Harder (Caroline & West #2)(84)

“I can make some time if it’s important. Is it Frankie?”

“Nah, just class stuff,” I lie.

“Are you going to be in Laurie’s 3D Design in the spring?” Raffe asks.

“No, I didn’t sign up.”

“How come?”

I shrug. “Just didn’t.”

Rikki gives me a look. “What did you register for?”

“A bio class, organic chemistry, an econ seminar, and an advanced statistics thing.”

“Those are all sciences.”

“Econ is a social science.”

“Why do you need so much science?”

“It’s practical.”

She sniffs. “Practical. You do not need more practical. You need more art.”

This is Rikki’s shtick. I need more art. I need to learn to play. I need to let myself take up more space in the world.

I’ve heard it enough times now that I keep thinking it’ll stop digging into me, but it hasn’t. Every time, I feel like she’s scraping over something soft inside me. It makes me irritable. I think she knows it, too.

I think that’s why she does it.

The thing is, I liked her class. It frustrated the hell out of me, but I liked it.

I like working with Laurie.

I even liked Russian history and Music in African-American Lit and Spanish, but when it came time to register for the spring semester, I went with bio, chem, econ, and math because the scholarship I’m on is worth more than fifty thousand dollars a year, and I don’t know what I could do with art.

Nothing, probably.

I can’t waste all that money on nothing.

Rikki’s watching me. Her hair is in pigtails. She’s got on a vest made of blue fur and underneath it a black long-sleeve top made out of leather. She should be ridiculous, but instead she makes these crazy clothes look like what everybody’s supposed to be wearing.

She makes her life seem like a life anybody could have, and should, if that’s what they want.

I rub my hand across my throat. Too hot. “What are you guys making?”

Raffe smiles. “We’re casting tiles for color samples. Annie, where’d the book go?”

She hands it to him, and he shows me pages and pages of small glass tiles in a rainbow of colors. I ask a few questions, get some answers, ask a few more, and then we’re off talking about the technique and how it works, where it can go wrong, what might be a better way.

Before I know it, I’ve got a spoon in my hand that I’m using to tamp down frit into the mold that was Rikki’s. It’s careful work, meticulous. Weighing out the components, adding the powder to the frit in tenths and hundredths of a gram. Ten grams in each opening. Tap tap tap.

“See, this is the kind of art I like,” I say.

“How come?” Raffe asks.

“It’s technique. I like the technique stuff. Or when it’s a puzzle, when Laurie needs something and I have to figure out how to get some result that you want but it takes a lot of planning or science or knowledge about materials to make it happen.”

“You work with Laurie?” Raffe asks.

“Yeah, I’m his assistant.”

“That’s tight.”

“It is. It would be perfect if it was a real job, you know, like, full-time, if I could be an assistant to somebody like Laurie.”

“But don’t you want to make your own stuff?” Annie asks. She’s got a tiny metal funnel out, and she’s using it to add red pigment to a cup of frit sitting on top of a scale.

It’s on the tip of my tongue to say I’m not creative that way, but I don’t. I stop.

Because I’m trying to notice, these days, when I’m making shit harder than it has to be.

I’m trying to notice when there’s something I want and I’m throwing obstacles up in front of it for no reason at all.

What I notice right now is that I was comfortable a few seconds ago, but I’ve started sweating, and I feel kind of … I don’t know, furtive. Like I’m checking out porn on the Internet when Caroline’s in the other room—not that I’d ever do that, but it’s that kind of forbidden feeling, as if I’m going to get caught talking about something I shouldn’t.

The thing I shouldn’t be talking about is art.

And what I say, when I open my mouth, is, “How do you know? How is that … How do you convince people it’s okay for you to be doing this stuff?”

Raffe exhales a laugh. “Who, like parents?”

“No, not parents.” Yourself.

Because that’s what I mean. How do I convince myself that it’s okay to take art classes?

How do I make myself get out of my own f*cking way?

I drop the spoon in my hand and say, “It’s like— Well, take electives. You have to have so many classes for your major, whatever that is—”

“Art,” Raffe says.

Annie nods. “Art.”

“Okay, but pretend it’s not art and you have to take bio classes, so you take those, one or two a semester, but you’ve got all these electives. So how do you decide what to take?”

“Whatever looks interesting,” Raffe says.

“Or if I’ve heard it’s really great,” Annie says, “like Gender and Women’s Studies with Professor Gates.”