grader. It wasn’t long ago I found my own, much less anyone else’s.
I don’t know how Iliana and Sarah are so effing casual about it.
“How did you feel about it?” Dusk scribbles into her tablet with a stylus.
“Clearly, not great,” I say. “It was so blank, like it was going to suck me in. It was screaming at me, almost. Then Iliana was screaming at me, and Sarah was giving me that look—”
“Well, to be completely transparent—” Dusk says. She retrieves her banjo from the floor and plucks out something soft. “Your mom is paying me good money to make the Capstone happen. Extra money. A lot of money.”
“Okay.” This doesn’t surprise me.
The Capstone Award means the world to Mom, and sometimes it seems like Mom doesn’t even try to pretend that matters more than what I might actually need to make progress in therapy.
Suffice to say, it’s not the first time my mom has been shady with my therapist, but Dusk has always been very open with me about it happening. I don’t really understand what Dusk hopes the outcome will be, but at least I know I can expect honesty from exactly one adult in my life.
I hope, anyway.
Dusk’s words are soft, and then she bends over the fretboard. Music hangs around us, mellow and plaintive, and I lean back in my chair.
“The Capstone Award isn’t just about status, right? It’s a yearlong ride at Alabama College of Art and Design. You get a fellowship at the Birmingham Museum of Art. It’s an opportunity.”
“Right.” Every conversation I’ve ever had with Randall hangs like a ghost over my shoulder.
It’s an opportunity, but it isn’t the only one I have left. Yet.
“What do you think about just … doing it? You said it yourself: You’ll be creating for other people for the rest of your life.” Dusk glances up from her finger-work. “Creating at will is a skill—you won’t be able to wait until the mood strikes forever.”
You won’t be able to wait until the mood strikes forever.
I understand the concept in theory, but I can’t wrap my head around it.
Just … make something. Pull it out of my God-knows-where and smear it across a canvas for everyone to fawn over.
It would be crap. Literal, actual crap.
People may love it, but at the end of the day, it’s still just crap.
“The thing I don’t understand”—I pick my journal back up from where it lies across the table and run my fingers over its half-finished cover—“is how I used to be able to do this exact thing. The world told me to jump, and I’d only ask how high they wanted me to go.”
The cover is crafted from a copy of Alice in Wonderland that was falling apart on Dusk’s bookshelf, embroidered all over with teacups, and keyholes, and a March Hare with long, floppy ears. Alice is only a peach-hued face and half a hair bow at the moment, the rest of her a faint pencil sketch where I want her body to go.
As per usual, this is when Dusk goes quiet.
Her eyes follow my fingers, but I know she’s listening close.
“That’s why I’m here, right? Because something broke in me, and even if I know the when of it, I don’t really know the why. And the why of it is what’s going to fix me, right?”
“You can’t think about therapy in terms of ‘broken’ and ‘fixed,’” Dusk says. “It’s more of a spectrum—surviving to actually thriving, with every little benchmark a success in between.”
But that’s not why I’m here. This is the thing that overrides my system: I need someone to fix me.
I feel like I’m crumbling inside, and Dusk is going to sit here and tell me that being here isn’t about being fixed?
Why the heck is she wasting our time?!
“Don’t look at me like that,” Dusk says, smiling.
“I just can’t believe, after everything we’ve talked about today, you’re asking me to do something. To create something. For the sake of making someone else happy.” It all jumbles out of me butt over kettle. My cheeks splotch and I swallow what’s left of my anger. “Even if you’re going to pick apart the semantics over broken and fixed and surviving and thriving, I just told you how much it hurt me when someone else did the exact same thing twenty-four hours ago.”
“Rhodes, listen to me: I’m asking you to evaluate all of these high and lofty ideas you have about art, and I’m telling you to think