13 BUILD THE RIVER AND THE RAFT
13
B UILD THE R IVER AND THE R AFT
The itching wound woke me early the next morning far before I was meant to be up for studio, the sun not yet awake, the sky still that pinkened breath of predawn. My nails ripped into it again before my mind blinked back to life, and I pulled my hands away wet with blood. Some was already half-clotted beneath my nails. Caroline was sitting on my bed.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “When did you get here? I thought I locked the door?”
She was in a little lavender satin nightgown with her hair hanging down around her face, dewy with sweat. Her tattoo was red beneath the plastic wrap and tape—I could see the faintest edge of it peek just past the armpit of the satin beneath her bicep. “Check your email,” she said.
I pushed my hair out of my eyes and stared back at her. Past the gauze of curtain, I could see pinprick lights glowing in Grainer. I was half-afraid I might look at her and see that light poke through the thin planes of her face. That she was an apparition I had summoned from my head. Some new form the ghoulish Boar King had taken—a shape I was more likely to trust and less inclined to run from. If that was true, it wasn’t doing a very good job. I still wanted to run.
“What time is it?” I asked, but she just shrugged, the look on her face intensely pensive. There was an eeriness to the rigid angle she held herself at. As if the news she had to give me were something life-ending.
I reached for my phone, still sorting through questions in my head: When had I fallen asleep? How long had I been dead to the world? Why hadn’t I heard her come in?
There was a notification highlighted at the top of my phone with St. Roche’s name on it. Fear curdled in my belly with the memory of Kolesnik’s death announcement.
“What is this?” I asked, but Caroline just wrapped her fingers around my ankle through my blanket, sweat beading along her upper lip. My eyes kept flicking around the room and back to my phone screen, finding nothing safe to land on. It was a campus-wide email with the official Rotham crest in the signature. I read it once, twice, three times, four. “What the fuck? Did you tell the others yet?”
“Just you,” Caroline said.
St. Roche’s scathing words were a slew of emotions like disappointed , confused , appalled , crestfallen , stricken , all used to describe what she stated “a local farmer had discovered in a field”: Kolesnik’s Boar King suit, defiled in a dirty patch of cornfield. Our ritual.
The end of the email stated that Rotham advisors were expected to speak to their students about what had happened to the suit. If faculty had reason to believe that one of their students removed the suit from its case, punishment would be meted out appropriately.
“We’re done for,” I said. “It’s fucking Survey on Friday. We’ll be expelled.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Caroline said.
“What the hell are you worried about, then?”
Fury rose until my first instinct was to say something hateful, something like of course that’s not what you’re worried about. Because Caroline would always be okay. Her parents were far more entrenched in Rotham’s history and culture than any of the rest of us were, with deep pockets to prove it. Caroline could burn down Grainer, and St. Roche would let her Solo with the tiniest disapproving pat on the hand.
The longer I looked at her, the more I wanted to snap. Panic constricted me tighter and tighter, every opportunity for our inevitable end cycling through my head. Now that they had the costume and could see what we had done with it, they would be questioning everyone on campus. Who knew how long we’d be able to stave them off? Saz was such a bad fucking liar.
Caroline leaned closer. Strands of hair stuck to her forehead, one caught in her mouth. Her eyes were a pallid blue. “Can’t you feel it?” she whispered. “Can’t you see it around us? They disrupted what we created. They cut our ties to a higher power.”
Frost coated the window. Another light blinked on in Grainer, then another, as the lampposts down the promenade slowly blipped out.
That was the first time, with Caroline on my bed and that wild gleam in her eyes. That was the moment I knew I wasn’t alone with my horrors—that even unsaid, we could all feel the shift. Whatever we had invited in had staked its claim deep within us. I could still smell her blood, feel her rough tongue against my palm.
I asked Caroline to go. I got dressed. Wordlessly, we gathered. We pretended that none of it had ever happened, and we went to class.
Moody avoided the subject of anything Kolesnik-related, though clearly St. Roche’s email had bothered her. It had everyone in a frenzy. Yejun pulled the email up on his phone, and we abandoned the half-moon of chairs to read over his shoulder.
“This is so fucked,” Phoebe said from my right. Her voice was laden with excitement. “Like, who thinks of this shit? And to do it after Kolesnik dies? Spit on his grave, why don’t you. I wish we could see what it looked like.”
Thea plucked Yejun’s phone out of his hands and read over the email again. I avoided her eyes at all costs, pulse thudding loud as footsteps in my ears. All I could think about was Thea in my studio. How she’d leaned in to peer at the painting of the five of us in the cornfield. I wiped my sticky palms against my jeans.
But she just scoffed and tossed the phone back into Yejun’s lap. “Who said it was made after he died? Maybe he did it himself. Maybe it was his final sculpture before he keeled over.”
“He wasn’t that creative,” Cameron said, shaking his head.
Phoebe rolled her eyes. “Who do you think made it, Jo?”
My head snapped up. “What?”
“Do you think it was one of us? It seems the most likely, right?”
I floundered. “I mean ...,” I started, before turning to find the others behind me—Amrita claiming the seat to my left, Finch hovering at the back with Saz to her right, Caroline relentlessly biting at the raw skin around her thumbnail. It was the only habit of hers that I’d ever been able to clock as distasteful. Blood collected in the torn skin like she’d been eating cherries.
“Why would any of us risk our Solo position like that?” Amrita answered Phoebe for me, her expression neutral and pleasant. “It was probably one of the juniors Kirsten hires to make the library displays. Sculpture majors always think they’re so funny, it’s ridiculous.”
“They’re wild,” I agreed.
“Twisted,” Saz said lightly. Finch nodded.
“Totally fucked,” Caroline finished.
“I think we have far more important subjects to focus on this week, don’t you all think?” Moody interrupted. She stood beside her stool, apparently too on edge to sit. Finch mirrored her when I glanced back and caught her eye, with her arms crossed over her chest and bottom lip caught in her teeth.
“Right on,” Cameron said. “Let’s get to work.”
Moody’s smile was weak. “This is your last week to collect your materials for Friday, when you will present the introduction to your thesis with the intention of expanding it throughout the winter and early spring for exhibition, whether that be in the Grainer Gallery or as a Soloist. I’ll remind you that what you show will be a determining factor in our selection of the five candidates for Solo. Please present your best selves.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Saz said.
Moody smiled again, a little looser this time. She waved her hands at us. “Alright, go on. I’ll come and find you.”
We split up, conversations still lingering about the Boar King. I could hear flashes of awe and disgust— Can you imagine finding it? I would have thought I was stumbling across a murder —but I kept silent.
In the studio I fretted over what I had to show to Moody: a collection of twelve Gatherings . The scene at the dining table. Saz’s nose spouting blood like a cracked faucet. All of us piled into the living room or sitting in rows in Saz’s SUV. Our collective on the beach in Michigan, painted from the last photo I had taken before senior year began. Amrita standing at the top of the Manor stairs. Caroline crouched at the bottom, invented candles sitting on each step. Caroline’s head peeking around the shower curtain, Saz applying false lashes in the mirror, Finch perched crisscross on the toilet lid, Amrita leaning into the doorway mid-shout. A series of us coming together over, and over, and over. A life crafted from the spaces in between us. All the shapes we made out of shadows and all the light we ferried with us. Our sabbath around the Boar King in the field, each of us with a hand on its body, spines arched and limbs entangled.
Right. Fuck.
I tore the canvas from the wall, pins clattering around my cubicle. The paint was just dry enough that it wouldn’t smear, still a little tacky to the touch. I rolled it frantically into a limp tube and stuffed it in the corner of my cubicle just as Moody rapped her knuckles on the wall beside the doorway. “Jo, ready for a chat?”
I nodded and tried to look anywhere but at the canvas. She leaned against my desk, her pants pressing into the edge of raw wood. I was afraid of being a mess. My worst fear was that she would stand up again and I’d find evidence of all my chaos on her in a mark of paint across the back of her thighs.
“You’ve been working hard,” she said. She traced a finger over a pile of discarded sketches, then drifted to my stack of loose canvases. She gestured to the one on top—the painting of the five of us on the beach. “That one’s new. Did you have a good break?”
I searched for an answer that wasn’t pitiful and ended up with “I never left.”
She hummed. “Hard worker. How do you feel about Survey?”
Wasn’t that the question? Knowing my own feelings felt like wisdom out of my reach. I needed someone else to fill me in after reading it on my face.
“I want to ask you how I should feel,” I admitted, “but I know that’s a terrible question.”
Moody laughed. “I can tell you what I feel. I think you’ve created some special pieces. The past few months have pushed you to explore something that really matters to you, and that value comes across in the work.”
I followed her eyes as they scanned the beach painting. On the canvas, we were eons from winter. White sun overhead, dark water sloshing against the rocky shore, dunes sloping like a mountain range. Five women standing in the water. Light refracting across the world.
That summer trip, Finch drove us everywhere. We liked to be in the car more than anything, Caroline queuing songs we’d all loved as teenagers—“Diplomat’s Son,” “Silver Soul,” “Congratulations.” Amrita sat up front with Finch, fiddling with the aux cord when its loose wiring would give out. We hung our arms out the windows. We listened to “Super Rich Kids” four times in a row because Saz kept saying, “ Again! Again! ” like she was a little kid on a roller coaster, hands flung up in the air, waiting for the drop.
It was music all the time. On the beach, in the kitchen, sound warbling out of my waterlogged speaker on Caroline’s back porch. It was enough tequila to fend off an inevitable hangover, hair of the dog, except the dog never strayed anywhere we couldn’t easily call it back from. Finch was our bartender. Squeezing limes all night. She liked to make things personal, liked to watch you take the first sip. By the end of the night, we all just wanted a heavy pour in a cup of something carbonated or sweet, but Finch still insisted. Wanted to be the one the rest of us could depend on.
In the mornings, Amrita made us breakfast. We relied on the raspberries we plucked from the tree line, endless baskets of red with each haul sweeter than the last. Caroline would sit at her grandmother’s piano and bang out tunes while we ate. Saz liked to lay herself halfway across its sleek body, crooning like a jazz singer to the repetition of “Hot Cross Buns.” She wanted to make us laugh. She was so good at it.
We mostly wore Caroline’s clothes, each of us somehow finding something that fit—oversized sweatshirts, loose summer dresses—and we kept laughing and saying, sisterhood, sisterhood, sisterhood. By the end of the week, everything smelled like woodsmoke and old sun. Grass stains on the elbows. Sunscreen clinging to the collars.
At night by the fire, Saz talked about stars and birth charts and told us all the ways the universe predicted our lives in signs and nodes. The water was a deeper black than evening. I couldn’t believe how old I was and how fucking young I felt. It was like playing at adulthood, ignoring all the ways we ought to grow up.
I imagined that this was what it was like to be in love: how people said it rose unbidden and unnamable.
Sometimes I forgot that we’d been a complete unit for only two years, that there were things they didn’t know about me and they had secrets I wasn’t privy to. That week on the beach came with a shift—some innate understanding that we were safe with one another. We had time to unfurl. Maybe they didn’t know me entirely yet, but they liked me so far. If I spoke up, they’d look at me and listen.
“I’d live like this forever,” Caroline had said, sprawled out on her back under the stars, fire painting her in shades of hell. “We could get a house, just us, and spend the rest of our days exactly like this.”
“You want kids, though,” I said, because I wanted her to know I remembered.
She cocked her head thoughtfully. “Yeah, I guess I do. But you guys could be their aunts. It’d be a cool way to grow up.”
Amrita hummed like she was sloshing the idea around in her mouth. “I think we’d make great aunts. I’ll have some practice when my sister’s baby arrives.”
“Will she let me test my aunt skills on that baby too?” Saz asked, laughing and ducking when Amrita flicked sand in her direction.
“Your kid would grow up to be such a dick with us in the picture,” Finch said. Her smile pressed into her bare knee as her arms wrapped around her legs.
Caroline laughed. “Perfect, that’s what I’m hoping for.”
“Imagine if they were straight,” Saz said, horrified. “What the hell would we do?”
Caroline’s laugh became a cackle. That set the rest of us off. I couldn’t tell if it was the fire making me feel so warm or if it was the thought that life could continue like this with them by my side.
It was the first time that anyone had suggested such an idea. The first time I learned it was the only thing I’d ever wanted enough to make myself sick.
That moment on the beach seemed so far from me now as Moody hovered a few inches away from the painting. When she straightened again, her eyes caught on the rolled-up canvas in the corner. I held my breath until Moody gave me her full attention again.
“You’re still keeping something out of the viewer’s reach. You give us these scenes of intimacy, and you make us feel excluded from them. I don’t think that’s entirely a problem, because maybe that’s the point. Maybe we’re supposed to be aware that we don’t fit into this group and we never will, no matter how many private moments we’re permitted to witness. But if you won’t let us love them, we need to understand why you do. And to me, it still feels like you’ve built a barrier between your audience and your subject. One that you probably keep between yourself and your subject as well. If you can’t cross it, how do you expect the rest of us to try?”
I followed her gaze to where Caroline’s head was outlined in the faintest trace of yellow, hair whipping in the wind. Finch with her arms looped through mine and Caroline’s. Saz half-turned, knee-deep in the water. Amrita leading us farther into the depths.
“Kolesnik said the same thing once,” I said quietly.
“Kolesnik was an asshole,” Moody said. “I’ll be the first to admit that. He was sexist, and self-absorbed, and he held little regard for anyone’s feelings other than his own. He was my professor, too, you know, in his first years at Rotham during my undergrad. I’m no stranger to the way he carries himself—or, carried. Sorry.”
Truthfully, I hadn’t known that. Moody ran her thumb along the frayed edge of my canvas. “I have to ask everyone about what St. Roche found. I’ve always been honest with you, Jo. I hope you all will be honest with me.”
Looking at her would have given me away. I made a fist around the brushes in my hand, thin wood crackled from sitting in cups of solvent for too long.
“Of course,” I finally answered, knowing I was a liar, knowing that I would be forever if it meant keeping that ritual to us alone. Maybe that was part of what Moody was talking about: my inability to take down the walls that encased my deepest desires could end in my own destruction.
I considered it and decided that I didn’t really care. It was such an easy pleasure to keep them all to myself, to let everyone else know they’d never see inside.
“You didn’t have anything to do with it, did you? You wouldn’t have disrespected Rotham property like that.”
She ended with a statement rather than a question. She gave me so much room to slip out of her reach.
“Never,” I said.
“Good.” She gave my painting one more glance and waved her hand in its direction. “You know ... what if you brought the viewer into the painting? You have these defined figures that almost become characters in your narrative. What if you painted some kind of representation, like a blank figure, or a symbol, that lived in each painting like a stand-in for the audience?”
I nodded and considered. “I like that,” I said.
Moody grinned. “Good. Give it a try. Now I won’t take up any more of your time, I’m sure you have plenty of preparation to do.”
“I’ll keep working,” I said. “I’ll be ready for Friday.”