Harder (Caroline & West #2)(44)

She cups my face in her hands. Strokes her thumbs over my eyebrows, making me close my eyes and listen hard to what she’s saying.

“So anytime you catch yourself writing a story over top of us—anytime you tell yourself you’re the bad guy, or you destroyed us, the end, it’s over—think about that.”

She leans in and touches her lips to my forehead.

It hurts not to take her mouth. To stop myself from pressing her down into the couch, into the soft cushions, touching her and kissing her because I need her and I want her, and because she could make me forget.

It wouldn’t be fair to use her like that.

God, I want to, though.

When she moves back and touches her fingers to my lips, I can see that she knows it.

“Just think about it,” she says.

I don’t have words to give her, so I say, “All right.”

After she leaves, I stay up thinking half the night.


Friday morning. Art class. A hundred bucks.

The stack of colored paper on the table in front of me cost a hundred bucks, and I’m supposed to “experiment” with it.

Try things, Rikki told the class.

Rikki’s my studio art professor. She’s dressed today like the world’s tiniest pirate—boots that go up to her thighs and then flare out and fold over at the top, a glittery sash across one shoulder. She’s from the Netherlands, married to Laurie, which means she’s my landlady in addition to my art teacher.

She’s also an art therapist, whatever the f*ck that is.

“The idea,” Rikki is telling the student sitting in front of me, “is to play with how the colors are in a relationship. Work with large and small fields of color to create illusions of difference where there is similarity, illusions of similarity where there is difference.”

The package of paper contains a hundred and fifty sheets, none of them the same. Sixty-six cents a color. The girl at the next table is going crazy with her scissors, snipping chunks out of one sheet after another. Turning money into confetti.

I can’t bring myself to take scissors to a sixty-six-cent piece of paper unless I’ve got some reason to think it’s going to amount to something, so I just push the papers around, laying one on top of another, until Rikki chucks me on the shoulder as she walks past and says, “Play.”

I pick up the scissors and open and close the blades a few times.

Drop them and shuffle the colors around some more.

This is me in Studio Art.

I’ve never taken an art class before, and probably wouldn’t have, but it was so late when I registered that I had to take whatever I could get into, which was nothing I would have picked. In addition to art, I’ve got Modern Russian History, Intro to Spanish, and this bizarre African-American lit class where all we’ve done so far is read philosophy about music.

Back before I started my first year, Dr. T told me the point of Putnam isn’t to specialize or get ready for grad school, it’s to learn how to learn.

Try everything, he said. Keep trying things until you find something that clicks. Learn how to think, ask questions, decide for yourself.

I didn’t do that, because I wanted to be a doctor—although looking back, I wonder what the f*ck ever made me think that would work out. Four years of undergrad, four years of med school, then residency, loans, studying, no chance even for part-time jobs—whoever’s life that was, it wasn’t ever going to be mine.

Now I’m trying things. Burning money. Feeling like an * most of the time, trying to wrap my tongue around rolling an R in Spanish, reading a memoir by this Russian woman who was imprisoned under Stalin.

I’ve been doing this kind of shit for eight weeks now, but I’m not sure what any of it is contributing to my well-roundedness. I don’t know what cutting up colored bits of paper is going to do for me that I need, either, but I pick up a sheet of deep, dark red and snip a triangle off one corner.

Lay it against a bright blue.

Lay it against orange.

I find a lemony yellow and cut a corner off it. Try again.

“Play,” Rikki says to Raffe on the other side of the room.

Playing makes me feel like a dipshit.

And besides, this isn’t even art. It’s math. The textbook makes it sound mysterious, like colors have these properties, and Oh, hey, what do you know? That one looks this way next to that one and this other way next to that other one.

When actually, you can assign numbers to hue and value, and they’ll follow predictable patterns. Bright pink looks like it’s vibrating on top of bright green. The pink square looks bigger on the black square and smaller on the white one.

It isn’t magic. It’s just numbers and common sense.

Rikki leans over my shoulder. She touches a brown triangle that I’d laid over a pale pink one and reverses the order. “Nice, this one. But work with bigger pieces, hmm? It’s hard to see with such small triangles that you have made.”

“I don’t want to waste paper.”

“Always I have one student who is afraid to waste. We will do paintings and you will choose the smallest canvas, or we will make sculpture and you will make something so tiny.” She cups her hands in space, showing me the size of my imaginary sculpture. “Wasting is what the paper is for.”

“Maybe I just don’t like throwing money away.”