Desperate for a distraction, I thumbed through the badges on the desk. I wondered if the previous volunteer’s badge was in this pile, or if he had taken it with him as a memento. “I can’t believe your old partner left you alone here. Your job probably depends on this.”
When I finished perusing the names, I opened the top drawer and shoved them in. It was then that I realized the silence on Kira’s part. I glanced up and was met with a curious look.
“This isn’t my job.”
I could fall into the faraway look in her eyes.
“Artist by weekday, art teacher by weekend?” I teased softly, hoping for some sign of reciprocity. A smile, a slow blink, an open posture. Anything I could use as hope.
Instead, all I saw was a clenched jaw when she said, “I’m not an artist at all.”
The statement sounded fabricated, but Kira was serious. This must have been how she felt earlier: all frantic questions, no coherent thoughts. Why wasn’t she an artist? When did she decide on a different path?
“But you went to school for art.” I settled for a statement.
Kira shoved a box of paintbrushes against my chest, indicating for me to pass them around the desks and workspaces. I followed her lead, leaving a few brushes next to each canvas she deposited. There were fifteen sets in total.
“I didn’t go to art school,” she said with a thick swallow. “Stop pretending like you know me. Clearly, we don’t know each other anymore.”
She spaced out a few paint colors and cups of water. I watched mind-numbingly, trying to rearrange my perception of Kira as a person without art. That wasn’t a fair statement, considering she taught art. Teaching wasn’t the same as creating, though.
I had the difficult sense that this anxious ball of energy in front of me hadn’t created something in a long time.
“What happened to art?”
“It’s not practical. I needed something that would pay the bills.”
I wondered why she thought that. I’d takeanswers your parents forced down your throat for 200 dollars. But pointing that out right now would open a whole new wealth of issues I didn’t want to touch. Her parents had been vehemently against Kira pursuing art almost as much as they had been against our relationship. Neither was good enough for their daughter.
Art was Kira’s dream. Her passion.
We’d known each other since we were five, forced to sit next to each other in kindergarten. At the start of every school year, her parents got her a new backpack. And every year, Kira picked one with a side pocket large enough to fit art materials. One year, it was charcoal pencils. The next, acrylic paint.
Sure, things had changed since we were eighteen, but passions that strong didn’t.
“And that is…” I prodded, expecting something like lawyer or doctor.
With the extra scrunchie around her wrist, she pulled her hair into a bun. “I’m an actuary.”
“What the fuck is an actuary?”
That question, finally, led me to the one thing I wanted most.
A smile.
It couldn’t be held back now, as a smile with an accompanying chuckle escaped Kira. She rubbed both hands over her cheeks, and when she removed them, the smile was gone. But I had already stained it in my memories.
“I basically do a lot of math to assess risk,” she said, like that combination of words meant something to normal people.
I blinked. “And you enjoy that?”
I tried to picture Kira surrounded by spreadsheets, crunching numbers instead of sketching in the margins of her notebooks like she used to.
She shrugged. “I like it enough. Numbers are reliable. I can always trust them.”
Ah.The implication settled over me.
“I guess you needed that reliability after what I did.”
