Chapter 1
BIRDIE
I think the apples started the second week. Not the first week—I would have remembered that—but sometime after the third or fourth studio session.
I walked back into the studio from the utility room where I kept my things and found the first apple on my desk. It was fat, gleaming, red…and, most importantly, not there when I’d left the room.
I hadn’t been sure it was meant for me. Apples on desks were for elementary school teachers, not college lecturers, and even calling myself a lecturer was a bit of a lie—I’d been smuggled into this adjunct gig at Evelyn College as a last-minute replacement, even though I’d never formally taught before and even though I avoided public speaking at all costs because of my cataclysmic anxiety.
This wasn’t my curriculum or my studio or my real job. I wasn’t meant to be here, so the apple wasn’t meant for me.
I’d left it on the desk, turned off the lights, and walked through the frigid January dark to my rattletrap car. January in Kansas is a windy nightmare, but I welcomed it that winter. It meant that the shaking—always bad before, during, and after a class—felt normal.
I wasn’t fucked up. I wasn’t terrified, even when I had no reason to be terrified, when my anxiety seemed to have no cause and no beginning. A fear and nervousness inborn in me, a tremulous cousin to the original sin that had nestled in my soul since the womb.
It was just cold, that was all; it was just January. Everyone shook in January.
The second apple came with a torn-off bit of paper from a sketch pad, my name neatly written in marker: Ms. Cooper.
The flush was immediate, hot prickles of embarrassment at my neck and cheeks and palms, even though I couldn’t explain to myself exactly why I was embarrassed, why the gift felt mocking somehow.
Maybe it was the Ms. Cooper, like I really was a teacher and not a warm body asked to fill in for a studio slot when no one else could.
Like whoever left the apple knew as well as I did that me being in charge of a studio full of students was a joke.
And I’d told them…I’d told them just to call me Birdie.
I was twenty-nine at the time, only seven or eight years older than them, and I felt clumsy and ridiculous presenting myself as Ms. anything; I felt utterly stupid asking for any kind of verbal respect.
They were mostly fine arts majors anyway and used to a certain level of informality.
When I’d introduced myself as Birdie, they hadn’t blinked.
No one called me Ms. Cooper. Not even the brothers. Not even the priests.
I didn’t take the second apple either or move the note. I left them both, walked to my car in the dark, and shivered in the driver’s seat until the vents started blowing hot, metal-smelling air and I remembered how to drive myself home.
The third apple came in the same way, with a torn-off bit of sketch pad and my name written in marker.
The studio was set up for life and still-life drawing—models, a borrowed cat, fruit—and to a one, the students used pencils.
They varied between colored pencils, graphite, charcoal, pastel…
but always pencils. I hadn’t seen a single marker in the last two weeks.
I stared down at the apple and told myself all the things I’d read about anxiety disorders online.
All the things I’d learned from that well-meaning counselor when I was a student myself at Evelyn College: I was okay.
I was here in my body. My brain was only trying to keep me safe by trying to identify danger, even though there wasn’t any right now and even though I’d never been in any kind of danger actually.
It was just my brain—just my broken brain.
The apple was from a friendly student or maybe a student as awkward as I was, and they didn’t know that I spent every studio session trembling quietly behind the studio desk, certain that everyone could see what a fraud I was, how embarrassing I was.
Not embarrassed—or not only that—but embarrassing.
That was all in my head. It wasn’t real. No one was trying to humiliate me with apples.
I still couldn’t bring myself to take it.
The next time I walked into the studio to arrange easels and chairs before class, an apple was already waiting. A juicy-looking crimson orb, throwing a glossy sheen off its upper curve.
The note underneath read the same as the last: Ms. Cooper.
I looked around the studio, although there was no point. It had been locked when I got here, empty when I walked in. When I checked the hallway outside, it was crowded with students leaving their afternoon classes. None of them were hanging around the studio door or watching me.
I went and picked up the apple and then the note. Other than being a fresh apple and a fresh note, there was nothing different about them from last time. But something made the nerve endings on the back of my neck tickle and sing, like I was being watched. Like this was a gift with strings.
I only taught this single section, which meant the apples had to have been coming from one of those students.
And that student would be here in just a few minutes, so I didn’t want to throw the apple away and risk its giver seeing it in the trash.
But I didn’t want to take it either. Taking it felt like…
I didn’t even know. Accepting something, agreeing to something, and I wasn’t capable of that even in the best of situations.
We were drawing fruit that day, so I set the apple in the bowl with everything else—pears and oranges and bananas—and pocketed the note as the first of the students began trickling in.
They were talking about volunteering; Evelyn College was a Jesuit school and, as such, encouraged acts of service.
Strongly encouraged. Service hours weren’t a graduation requirement, but they were a good idea for anyone hoping to apply for a grad program somewhere choosy, like Loyola or Georgetown, and the yearly service awards were nice trimming for a CV.
As usual, I kept myself behind the desk as students got settled and pulled out their things.
They didn’t need me here, not really, since third and fourth years already knew shading and proportion and how to sharpen a charcoal pencil without breaking it.
Mostly I was there to log attendance and turn off the lights at the end.
It was safer behind the desk anyway. I could disappear back there in the corner, with the massive metal supply cabinet between me and the door. A shelter for soft, timorous things like me.
And from there, I could watch. I enjoyed watching them.
I enjoyed their camaraderie, their laughter, their easy friendships.
I enjoyed watching them sketch, erase, sketch, smudge, sharpen, try again, stretching their still-young artistic legs, learning that skill is built on mistakes and not successes.
I even enjoyed watching their little rivalries, the unrequited crushes, the aftermath of heartbreaks when I hadn’t even known there were hearts at risk of being broken, the subtle topography of cliques and friendly acquaintances and unfriendly acquaintances and students who clearly couldn’t stand each other.
I enjoyed it not because it gratified me to see them unhappy but because it was all so human and so young, and I had never been young like that.
My college years hadn’t been filled with bumped shoulders and jokes from the next easel over, hadn’t hummed with the thrill of possibility, academic or romantic or social.
It was vicarious but maybe even a level removed from vicarious because I’d given up on having any of that for myself, even by proxy.
I watched the students live their messy, possibility-laden lives in the same way a dying person might watch travel documentaries on TV.
Gazing at places I would never be able to visit, but I was happy other people could.
A well-behaved few had already started sketching, finding the horizontal line of the table and the vertical midline of the bowl, and then the studio door opened again, three minutes after studio had officially started.
Just as it had since the first session. And every session since. Three minutes late every time.
The whole room brightened as he strode in—and I mean brightened as close to literally as possible. The lights cheerfully emitted more lumens after he came into the studio, the air became warmer, everything went gentle and golden.
He glowed.
I shrank back into my cabinet and desk shelter and held my breath.
I didn’t want him to see me. Even being looked at by him felt wrong somehow, like violating some moral law.
He was radiant, beautiful, a young man whom God poured every whim and wonder into, and he was so far above any of us in this room but especially me.
I dreaded even the polite cast of his gaze to me when I gave the class my quiet instructions for the session.
It sounds unethical, this awareness of my own student, but I had no sense of my awareness being desire or even attraction.
I don’t think I was even capable of being attracted to someone in those days because that would have required a degree of self-deception I couldn’t bring myself to entertain.
Being attracted to someone was too close to hope, and hope was a guttering flame cupped in my shaking palms. I didn’t have enough of it to light even the smallest room; I certainly didn’t have enough to ignite that kind of yearning.
No, I was aware of him like Mary was aware of Gabriel, like a sailor was aware of the sea. Ryan Bell, the architecture major, the darling of Evelyn College, simply called Bell by everyone because Bell fit him in a way that Ryan didn’t.