“You pulled them completely out and rewrapped them.”
“They were loose.”
I yank off my gloves and rub my temples harder. I can’t remove the bite in my tone. “They weresupposedto be loose.”
She finally looks at me and sighs. Her jaw is set the way it gets when she’s already decided she’s right and the conversation is a formality. “They looked unfinished, Dorien. Like you forgot to tighten them.”
“I didn’t forget anything. The spacing was deliberate.”
“Well, it didn’t read as deliberate. It read as sloppy.”
I press my tongue against the back of my teeth and count to three. Around us, our classmates are getting to work, taking advantage of this time to finalize their projects for next week. The tall windows let in gray September light that flattens everything it touches. Professor Whitman is at the front, sorting through a stack of papers, probably enjoying that she doesn’t have much to do this class.
“We talked about this,” I say, fighting to keep my voice level. “We sketched the layout together. You took the canvas home to do the crayon, and that was the plan. Crayon on the back. That’s it. Were you, I don’t know, drunk?”
She crosses her arms and gives me an edgy frown. “I did the crayon, obviously. And it looks amazing. I also fixed the wires because they needed fixing.”
“They didn’t need fixing. You just decided they did and you didn’t even talk to your collaborator first, which is me. Did you happen to forget this is ajointproject?”
She gives me a slow, uninterested, stubborn-as-hell blink. Cadmium yellow is dried on her right index fingernail. “I’m not going to leave a piece looking half-done just because you’re clingy about the negative space.”
“I’m a sculptor. The negative space is the piece.”
“And I’m a painter. The surface matters.”
We stare at each other across the worktable. The canvas sits between us with its tightened wires and its bled-through crayon; apparently a battleground we’re both going to die on.
I could keep arguing. Iwantto keep arguing, because she’s so very wrong and she knows it, and the fact she won’t admit it makes me the most irritated. But I also know how this goes with her. She’ll dig in harder the more I push, and the piece will suffer for it.
She always has to do things her way.
I exhale through my nose and pull my bag onto the table. “I’m adding mirrors today.”
“Mirrors?”
“Yeah. My original piece had mirrors, remember? They need to be added.” I take out a paper bag and shake out the shards I took off the piece last class. They catch the overhead fluorescents and throw small squares of light across the ceiling. “They’ll angle away from the canvas. When someone looks at the piece, they see the landscape reflected back in fragments. The piece interrogates itself, almost questioning what it’s now become. Two separate halves becoming whole.”
June stares at the mirror shards for a long moment, then at me. Her lips part in disbelief. “That’s pretentious, which is the only art you do, isn’t it?”
Okay, this is getting too personal. Last class, she’d said “pretentious” with a half-smile and we seemed to actually be getting along for once. This time her mouth is flat and her voice is serious. She means it. Or she’s using it as a wall.
This is how it goes: neither of us can coexist peacefully.
Guess it’s our subconscious reminding us we shouldn’t even try.
I grab the adhesive. “It’s conceptual,” I say.
“It’s you making the piece about yourself. About how clever you are.”
“I’m making the piece about perception. Which is what it’s been about from the start, if you’d been paying attention to anything.”
Her eyes narrow. The powder-blue goes cold. “Don’t talk to me like that. I took the piece home and finished it and made itbetter.”
“You made it worse.”
Her voice is climbing. Mine is dropping, which is worse, because when I get quiet people mistake it for calm and it is not calm.
Quel borde.
