Chapter 1 #2
He was in his final year then, twenty-two years old, but he wore confidence and charm like they’d been placed with him in the cradle.
He had fair skin that tanned easily, thick, blond curls that would turn white with sunshine by the end of the semester, and pale, pale blue eyes.
There was a beauty mark above his mouth, and when he smiled, his mouth stretched wider than the sky, wide enough to crease his face from his cheek to his jaw and to send lines fanning out from his eyes.
When he wasn’t smiling, there was a natural upward flick to the corners of his mouth, like he was perpetually amused but at no one’s expense. Like he was just…happy.
I want to carve his likeness was the first thing I thought when I saw him. I wanted to make those curls myself, render that mouth holy by giving it to Jesus or perhaps John the Beloved. Maybe an angel.
I knew he wasn’t perfect—at least according to Kaitlyn, who knew everything happening at Evelyn.
He was a brilliant artist and would be a brilliant architect one day, but he seemed to have gotten through his gen eds at his first university by brute force alone.
His family was a mess—there was a brother who was a disgraced priest, another who’d had an affair with a novitiate.
There were rumors of drinking and parties before he’d transferred here from the University of Kansas, but they stayed rumors and there were never any new ones.
Since coming to Evelyn, he’d been a model Catholic citizen; he volunteered everywhere, showed up to every student life event with a name tag and that wide smile, and he was at Mass twice a week (and went to the rosary service on Thursdays).
He carried a well-made pocket watch that he’d inherited from a grandfather, and he never had his cell phone out while he was talking to you.
He was kind to everyone: the ancient nuns in the office, the disoriented first-years, the zealots, the sickly, the meek.
He was three minutes late to studio every week because he was across campus organizing the student coat closet.
His talent for both architecture and art was legendary—his architecture projects won contests; his doodle of the college’s eagle mascot made it onto official school merch last year.
He could draw anything if you put it in front of him.
He wasn’t perfect, but he was beautiful and good.
And I wanted to carve his curls so badly.
Another fruit-drawing session, another apple and note. I donated the apple to the bowl, hid in my corner as long as possible, and then after some time had passed, I avoided looking in Bell’s direction.
Once a session, I forced myself to make a lap around the space to see if anyone had questions, even though it terrified me to answer them—not because I didn’t know the answers but because I knew how I sounded when I answered in my uncomfortable, hesitant way.
Because I knew how I looked compared to these gleaming, glowing younger people.
Awkward and frizzy-haired and shy and faded.
Nothing that came out of my mouth would ever seem as true as it could simply because it was forever tainted by a skittish and provincial smallness that these students, with their confidence and happiness and certainty and winsomeness, could never understand.
I paused behind a student, taken with her interpretation of the scene. Even though the apple in the bowl was whole, she’d drawn it with a perfect bite mark at the uppermost curve and a thin line of juice running down to the pear below it.
“I really like that, Isobel,” I said quietly.
Isobel beamed. They were all kind to me, which made my fear of them even more ridiculous, but I was still convinced that any kindness toward me was rooted in pity and that my payment for the gift of pity should be acute shame for needing it in the first place.
“Thank you, Birdie,” she said. “I felt inspired by the apple. Forbidden fruit and all.”
“You can make any of the fruit forbidden if you’d like—or all of it. Genesis only says that Eve ate fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, not that it was an apple specifically.”
Another student, Emily, chimed in. “We learned about this in Brother George’s class. It came from Saint Jerome—”
“Malum means ‘evil,’ and mālum means ‘apple,’” another student added.
“No,” said yet another student, shaking his head. “The word for any kind of fruit in Latin is pomum, and medieval French monks began reading the word as apple rather than fruit over time.”
The priests would be so proud of their students having a spontaneous debate about etymology and translation. What could be more Jesuit? I felt something like a smile flicker on my lips—a first since I’d started teaching this class.
“The freedom is yours,” I said to Isobel, my hands knotted in front of me. I was too aware of everyone’s interested stares, even if the interest was in the subject matter and not me. “Even Michelangelo chose a fig tree rather than an apple tree for the Sistine Chapel.”
Isobel turned to face me fully. “Which fruit do you think it is?” she asked.
“Obviously a fig,” Emily insisted before I could answer. “Adam and Eve make clothes out of fig leaves right after they realize they’re naked, and why would they do that if they weren’t already right next to a fig tree?”
“Augustine makes it seem like it was a fig,” another student concurred.
“I think it was a grape,” said someone else. “We know they were making wine well before this account was written, and the association between grapes and wine and then wine and sin would have been well-known.”
Someone cast their vote for mushrooms—specifically psychoactive ones—and someone else for wheat. But Isobel was still staring up at me with an expectant expression.
My fingertips tingled, I had my hands twined together so tightly. The whole class was looking at me…including him.
But I made myself answer. It was normal to answer. Normal people didn’t freeze at the prospect of speaking in front of twenty politely interested Catholics.
“I think figs are the most likely,” I said. “But I like the idea of pomegranates more. They seem more tempting to me.”
And then I blushed. It was too subjective—too personal—and I wished I hadn’t said anything at all.
But Isobel smiled up at me, and then Emily was wondering which fruit was more connected with a cultural fear of women’s sexuality, the fig or the pomegranate, and someone else was demanding to know how exactly Augustine had likened the tree in Eden to a fig tree, because he felt like that was a pretty weak assertion.
And then I slipped quietly back to my corner, behind the shared studio desk, and focused on prying my hands apart.
I didn’t leave until the very last student was gone and the hallway outside the classroom was silent.
Tempting. Why had that word even bloomed against my lips?
I shook my head, promising myself I’d talk even less the next class, and went out to my cold, unwelcoming car to go home.