10 PITS AND STEMS AND FINELY STRETCHED SKIN
10
P ITS AND S TEMS AND F INELY S TRETCHED S KIN
“You’re being weird,” Finch said.
To be fair, I had been staring at the computer screen in the equipment room for the last hour without clicking my mouse, while Finch ate cherries out of a Tupperware container and flicked concerned glances in my direction with the same hard ferocity as her spat-out pits. All I could do was let my eyes water as I hovered over a highlighted box waiting to be filled in with someone’s camcorder return date. They were three days late.
I was sleeping only a few hours a night. The Manor’s radiators finally kicked on with November’s arrival, and they boiled the house to an inconceivable heat, one that left me kicking off my duvet every night and sweating beneath the top sheet. I’d drift off for a scant hour, my body in the dream space of half rest, and find myself in the same vicious nightmares. That white house forever. The same violent deaths of the people I loved most.
Even waking couldn’t banish them—some nights, I’d stir in the dark to the sensation of something sitting on the end of my bed.
The first time was the night after the Grotesque ended. The others came home after they realized I was gone. Amrita knocked on my door asking if I was okay. I told her I was just too drunk and I wanted to go to sleep. Two hollow half-truths. Still, she let me sleep without pressing the issue, and I pushed my cheek deep into the pillow with makeup still smeared around my eyes. I always slept on my stomach with the lamp off, but someone had left the hall light on. I remembered drifting off with my eyes trained on the bar of light under my bedroom door. The dip of the mattress woke me—the distinct sensation of something else’s weight.
My first assumption was that Amrita had come to check on me again. But I was pinned by the dregs of sleep paralysis. I couldn’t flip my body around to see what perched behind me. The weight was an imposing pressure beside my feet. Sound wouldn’t leave my mouth no matter how hard I tried, my mind still remembering how to call itself back from REM. Finally, I let out a little hum. Needles prickled all the way down my wrists as my limbs came back to life, and I pushed myself up on my elbows and twisted. Nothing. Just the black room. The distant hum of someone’s fan, the creaking of the house, the clank of the radiator heating up.
I turned the lights back on and never went back to sleep. There was no way I could have eased the pounding of my heart. I went through the same process the next night, and the next. My head was impossible to clear. Everything held the slight tinge of unease and the potential outline of an apparition waiting in the dark.
In Moody’s class I was dull-eyed and quiet. But I refused to waste any more time—instead, I spent long hours in the studio, both in class and out of it, determined to make something good out of all the ways my brain couldn’t keep up with my body and unwilling to spend more time alone in my room. It was so embarrassing to lose control.
Personally, I thought I had been hiding it decently well. But I always assumed no one was looking at me and found myself shocked when they’d been watching the whole time.
Apparently, Finch had been alert. Tuned into a frequency I hadn’t been aware I was putting off.
“You can talk to me, you know,” Finch continued when I didn’t answer her first prompt. She had her feet up on the work desk, her face creased with concern. “Sometimes you worry me. I think you spend so much time listening to the rest of them, and you keep important parts of yourself away. You’re not honest about when you’re going through something.”
I hesitated, feeling overwhelmingly scrutinized and resentful that she was calling me out for it. I twisted the strings of my hoodie between my fingers and pulled. The hood scrunched closer around my face. “That’s not true,” I said, but it was a lie, and both of us heard the waver in it.
She looked at my fist. The bandage was finally gone, a wickedly pink half-formed scab now evident in my palm. Washing my hands in the studio had opened the wound on and off. I thought it might never heal.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Well, I’m here, if you ever wanna vent.”
Maybe I should have been pleased by the concern. But I was still smarting with the aftermath of finding Finch and Thea in the garden, disturbed by all the ways I could imagine them touching.
Besides—why would I complain to Finch when something innate was finally starting to click?
A week after the Grotesque, I signed up for critique. Finch started us off. Her canvases were cloudy with gradients of gray and blue and beige and taupe, like looking at the horizon with a magnifying glass and snaring the color you found there. Atop those surfaces she had sketched out portraits with half the face absent—they were just outlines of hair and shoulder blades, mouthless beings with the eyes filled in. Their gazes held wet, luscious detail, sparkling with unshed tears, peering past a gold wash of paint. Of course Moody loved them. They had that quality that Saz sometimes referred to as “Finchian,” the one every professor ate up without fail, though Saz usually used the term as a replacement for calling something “fucking creepy.” They were intangible, unsettling, all-knowing. They glowed from within.
But Moody also loved my new paintings. I had started to call them Gatherings ; a collection depicting our group of five in mundane situations painted with the same chiaroscurist glow of a Renaissance piece, full of haunting light and umbral hues. I painted us eating at the table in Banemast with the fluorescent overheads replaced by candle glow, the walls black and deep, the table a cool green melting over our thighs. I painted Caroline with Saz in a headlock atop the sofa and the rest of us framing them, hands on thighs, fingertips digging into biceps, heads tossed back like we were worshipping the Pietà . Then another of us basking in the TV’s blue glow, curled up in the dark in our massive bed of blankets across the living room floor, illuminated in a ghoulish writhe. I found that when prompted to make a record of them, I could draw every detail. I’d done it already, a hundred times, a thousand, and with these new paintings I kept finding ways to reinvent their image. Still—I found it hard to summon my own face without a mirror. I became my own Bloody Mary, apparent only when called.
Moody called them eerie and nostalgic . She dubbed them a departure from my comfort zone. She rhapsodized on their magical quality , their poignant tension , their anticipatory beauty, as if awaiting the second that captured moment might end, like an archaeological excavation of a future that hadn’t passed yet. I lit up with all the praise. It made my enervated state a little more bearable. Of course, I was still terrified that there was something wrong with me after our ritual and Kolesnik’s end, but I was also afraid that we had uncovered the answer—that maybe suffering really did make for a better artist. Clearly, it was working for me.
Moody’s appreciation made me even more aware of the ways everyone promised that life after Rotham would change, all the warnings that my friends would go on to lead new lives. Insistences that I would think of them sometimes, not often, wistful for a time that was perfect only in its inevitable end. Premonitions that we’d marry and procreate and die.
But nothing about us adhered to tradition. At least, that was how it felt to me—I imagined that every relationship, platonic or romantic or some twist of the two, had the capability to leave you in reverence of it. You could only worship ordinary adoration for so long before it became sacred.
So I painted it. I tried to draw them closer to me, my hold on selfhood a loosening grip.
The last few days before fall break were alight with frantic energy. We were all meant to head home for Thanksgiving, but I couldn’t imagine a week away from the studio. Things were finally starting to fall into place, and taking a break felt like failure.
“When you return for the rest of the semester, you will have one week before Survey,” Moody said to us on the Friday before break. “I understand that things have been strained without Kolesnik, but I believe that you all have the potential to move forward if you keep this momentum up. It’s anyone’s Solo.”
Potential. That was the key.
Saz showed her work for critique, and Moody was overjoyed with the path she had taken. Saz’s sketchy abstractions were gory with color. They were the kind of paintings my mother might declare childish, claiming she could do the same thing in an hour. But Saz’s hand made them viscerally violent, moving beyond waxy scribbles into lines that suggested dripping lacerations. She painted on huge canvases with wide sweeps of the arm. Blaring fuchsias melted into pinks behind flat red animals, like something you might find carved into the belly of an amphora. They had the same ritual nature of the way Saz moved through the world—her abstracted icons and shapes and overlapping figures appearing like points along a constellation, like cards pulled in a tarot reading, like automatic drawings made with the eyes shut. Her energy exploded across the canvas, unrestrained.
Our paintings had such an unbridled newness to them. In the private chamber of my heart, I believed that the ritual had unlocked something important—something we couldn’t have accessed without it.
Moody clearly thought so too. She was delighted by our progress and said so often. “I’m impressed by how many pieces you’ve been able to complete over the last few weeks,” Moody told Saz as Amrita and I helped her take her work down. “From my perspective, it looks like you’ve found a rhythm that works for you, and the paintings are stronger for it. You’ve developed a signature style that feels inventive.”
Saz’s grin was full of giddy relief.
But we weren’t the only ones reaping the benefits of hard work. The other painters kept their heads down and spent long nights in the studio. Grainer was never empty, the lights eternally on. We were all striving for perfection and trying not to get lost along the way—and Moody was an encouraging leader, enduringly honest. She chastised Phoebe for “laziness” when she didn’t paint the edges of a canvas. She called Yejun’s most recent painting “muddy” and instructed him to start it over without using any black. She read a section of Cameron’s thesis paper out loud and asked the rest of us to point out what parts were confusing while he sat in front of us, head down and the tips of his ears red. She told Amrita that her palettes were overwhelming and instructed her to create three new pieces in monochromatic tones. She asked Caroline to push her textures further. To thin out her washes, build up the waxy drips, and give us more of an impact.
And she told me to keep it up, with a smile on her face.
I felt blessed by my apparent growth. Letting Moody down wasn’t a possibility.
When everyone else started to clear out of the studio, I went into the hallway and made a call. The phone rang forever. I waited for an answer and watched Rotham darken past the windows. Campus was busy. Everyone leaving class and heading to dinner with hoods pulled over their heads. Leaves speckling the dying grass. The promenade wet with icy rain. The garden still lush with coniferous growth. The edge of the woods butting up against it, Lysander Gate blowing open and banging shut in the wind. I wondered what the Boar King looked like now. I imagined him soaked and tattered, that great head lolling in the dirt, stuffed arms limp at the sides. The fur all matted and sour. The stuffing melting into the meat and into the mud.
My mom’s greeting finally came through the speaker. “Hey,” I said, and then immediately followed with, “I’m not coming home.”
“Oh,” she said. Then, “Wait, what? Why not?”
“I have too much left to do. Survey is coming up, and if I went home, I’d fall behind. They’re picking the top five students from our class to advance for Solo, and I need to get a spot in that group.”
In an ideal scenario, those five spots would belong to us. I didn’t know how to cope with any other outcome. The rest of what I wanted to say hung unsaid in the air—that there was no point if I didn’t get the chance to Solo, I might as well drop out now, all this time and all this work just for nothing to come of it.
“Are you sure?” That was my dad. I felt betrayed by the speakerphone. Then his voice got closer, and I could hear movement, likely him taking the phone into the other room. “Do you want to fly in for just a night or two? It would make your mother happy, and it sounds like it would be good for you to spend some time clearing your head.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if that was true. A beetle crawled across the windowsill in front of me, and I crushed it with my thumb. A grassy scent clung to the air. “I just can’t afford to leave right now.”
It was, reluctantly, confirmed—I would stay at Rotham for break.
Saz never flew back to London for such a short period of time, and Finch would just drive home for the day, so I knew I wouldn’t be alone on campus. But Caroline could never escape a holiday with her family, and Amrita loved heading south to see her parents and sisters in North Carolina. I didn’t blame her—I’d visited once, and her mom had fed me so much that I had to buy two new pairs of pants just to have something to wear for the rest of the trip.
We threw our fourth annual Friendsgiving that night after critique, before Caroline and Amrita headed out. It was a tradition we had formed in our first year as friends after Saz asked for a “true American Thanksgiving spread.” We all helped with the cooking, though usually Amrita and I took over most of the work. None of us liked turkey much, so we stuffed a chicken with lemons and thyme and roasted it and seared a scored block of tofu for Amrita. The oven made the whole house so hot that we kept the back door open, wind blowing into the kitchen.
“You’re really just going to stay on campus?” Amrita asked Saz and me. “Why don’t you come home with one of us?”
I leaned against the kitchen counter and shrugged. Finch sipped a beer at the table, her knees splayed wide. Caroline sliced pats of butter into a bowl of mashed potatoes and tipped her head toward Finch, who poured some of the beer into her waiting mouth and laughed when it dribbled past Caroline’s lips.
“Someone has to stick around to make sure that Jo doesn’t make herself sick spending her whole vacation hard at work,” Finch said lightly.
“Hey,” I complained, flushing. “I’ll be fine.” I cranked open a can of cranberry sauce. Amrita had wanted the real stuff, made from scratch, but Finch insisted that it tasted best out of the can, and she had been the one to do the shopping. Something buzzed close to my head. I swatted next to my ear, annoyed.
“You can always come to dinner with my family,” Caroline suggested. “The food sucks, and my mom will probably say you look dykey right after she finishes grace.”
“Wow, that sounds awesome, you should totally do that, Jo,” Finch said drily.
“I’ll be fine, I want to be on campus for a reason. I need to have ten finished pieces by the end of the week, and two of them are still in progress. You guys are already leagues ahead of me, and I’ll be lucky if I can catch up.” The buzzing continued, the fat flutter of an insect’s wings. I pressed a fingertip to my ear. “Is there a bug in here?”
“It’s November,” Saz said, like I was ridiculous for even suggesting it.
“Planet’s melting, anything is possible.” Caroline sucked mashed potatoes off the end of her finger. Saz coaxed Finch up to help her set the table. I tried to commit the sight of them to memory, imagining what it would look like in paint. Amrita tossing roasted carrots with spiced oil, Finch fiddling with the napkins beside each plate, Caroline with a bowl in each arm, Saz lifting the chicken out of the oven, Amrita rushing to clear a spot for her to put it down. Everyone pulling out a chair. Music playing from the speaker in the other room—the Cranberries. Saz lighting what felt like a hundred taper candles. Wax dripping down the sides and onto the tablecloth, which was really a piece of cobalt fabric that Finch had brought over from the studio. Brisk breeze creeping in past the open back door, a black cutout of night, lampposts glowing far down the promenade and lighting up the main door of Slatter Hall. The world a portrait of shadow. The memory of Kolesnik’s shape standing by the pond.
“C’mon, sit,” Amrita said, squeezing my wrist.
I sat. I watched them fill their plates. Saz heaped food onto mine and everything smelled heavenly, even though my stomach was tight with anxiety. I tried to lean into the simple pleasure of sitting with them, of enduring tradition, of all the ways we had claimed each other. I could have lived forever like that. Cooking a meal for them and watching them eat it.
There was no Boar King in this room. I sent him back to the corners of my self-doubt.
“This is so good,” Saz moaned. “You guys should cook for us every day. Fuck Bane, I cannot eat another lukewarm penne Alfredo.”
“It was mostly Jo,” Amrita boasted, squeezing my knee under the table.
“Cheers to Jo, then.” Finch raised her beer to me and fixed me with a knowing look. Caroline finished pouring the rest of us glasses of wine, and we raised them back, though I did it sheepishly, smiling and trying to hide it.
Finch was so pretty like that. There was an arrogant laziness to her stare that made her delicate and overwarm. She took another swig from her bottle and winked. She didn’t even have to touch me—all it took was a look. I shivered and tried to play it off by fixing my napkin in my lap. I wanted to offer her something sweet and watch her chew in that open-mouthed way of hers, like the food was so good she couldn’t remember to be polite about it.
My eyes kept drifting back to her mouth, too obviously. I didn’t have it in me to rein the feeling in or remind myself that it was likely Thea she wanted, not me. Usually my brain would repeat the same frustrated mantra by now: Don’t fuck up your friendship don’t fuck up your friendship don’t fuck up your friendship don’t fuck up your friendship don’t fuck up your friendship. The dull buzz picked up in my ear again.
“You have to try it,” Saz was saying to Amrita, nudging the plate of cranberry jelly and watching it shake. Amrita made a face—her nose wrinkling, brows raised in disbelief.
“That thing is a travesty,” she said.
“It’s fuckin’ good,” Finch responded, hand over her chest in mock hurt.
“You might like it,” I tried. “Just a bite?”
That did her in. Amrita rolled her eyes in my direction, but she dutifully slid the plate closer and forked a gelatinous piece into her mouth. Everyone went quiet as she chewed, her expression blank until it slowly started to crumple.
“Amrita hates it,” Caroline said, gleeful. “You can see it all over her face.”
“I do not! It tastes good!”
“She’s practically gagging,” Saz cried. “Look at her try to swallow it!”
“I hate you all,” Amrita said after spitting into her napkin, but she was laughing hard enough to choke, and Caroline had to thump her heartily on the back. Finch slurped up her jelly and grinned, cranberry sauce viscous and red between her teeth.
“Gross!” Saz cackled, seizing my shoulders and trying to hide behind me.
I leaned into the laughter. If growth was an endless repetition of leaving them behind, I wanted stagnancy. We could stay like this no matter what time dropped in our laps. They weren’t afraid of Survey, of the coming selection, of the possibility of some of us moving forward while the others did not. So what did I have to be scared of?