Harder (Caroline & West #2)(85)

“Okay, well, what I do is think about work. I think what’s going to be most useful to get a job that pays well. What’s going to mean I’m in a position to make the most out of college.”

“So how’d you end up in Studio Art?” Raffe asks.

“Fluke.”

“Huh. It seems like a good fit.”

“I got a B-.”

“Rikki’s a hard grader.”

I look around, because he’s talking about her like she’s not here, and I realize she’s not. She must have slipped out when I wasn’t paying attention.

“You know that assignment with the still life, and we were supposed to paint the apple?” I ask. “My apple looked like it belonged in a children’s book. This dipshit next to me, he never seemed to have the first f*cking clue what was going on—swam through the whole semester in a daze—and then he paints this apple with, like, black and purple and blue and yellow and pink and white on his brush. No red at all. But when he’s done, it looks exactly like an apple.”

“Wait, is this Kyle?” Raffe asks.

“Is that his name?”

“Skinny kid, always made Rikki repeat the demonstrations?”

“Yeah, him.”

“He’s f*cking gifted with colors, man.”

“That’s what I’m saying. So Kyle is creative. He should make art. But me … I don’t want to be dicking around, wasting money on four credits when I’m not going to get anything out of it.”

“Sounds like you got a job out of it,” Annie points out.

“That was a fluke.”

“Lot of flukes in this story,” she says mildly. “You know how I got into art?”

“How?”

“I took a class in high school, started messing around with drawing and painting and sculpture. When the bell rang, I never wanted to leave.”

“Same for me,” Raffe says, “except it was here. First art class, and I was in the studio all the time. I’d forget to eat. Skipped meals, skipped parties, so I could be here doing this. Me and Annie—that’s how we met.”

“But don’t you worry what you’re going to do with it?”

“Rikki and Laurie seem to be surviving all right,” Raffe says.

“But not everybody’s as lucky or as talented as Rikki and Laurie. You could crash and burn, and then where’d you be?” Raffe says, “I’d be a guy with a bachelor’s from Putnam who knows how to work hard on something that’s important to me, and who knows how to take something I’m passionate about and try to realize it, and how to communicate that passion to the rest of the world. That’s not, like, wasted time. And even if it was, I’m not sure I care.” He picks up a plastic tub full of frit and powder and starts shaking it to mix the color in. “Plus, dude, you’re what, twenty?”

“Twenty-one.”

“So, you’re twenty-one. You’re allowed to f*ck around and experiment with stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s the point of being twenty-one.”

“It’s not like you can only ever have one career,” Annie says. “You can make art and teach school, and if you hate teaching school you can run a gas station, and if you hate running a gas station you could try your hand at embalming dead bodies, and the whole time you’re making things, if that feels good.”

“Embalming dead bodies?” I ask.

“Just as an example.”

Raffe finishes shaking his frit and sets the container down on the table. “For what it’s worth, Leavitt, you’ve got talent. It’s just not the same as Kyle’s. He’s got an eye for color. You’re precise, and you see things from more than one angle. You’re good at solving problems, because you’re f*cking persistent. I could see all that just taking a class with you, and I know I’m not wrong because Laurie hired you, which he wouldn’t have done if he didn’t think you had something.”

“He didn’t hire me,” Annie says. “I applied.”

“He didn’t hire Josh, either,” Raffe says. “Or Macon. I didn’t even know you were in the running for that job.”

“I wasn’t,” I admit. “I didn’t know there was a job in the first place. He just offered it to me.”

“There you go.”

There I go.

And actually, I feel like I’m moving. Like I’ve taken a step to the left and cleared a path that was blocked.

I’ve got a sketchbook at home full of ideas for shit that I would build or make or do if I had unlimited time and supplies. A sketchbook I’ve never showed anybody—not even Caroline—because it’s scarier than it should be to step away from what I know is practical in favor of what might turn out to be impractical but f*cking pleasurable.

My sister keeps drawing these grid drawings, one after another, like she can’t stop. They’re all she wants to do. But she keeps telling me they’re not real art, even as she gets better and better at them.

My grandma Joan has a houseful of blankets she’s knit. She makes them without patterns, and they’re f*cking impressive, but if you ask her anything about them she’ll tell you she just does it for her arthritis.

Not because it feeds something in her to make beautiful things.