we were privy to, and she was delighted to lay it out for us.

“Well, yeah. Kolesnik.”

His name summoned the image of the man standing at the front of our lecture to mind, along with that creepy Boar King costume suspended in the library’s glass Grotesque display. I could feel the weight of him—not in physical stature but in his status at Rotham, in the domineering way he dismissed our words, the unnerving closeness of his gaze on us in class, or a heavy hand on the shoulder as he passed our seats. Years of rumors about Kolesnik himself: that he made his female students increasingly uncomfortable, that he was crude and cruel, that he thought himself above reprimand after everything he’d given to Rotham’s institution. If there was anyone who deserved to bear a curse, it was Kolesnik. But the idea still gave my stomach a twist. Saz’s idea sounded like something I would have believed in as a kid. Berries smashed in the palm and smeared all over the body. Stick dolls bound with grass and smashed underfoot. Pagan and animal and close to the heart. It was probably all nonsense, the kind of ridiculous game we might have played late at night after getting too high and reading each other’s tarot cards, Caroline lying on the rug with our fingertips grazing her arms and thighs. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board.

But if it was real—if even a fraction of it could come true—who were we to use the stain of Kolesnik to advance our own work? Weren’t we meant to better ourselves by putting in the hours, by channeling something within ourselves rather than bargaining for it from the world? If the talent wasn’t there, then that was that. I didn’t feel that I deserved to win if I hadn’t somehow earned it myself.

Still, I watched the interested downward tilt to Caroline’s brow as it deepened with satisfaction, the kind that formed when she was listening extra close. She absentmindedly drew patterns in the condensation her water cup left on the table. “So what, we burn a picture of him? Stick it with pins? Spit in his water bottle?”

“We have to use bodily material to craft a likeness of him,” Saz answered immediately, as if she’d been waiting for one of us to ask. “So we actually need his spit—or hair, or snot, or blood, or urine. I’m sure you can think of a few more options.”

Amrita shoved the remnants of her food away from her. “I was still eating, thanks.”

“All we do is gather that stuff and mix it with something of ours in the form of a handcrafted Kolesnik model, where it can live forever and ever, unless we decide to destroy it.” Saz splayed her fingers and wiggled them, as if finishing a magic trick. “Abracadabra and all that jazz.”

“It sounds like you’ve been reading that nasty book too much,” I said loftily, gesturing at ANTHROPOMANCY . “Where did you say you found this idea again?”

Now Saz flushed pink. Her palm rested on top of the book. “Um ... Reddit.”

Finch pushed away from the table and piled her trash onto her plate. “Well, you guys can have fun with that. Personally, I don’t think we need a hex or a ritual from the depths of 4chan. As much as I think he’s a prick, I’m not making a Kolesnik doll, and I’m not collecting his piss, and I’m not sacrificing him to the devil. I’m going back to the studio to do my work.”

“All you bitches do is complain,” Saz said, shrugging. “Don’t jump down my throat just because I tried to help.”

Caroline’s slowly blooming smile could have powered the electricity in all of Grainer. “I love you and your beautiful brain, Saz, and I think it’s a great idea.”

“Still not doing it!” Finch called over her shoulder as Amrita stood to join her.

“She’s right, you know. There’s no point in wasting time on a ritual when we should just be directing all that effort toward Solo. Jo, you coming?”

I felt caught between them—Amrita’s waiting gaze as she hovered at the edge of the table, Saz tugging on my wrist as she heaved a devastated sigh and said, “No more studio, you said we could watch The Ring tonight!”

Amrita’s dark eyes were questioning. She touched my shoulder lightly, and I could feel the coaxing in it.

“I really should get some work done,” I said finally, standing to join Amrita and Finch. “Tomorrow. I promise. We’ll all watch it tomorrow.”

“No, fuck you lot, I’ll watch it by myself and wake you up at three in the morning when I have a nightmare.” Saz slung her bag over her shoulder and waved us away. “Go, go, have fun selling your soul to Moody.”

We split like that, Caroline deciding she was too tired to join and Saz leading her home. I followed Amrita up the stairs after Finch, past the empty classrooms and buildings along the promenade to the glowing tower of Grainer, to the studio and its buzzing fluorescents, to the overhead fans ruffling papers around the room and the windows cracked open to let some of the night air inside.

We worked until midnight. Until my headphones finally died and I had to sit in silence, dragging my brush across the canvas and marking out the outline of Caroline’s legs. Until I thought I heard someone behind me in that studio—peering over my shoulder and watching me work—and I turned to find the space empty. Until Amrita came to fetch and ferry me home. Until we left Finch there, her light burning on, her studio covered in sketches and sketches and sketches, all depicting the same gauzy black outline of a profile with hyperrealized eyes staring back at us.