I pull off my gloves and set them on a small table. I flex my fingers. They’re cold, and I rub them together before reaching for the cloth.
The sculpture underneath is small. Twelve inches, maybe. And it’s marble, not clay. I’d chosen marble deliberately, because marble is permanent.
Like her.
The figure is a girl. Her chin is lifted and she’s gesturing. Or dancing. I’m not sure. There are no features yet, only the planes of the face suggested through the tilt of the head and the tension in the neck.
Her.
I pick up a flat chisel and position it along the jaw line. I tap it gently with a mallet and a small curl of marble pulls away. The grain underneath is finer and smoother, closer to the surface I want. I work slowly because marble doesn’t forgive mistakes. With clay, you can push material back, reshape, start over. With marble, every stroke removes something permanently. You have to know what you’re looking for before you find it. You have to trust that the shape is already inside the stone and your job is to carve away everything that isn’t her.
Isn’t that what I’m always doing? Every waking second?
Carve away everything that isn’t her.
These sculptures are the only way I can ever let myself be near her.
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 toread as atruecollaboration, 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.”
