The Swap(3)

On my second lesson, I arrived to find that the side-by-side pottery wheels had been moved to face each other. “This way, you can mirror what I do,” Freya said. It was the most considerate thing anyone had ever done for left-handed me. As I took my seat across from her, a lump of gratitude formed in my throat.

I was not particularly good with my hands, but Freya was a patient and encouraging teacher. Within a few lessons, I was creating slightly lopsided bowls, mugs that were a tad off-center, and vases that wobbled on flat surfaces. Pottery is quite a forgiving craft. Freya would help me trim and patch my creations, would suggest a heavier glaze that would better hide the flaws in my work. In time, I created giftable, even salable crockery. But the product of my lessons was not the point.

Freya was the point.

As we worked, I learned more about her. She had grown up in Pacific Palisades, a coastal neighborhood west of Los Angeles. Freya’s mother was Icelandic, had gifted her only child her Nordic good looks and artistic talent.

“She taught me to work with clay when I was five years old,” Freya said. “By the time I was eight, my pieces were good enough to sell. We spent hours together in her backyard studio. I didn’t realize she was batshit crazy until I was thirteen.”

“She was crazy?”

“Bipolar. But she never got diagnosed, so she never took medication,” Freya stated. “She’d stay up all night making pottery, then she’d sleep all day. Sometimes, I wouldn’t see her for over a week, just hear her banging around out there in the night.”

Freya’s father was a powerful entertainment lawyer and a workaholic. He’d been a distant and distracted parent, but she’d inherited her drive and work ethic from him. Her parents’ marriage was tense and dysfunctional.

“My dad loved my mother, but she was a liability. He never knew what she was going to say or what she was going to do. Once, he took her to a film premiere and she made out with the female lead.”

I was tempted to laugh at the outrageousness but didn’t know if I would offend my teacher. Luckily, Freya chuckled.

“She was nuts, but she was never boring.” She set down a scalpel-like trimming, too. “And boring is the worst thing you can be.”

I couldn’t suppress my smile. I knew people considered me odd, charmless, intense—but not boring. I was complicated. I was complex.

After numerous affairs, her parents divorced. Freya’s mom moved to Topanga Canyon, but Freya stayed in the Palisades with her dad. “I knew if I lived with my mom, I’d become her caregiver. And my dad had a lot of useful connections in the entertainment industry.”

Freya had started out as a model. “Commercial stuff,” she explained, as she demonstrated how to apply slip to a bowl with a squeeze bottle. “I wasn’t tall enough for editorial.” She looked at me then. “Have you considered modeling, Low? You’ve got the height and a really unique look.”

My response was a blank stare. In addition to the lack of a modeling industry in our tiny community, I’d never thought of my lanky body and pointed features as positives.

“Actually, don’t do it,” Freya continued. “You’ll end up with low self-esteem and an eating disorder.”

It had been a throwaway compliment, but I clung to it for days. Unlike every other person on our island, Freya saw something different when she looked at me. She saw someone interesting, fashion-forward, maybe even elegant. I swear my posture improved in the afterglow.

Freya had been an actress, too, a career she called soul-crushing.

“I did a teen sitcom pilot that never got picked up. And a sappy Christmas movie that was just embarrassing. My character’s name was Trixie Gains. Do I look like a Trixie fucking Gains to you?”

I laughed. “No.”

“We filmed it in LA with fake snow. I had to wear angora sweaters in every scene, and it was ninety degrees. LA is a cesspool,” she informed me, “but I miss the weather.”

In more recent years, she’d been a social media influencer. “It was the best gig ever,” she said, her eyes sparkling with remembrance. “I’d get paid twenty grand for a post. Up to thirty for a live story. I got invited to clubs and restaurants and concerts. And I got so much swag! Beauty products, electronics, even vacations.”

I avoided social media like a root canal, but I said, “Sounds amazing.”

She put down the sponge she’d been using to wipe the wheel. “I had half a million Instagram followers. I’d get over a hundred thousand likes on my posts. Sixty thousand views of my stories. It was addictive—all the attention, all the adoration, and positive reinforcement.”

I smiled and nodded, though I was unfamiliar with the feeling of public validation.

“But then . . . all those people turned against me.” She dropped her sponge into a bucket of water and stood. “It was never real. They never cared about me.” She moved toward the back sink, leaving me to ponder her bitterness.

Other than some superficial chitchat—What’s your favorite class at school? Photography. What kind of music do you like? Eighties and nineties alternative—Freya talked exclusively about herself. This worked well for me. I wasn’t ready to open up to her, didn’t want to dispel the illusion that I was just a regular girl. I couldn’t risk her judging me as a freak and cutting me off. She was the most interesting, extraordinary person I had ever met. I was already addicted to her.