with her kind of focus would be a good fit for me—either as a friend or a girlfriend. Today, he wouldn’t piss on her if she were on fire.
After a moment, she disappears.
Griffin settles into his seat, collects his thoughts, and picks at a button on his shirt with two fingers. “You know what everyone else is doing right now?” He says, continuing our conversation from the car.
“What?”
“The Nutcracker. Every single one of my friends’ lives are consumed by it right now.” He shakes his head. “Mom just doesn’t get it—the Alabama Ballet needs to actually see me if I want to get on there. I need stuff like this on my résumé if I want to audition somewhere else. I feel myself getting weaker. I’m stuck.”
“No, she doesn’t get it at all,” I say. “She was paying Dusk to convince me to do the Capstone. Can you believe that?”
Iliana appears again with mugs and an oversize coffee carafe. The conversation dwindles as she sets them in front of us, filling each with shaking hands.
Her expression is unruffled, but the coffee splashed onto the tabletop says differently.
She wipes it up with the hand towel hanging from her apron and marches away again. A part of me feels bad for Griffin’s antics.
A very, very small part of me.
Too small to actually say something about it.
It’s clear he’s getting to her, though.
“I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” I say. “What are we going to do?”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’m doing,” Griffin says. “I talked to a lady at Dance!Alabama, and she’s going to let me come dance with the troupe starting in January, if I teach classes three days a week now. They don’t have enough upper-level boys.”
“Oh, Griff, that’s—” It’s amazing.
It’s also nearly impossible with his tech-track schedule—exactly the thing my parents were hoping for.
“Be happy for me…?” It isn’t typical for him to beg.
“Oh, I am! I just—”
“I know; it’s a lot,” he says. “But I have to do it. Mom and Dad said they won’t pay for it, but they didn’t say I couldn’t dance.”
This is how Griffin is paying for that night at the art installation last school year: By being forced into doing the thing Mom and Dad wanted him to do all along.
I always think my life was the one that was irreparably altered—I haven’t really drawn since Mom shipped us off to rehab last summer—but then I remember the way Mom and Dad clipped Griffin’s wings and forced him out of something they were merely humoring until they had the first opportunity to take it away from him.
“You’re right. I’m happy for you.” I’ll be watching closer this time, though. “But now that you’ve got all the answers, what am I going to do?”
“Well, what would you have done a year ago about the Capstone?”
That is an easy answer. I spent three years dreaming about what I’d pitch for my Capstone project. Now, I can’t remotely wrap my head around the idea. It’s wild to remember a time when things actually sprung forth from my mind, tiny Athenas in full armor splayed out on paper for the world to see.
It was only a year ago, but it feels like a lifetime.
“Nudes, of course. A series—lighter than air, soft pastels on dark paper.” I ramble the next part off from memory, word for word: “The study would emphasize each person’s innate vulnerability while focusing on their shared humanity in spite of their physiological differences.”
Griffin golf claps. “Lovely. And then what would you do?”
“Well, I’d draw them. I’d email the figure-drawing professor at Montevallo, tell her I’m a Capstone candidate, and ask to sit in on a few classes.”
The look on Griffin’s face speaks more than anything he could actually say:
Duh.
You have everything you need, right here in front of you.
What’s the problem, then?
Except ideas are never the problem. I know what I would have said, and what June and the other board members expect of me. I know what kind of brand I’ve created for myself.
The problem, as in everything else, is the execution.
“Okay, so I propose a series of nudes,” I say. “I call Montevallo and line up a few classes. I show up for class—and then what? Nothing works anymore. It’s like my brain doesn’t know how to—”
“Connect your eyes to your hands?” Griffin dumps half a cannister of sugar into his coffee, then stirs it with a tiny brown stirrer.
“No, it’s more like … I don’t know how to