6 SYMPTOMATIC OF THE WILD HEART
6
S YMPTOMATIC OF THE W ILD H EART
“Rough day?” Amrita asked as she pulled out the chair to my right and settled into it. Her bracelets clinked when she moved, and the sound echoed throughout the dining hall. Banemast was nearly empty save for us. The lunch rush had ended long ago, but I hadn’t been able to summon the energy to go back upstairs.
I looked up. “How could you tell?”
“Your coffee’s black, you only drink it like that when you’re irritated about something. And you didn’t show up for Moody’s afternoon check-in. You’d only skip that if your appendix burst or something equally nasty. Your appendix hasn’t burst, has it?”
My grasp tightened around the paper cup. Tears burned high in my nose. I wanted to lean forward and lie in her lap. Instead, I rested my forehead on my arms and stared at the table, feeling it stick to me in places. Amrita’s hand came up and stroked my hair.
It had been a horrible day and a horrible week. Day after day of useless time spent in the studio, all of us incapable of making anything worthy of hanging up for critique, with the only reprieve being the moments in between when we came together in the Manor to complain about our lack of progress. My greatest and only joy was in our mundane routines. Coffee and lunch, Finch’s deck of cards, Saz’s clay face masks, dinner on the table and in a pot on the stove. Beyond that familiarity, my hands no longer felt like a part of me—everything I painted had the disjointed quality of someone else’s brain piloting the mechanics. The ideas wouldn’t translate from my head to canvas. Sketches were no better. I wasted a forest of pages trying to put an interesting image down on paper.
“You alright?” Amrita prodded again. Her hand was still stroking, fingers hot against my scalp. “You seem so ... tired.”
I shrugged, forehead digging into ulna and radius. “I’m pitiful. Everything I make looks like garbage. I feel like an imitation of myself. A really shitty imitation.”
She waved her free hand under the table and above my knees, where I could see it. I finally lifted my head and she smiled as she smoothed her thumb across my brow. “You’ve got a red spot,” she murmured.
“Great. Ugly and pitiful.”
“Oh, shut up. You think any of us know what we’re doing? Moody told me my horse painting looked like a starving dog, and I still don’t know if it was an insult or a compliment. Come on, let’s go up together. The others would never forgive me if I left you down here to wallow like this.”
I followed her because I knew she was right. Amrita linked her arm through mine, and together we went back to the studio. Moody barely looked up when we entered, but the frown on her face told me she was annoyed. “You’re late, Jo,” she called. “Don’t make it a habit.”
I saluted her, and then despised myself for it. Amrita snickered.
“Come on,” she said. “You can do your sketches right here.” In her cubicle, she shoved aside the papers on her desk and cleared a space for me. “If I see you pull out your phone or get distracted, I’m going to pinch you.”
We stayed long past the end of class, Amrita scraping paint across the sheet of paper taped up to her studio wall while I sketched at her desk. I drew her side profile, the way her hair fell down her back, the long flutter of her lashes, the swell of her bottom lip held between her teeth, the beauty mark on her cheek just below her right eye. She looked like a hundred women I’d never meet—I could see her face and imagine her mother in it, and her mother’s mother, and a million mothers before her. My sketch immortalized her there among the others as I thumbed through the pages.
There was Amrita again, in her bed. I’d drawn her as I watched her crochet—it was a foreshortened portrait, with her socked foot large and primary as it led to her bent knee and her face half-obscured in the background. Then Caroline in the bathroom, putting her hair up in the mirror with a scrunchie held in her mouth, half-lidded blue eyes staring at me in the glass. Saz sitting on the kitchen counter and eating out of a bag of carrots in her pajama shorts, the newly dyed strands of pink at her temples held back with star-shaped clips. Finally, Finch—sitting on the steps of Grainer and smoking a cigarette she had bummed from Mars, the smoke shadowing her in a gray haze, shoulders stooped forward and a smile on her face.
In a perfect world, this would be my thesis: my women and the record I made of them. It didn’t have to be any bigger than that. There would be no expectations of Soloing, no pressure to perform, no need to impress Rotham and the world beyond it. It would be enough to hear their footsteps on the stairs, to smell Caroline brewing coffee and see Amrita’s hair tie on the edge of the sink. I could eat fruit from the fridge and read books on the shelves and hear music coming down the hall, Saz’s, something round and electric. I could be happy like that, content with their immeasurable simplicity.
“You always make me look so pretty,” Amrita said softly, her voice beside my ear. I turned to her and she rested her chin on my shoulder, smiling again, that beaming expression that made my heart ache with love for her. That’s just what you look like, I wanted to say, but I didn’t want her to dismiss me and ruin the moment. I watched her go back to fretting over her painting again, her brush making hesitant strokes.
At least I wasn’t alone in my spiraling descent.
I started to dread Kolesnik’s class even more than studio. He was a physical reminder of our looming deadlines. He liked to start every class with two countdowns: one for our end of semester Survey—a measly 52 days to go—and one for the Solo Show, coming in at a whopping 171. Those days felt like minutes. I was hurtling toward an inevitable end. In between these reminders, he’d spout off long lectures about the state of the contemporary art world and all his resentment for current trends. Those self-indulgent rants typically led to him turning on us and asking how our thesis papers were going. Every time he questioned me, I floundered and began to spout off nonsense about family and effervescence until he’d finally give up on me, turning to Veda or Cameron. Sometimes, if I was lucky, he’d be interrupted by one of his frequent nosebleeds before he had the chance to reprimand me. He’d pinch his nose closed with a tissue and nasally complain about Rotham’s dry air.
This was my routine. Go to class, stumble into inadequacy, float from room to room and building to building with the hopes that one of my steps might lead me somewhere more meaningfully defined. I was still waiting, still finding no results. There was a permeating doubt at the back of my head wriggling in my mother’s voice: What are you going to do with your future?
It was finally starting to cool down on Wednesday when we left Kolesnik’s class early. He’d declared that he had a board meeting that afternoon and let us out by eleven. Outside on the promenade, the world had that earthy scent of decaying leaves. We walked in unison—all of us except for Caroline, who we’d lost somewhere along the way.
“Do you think she went back to the Manor?” Saz asked, scrolling through her texts in search of one from Caroline.
Amrita shrugged, looking back at Slatter Hall where we’d just left Kolesnik’s class behind. “She would have said.”
I reached for my phone and patted an empty pocket. A jolt of anxiety halted me in place. “Fuck, I think I left my phone in Kolesnik’s. I’m gonna go grab it before he leaves.”
“Meet us in the studio!” Finch called, and I gave her an acknowledging wave as I jogged back in the direction we’d just come from.
The building was nearly silent, everyone either still in class or heading to Banemast for lunch. Kolesnik’s class was on the first floor down the west wing. I retraced my footsteps back to his room. The door sat ajar, the lights still on, but my relief at the sight only lasted a moment.
Past the opening, Caroline stood with her back to me beside Kolesnik in his desk chair. Her voice spilled into the hall—it was the tone she used every time she spoke to a professor, that clipped, clean resonance she’d been raised with, the one that reminded me she came from the kind of family who had given her particular tools and would always operate in the world differently from the way I could.
“Would it help if I came to your office hours? Time is not an issue for me. I’m willing to put the work in.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Kolesnik said, his voice a rough timbre beneath hers. “Of course I welcome your company, Miss Aster. But I don’t know if just showing up is enough to set your work apart from the rest of this group.”
There was a certain low warmth to the way he said company that made my nose wrinkle.
Caroline tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and turned to meet his upturned face. Kolesnik’s desk lamp lit up the outline of her profile. There was a placating smile on her lips and a flat glaze over her eyes, an expression I recognized as her pretended interest. It was the same look she adopted whenever Saz talked about astrology.
“Whatever you recommend, I’ll do,” she declared, and her eyes lit up with the fire that had drawn me to her since we met.
It kind of broke my heart, to listen to her like that. To witness the pressure she put on herself that the rest of us weren’t permitted to see and to know that she meant it. Caroline’s parents weighed expectations on her that made me feel ridiculous for thinking I had it bad—the Asters had spent a lifetime donating to Rotham, hosting charity events, attending annual galas. They were patrons of the arts. They expected Caroline to be their link to the payoff, her success a physical representation of the culture they cultivated in their lives.
I took the smallest step back from the door. Just behind Caroline, I could see my phone face down on a desk. They couldn’t talk for long. I would just wait until they were done, and then I would slip in before he locked up for the day.
But before I could turn away, my eyes snagged on Kolesnik’s hand rising and landing on the back of Caroline’s thigh, his face tilted up to hers, knees splayed wide in the leather chair. His fingers encircled and pressed down. I watched in frozen horror as he yanked her into the space between his spread knees, Caroline rocking forward and her face falling in surprise.
“It takes a certain dedication to be worthy of Soloing,” he said roughly, the words unfurling like a lick of flame. “Will you devote yourself?”
Heat in my cheeks, the kind of immediate fury I hadn’t known myself capable of. His knuckles strained as he squeezed—his thumb digging into her skin just below the thin fabric of her cotton dress, the hem brushing against the tops of her long thighs, her eyes widening for a split second before they hardened over again.
Caroline stepped out of his reach and crossed her arms over her chest, as if pulling her exoskeleton back over exposed organs. Frenzied, I pushed the door fully open and entered with the announcing creak of old wood.
Both heads swiveled to face me. Kolesnik straightened in his chair and cleared his throat, his hand falling to his lap again.
“Office hours are over,” he snapped, turning back to his desk.
I was already halfway across the room, phone snatched in one hand and the other reaching for Caroline’s, pulling her with me into the hall as I said, “Sorry, forgot something.” The door slammed hard enough to rattle the paintings on the wall.
“Jo, stop,” Caroline finally said, tugging her hand out of mine when we finally reached the main doors of Slatter. She folded her arms again, that armor between me and her heart.
Campus was busier now, but I didn’t care who might hear—I just hissed, “What the hell was that?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Caroline,” I said sharply. “He grabbed you.”
Her frown deepened. “It was hardly a grab. I handled it.”
“I’m not saying—I know you did, but—” I kept sputtering. I wanted to cut his fucking hand off at the wrist. “He can’t just do that.”
“Drop it.” Caroline’s face was a mask.
Impossible. I flared with anger. The branches of my rushing fear kept opening new avenues for me to consider—Caroline had visited him in years before as an advisor, had taken that Art and Activism in the ’80s class. Had named him Professor Perv for a reason. But I hadn’t imagined that reason could be so physical. “Has he done something like this before?”
“I said fucking drop it.”
She started toward Banemast, her back to me again, an unreadable solidity to her gait.
I hurried to follow. “Would you drop it if you were me? You don’t even have to answer that, I know you wouldn’t.”
“Jo, please, just stop. We can talk about it later, okay?”
She was walking too fast for me to keep up. I beelined after her into the rush of the dining hall, scanning the crowd for the others, trying to swallow past the stone in my throat. She beat me to the table and sank into a seat with a grate of chair legs on linoleum.
“There you are,” Finch called. “Find your phone, Jo?”
“What? Oh, yeah, I did.” I pulled out the chair across from Caroline, between Finch and Amrita. Amrita pushed her plate in my direction and gestured toward an uneaten half of a sandwich. The sight of it made my stomach turn.
“We were just talking about thesis papers and Creep-lesnik,” Saz said.
Caroline stiffened but kept her head down, scrolling through something on her phone. I obediently started to eat when Amrita nudged me again, but everything tasted mealy between my teeth.
“Can we change the subject?” I asked. The bread caught in my throat. I could feel it cling as I tried to force it down with a gulp of water.
“Ignoring the fact that we have to write these papers won’t make them go away,” Saz sang, poking my arm across the table.
“I just want to talk about something else right now.”
There was a beat of silence. Caroline fixed me with a hard, irritated look. “Go ahead, Jo. You can say what you really want.”
Saz’s eyes flickered between us. “What’s going on here?”
“Nothing,” Caroline snapped. She shot me a glare that told me to shut the fuck up.
“Caroline—” I started, and she interrupted with an exasperated sigh.
“Jo saw Kolesnik being a creep, as per usual. It’s fine. He was just getting handsy. I got him off me, and that was that.”
“Are you fucking kidding?” Finch said, sitting up straighter in her chair at the same time Saz started to ideate in a rush.
“Caroline. We’ll report him to the dean. Or we’ll kick his ass. Or we’ll do both.”
“Keep your voice down, oh my god. I said it’s fine. I don’t want to deal with any of this right now. I have plenty of other shit on my mind. Can we please just go home and chill before I need to deal with work again?”
There was such a ragged, desperate quality to her voice, in the way she said home , like she was begging, like she couldn’t bear one more second of this. We went silent. We could hear what she needed from us, even if it wasn’t what we wanted to give.
“’Course,” Amrita said quietly. “Let’s go home.”
We never went to the studio that afternoon. Instead, Finch came home with us, and we took a break for the first time in what felt like weeks by curling up in the living room under a pile of blankets, Caroline rigid and quiet with her knees pulled to her chest on the couch. I had to fight to keep myself from continuously turning to look at her. Hellraiser played on the TV as the sun set beyond the windows. Saz and Finch picked up a pizza—real pizza this time from the spot in town that we loved unanimously, an enormous thing smothered in shallots and arugula and honey and salami.
I still had no appetite. I left my piece half-finished. All I could think about was Caroline in that room—and how if I hadn’t seen her, she might have kept that moment all to herself. I wanted to know what else she contained. I wanted her to know that she could give those worries to me, that she didn’t need to isolate herself, that Solo wasn’t the defining moment of her life no matter how absolute it seemed, that it wasn’t worth a fraction of suffering if it meant subjecting herself to the power trip of a man like Kolesnik.
Because that was what this had to be about, right? Kolesnik’s influence held such magnificent sway over the final Solo decision. He was half of Moody’s erudite team. He was meant to be a guiding force for us. Caroline, whose drive toward the insurmountable mountain of Solo could not be discouraged, would always take the initiative, even if that put her in Kolesnik’s direct path. Of course, we had all thought he was unsettling. Instinct couldn’t be argued with. But he was still a beacon of success on the track we hoped to ascend—someone whose approval we craved as validation for the work we were creating. Caroline, under the pressure of her family’s investment and her mother’s scrutiny, would sacrifice anything for acknowledgment.
We all knew that Mrs. Aster didn’t like her daughter, because Caroline was what her mother liked to call “peculiar.” Caroline later explained, after several months of friendship, a few drinks, and a vicious game of truth or dare that ended in Finch drinking a raw egg from a shot glass, that this meant that between the ages of six and eleven Caroline woke every night from a recurring and lucid night terror with ragged cuts across her biceps and thighs where her nails had scratched her back to a waking state, screaming all the while, claiming that there was a man crouching in the corner of her ceiling. The nightmares had only stopped after the intervention of an expensive counselor and a heavy dose of sleep medication that left Caroline too drowsy to stay awake in her fifth-grade classroom. The Asters promptly started pricey laser removal for the scars her nails left across her body and swapped her to an equally highbrow at-home tutor until high school, where Caroline excelled as an example of her family’s beauty, intelligence, and drive. Her grandfather had been a Rotham legend—his name was on a placard beside a Sol LeWitt drawing in the library with profound gratitude for his donation—and Caroline followed expectations by earning a legacy acceptance with a smile on her face. Her mother had been so proud—until a photo started circulating on Facebook of Caroline with another girl’s face between her tits at a high school graduation party and a half-empty bottle of champagne held in one fist, foam spouting all over them both. Caroline made it her profile picture.
Under the threat of Kolesnik’s assault, I wanted that Caroline—the one willing to wreak havoc if it meant putting someone else in their place, regardless of the consequences or the way it might sour her reputation. I wanted her to kill the pathetic part of me that still hoped Kolesnik might tell me I was capable of Soloing, to crush that desire underfoot even if it left a crucial part of me in pieces.
I looked at Caroline. Her eyes still held the same scolding quality they had over lunch, when she had begged me to let it go. If she would not allow us to go to the administration, what else could I do to defend her?
Saz leaned close to Caroline and rested her head on the other girl’s shoulder. “What’s up, Jo? Not hungry?”
I shook my head. Couldn’t stop shaking it. Couldn’t get a grasp on myself.
“You know what,” I said, faltering. “You know what, fuck this, and fuck Kolesnik,” I said. Every head swiveled. Even Pinhead stared back at me through the fuzzy TV screen. “Let’s do the ritual.”
“Yes, bitch!” Saz launched herself on me in glee, her arms squeezing around my middle as I laughed. Caroline straightened beside her. There was a triumphant joy etched in Saz’s smile. “You mean it? No backing out now. If Jo’s in, we’re doing this. Come on.”
The come on was directed at Amrita and Finch. Amrita shook her head, smiling, her ponytail bobbing with the movement. “Fine,” she said, “I won’t be the one to stop y’all. Let’s do it.”
Beside me, Finch shrugged indifferently but remained quiet. I could tell she was uncomfortable with the idea. And while her wariness left me uneasy, I was game for anything if it meant making them happy.
I needed Kolesnik to suffer—and if our thesis work happened to improve in the process, what harm could that be?