11. Dorien #2
I swallow because I know I shouldn’t touch that phone. It’s a huge invasion of privacy, but what the hell was the text about? I’ve never seen her look so startled. And seeing her like that, seeing that someone hurt her, inches me toward a violent rage.
I stare at the phone for about fifteen seconds before I pick it up.
The screen is locked. It needs four digits, so what might she have picked? Knowing June, it isn’t four random numbers. To June, everything has some meaning and significance.
Melia comes to mind. I’ve been at enough Belrose dinners, enough birthday parties, enough of those chaotic Sunday mornings where everyone’s in the kitchen and Melia is burning toast and laughing about it, to know how June and Melia are less like mother and daughter and more like best friends.
I could be completely wrong about the passcode, but I take a guess.
I type in Melia’s birthday. November third. 1-1-0-3.
The phone unlocks.
A jolt runs through my stomach and it’s part satisfaction, part guilt. I know her well enough to guess her passcode. I also know her well enough to understand that if she finds out about this, I might get the silent treatment forever.
I just can’t stand not knowing who harmed her, or if I can do anything about it.
The text is open on the screen, and it’s from an unknown number.
I read it.
My hands go still.
You’re a talentless bitch who has to be the center of attention. Do you even care how manipulative you are? You didn’t deserve a spot in the exhibition. Everyone knows you spread your legs to get chosen. Whore.
I read it twice because the first time my brain rejects it, refusing to process that someone typed these words and aimed them at June. It sinks in the second time, the anger arriving not as heat but like a cold, steel beam dropping into place inside my spine.
Putain.
I stiffen, and my hands—the hands that shake after nightmares and fumble with gloves every morning—are perfectly steady. Sculptor’s hands. They know how to be still when everything is falling apart around them.
I’m certain whoever sent this text was behind the flyers too.
I type a response, barely coherent of what my brain is spitting out. Pathetic coward. You’re such a loser that you’re jealous other people have talent. Show your face and we’ll have a real talk.
Send.
Now that it’s done, the rational part of my brain finally shows up. It walks into the room, surveys the damage, and informs me that I just made a choice about June’s safety without asking her.
Putain de merde. What did I just do?
I put the phone face-down, the same position she left it. My pulse is steady but my thoughts are running hot, and I can feel the anger sitting in my shoulders, in the locked muscles along my neck, in the base of my skull where tension builds when I can’t relax myself quick enough with weed.
Regardless of my stupid actions, someone out there is targeting her. This is no longer coming across as an angry student who’s hurt and lashing out from not getting picked. This is a person with long-term intent who’s willing to keep escalating things, only I don’t know what that intent is.
The classroom door creaks open.
June returns. Her eyes are red but she’s pulled herself together. She’s done whatever she needed to do in the bathroom to rebuild her walls, and she’s carrying herself like someone returning from a meeting, not a breakdown.
Then she sees me, and all the guilt probably written across my face in Sharpie.
Her eyes drop immediately to her phone. I don’t think I placed it back exactly where it was, and June notices the quarter inch difference.
She unlocks it. She sees the thread and my message at the bottom.
A sick feeling snakes its way through my abdomen.
The look she gives me is the moment right before anger, the moment of understanding, when the facts assemble themselves into a picture of betrayal.
“You…”
I drop my gaze because it’s obvious what I did.
“You unlocked my…” Her voice is the stillness that comes right before something breaks. “I can’t believe you…”
“June, I’m—”
“You had no right.” Her hand closes around the phone and she pulls it against her body, screen pressed to her stomach. “You had no right. That was mine. That was my decision. How could—”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
Because the text made me want to tear someone apart with my bare hands.
Because you walked out of here looking like you’d been shocked out of your skin and I couldn’t sit here and do nothing.
Because I’m wired wrong when it comes to you, and the part of me that wants to protect you is louder than the part that knows I need to stay away.
Instead of a real apology, or the truth, all I say is, “I don’t have a good answer.”
“No. You don’t.”
She sits down, puts her phone in her bag, and zips it shut.
Then she turns to the canvas and begins yanking mirror pieces off, scattering them across the table.
She grabs the wire cutters and starts snipping randomly so now wires are just sticking out of the canvas, a cage that’s been chopped open.
She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t speak.
And I let it all happen because I deserve it.
I pull my gloves tighter on my hands. The leather is cold, even though its job is to warm my fingers.
I press my fingers together inside them and feel the familiar tightness, the way the material holds my hands in place, keeping them safe from everything bad in the world, even though they’re still ice.
When June is done with her wrath, even the canvas is chopped up. Our collaborative piece is simply in ruins, and we both know we’ll send it to critique that way because neither of us has the heart to try to fix it.
Class finally ends. While June packs, her face turned away from me, my mind drifts backward. I don’t want it to, but the weed isn’t here to turn the volume down.
I was nine. And it was before the summer that changed everything.
I was at the Belrose house on a Saturday because our mothers were having lunch and I had nowhere else to be.
June and I were in the backyard, sitting in the grass near the tree line, and she was teaching me how to braid.
She’d pull long blades of grass from the ground and weave them into these flat little strips, and I kept messing up mine because my hands were clumsy back then.
She’d laugh at me and say, “You’re going to be a terrible sculptor,” and I’d reply, “You’re going to be a terrible teacher. ” And we’d keep going.
We sat there for an hour. The sun was warm on the back of my neck and the grass had stained my fingers green.
She showed me how to fold the ends so the braid wouldn’t unravel, and when I finally made one that held, she took it from me and tied it around her wrist like a bracelet.
She wore it for a week until it fell apart.
There were no boundaries then. I could pick up her things and she never cared. I could read her diary and she’d see the random things I wrote down on sticky notes. We shared everything because it never occurred to us not to. We were just kids who trusted each other the way kids do.
Whitman announces that critiques are next session and reminds us to bring finished pieces.
June zips her bag and stands. She picks up the canvas with the wires, and scoops mirror fragments into a paper towel, like she doesn’t trust me with the mess. She even picks up the bag of extra mirror shards. She takes everything, even my personal wire cutters.
She doesn’t look at me.
She leaves.
I stay at the worktable and stare out the window while everyone else leaves. The tall windows frame a stormy sky beyond the glass.
I get it. I don’t deserve her trust. I’ve known it since the day I chose wrong and someone paid for it, and every day since has been a reminder that my instincts, when it comes to those I care about, only lead to wreckage.
I tried to protect her today and all I did was prove why she shouldn’t let me close enough to try.