by Daryl Banner
It’s Clayton who punches my arm, stealing my attention. Then he says, “Keep it simple, dude. Let her know how you feel. Let her know that you’ll be there when she’s ready. And for fuck’s sake, bury yourself in that work of yours.”
Dmitri nods encouragingly, his dark eyes burning behind those thick glasses of his, and then his gaze breaks away, lost again in his own troubled relationship and whatever waits for him there. Clayton’s smile is infinitely more heartening, thoughts of Dessie and him giving me just the boost I need to make it through the night.
Afterwards, with a blanket of half-hidden stars overhead, I cross the quiet campus with my hands shoved deep in my pockets. It’s way too early for a cold front, but I feel downright chilly tonight. Seems like the weather is doing all it can to support my sullen mood. All I need is a damn rainstorm and I’d be all set. Not even the crickets sing tonight. My only company is the soft crunch of grass beneath my shoes, followed by the soft tapping of my soles against the pavement as I approach the School of Art.
I push through the doors, allowing an even colder air to swallow me up. I fold my arms as I move through the dim halls. On the way to my destination, I happen to pass by room 1401, the infamous room in which I first stripped down and took to a stool in front of Nell and the rest of her class. I hang at the door, noticing a few students inside sitting at their easels and chatting to one another, their drawings being ignored as they laugh about something to do with a Saturday night outing. They turn for a second, notice me, then return to their chat.
It’s so strange, to think back on that day when I bared it all for Nell, yet bared nothing at all, as she didn’t yet know me. Maybe naked isn’t enough. Maybe naked was never enough, not for someone as deep and dark and beautiful as Nell.
I need to get deeper.
I need to reveal myself. I need to show the parts of me that I haven’t revealed to anyone, parts of me that I may even be scared to reveal to myself.
My own scary Halloween stories.
Like, maybe I’m still the petrified kid in the back of the party, the one Clayton used to make fun of, the one who never touched a girl in his life. Maybe the “Brant” that everyone knows is just some armored version of my scared childhood self, like I wear all this cockiness and confidence on me like armor, masking all the fear and doubt and second-guessing I really feel. Maybe I’m a big ol’ liar and the real me is something so much simpler, so much more …
Naked.
These thoughts are what I take with me when I sit in the digital media lab and plug my camera into the computer. Sorting through the photos, I squint at the screen and think long and hard about what I really “saw” when I took each photograph. Crumpled leaves at the base of a tree. A strange fissure in the red bricks of the School of Music. Long strands of hanging beads on a costume rack at the theater. The backside of Clayton’s head as he’s watching Dessie perform from the wing of the stage.
So many photos. So many moments.
A view of the School of Art from the ground, the sunlight blaring behind it and turning the structure into a huge, daunting silhouette. A blue candy wrapper caught in the grass with a single ant perched atop it, separated from its family. The anthill from which that ant likely came, its impressive palace standing like the capitol of a great queen-ruled empire—with a condom resting at its base. Soil turned up from a tiny hole in the ground by a rosebush where a squirrel had hidden its dinner.
What do these pics even mean?
What did I see when I took them? “What do you see in this?” I can hear Nell asking me. “You don’t ever just take a photo.”
I turn to the next photo.
My throat constricts as I gaze on the side of Nell’s face in black and white, her hand up by her cheek, caught in the process of drawing hair behind her ear. I stare at that photo for so long, I feel it burn into my retinas.
Then I’m reminded of a deep chasm in my chest. It was carved there the night Nell got in that car and took off. Here I am, trying to fill it with hours in front of this computer, convincing myself that any of these photos are worth shit. I tried filling it with Dmitri and Clayton’s words of encouragement. I tried filling it with assurance that I’d check my phone one of these times and find a message from Nell.
Nothing will repair the chasm but her.
After I’ve successfully completed nothing, I gather my things, throw my camera over my neck, and stalk out of the lab. It’s then that I notice the posting at the main intersection of the hallways. They’ve selected the End Of Year Showcase exhibits. There were twenty-two art pieces chosen.
Number twenty, right near the end of the list, I see my name.
Chapter 22
Nell
The canvas is blank.
White, white, white.
Nothing.
Inspiration-deprived. Void of idea.
Zero clarity.
No burn or fire or thrill.
The spirits are silent. The world is quiet. The rage is dead.
And the canvas is blank.
“Maybe I was wrong,” I mumble into the phone, leaning sullenly against the windowpane and staring out at the courtyard outside the classroom.
“About what?” Minnie returns through a mouthful of whatever it is she’s eating on the other line.
I pick at my nails. My fingers are so … clean. Where’s the grit? Where are all the black smudges and charcoal stains and marks? Where is all the evidence of my torment and anguish and artistry?
“Listen,” Minnie starts, not waiting for my answer, “you either need to use him or lose him. Because this weird in-between shit isn’t cutting it. When I said you hadn’t produced any work for a while, I didn’t mean for you to go and half-dump his ass.”
“I didn’t do it for you, Minnie. Lord, self-centered much?”
She sighs into the phone. “You’re the closest thing I have to a sister and I don’t want you to discredit how much I adore you and your work. I miss your work. You used to be … visceral. You used to gut me with every single thing you did. Where’s the darkness, Nell?”
Here. There. Everywhere. “It’s high noon, Minnie. Sun’s blaring in a cloudless sky. No darkness anywhere.”
“You’re wrong. Has it occurred to you,” she goes on, “that shadows can only exist when there’s light? I remember coming over to your loft and finding you knee-deep in paint, in clay, in oils and inks and chalk. You’d be positively buried in joy.”
I close my eyes and let that imagery return to me. My freshman and sophomore years, ripe and toiling with art, with design, with ideas. I mourn those years like a best friend that has passed away.
“You do realize,” she says, “that you can carry your darkness … with a smile on your face, don’t you?”
With my eyes still closed, I smile, still leaning against the cold windowpane. I hear you, I’d say to her, but I wish I could believe you.
“Is all of this about the Showcase?”
I flip my eyes open at her words. “No,” I answer too quickly, my throat tight.
“You were simply outvoted,” she explains, as if telling a child why they can’t have all the candy they want in the store. “You had my vote. You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Did you … Ugh, I hate to even ask this, knowing the answer … Did you submit to any of the other student showcases in town? Please don’t tell me you put all your eggs in one basket. Or, more accurately, your one egg in this one basket …?”
I keep my lips sealed tight and cross my legs, finding my eyes once again resting on the blank canvas before me.
“Alright,” mumbles Minnie. “I have a list of other venues you can show your piece at. I’m forwarding it to you right now. Check your email and get on the ball. Or keep out of the spotlight for the semester and just try to get into things in the spring, I don’t know. I’m tired of trying to pull teeth for you, Nell. I really don’t know what else to—”
“You don’t have to pull anyt
hing. I never asked you to.”
“Don’t get bitchy with me, Nell. I’m the one who’s trying to figure out how the hell to get you out there in the industry and seen by the people who matter.”
“Why?” I blurt tiredly. “I never asked you to assume whatever self-entitled throne you’ve found since graduation, acting like you’re the one with the favors and opportunity to dish out.”
“I am not self-entitled! And I act that way because I do have the connections and the people who can help you. Why do you have to make this an ego thing, Nell? Someone helped me up, too.”
“Stop trying to help me. I don’t need your damn help or your damn recommendations or your fucking pretentious-as-fuck End Of Year Showcase. What’s happened to you anyway? We used to make fun of the corporate, commercial, sell-out bullshit that would get picked for the show. We laughed derisively at those idiot judges and their dumb criticism and their senseless candor. Now you’ve become one of them.”
“You’re just pissed because Captain Big Dong Brant got in the End Of Year and you didn’t.”
My jaw tightens at her low-blow. An icicle has buried itself in my body as her last words circle my brain, taunting me the way she meant them to.
“Yeah, that’s the truth,” she pushes on. “It stings, doesn’t it? Well, fuck that sting, Nell. I know you. I know what you’re capable of. Pick up your goddamn pieces you’ve broken into, and make some damn art!”
“And what the hell have you done lately, Minnie? Are you following that old adage—if you can’t do, teach? You enjoy sitting back, judging everyone else’s work when you haven’t produced a speck of your own in half a year? I bet the higher-ups fatten your wallet considerably in compensation.”
“That’s not the same. Oh, you’re such a bitch.”
“Sell-out,” I blurt out, not even hearing what I’m saying. “Corporate lapdog.” All I do is pull out every word like a knife and fling them at her. “Commercial cunt.”
“I’M DONE!” she shouts into the phone. “You’re dead to me, Nell. Good luck selling your blank canvases, you arrogant charcoal-fingered twat.”
“Love you, too.”
I mash my perfectly clean thumb into the phone, hanging up on her, then pitch the thing halfway across the room, furious. Folding my arms in an effort to both hug myself and to somehow quiet or expend the built-up, seething anger and bitterness within me, I grip myself tightly and glare out the window. I hate every person who strolls by the glass. Especially the ones who smile. Or laugh. Or breathe. Or walk with someone by their side. Or act like life is so damn easy and uncomplicated and bright.
I have, all my life, wanted to be simple. I’ve desperately wanted to feel as light as everyone around me. Why am I always the lump of lead in a pool? Everyone else floats and swims … and I just sink.
Sink, sink, sink, sink, sink …
Deeper, darker, sinking into that abyss where there’s no sound, no sight, no anything. It’s where I’ve always lived. It’s where I belong. My father’s anger put me there. My mother’s silence kept me there. And maybe it’s just supposed to be my life to sit at the bottom of the lake and stare up at the wavy, shimmery sky that’s so, so far away … shielded from me by the rippling surface of the water where all the light, happy, normal people swim and float and smile.
And among them, Brant swims.
I was an idiot to let myself believe, even for as short as it lasted, that I belonged up there with the rest of them. I’m an artist. I’m an architect of pain. I’m a surgeon who transplants emotions. I creep beneath the skin of every unlucky lover who passes through my bed, and I leave all my marks in ways that cannot be seen. I’m sorry, Brant. I hope someday you’ll forgive me for the mark I left on you.
“Sucks, doesn’t it?”
I lift my head off the window, ignoring the smudge my forehead left on it and turning toward the voice. It’s Iris, but she’s dyed her hair a sharp and vibrant purple with subtle orange highlights. Her arms are folded and she leans against the doorframe, her eyelids heavy and her smirk heavier.
“What sucks?” I ask back, bothering to entertain the notion of a dialogue with yet another bitch today.
“Not getting into the End o’ Year.”
Great. Has she come here to gloat? I can’t wait to hear what glorious work of hers was chosen. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, turning back to stare out the window. “My piece was shit.”
“I didn’t see it, so I can’t say what I thought of it.”
“Not that I care,” I mumble.
“Hey.”
I ignore her, crossing my legs away from her and hugging myself, pressed into the window so tight, you’d think I was trying to osmose myself through it.
I hear her footsteps. Then, unexpectedly, her voice calmly touches my ears. “I didn’t come here to hate on your sulky parade. I came to join it.”
I turn my head slightly, quirking an eyebrow.
“Yeah, you heard me.” She rolls her eyes and squints through the window, like the sunlight bothers her. “I didn’t get in either.”
“Oh.”
Iris snorts. “Good for nothing bitches. They don’t know real art. They just pick the most commercial, the most safe, the most investor-impressing type of shit work that they can. How is that representative of the whole program? How is that representative of its students? They ought to pick a fair selection of every type of art out there, including the subversive, including the provocative, including the seditious, the insurrectionary, the inflammatory, the offensive.”
“What are you, a thesaurus?”
She shoots me a look. “What I’m saying is, they should’ve picked both our works. It’s your last year too, isn’t it? Aren’t you graduating in the spring?”
I sigh, rubbing at a spot on my arm, which oddly reminds me of how Brant would softly touch me there after sex, running his fingers up and down my arms while we were in his bed, or mine.
“I’ve got an idea.”
I meet her eyes. “What kind of idea?”
“But I can’t do it alone.” Her whole mouth tightens up, as if the next words she’s about to utter take all the effort in the known and unknown universe to produce. “I … need … your help.”
“Alright. For what?”
She taps the edge of my blank canvas. “We’re going to do our own little … ‘showcase’. Your work. My work. Hopefully many others too, if I can enlist those who will dare to be a bit … rebellious with us.”
I hesitate. “Rebellious?”
“What I have in mind isn’t exactly … legal, per se. I mean, it’s legal-legal. But it’s, um …” She tries to find the words, despite the growing look of concern on my face. “It’s … going to garner a lot of attention.”
“Hmm. Isn’t that the point?”
“Yes. And … it could potentially get us in trouble with the school. And it might even …”
“End our careers as we know it?” I offer sweetly.
Iris shrugs. Then her pretty little eyes turn dark. “I may not like you, Nell. Maybe since day one, I just couldn’t stand your work. But after being around it for so long, I’m starting to understand your particular brand of … getting in people’s faces. I’m starting to relate to it. After being overlooked for so long, you can say I’m acquiring a certain taste for … the loud … and the dangerous.”
“And you think I’m loud and dangerous?”
“I think you could own the world, if you tried.”
I squint at her, appraising her supposed (and rather sudden) bout of artistic courage. Can I trust her? Are we really seeing eye-to-eye, or is this some sort of unsubtle act of self-destruction that she’s skillfully inviting me to partake in?
“I want them to see us,” she emphasizes. “I want the whole campus to know our names. Nell … Iris … We could own them. Are you in?”
After a glance at my blank canvas, I feel the corners of my mouth pull up. Meeting her ruthless eyes, I give her a curt nod.
Chapt
er 23
Brant
“Dude. Are you shitting your pants right now?”
I let out all my breath at the mirror, adjusting my tie. “Do I look like a fuckin’ penguin with a stick up my ass? I feel like a penguin.”
“You look hot.”
“Calm your tits, Dmitri. I’m not gonna fuck you.” I dodge him swinging a fist into my arm for that comment. “Just kidding. I know you’re trying to fake a relationship with this imaginary Riley chick. Don’t mean to blow your gay cover.”
“She isn’t imaginary, you dickwad. She’s coming tonight. So’s Sam and Clayton and Dessie,” he goes on. “Everyone’s coming.”
I freeze. “Really? Everyone?”
“Yeah, dude! They all want to see your work.” Dmitri slaps my back, then leans into me. “Even Eric wants to come. I guess he was able to pencil you in between all his twink hookups.”
“Twink? You gay guys are into Twinkies? What do you do with them? Because you obviously ain’t eatin’ them.” I dodge another timely whack from him, laughing as I slip out of range. “Just kidding! Chill, bro. Shit, you’re so tense, you’d think it was your damn showcase we were attending tonight.”
Dmitri chuckles, shaking his head and righting his glasses which had gone crooked in his effort to hit me. “So, like … is Nell …?”
“Nah,” I grunt. “I doubt it. I mean, well, maybe she’ll come. I don’t know. Shit.” I draw closer to the mirror, inspecting a spot on my face. “Is that a bruise?”
“Mosquito bite, maybe. So wait, dude. Have you even talked to her since …?”
“Nope.”
“Not a peep? Not even seen her at the school?”
For some reason, I can’t bring myself to say it out loud, but I did take a day to go down a few streets “in the bad side of town” and found myself at the Westwood Light, where I was met by the woman who supposedly hates Nell, yet lets her continue to come and spend time with the children. “It’s important for them to be exposed to the arts. I always had a soft spot for that,” the woman explained to me. I asked if Nell was around, though the answer was clear when I went into the room with the kids and didn’t find her there. The next two hours were spent at the circular table creating art with the children and feeling my own inspirations flare up inside me at the sight of their unadulterated joy. “Are you Nell’s friend?” a girl asked. “Do you and Nell kiss?” asked one of the older girls, inspiring a bunch of grossed-out reactions from the littler ones. I laughed so much that day, I almost forgot the reason I’d come to the Westwood Light in the first place. After a quick talk with the supervisor on duty that day, I got special permission to engage in a different sort of artistic activity, in which I pulled out my camera, got the kids gathered around, and collaborated on a fun, impromptu sort of project. I had wished Nell was there with me.