4. June #2
“So? That doesn’t mean you can’t try.” She nudges me with her shoulder. “Your gallery piece alone could qualify I bet. Or you could make something new.”
Even though the desperation to prove myself is rising inside me, I know I don’t have a real chance at it. “Are you going to enter?”
She reads the flyer, her expression becoming neutral. If she’s excited about the prize, art, or any of the work she does, she doesn’t show it. She adjusts her hair again, that nervous habit she has. “No. I don’t do competitions.”
“Why not? Your work is good.”
“My work is just okay.” She shrugs and then starts picking at her fingernails like the competition is annoying her. “I don’t know. Entering my stuff into contests makes me feel weird. Like I’m asking people to rank me. Who wants that judgement?”
“That’s literally what art school is. Getting judged so you can get better.”
“Teachers already tell me my work is crap, so why would I sign up for more?” She turns away. “Seriously, though. You should go for it. You have an actual shot.”
I want to ask which teachers are being harsh to her, and why she deflects when it comes to her own work, but she’s already looking at her phone and saying we’ll be late if we don’t move.
“I love your art. I think it’s amazing,” I tell her, but she only rolls her eyes.
Since she’s clearly done with this subject, I pull out my phone and snap a quick picture of the flyer, capturing the entry website at the bottom.
“Research for later,” I say.
“Good. I expect a full application strategy by tomorrow.”
“You’re very bossy.”
“I’m very supportive.” She grins, back to her usual cheerful self.
As we continue to class, I pull my diary from my bag and scribble as we walk: Alaria Annual Prize. MoMA curator mentorship. Just enter, even if you’re terrified of the judgement. If I don’t even get an honorary mention, nobody has to know I tried. If I do get in, I’ll throw up and then celebrate.
I snap the leather diary shut and stuff it back in my bag. Cinna gives me a knowing smirk.
We make it to the Visual Studies class, held in a small second-floor lecture hall that seats around fifty people—though it’s never completely full—with three minutes to spare.
The building is one of the older ones, with arched doorways and corridors that swallow sound.
Cinna and I slide into seats near the middle and pull out our laptops as Professor Morrison arranges her slides at the front.
The class fills in around us, conversations layered over the rustle of bags and the scrape of chairs. Morrison is one of those professors who starts exactly on time regardless of who’s still finding their seat, so when the clock hits ten, she launches into her lecture immediately.
“Today we’re examining the relationship between negative space and narrative absence,” she says, dimming the lights. She clicks around on her computer until the first slide displays on the projector screen. “How does what we leave out define what we put in?”
I’m typing notes, trying to keep up, when the door at the back of the lecture hall creaks open.
Without looking, I know it’s Aeron.
He slips in fifteen minutes late, per usual, trying to be invisible.
It’s ironic because his arrival draws the attention of at least a dozen students who turn to watch him slink toward the back rows.
He finds an empty seat in the far corner and slides into it, hunching his shoulders like he’s trying to disappear into the chair.
Morrison doesn’t pause her lecture, but I catch the slight tightening of her mouth, suggesting she noticed. Aeron is going to get an email later about attendance expectations. I make a mental note to remind him to check his inbox.
I try to return to taking notes, but my attention keeps drifting. Not to Aeron, exactly. To where Aeron is looking.
Because my brother isn’t watching the lecture. He’s watching Cinna.
His eyes are fixed on her profile, tracing the line of her jaw, the slope of her nose, the way her hair falls across her shoulder. It’s the look he gets when he’s making art, that focused intensity that blocks out everything else.
Except this is Cinna, not an art piece.
I asked him about it a few months ago, when I caught him doing the same thing at a group hangout. “Why are you always staring at her?” I whispered.
He’d blinked at me, like he was surprised I noticed. “She just… has good bone structure.”
“That’s a really weird thing to say about a person.”
“I’m an artist. It’s an observation.”
“A little creepy, honestly.”
He’d just shrugged and gone back to his sketchbook, and I’d let it drop because I didn’t know how to investigate without making it into a bigger thing than it probably was.
But now, watching him watch her from across the lecture hall, I’m not so sure it’s about an artist simply observing someone’s beauty.
Aeron has always been awkward with people.
He stands at the edge of conversations and observes instead of participating, and he communicates better through his art than through words.
I don’t know if he really just thinks Cinna is a good drawing subject.
Or if there’s something else there. A crush, maybe.
The thought makes me uncomfortable because Cinna is my best friend. Aeron is my little brother. The idea of those two worlds overlapping feels wrong, like mixing oil paint with watercolor.
I force my attention back to the lecture. Professor Morrison is now discussing the use of silence in visual storytelling. But every few minutes, my gaze drifts back to Aeron in the back row, still watching, still studying, still… whatever he’s doing.