9. June
CHAPTER NINE
JUNE
Professor Whitman claps her hands twice, the chunky turquoise bracelets on her wrists clanking together.
“Pair up,” she announces. Her silver-streaked hair escapes from its low bun as she surveys the room.
I blink at her then look at the sad excuse for an art piece that’s in front of me: globs of colored hot glue and melted crayons on a canvas, along with acrylic paint.
I tried to do a simple landscape, but it’s a fucking mess is what it is.
We brought our first assignments today—the one I stayed up until 3 a.m. finishing—and she’s not even going to look at them?
Dorien is next to me and, of course, his art piece looks amazing so he’s not even fazed.
It’s a small sculptural form made of twisted copper wire and fragments of mirrored glass, the whole thing no bigger than a grapefruit.
The wire creates a kind of cage, open on all sides, and the mirror shards are positioned so they catch light and reflect it back in fractured pieces.
“Your next assignment builds on the first,” Whitman continues.
“You’ll be blending your original piece with a partner’s.
How you blend is up to you. Deconstruct.
Reconstruct. Merge materials, merge concepts, merge colors.
But it has to read as a true collaboration, not two separate works sitting next to each other pretending to be friends. ”
As soon as she’s done talking, the room erupts into motion. Chairs scrape across the floor and everyone hurries to partner-up with friends. Within thirty seconds, the entire class has dissolved into clusters of two and I’m barely wrapping my head around this second assignment thrust upon me.
I’m still sitting at my worktable.
So is Dorien.
We look at each other across the three feet of space between us, and I watch the same realization land on his face that’s currently making my stomach sink.
Dammit.
“Great,” I say under my breath.
“Thrilled,” he says flatly.
Professor Whitman appears beside us and her voice is too cheery for this ungodly situation. “Belrose. Kael. You two are partners, I assume?”
“By process of elimination,” Dorien says.
“The best collaborations often are.” She sounds almost amused. “You’ve got the rest of class to work on your piece.”
She drifts off to check on another pair, and I’m left staring at Dorien, who’s staring back at me like he just swallowed sour milk.
I glance down at his piece again. When I tilt my head, I see my own eye staring back at me from three different angles in a piece of broken glass, all of them slightly distorted.
“It’s about perception,” he says, like I asked. “How we only ever see ourselves in fragments. Never the whole.”
“I got that.”
“Did you?”
I sigh and glance down at the crayon vomit I somehow thought would make good art. The silence that follows is excruciating.
I didn’t have some “sophisticated” concept for the piece. I’ve never done mixed media, and I already feel behind in this class, so I just wanted to get something done.
I don’t have to attempt brilliance all the time, do I?
Apparently, Dorien would say, “Yes. Yes, you do.” He never does a half-assed art piece.
Dorien is staring at my disaster and I’m waiting for the criticism. The smirk. The cutting remark asking if I was drunk when I attempted it.
“The texture’s interesting,” he says finally.
I scoff. “Uh-huh. And what else?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. You’re being weird.”
His mouth quirks. “I’m trying this new thing where I don’t insult my collaborator before we’ve even started working together. Revolutionary, isn’t it?”
“You’re an ass, so just do that and be normal.”
“Give me ten minutes. I’m sure you’ll provoke it out of me.”
I shouldn’t smile at that. And I definitely shouldn’t feel the knot in my chest loosen slightly, but it does anyway.
Why is he so much more irritating than I remember?
It’s like he’s trying to make me forget why I’m supposed to keep my distance, make me think maybe we could just be normal with each other.
Then I remember and everything feels worse somehow.
“Whatever,” I say, pulling my piece closer and examining it with fresh eyes. “How do we blend a pretentious mirror sculpture with, well, this mess I created?”
His eye roll makes me feel a bit better because I’m way more comfortable with Dorien the Jerk, the one with walls and snappy comebacks that make me want to stay away. “First of all,” he says, “it’s not pretentious. It’s insightful. And second, I wouldn’t call yours a mess.”
“Trash? It’s probably just trash.”
He smiles and I like that smile too much. Note to self: stop making Dorien smile.
“It looks like you were working through something and ran out of time,” he says, his voice is matter of fact. Just an observation. “The color palette is aggressive, but it’s cohesive. The crayons and glue add dimension that straight paint wouldn’t.”
I don’t know what to do with Dorien being genuinely analytical instead of mocking. It throws me off balance, so I focus on our assignment instead.
“How do you want to do this? We could deconstruct both pieces,” I say. “Pull apart the wire skeleton, cut up the canvas. Use elements from each to build something new.”
“Or we keep certain parts intact. Your canvas could be the foundation. My wire form could…” He grabs his sketchbook and makes a rough drawing.
The more he draws, the more I frown. I actually like his idea.
“Here,” he says, turning the sketch toward me.
“My wire can bend around, even pierce your canvas. It turns the canvas 3D, using both the back and the front.” He’s leaning forward now, his hands moving as he talks, sketching invisible shapes in the air.
“We can create a conversation between the flat and the dimensional.”
I watch his hands because I can’t help it. They’re sculptor’s hands, strong and capable, with calluses on the fingers. Thick fingers.
I’ve never held his hand and now I’m wondering what those sturdy, commanding hands would feel like wrapped around mine.
I shut that thought down so fast it leaves skid marks.
“Okay,” I say. “Um…” I lift my canvas and flip it over. “I think if I heat the crayon, I could work some of the color through the holes the wire creates. I think there should be color bleeding onto the back.”
He grins. “Yeah. Yeah, I think that could work.”
Stop grinning. I don’t like his grin because everything about him is more handsome.
He grabs his piece, looking too excited about our assignment. “Let’s start pulling things apart.”
We work in silence for a while, me adding things to his sketch while he messes with wires. The classroom fills with the sounds of other pairs working on their own pieces, with the occasional burst of laughter from the duo near the window who seem to be having the best time ever.
My phone lights up on the table with a text from Tyler, my flirty watercolor classmate. Botanical garden has a new orchid exhibit. Still a maybe?
I type back a smiley face and lock the screen. It’s the least committal response possible, and I’m aware of that, but I like keeping Tyler in the maybe zone. The maybe zone is safe, fun, and doesn’t require me to feel anything I’m not ready to feel.
Dorien glances at my phone, then at me. He doesn’t ask, and I don’t explain.
I show Dorien the sketch I was working on and he nods mindlessly, which I take for a sign that I can proceed, so I grab an X-Acto knife and make a few small cuts in my canvas where his wire can push through.
I watch him unravel his piece. There’s something meditative about deconstruction, about taking apart something you made to see what’s left when you strip away the mistakes.
Not that his piece had any mistakes.
“So.” Dorien’s voice breaks my daze. “Anything new with the rumors?” He’s not looking at me, too focused on bending a piece of copper wire into a new shape, but I can tell he’s paying attention.
My shoulders drop because I’d kind of forgotten about the rumors for at least fifteen minutes; otherwise, they’re constantly on my mind.
“Nothing new about me. The flyers stopped, at least.” I set down the knife, flexing my cramped fingers.
“But there’s been another one about a guy this time. He was also in the exhibition.”
“Who?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Cinna told me this morning when she was in a hurry and I’ve been trying not to think about it, honestly. This whole thing is insane, that someone is doing this.”
“Adults can be childish.”
“Yeah. Someone started posting on the campus forums, saying this guy’s portfolio is full of AI-generated images. It doesn’t make sense because he had a literal hand-painted canvas at the exhibition.”
Dorien’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t say anything.
I pick at a piece of crayon on my canvas. “People are believing it anyway. And…” I close my mouth before I admit that part of me is relieved the attention is off me. Everyone is talking about this new rumor, not mine anymore.
Dorien sets his piece down and glances over. “And what?”
“Just… you should watch yourself. You were in the exhibition too.”
He shrugs. “Let them talk.”
“I’m serious, Dorien. If someone’s targeting everyone who got in—”
“Then they’ll get to me eventually.” He takes my canvas and pushes a piece of wire through a cut I made. “I don’t care. Reputation is just what other people project onto you. It doesn’t change art, the art I’ll keep making.”
I want to agree with him and have that kind of confidence, the unshakeable certainty that the art is what matters and everything else is a distraction.
But I’ve spent the last week catching people staring at me across the quad, hearing conversations die when I walk into rooms. It’s hard to focus on the work when the work feels poisoned by association.
“Must be nice,” I say quietly. “Not caring.”