me anything.”
“So, that’s what this really is,” I say. “You guys are fighting again.”
This back-and-forth with them is exhausting. I thought they were fine.
“Is it fighting if you haven’t really been talking?” Sarah fidgets, picking at the hem of her denim skirt and flicking the hole in her tights with a thumbnail.
“I don’t know. Is it?” I ask.
Rhodes really doesn’t seem to understand what the Silent TreatmentTM does to Sarah. I want so, so badly to tell her I have zero desire to hear any of this.
It’s sixty-two degrees outside, twenty degrees too warm for Sarah’s “winter aesthetic” wardrobe choices. Her hairline is damp around her ears, and her DIY finger-knit scarf lay cast aside across the back of the chair where she sat typing into a computer only moments before.
She hikes her sweater sleeves over her elbows and turns her eyes to the wide, single-pane window past my shoulder.
“Look, about Sylvia’s”—Sarah pulls her bottom lip through her teeth—“just … I don’t know. I’m not sorry for what I said, but I’m sorry for how it made you feel? I don’t know.”
“Wow, some apology,” I say.
Truthfully, our argument hurt more than I would have ever told her.
There’s so much I never say to her. In spite of how used I feel, I’m not saying anything about this, either.
I need her, too. Aside from Alice, she’s all I have.
Personal responsibility is not something Sarah has ever attempted to figure out for herself, though, and it would just become something she put back on me: I’m jealous of her relationship with Rhodes. I’m jealous of Rhodes’s talent. I’m jealous of Rhodes’s opportunities and Sarah’s opportunities because she’s in Rhodes’s orbit.
Still, I need something from her so I can put it all to bed once and for all.
“Are we okay?”
“Yeah.” I lie. I’ll need another week before I’m really over it.
She smiles and leans around my hair to take a look at my work. “What are you working on?”
“My Capstone project.”
I want so much to sound nonchalant about the award, but my voice gives me away: Each syllable drips with pride. Pride, and fear, and longing, and excitement, and God only knows what else I’m transmitting that I’m not aware of.
The way Rhodes talks about these things is always so sophisticated, and I know Sarah sees the difference between us. I want to crawl under something and hide.
I want this too much. I want everything too much.
“You don’t even know if you’ll make it in,” she says. “What is it?”
“Well, it’ll take a while.” I roll back onto my stomach and run my hands over the paper. Seventy-eight rectangles marked in white pencil, waiting to be filled with seventy-eight tiny vignettes. “I need to get a jump on it. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, so I won’t regret it.”
I don’t mind telling Sarah about this. She’ll never be able to replicate it.
“It’s a paper-cut, Alice-themed tarot deck. I’m going to mount the cards in a grid between sheets of glass.” It isn’t hard for me to picture: A lacy, delicate cups suit featuring the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. A swords suit detailing the slaying of the Jabberwock, one card at a time.
Alice, the fool.
Cheshire Cat, the hierophant.
Just like I wrote in my essay, each minor arcana suit is a story arc of its own kind, and it won’t be hard to use this medium to illustrate each of the arcs in the universe Carroll built in Wonderland. I just hope those old biddies will understand that I’m exploring the myriad ways we can use art to tell a story—and not attempting to summon the devil himself.
“I can’t picture it,” Sarah says with a shrug. “I guess I’ll have to see it when it’s finished.”
“I figured,” I say, but really I want to stretch myself over the paper so she can’t see the preliminary sketches already filling some of the rectangles under my arms. Something about Sarah’s tone makes me want to wad it into a ball and try something else.
Instead, I focus myself on sketching in the Knight of Swords card—Alice, wielding the vorpal sword—and ignore Sarah’s presence to my left until she finally gets up and walks away. It’s all an act, though: I can’t focus on my work, or the pencil in my hands, or even the very conceptual basis of what it is I’m trying to accomplish.
Alice might be on the verge of an academic disaster, but now all I can think about is Rhodes.
Removing herself